Confession of the big party.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “System 2”, author Li Yi |Systematic Rational Marketing Consulting, Business Leader .

MarketingWeek reported a small news last week. Although it was ignored by most marketers, it seems to us to be a small milestone in the marketing circle.

The headline of this news is “Adidas: We have over-promoted in the digital marketing arena.”

Let’s call it: “Adidas’s confession” (Adidas’sconfession).

Adidas spends $3 billion on the lesson: Why is it so difficult to make a brand?

What did the news say?

Adidas’ global media director Simon Peel said: Over the past few years, Adi has invested heavily in digital and performance channels, thereby sacrificing brand building.

The text also provides exceptionally accurate numbers: 77% of the budget is in effect and 23% is in the brand.

The word “over-investment” sounds less serious. But you have to know that Adidas’ annual budget for marketing is about 2 billion euros, even if it is only a mismatch of 20%, which is the lesson of 3 billion yuan.

What is the so-called “digital and effect channel”?

Translate, in essence, you can understand that this is two standards:

1 investment can be monitored >> not monitored

2Investments that directly generate conversions>> cannot directly generate conversions

In other words, Adi has put a lot of budget on channels such as information flow, SEO/SEM, and e-commerce advertising. These channels can be monitored and even paid for by CPA or even CPS (purchasing). ROI is immediate.

Traditional outdoor, television, radio, and newspapers are naturally dwarfed.

What’s more interesting is that the article mentioned that Adi has been in the past few years.Directly quoted is an attribution model called LastClickttribution.

This model takes “pragmatism” to the extreme – as the name implies, no matter how much other brand information the consumer has seen before, this model will attribute all the credit for the conversion to the last click before the purchase. .

When you see this, you should suddenly realize:

Adidas spends $3 billion on the lesson: Why is it so difficult to make a brand?

Obviously, this goes against the most basic marketing common sense:

The effect of conversion is not a passive water, the source is “brand building.”

From any consumer decision-making journey or basic funnel model, we can see that without the source of cognition and interest, there is no final conversion and purchase. Quote data from a senior practitioner of digital advertising:

In fact, users typically have to go through more than 20 ad clicks to make a purchase. Various presentation methods include search, social, email, shaped ads or TV commercials.

BenedictHayes

Adidas spends $3 billion on the lesson: Why is it so difficult to make a brand?

It’s like farmers planting rice:

Harvesting rice is the effect/transformation; while sowing, fertilizing, and watering are all brand activities. Receiving rice, of course, happy. But you can’t do not sow, just collect rice. Is it difficult to expect rice to grow out of the air?

So, I believe there is a bigger question that is presented in your mind:

Aididas is really stupid? Why not pay attention to the brand?

A mature global brand with a well-established marketing system and a budget of tens of billions. . . How can they ignore such important marketing common sense?

In fact, for most of Party A:

Standing on “brand building” is really difficult.

There are three aspects to talk about here:

01 Difficulties in understanding: What is building in the brand building?

The brand is a fuzzy term whose definition is too