In 2025, I visited 1089 customers and the most frequently asked questions were [What should we do if prices get lower and lower] [What should we do if sales pressure gets higher and higher] [What should we do if there is a bottleneck in internal traffic] [We have learned new technologies and algorithms, why is business becoming increasingly difficult] [Where are the new traffic troughs] [Where is the new growth curve], and various internal competition anxieties persist.

On New Year's Day 2026, I summarized the 26 most important keywords about brand anti involution, hoping to provide some ideas for the brand growth of enterprises in 2026!

1. Price reduction anxiety and dimension enhancement solution

The anxiety of price reduction cannot be solved by price reduction, as there is no bottom line for price reduction under China's excess supply chain capacity. Your price reduction will only lead to a bigger round of price cuts from your competitors.

Quality improvement: For example, White Elephant Soup Noodle uses six hours of aged hens over one year to cook real soup instead of powder and sauce packets. The cost is limited, but the perceived value of consumers has risen significantly, creating a single product worth billions.

Service Upgrade: Starting from 2024, Tmall will vigorously promote VIP88 members on its platform, increasing from over 6 million members to over 50 million last year. The annual fee of 88 yuan actually costs users hundreds of yuan, and once users enjoy numerous valuable privileges, they reduce their shopping on other platforms. Tmall has captured the most valuable users with VIP 88 service upgrade.

Pain point upgrade: The Tailanis stable shoes feature segmented sole support and BV MARK global anti slip certification, solving the pain point of how children can walk steadily and avoid falling during their learning period. They sell for 598 yuan and rank first in product sales, surpassing many peers.

Emotional enhancement: For example, the Xiaomi power bank has excellent quality and functions and is sold for 89 yuan, but if it is paired with a Hello Kitty or Pok ? mon IP, it can be sold for 10-20 yuan more. If you give your daughter a power bank, do you want to give her a favorite IP, pay a little more, and buy her a favorite one? It's worth it! Not focusing on functional value, but on emotional value.

So it is easy to compete in the same dimension by focusing on product functionality, cost-effectiveness, product quality, usage value, and other hard strengths. One can seek to enhance soft power, emotional value, scarcity, exclusivity, resonance, cultural experience, identity symbol, aesthetic value, scene value, and service value. Only by enhancing value can one win a premium.

2. Brand solution to sales pressure

The pressure of sales cannot be solved by promotions! If a user places an order just because of the strong promotion, they will also turn around and go to another store tomorrow due to the opponent's stronger promotion!

Ogilvy once said: Money is not spent on investing in brands, it will be spent on promotions and discounts, but spending on the latter will only lead to lower sales. And investing in your brand will make it a part of people's lives.

On the surface, the current problem is that China's demographic dividend has disappeared, consumer expectations and confidence are insufficient, offline traffic is halved, shopping malls and hypermarkets are still getting fewer and fewer people, online dividends are no longer available, and it is not easy to make money in areas of growth, and it is not easy to grow in areas of profit! On the surface, it's all a dilemma of channels and consumer power, but behind all these challenges, there's only one point - finding people for goods. In the past decade, people have lost their ability to find products for brands. If consumers really want you, love you, and insist on you, will they not be able to buy you? When you focus on how consumers want you to love you and demand that you must, brands have a reason to choose you over others, and the problem of sales is naturally solved!

So brand is the cause, sales are the result. Cause and effect are the reasons for choosing you over others. Fate is the ability to deeply distribute and operate traffic. Sales are the result, and returns are the rate of return. Management is not about managing outcomes, but about managing causality. If you do a good job in the cause and a good job in the fate, the result will come out and the report will come out.

3. Internal issues and external solutions

What are all the issues within the station? The traffic has reached its limit, and the cost of traffic is increasing by a factor of two. Moreover, everyone is investing in the A3 group, which seems to be very accurate. However, the ROI of investing in the A3 group is getting worse as you invest more and more, because these are the only people who need to be washed away!

We overestimate the role of precision and underestimate the role of social consensus. Precision marketing is definitely right at first, but when everyone goes for it, it goes wrong. Everyone is competing for A3, and the cost becomes higher and higher. But fundamentally speaking, what is the essence of consumer goods? How many people know your core values? For example, if you want 1 million people to buy you, you need about 50 million users to understand you, which is 50 times breaking the circle. The conversion rate for general health is 2%. So if 10 million people specifically purchase you, you would probably have 500 million people know. If you don't have 500 million people knowing this name, you can't have 10 million consumers.

So today your product is very good, but there is a bottleneck in business mainly because you haven't broken through the circle to educate those potential customers. Just like how the online sales of Kongke pasta have reached a bottleneck of 500 million yuan, because pasta is already a small dish, and after breaking through the circle, it has also reached over a billion yuan. Because it educates potential users that making spaghetti is delicious, but only for mothers and not for cooking, it truly solves a pain point for mothers.

Looking at DeYou wet toilet paper again, if it doesn't break through the circle and educate users [three dry sheets are not as good as one DeYou wet toilet paper, wipe visible and invisible clean], how can it go from 300 million to over 2 billion in three years!

4. Numbers do not represent facts

Kantar analysis found that media placement has a significant impact on brand activity and market share. If marketing expenses are reduced by 50% in a quarter, brand activity will decrease by 19%; If there is no advertising investment throughout the quarter, the activity will decrease by half; If there is no advertising placement for six months, it will directly reflect on sales, with an average sales decrease of 13%.

Traffic placement on digital records often involves hundreds of millions of exposures and tens of millions of readings. Enterprises think they are popular all over the internet, but consumers' perception of you is far less optimistic than enterprises think. These figures do not represent true and effective reading, and they are often just a drop in the ocean of the Internet! Every night you watch 500 videos, how many do you remember the next day? Consumers are forgetful, and their brains are accustomed to filtering out information that is meaningless to them. Only information that is relevant and valuable to oneself and repeatedly browses the screen will be remembered. This is also why many well-known brands continue to show their presence in the real world, and maintaining sustained reach in consumers' living spaces is the foundation for maintaining brand popularity!

5. Pay more attention to traffic

Buy KOLs, streamers, and the platform is a data rental platform. Data will only become more and more expensive, and the money will stop, the volume will stop!

Brands need to pay more attention to traffic, as traffic is not the foundation of business growth. Long lasting traffic is the result of a brand winning people's hearts. Traffic is the channel, and the problem to be solved is to buy it, buy it, buy it at a lower price. Brand is cognitive, and the problem to be solved is to love it, love it, love it, and why love it. Buying without love is unsustainable, and brands without a mindset will eventually be swallowed up by price wars and traffic wars.

6. Planting grass requires planting trees

Marketing requires planting trees, even more so than planting grass. The era of massive grass planting has ended, and now we are planting grass on the grassland. After planting the grass, we can't find where our own grass is. Moreover, too many unlimited companies have led to the proliferation of wild grass, weeds, and even poisonous weeds on the social grassland. Users' recognition ability for KOL's paid soft ads is also increasing day by day!

It is difficult to form a unified brand awareness, memory, and dissemination by using KOLs from various perspectives, scenarios, and keywords! Don't overestimate the power of diversified and fragmented planting, and underestimate the power of brand planting.

Brand hard advertising focuses on the core pain points of users and repeatedly outputs the central idea in order to truly make consumers remember and implant it into their minds, which is effective.

Professor Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, pointed out that the best way to make people remember a concept or thing is to constantly repeat it, because humans cannot distinguish between familiarity and truth. Familiar things can relax consumers' minds and make comfortable and easy reflexive judgments without thinking.

7. Touching the touch is even more important

The media is not buying touchpoints, but buying touchpoints. Nowadays, there are many advertisements passing by every day, but very few that can be remembered. There are even fewer advertisements that can change your behavior. The premise of brand growth is to grasp the pain points of user scenarios, penetrate and form memories to change behavior.

So truly effective media requires high reach, high attention, high frequency, and high completion in order to effectively generate memories, trigger consumer behavior changes, and become a powerful booster for sales growth.

8. The brand is fish farming, the effect is fishing

The synergy of product and effect is actually like raising fish and fishing. A brand raises fish in a pond, and the effect is to catch the fish. If you only fish without keeping fish, you will soon have no fish to catch.

Without the support of brand power, the fish in the pond will be quickly caught, and the number of people fishing will increase, making it increasingly difficult and costly to catch a single fish.

Brands need to constantly educate and create markets in order to catch endless fish. For example, the Ulike hair removal device reached a bottleneck of one billion and ran out of precise online traffic. However, in reality, there are very few people in the market who really know about the home painless hair removal device. Therefore, in 2021, Ulike ignited a mainstream audience of 400 million through targeted marketing, from 1 billion to 2.5 billion and then to 4.5 billion in two years, and its market share increased from 30% to 70%

9. Dividends are not as good as compound interest

The biggest change in the past decade is that everyone has turned brand building, which is a very systematic thing, into an instant, data-driven and visualized one. This is a progress, but it has made brands more and more short-term thinking and KPI oriented. The world often comes and goes quickly, and what comes and goes slowly also goes slowly. Management is not about managing outcomes, but about managing causality!

IPA research shows that the sales return of traffic effect advertising is likely to be higher than that of brand advertising in the first 6 months. After 6 months, the contribution of brand advertising to sales driven by compound interest will surpass that of effect advertising. Looking at a 1-year cycle, the sales return of brand advertising is 50% higher than that of effect advertising. Looking at a 3-year full cycle, the overall sales drive that brand advertising can bring is three times that of effect advertising.

10. Bedroom Proposal and Square Proposal

From a transactional perspective, advertising does need to be precise and target those who are likely to make a purchase. However, from a brand perspective, branding is not a bedroom proposal, but a square proposal. Everyone witnesses it together and cannot only influence the buyer. Behind the buyer are decision-makers, influencers, experiencers, disseminators, and distributors. A brand needs to form a broad social consensus in order to have true brand momentum. Being a person should not be snobbish, but being a brand should be snobbish. Having power is advantageous, otherwise it will only be small and short-term profits at most, and it will not go far.

When brand advertising has established a foundation of cognition and interest for consumers, and when effective advertising reappears in front of consumers, you represent a brand that many people are using, a brand with social consensus, and no longer an unknown miscellaneous or white brand in the eyes of consumers.

Brand consensus is the unified understanding formed by consumers towards a brand, firstly recognizing your name, and secondly recognizing your value. If you have a product or service that is excellent enough but does not match its sales, there is often only one reason: not enough people know you. Brands must break through boundaries and explode, repeatedly outputting becomes common sense and consensus!

11. From quantitative change to qualitative change

Focusing on core products and reducing long tail products, the survey shows that core products contribute more than 90% of the company's revenue.

Focusing on brand value, reducing promotion and traffic dependence, only the accumulation of the brand can enjoy the compound interest of time.

Focusing on changes in consumer behavior and reducing ineffective advertising, only by high-frequency targeting of core media and audiences can we drive changes in consumer behavior and market patterns.

12. Volume and sales

Most companies only focus on storing grain for the winter during turbulent times, but top companies in various categories should actually increase their brand investment. Because consumers are more cautious, they will spend their money on brands that are more secure, certain, and trustworthy.

At the same time, the noise in the market is lower, the competitiveness will weaken, and brands that dare to over invest will win a larger market volume, seize a larger market share, and increase brand concentration faster.

13. Muscle and fat meat

Enterprises need to consider what are the true core businesses that can bring long-term profit value. Businesses that lack the core advantages of building a brand and are not actively recognized and chosen by customers must be removed, as they will only make you gain weight rather than truly become strong.

We cannot mistake gaining weight for growth. We need to find the key engine for business growth, which can occupy the first or only position in the customer's mind, and gain the active or preferred choice of customers. Business growth is muscle growth.

14. Scene is the demand

In an era of stagnant consumption and low desire, the most important issue for brands is to create scenarios and stimulate purchasing desire in order to drive business growth. The Job to be done theory holds that the scenario is the demand, and the creation of the scenario is the commercial increment, because what people need is not the product itself, but the scenario problems that the product can solve, as well as their own emotions and life meaning in the scenario.

What is a scene? Scene is time, place, characters, events, and it is the reason for a person to actively participate and engage. For example, Wang Laoji's function is to reduce internal heat and prevent internal heat, while staying up late watching football, working overtime, and eating barbecue and hot pot are the scenes. Only with scenes can sales be achieved. The advantage of Juewei duck neck is its freshness and spiciness, while traveling is tasteless, working overtime is tasteless, watching TV shows is tasteless, and the lack of flavor in the mouth is the trigger point for some Juewei scenes.

15. Becoming top or unprofitable

Products are not born equal, and for each category, a ladder of purchase order will be formed in the minds of customers. Once your brand becomes the first choice, competitors have already been blocked in the minds of customers. Brand is the biggest Matthew effect in the stock game cycle, so in the next decade, the concentration of top brands will gradually increase. Entering the mind is not the ultimate goal, becoming the first choice is.

16. Concentrated explosion with limited budget

Some companies have limited budgets but prefer a decentralized approach, punching a few punches in every corner. Is it effective to cast 10 top programs with a rating of 0.4% for a TV program? No, it's basically equal to zero. Even if the target audience is exactly the same, only 4% of the top columns can ignite the brand and establish mental memory.

To win the business war over consumer mentality, we need to concentrate our firepower, penetrate the blood-brain barrier of consumers, and achieve sufficient concentration and pressure. 'High pressure' means concentrating firepower, while 'high concentration' means increasing advertising frequency to ensure high-frequency saturation attacks and repeated outreach.

17. Take a gamble where you can win

Diversifying resources is actually the biggest risk. In a situation where resources are limited, you need to put all your eggs in one basket. If you are inexperienced in every field, it is easy to be devoured or defeated by competitors. In areas where one has a chance of winning, one should dare to take a gamble where one can win, and give up decisively where one cannot win. Victory belongs to the side that can concentrate the largest force at a decisive location, form a victorious force locally, and gradually establish strong barriers.

18. Upholding integrity and surprise

There are usually three paths to brand explosion: integrating into major social events and topics; Integrate into major entertainment and sports events in society; Integrate into consumers' daily living spaces such as communities and office buildings.

In the information dust society, betting on the dissemination of major events and entertainment has significant effects but the probability is very low. The number of major events or entertainment that can truly positively ignite a brand in a year is often few and far between, which is rare for enterprises.

If you want to put your brand name and core values into the ears of hundreds of millions of mainstream consumers, you need to find the core living space of mainstream consumers, such as office buildings and apartment buildings that people pass through every day. In low interference enclosed spaces, repeated high-frequency contact is the true certainty of viewership. The "life scene attention" represented by Focus Group has become a scarce infrastructure, forming deterministic links to 400 million mainstream people every day through precise and stable daily life scene links.

19. One Shake, One Book, One Share

According to Kaidu's Research on the Advertising Attention of Chinese Urban Residents in 2021, the Internet, elevators and TV are the three core arrival media, covering more mainstream people in mainstream cities, with the Internet arrival rate of 95%, elevator arrival rate of 79% and TV arrival rate of 51%.

From the perspective of advertising attention, consumers are less affected in limited living spaces such as elevators and cinemas. And due to high-frequency contact, more memories are left behind, which drives stronger brand purchasing intentions.

Wang Xing, CEO of Kantar Greater China, pointed out that the most effective paradigm for brand building is to "plant grass" and create brand content online through social media represented by "one TikTok, one book", and offline through targeted media to trigger scenarios, awaken consumer purchasing needs, and achieve high-frequency reach in enclosed spaces.

20. 70 points firm is better than 90 points shaky

The true brand value takes three consecutive years to solidify in the minds of consumers, and often reaches a turning point after three years when brand assets increase significantly. Sometimes we are too anxious and can't wait for a year before we have to switch to a new advertising slogan. Does the more work we do, the better our results will be? We are getting busier and busier, but also more anxious. It's better to do less than to do more.

Wu Xiaobo mentioned on the year-end show that 'perseverance is the top priority, slowly win'. There will still be many unexpected events in 2026, so we must figure out what we are doing and bet on doing something continuously. We need to use more determined and powerful methods to grasp the core of brand growth and focus on the focal point.

21. Embracing change is not as good as betting on staying the same

A founder's current conviction often comes from a choice made a few years ago, and enjoying the compound interest that comes with that choice today. Trying new concepts, technologies, and algorithms, constantly competing with platforms, algorithms, and uncertain markets, will only make you busier and more anxious, because what you are busy with is not the essence, and you are not busy with things that can accumulate and bring compound interest in the long run.

When companies fall into the anxiety of growth, they often spend too much energy embracing so-called changes, grabbing those infinite and fluid things, but ignore the truly scarce and unchanging things. Persisting in doing things that are more certain, long-term, and truly sustainable for growth will lead to positive value accumulation.

22. 'Advertising' is not 'narrow advertising'

'Guang' refers to centralized detonation, formation of collective memory, and establishment of social consensus, all of which are based on 'scale and precision' rather than one-to-one precision. Nowadays, one-on-one digital precision outreach and personalized marketing cater to thousands of people, resulting in different content for each person. Although it may seem more accurate, "advertising" has become "narrow advertising", making it difficult to form social consensus and brand presence.

To make a brand bigger, it must catch big fish and cast a big net. To build a brand, it is important to target the largest possible audience. The precise marketing of circle based marketing is difficult to form a broad social consensus. Only by achieving extensive reach to a large-scale audience can it become a public brand. A brand that hasn't exploded and broken boundaries is like constantly flapping in a lake, never seeing the capacity of the sea.

Brand startups can rely on point-to-point precision marketing methods, as this stage pursues high conversion rates. However, as the brand develops and grows in size, precision becomes the biggest obstacle. When a growing brand excessively pursues precision in its communication process, it is giving up the possibility of becoming a public brand.

23. Instead of being better, it's better to have opposition

Many people believe that competition is about doing better in quality or cheaper in price, but in reality, the market leader is most likely the pioneer of the category. Even if newcomers do better, people still consider them to follow the trend, and those who follow the trend are naturally considered second rate. Rather than being better, it's better to be different, it's better to be opposed.

While enterprises use technological innovation or category innovation to create markets, they also need to use marketing to connect with users' minds. Successful enterprises often focus on both marketing and innovation. Any breakthrough in innovative technology that is not linked to customer value through marketing and has not become the first choice in the minds of customers will either be meaningless or difficult to maintain.

24. You hit yours, I'll hit mine!

The best tactic to deal with strong competitors is to go in the opposite direction and not dance to their rhythm. Effectively hit the inherent weakness of the opponent's strength, guide the enemy to where you are best at, and turn the opponent's strengths into weaknesses.

Brand marketing should not follow the beaten path, but target the beaten path. For example, in the face of the international brand dominated milk powder market at that time, Feihe's "more suitable for the physique of Chinese babies" hit the weak point in the international brand advantage, or focused on a specific group of people and became their first choice, such as Winona, which focuses on sensitive skin.

This is achieved through the transformation of battlefield types and rules to achieve "self centeredness" and take the initiative on the battlefield. If a brand wants to succeed, it needs to ask itself in the product development stage, which category is my first choice, which function is my first choice, which audience is my first choice, or which scenario is my first choice. If I can't say a word, I usually won't succeed.

25. Affects C-end more than B-end

Brand building should be guided by potential energy. As the brand's voice grows and its potential energy increases, the brand not only quickly establishes public awareness, but also exerts influence from the C-end to the B-end.

The strength of brand momentum determines the flow of resources. The potential of advertising also lies in where it comes from. Standing on the shoulders of top media, borrowing the potential of mainstream media, such as a large amount of brand advertising, can inspire dealer confidence, guide store terminals, exchange for better positions, larger layouts, and also attract online platforms to gain more traffic.

26. The brand is the Matthew Effect

Strong brands bring value in any channel. Neglecting the brand will lead to being overlooked by the market.

Firstly, big brands come with their own traffic. When a brand is deeply rooted in people's hearts, there can be sustained free traffic. Big brands come with 60-70% of free traffic, and the remaining 30-40% is brought by traffic advertising.

Secondly, large brand traffic advertising has a higher conversion rate. The popularity and recognition of big brands are high, so the probability of clicking on advertisements and transactions is also higher than that of ordinary brands, and the conversion rate can reach several times that of others.

Thirdly, big brands bring greater premium value. A big brand with trust, reputation, and brand momentum can bring greater premium ability.