Whether a company takes the road of branding is 99% determined by the market and environment. When the OEM business is becoming more and more differentiated, and when the international environment is becoming less and less conducive to OEM trade, how many options are there besides independent brands? Investing and building factories in low-cost countries is not the ultimate solution. It requires a large amount of capital injection, and there are local cultural, talent, legal and other risks, unless there are companies with sufficient international capabilities.
Maintaining advantages through technology leadership and innovation leadership requires more investment and a large number of technical talents, design and innovation talents. You can ask Baoshide…
Without such courage, technological leadership is not feasible.
Then independent brands have become the best choice for enterprises. Technological innovation is a ladder type. After new technology comes out, the original technology will fall behind or lose value, and it has an expiration date. The brand is precipitated, and all efforts and investments make the brand stronger and more valuable. A brand can exist for hundreds of thousands of years, and it won’t take many years for a technology to fall behind or become owned by everyone. Today’s electricity, steam engines, and electric lights do not belong to the inventors of the technology. Technological innovations and inventions only have a protection period of 10-20 years. Once the protection period is over, they no longer belong to you, but the brand can continue forever.
Of course, technology is of great help in the early stages of starting a business. If you have strong technology or are good at a certain field, it will be a great help to the success of the business. Technology belongs to the category of production and manufacturing, and brand belongs to the category of market operation.
Why is the branding of tool companies unstoppable?
This is the law of history and the will of the people. Who pushed the bosses to buy land to build factories and equipment 20 years ago? Factories are rising one after another, and industrial parks are being formed one after another. The government only plays a planning role, and the real driving force comes from the entrepreneurs themselves. Even if you borrow money, you have to buy it with a loan.
In addition, trading entrepreneurs invest heavily in office buildings. I believe many foreign trade companies know that no matter Ningbo, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, Qingdao, Guangzhou, Shenzhen or Xiamen or Fuzhou, powerful companies will buy one or two floors or even an entire office building. Whether it’s a factory or an office building, who is driving this? Market and environmental forces, plus government guidance. The most important thing is hope. The business of factories and foreign trade companies is in full swing, and they are full of hope for the future.
This is an unstoppable trend, but unfortunately for most industries, this trend is coming to an end. The market is becoming less and less interested in traditional models, and customers are becoming less and less enthusiastic about OEM business. When business is booming, customers actively place orders and try to fill the warehouse as much as possible, fearing that the factory will not be able to produce in time and cannot deliver goods in time. Today all this is drifting away!
The global market and consumers are looking forward to more than just Made in China. Products produced in China have become household names to them. No matter what brand of product, consumers will be accustomed to thinking It’s Made In China.
Therefore, today the market and consumers are looking forward to Chinese brands more. They all know that Chinese brands are more cost-effective, high-quality and low-priced. For them, those European and American brands are middlemen who make the difference. But we are unfamiliar with brands. How to build a brand is a difficult problem for Chinese companies from zero to one. Our perception is that building a brand is too difficult, and we don’t even know the basic elements of building a brand.
However, the trend of corporate branding is slowly taking shape, just like the trend when companies bought land to build factories, and corporate cognition is converging on this consensus. The government is also constantly guiding or making companies understand this reality. Because the road to OEM is becoming narrower and narrower, the advantage of low price is being taken in by lower price players.
Under such a historical node and trend of the times, whether the company is willing or not, it will push the company forward or upward. Just like Wang Xing of Meituan said: “Either you are awesome or you get lost.”
It is better to build a brand sooner rather than later. Although brands will not be homogeneous, positioning is very important, and there are not many business concepts. It becomes more difficult to discover the core concepts of an industry and a category as time goes by, the scarcity becomes more and more expensive as time goes by.
In fact, there are no century-old companies in the world, only century-old brands. Many brands have changed hands several times, but the companies have long since ceased to exist. Therefore, the only way to build a lasting business is through branding. Just take a look at the following brief analysis of century-old brands. There are many hidden events and market information in it.
