According to the 2024 global smartphone market data released by IDC (International Data Corporation) in mid-January this year, although China’s smartphone shipments are growing globally and occupy an important position, 80% of the profits in the global mobile phone market are occupied by Apple alone.
Perhaps there are many reasons behind this, but the most critical one may be the brand positioning of the iPhone: it has been positioned as high-end since its birth, with unique design, exquisite craftsmanship and powerful performance, making it a symbol of “geek spirit” and accumulating strong enough user loyalty. Users are willing to pay for this “brand with geek spirit”.
And if we think about the memorable advertisements created by iPhone for its brand image: in 2018, Apple and director Chen Kexin used iPhone X to shoot the Spring Festival advertisement “Three Minutes” throughout the whole process; or on the Chinese Valentine’s Day of a certain year, Apple used “Our Song” to present the “audio sharing” function of AirPods while letting users harvest a lot of touching, etc. Obviously, compared with performance advertising, Apple has always been committed to delivering product power through brand advertising, while paying more attention to the delivery of brand concepts and spirit.
Similarly, when mentioning “happy water”, Coca-Cola is likely to be the first brand that comes to mind; when mentioning yoga, Lululemon will be the first choice…
In fact, including brand awareness, advertising memory, consideration intention, recommendation, preference, etc., are all “brand mind”.
Let the brand enter the user’s mind. This is the goal of all global brands, but it is also a problem faced by most overseas brands.
After all, as an “outsider”, overseas brands not only have to compete with international brands, but also face challenges from local brands. For example, if there are half and half daily chemical brands, they have to compete with Unilever brands on the shelves for users. At this time, when consumers make choices on the shelves, what is essentially reflected and tested is the status of each brand in the user’s mind, that is, the difference in brand power.
But specifically looking at the actual situation of Chinese companies going overseas, brand power is precisely the weakness of most companies.
The reason is that according to Morketing’s research, most Chinese brands going overseas are almost effect-oriented in their advertising. Although some companies have tried brand advertising, the proportion is less than 10%. As a result, the problem follows: once the advertising stops, the growth stops, the brand’s natural volume is very small, and it is even more difficult to talk about brand mind.
But on the bright side, we have also noticed that more and more companies are beginning to realize the seriousness of this problem. They are beginning to pay attention to and shape the brand. Therefore, there are new signs and trends about the importance of “brand advertising” and marketing strategies.
In fact, if we simply divide the brand going overseas into stages, then the 1.0 era was dominated by traditional foreign trade cross-border e-commerce from 2005 to 2020; in the 2.0 stage starting from 2020, in addition to cross-border e-commerce, DTC also joined. Since around 2022, the 3.0 stage of going overseas has begun to move from “product” to “brand”, and some brands have realized the importance of building brand influence through localized operations. However, at this stage, most brands remain at the stage of “only awareness”, or in other words, even if they have realized the importance of the brand, their advertising strategy is still mainly based on performance advertising for short-term growth.
But in Morketing’s view, in 2025 and the future, when “brand going overseas” enters the deep water zone, brands can no longer “only have awareness, no action” for brand building. Instead, they need to have a longer-term thinking, pay attention to product-effect synergy, and more bluntly, they need to pay attention to brand advertising. This is the core of doing a good “brand”, and it is also the key to achieving brand premium and brand mind building and achieving long-term growth.
After all, building a good brand is a marathon, which requires a long-term business approach. We cannot only use short-term buying volume thinking and a single thinking of pure selling to build a brand.
01
Why do we need to balance the proportion of “brand advertising”?
Before talking about how to do brand advertising well, let’s take a look at the current budget ratio of overseas brands for brand advertising, and why we think the budget ratio of brand advertising needs to be further increased.
“Overall, the brand is 30% and the effect is 70%. However, as the penetration rate of products in some destination countries gradually increases, we will also pay more attention to the investment in brand marketing, expand the user scale through brand marketing, and maintain the vitality of the brand.” Liang Ce, head of Midea’s Little Swan’s overseas expansion, told Morketing.
In fact, when communicating with the industry, we found that although the industry’s brand marketing budget investment is becoming more cautious, the investment in brand marketing budget varies from company to company and has a significant relationship with the company’s operating conditions, but high-growth companies are increasing their brand investment. In other words, when conditions permit, more and more brands are beginning to realize the importance of brand advertising investment.
The reason is that Ipsos pointed out in the “2024 China Brand Global Trust Index” that from a global perspective, European and American brands are at a high position in terms of net trust; but from a trend point of view, the consumer trust of European and American brands has stagnated or declined for many years in the past five years, and the corresponding momentum of increasing trust in Chinese, Japanese and Korean brands is strong. But 67% still face the problem of “brand building and awareness improvement”.
In Morketing’s view, most brands in the 3.0 stage of going global are actually experiencing a period of pain in the development process of the past two years.
Just as Morketing Research pointed out in the “2024-2025 Brand Globalization White Paper: Brand Power and Localization Resonance” the dilemma faced by global brands – with the intensification of competition among cross-border e-commerce players, some merchants/brands will inevitably fall into the phenomenon of “rolling low prices”, and even fall into deeper vicious price competition again under the squeeze of scale, resulting in their own profit space being severely squeezed. When cross-border e-commerce platforms are in fierce competition and the cost of traffic acquisition continues to rise, companies have to face the problem of high advertising costs and reduced ROI. Companies face huge challenges in controlling marketing costs and improving ROI.
Most of the surveyed companies also bluntly stated that low prices can win back part of the market and drive consumer purchases, but this can only solve temporary problems and put themselves in a vicious cycle.
Advertising based only on temporary effects is not a long-term solution. As McDonald’s China CGO He Yabin said to Morketing, the end of the ultimate ROI is white label. This sentence can almost ring the alarm bell for all marketers who want to build a good brand, especially for overseas brands.
A well-known domestic health food brand launched its overseas expansion in 2024 and said it would continue to do so in 2025 and in the future. It told Morketing that for Chinese brands, there is still growth to be found in the overseas market, but the threshold has become higher. Especially the “cognition” threshold. The cognition here means that, on the one hand, it is necessary to understand that it is no longer a simple supply chain or product going overseas, but a brand going overseas. Furthermore, it is particularly important to create “brand cognition” in overseas markets.
And one of the most direct ways to create “brand cognition” or convey brand concepts is to use brand advertising well to “build a good brand.”
Different from the short-term shopping stimulation of performance advertising, brand advertising focuses more on using advertising to convey the brand’s information, value, image, characteristics, etc., and is a better choice to guide users to trust and be loyal to the brand, and to improve awareness and reputation.
In particular, brand advertising is also capable of accomplishing things like “stimulating purchases” or “expanding and settling the crowd”.
For brands with a narrow audience range and the need to settle crowd assets, unlike performance advertising that “extremely” improves conversions among the existing crowd, the placement of brand advertising can further break through the circle to a new user pool. While achieving crowd expansion, brand advertising can also increase fan stickiness and brand loyalty;
For brands that are caught in low-price competition and whose customer unit price cannot be raised, it is key to increase brand premium through brand advertising;
For companies that realize that the cost of buying volume is high, the effect is small, and the “short-sighted” path is not feasible, brand advertising is their choice to build brands from a long-term perspective and achieve marketing cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
For this reason, in Morketing’s view, as far as brands go overseas, no matter how big or small the current overseas market is, now and in the future, the proportion of brand advertising budget should be further increased to about 40%-60% to achieve true product and effect synergy.
02
“Good” brand advertising:
Channels and crowds are the foundation
Of course, when we say that we should pay attention to and increase brand advertising budgets, it does not mean to use “traditional” brand advertising ideas. Facing new global markets, new users and new media platforms, brand advertising also needs to be adapted to local conditions and timely.
Product is 1, marketing is 0. In Morketing’s view, in the marketing circle, there may be another saying: user is 1, marketing is 0. No matter what form of advertising, understanding users and catering to their preferences is the premise of everything. For brands, channels and crowds are also the foundation of brand advertising. After all, only by finding and capturing the crowd can business growth be achieved.
So, in this fragmented, or broken screen era, where are the users?
In terms of Internet channels, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp are more saturated in brand advertising. In our opinion, channels with new bonuses for brand advertising are more worthy of attention. Compared with other apps, users spend the longest time on TikTok channels every day, close to 50% of the total time playing with mobile phones.
According to statistics released by the well-known data agency Statista, as of April 2024, TikTok’s global monthly active users will exceed 1 billion, making it the world’s fifth most popular social app. What is more worth mentioning is that when users pay attention to TikTok, their attention is focused and will hardly be transferred to other platforms.
One by one, the data has pointed out that TikTok has enough advantages in terms of user scale and user attention grabbing.
Just as the HBG theory in the book How Brands Grow gives the basic logic and truth of brand growth in a fragmented media environment-brand growth is driven by penetration. One of its core views is that the most important thing for brand growth is to find more users. More users are the premise of growth and the key to continuously deepening brand loyalty.
Therefore, we believe that it is a consensus that brands need to choose TikTok at the moment, but at the same time, in addition to delivering performance advertising, if you change your mindset and further focus on “brand advertising”, there will be more new growth opportunities.
In particular, unlike other platforms, in addition to having a strong user scale and activity, TikTok is more accurate and diverse in user portraits and content ecosystem richness.
“Short videos play a vital role in brand marketing in the current era. They can most efficiently explain the brand’s expression and continuously output the brand’s value proposition.” As Liang Ce, head of Midea’s Little Swan’s overseas expansion, summarized to Morketing: “To this day, TikTok still has a steady stream of user growth in many regions, which also means that there is more room for traffic growth. At the same time, TikTok’s commercialization is also driving many regions to achieve brand-effect integration. For brands, these two aspects of value are very important.”
Morketing learned that currently, about 4 million brands have chosen TikTok as their “home field” for advertising marketing.
So, when TikTok becomes the best traffic pool and channel for brands to find incremental users, how can brands “grasp” the crowd here and make the “crowd” truly become loyal users of the brand?
Back to the conclusion given by HBG: brand growth is driven by penetration, and loyalty is just a result of penetration.
This also means that if brand marketing needs to do a good job of the trio of users, content and time nodes, then “customer penetration” is the first sound that the brand should play.
As for the specific “crowd penetration theory”, at the crowd level, TikTok divides a set of O5A crowd asset models according to the progressive relationship between brand and user behavior.
Specifically, the 5A are: Aware – Reach Once, reached once by advertising content and native content; Aware – Multi Reach, reached multiple times by advertising content and native content; A3: Consider, taken positive actions such as search, sharing, and interacting with brands by liking; A4: Purchase, achieved conversion; A5: Advocate, achieved multiple conversions.
Among the 5A population, the most important population is the A3 interest population. On the one hand, they have been reached many times and have a certain understanding of the brand, which can accelerate short-term purchase conversion; on the other hand, through further penetration, it is also conducive to cultivating long-term loyal customer groups for the brand and completing the accumulation of population conversion.
Of course, when carrying out long-term brand building, large-scale user acquisition and the efficiency of user conversion from shallow to deep relationships are equally important. Therefore, in addition to “making good use of” the A3 population to promote the consumption decision-making and population accumulation of the A4 population, before A3, the brand’s reinvestment in A1 and A2 is the prerequisite for accumulating the A3 population.
As for how to further “grasp” your own 5A crowd and “throw” the right products to them, TikTok for Business also provides brands with a “customer penetration” manual. Morketing learned that brands can further build their own 5A crowd model through the data insights and calculations of TikTok Market Scope (TTMS), and take a “four-step” approach to optimize marketing decisions:
Step 1 – Redefine the audience group: observe the penetration rate of different groups under the category, and increase advertising investment for groups with high conversion rates but insufficient penetration rates;
Step 2 – Maximize the reach rate: expand the reach range and increase the frequency of reach;
Step 3 – Optimize different touchpoints: increase the intensity of product-effect advertising for the target audience at the same time;
Step 4 – Develop content strategies based on crowd portraits: create content based on user-favorite video formats, content categories, selling point preferences, etc.
03
The right time and right people for brand advertising:
Content and time nodes
The core idea of brand building is wide coverage + high-quality influence, thereby forming a brand. If finding the right channels and users is the key to achieving wide coverage, then content is the key to making a “high-quality impact”. In particular, at present, “content determines the upper limit of the brand” has become a consensus.
In fact, TikTo