Wen 丨 those things of the Internet, the author 丨 sanjin, the editor 丨 Shi Yulong
This summer, young people's socialization is absolutely inseparable from hand-played lemon tea.
Before lemon tea, it was milk tea and coffee that took on social responsibilities.
But what is visible to the naked eye is that the ingredients used in milk tea are becoming more and more realistic, and the bells and whistles are going farther and farther on the road of becoming porridge, dissuading young people who pay attention to health and wellness.
And the coffee can not put down the body for a while, cold and arrogant to turn away the fearful people.
Lemon tea is a foreign army that has risen at this time, and most people first heard of lemon tea, which should be in Hong Kong dramas.
So when the first episode of "Gangpu F4": Cai Shaofen, Zhu Yin, Chen Farong, and Hong Xin's new program "Sister Please Eat", a cup of lemon tea was made on the spot, and the memories were suddenly pulled.
As early as the 1960s and 1970s, lemon tea swept through Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and after entering the mainland market, its classic drinks as restaurants and milk tea shops have endured but are not tepid.
In the past two years, lemon tea has also counterattacked, re-emerging with new packaging and new flavors, and a series of eye-catching achievements have attracted capital to the sea, ushering in an explosive period this summer.
Uncle Qiu completed his first financing at the beginning of the year, and 10 days later, two institutions chased after the investment, and the valuation doubled nearly 3 times in 10 days; in early July, Hunan brand Lemon Season announced the completion of tens of millions of yuan A round of financing from ByteDance; at the end of July, linlee, a hand-played lemon tea brand, received exclusive investment from ByteDance.
The Baidu index shows that as of May 18, the popularity index of lemon tea has soared by 9886% compared with last year.
In recent years, with the change of the consumer environment, the water industry's explosions are one after another, dazzling, from sugar-free sparkling water to hand-played lemon tea, do their explosions have a similar logic? What are the hidden worries behind the rapid exit of the circle? In the face of rapidly changing categories and brands, how long does young people love?
And look at the breakdown of this article.
According to the "2021 China Lemon Tea Industry Development White Paper", Chinese consumers drank 280 million cups of lemon tea in 2020.
The number of lemon tea specialty stores nationwide has grown from 1600 in 2019 to more than 2500. It is estimated that the number of consumers of china's ready-made (hand-beaten) lemon tea will exceed 30 million in 2021.
Lemon tea has a hit after it became sparkling water.
"All consumer goods can be redone" has long been the tacit norm of the new consumer market, but it is still curious, lemon tea has been out of the world for decades, has always been active only in Guangdong, how did it suddenly become popular all over China? Why are young people willing to pay for it?
Little Red Book netizen @ is Aqi, observed in the store for an afternoon, reproduced a cup of internet red lemon tea that queued for 2 hours, and received 36,000 likes and 19,000 collections.
Hundreds of thousands of netizens across the mobile phone screen, it seems that they can smell the aromatic oil with the smell of white flowers on the other side of the screen.
Lemon tea sells a kind of "Sugar Rush + caffeine + cold thrill".
It is equivalent to extracting and shaking the soul of a cup of milk tea, coffee and cola to make triple happy water, which is addictive and addictive, and the price is less than the average price of the three.
It is undeniable that the lemon teas of the "Hand-Played" series are indeed innovative in taste and vision.
Traditional lemon tea is bitter and astringent, and hand-beaten lemon tea uses perfume lemon as the main ingredient, and then the method of hand crushing further stimulates the lemon aroma and weakens the sourness of traditional lemon tea.
Taking the lemon season as an example, in terms of packaging, the unique fluorescent green with the funny and cute "lemon essence" emoji has strongly seized the minds of consumers in the hot summer.
In addition, as a member of the new tea world, lemon tea is more affordable and healthy than coffee milk tea.
A cup of "fruit + tea" of more than ten yuan, for this era of milk tea coffee often thirty or forty yuan, is like a dream that reduces both burden reduction and stomach reduction.
According to the "2021 China Lemon Tea Industry Development White Paper" of the food treasure book, 65.8% of consumers who participated in the survey believe that lemon tea is healthier than other milk teas, and 36.2% of consumers believe that drinking lemon tea will not gain weight.
In terms of marketing, hand-play lemon tea is very good at capturing the fashion of young people, and then using its social attributes to quickly open up the market.
A cup of "hand-beaten slag male lemon green tea", which binds lemon tea with the "green" culture in the young circle, attracts a large number of onlookers.
Source: Little Red Book
The new category of classic models not only allows young people to find freshness, but also visually just stepped on their aesthetic points.
Delicious, inexpensive, healthy, good to take pictures, all the natural and non-natural advantages added together, and through the highly imaginative marketing methods, the explosion of lemon tea seems inevitable.
However, is such a routine déjà vu?
Yuanqi Forest's explosive sparkling water has opened up a new track for the water and drinking industry, and has become an indispensable social currency for young people, and accurate positioning and marketing are also an indispensable part of its wealth code.
The explosive logic of lemon tea and sparkling water converges:
First of all, they all chose a good track, sparkling water made up for the gap in the previous sugar-free carb water in the beverage industry, lemon tea expanded from the southern market to the whole country, finding a good opportunity for secondary development;
Second, they have all seized the outlet of health, and on this basis, to cater to the aesthetic and emotional needs of young people, it can be said that they have done the right thing at the right time; third, capital blessing has accelerated the market heating up.
The spending power of young people is beyond doubt, brands can quickly upgrade their preferences, and capital is often in a hurry to go to the sea in order to make money, boosting the further combustion of the market.
The fire is on fire, but there are still a series of questions behind the fire that are worth thinking about.
For lemon tea, the first is the sustainable development of the product itself.
At present, most of the lemon tea on the market is ice drink, and one of the important opportunities for it to be popular in the summer is also due to the cool quenching of thirst of the lemon itself, but after the summer, the lemon will become bitter when it is hot, and the shop that specializes in lemon tea should go.
At the same time, lemon tea itself has simple raw materials, the process is not complicated, innovation and breakthrough are difficult, if it is difficult to continue to promote new, whether it can retain young people is also unknown.
Even if the explosive product becomes a classic, when the boom subsides and the queue for half an hour is no longer there, where should the store look for new profit points.
In fact, the videos of opening the Little Red Book and making lemon tea have been overwhelming, and the videos with tens of thousands of likes are not in the minority.
In addition, most of the hand-made lemon tea on the market is used in perfume lemons, and the surge in demand has also led to insufficient supply, supply chain problems have directly raised costs, it is understood that the unit price of perfume lemons in the past 2-3 yuan / kg has been raised to 35 yuan / kg.
The low production threshold not only makes more and more lemon tea shops, but also the homogenization phenomenon is becoming more and more serious, and the market is beginning to saturate.
High cost hinders the entry of small and medium-sized players, and under the homogenization of more brand power, all signs indicate that the lemon tea market or will usher in a reshuffle, the head effect is about to form, lemon tea business may no longer be tempting.
The dividend period of a single hit is gradually shortening, and consumers' aesthetic fatigue and taste fatigue will come at some point.
In fact, the drinks that are stepping on the wind are dazzling, all of which are "well-packaged" and "healthy and delicious", and strive to cater to the consumption preferences of the new generation.
In recent years, Starbucks, FamilyMart, Xicha and other merchants have successively launched nitrogen-filled coffee and nitrogen-filled tea drinks, nitrogen-filled drinks have both super charm in taste and vision, and there is no carbon burden, which is expanding the niche market, and may become the next explosive model in the beverage industry in the future.
Before the lemon tea burst, it has been living in the streets and alleys of Guangdong for a long time, and it is said that Guangdong people consume 60 million lemons every year.
In the industry, lemon tea can not go out of Guangdong has become a magic spell, it is difficult to appear chain brands, the formation of scale. It is mentioned that lemon tea is mostly piled up in Guangdong and Hong Kong, such as tart lime, Lin Xiang lemon, Uncle Qiu and other brands.
However, in the past two years, the tea drinking culture has advanced by leaps and bounds, and the excavation of subdivided tracks has become more refined. Lemon tea, made by natural handmade, successfully abducted a group of customers who hesitated in front of the milk tea shop.
The misalignment between supply and demand between new tea drinks and people's health awareness has given the opportunity to subdivide products the opportunity to rise, which has spawned the "summer wind" of lemon tea.
Since the beginning of 2019, the lemon tea brand has gradually spread throughout the country, including the expansion of old brands to other regions, such as The guanli is based in Guangdong, and gradually moves towards the whole country, and currently has branches in Guangdong, Yunnan, Guangxi and Hainan.
Regional kings have also gradually emerged, Uncle Qiu in Guangdong, Wang Lemon in Shenzhen, Lemon Season in Changsha, lemon tea head brand play is almost the same, with the region as the base camp to become a king, and then radiate to the whole country.
Taking Changsha's "lemon season" as an example, 150 stores were opened in 4 months, and the monthly revenue of a single store in May exceeded 230,000 yuan, which is enough to show that the consumption power of lemon tea users is beyond imagination.
And want to go to the whole country, the most important thing is to solve the standardization and supply chain and other problems, hand lemon tea emphasizes "hand play", relatively difficult to standardize.
But we can also see some lemon tea, in the milk tea industry work.
Poor management of raw materials, dirty kitchens, incomplete health certificates for staff, irregular operations, regardless of brand size, lemon tea shops began to be put on the hot search by market supervision departments.
With mature supply chains, developed social media, and fueled capital, new consumer brands are in an unprecedented era.
The wave of the water and beverage industry is wave after wave, new categories and explosive items are emerging in an endless stream, on the one hand, the grand scene of new things being warmly sought after by young people, on the other hand, the fate of more brands that have been quickly forgotten "net red".
In any case, if you want to be remembered by young people, only marketing is useless, and in the long run, product power is the last word.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi took a hundred years to grow into a world beverage brand, and some answers can only be handed over to time.
Reference Articles:
Zinc Finance: Xi tea rushed to 60 billion, hand lemon tea into a new favorite, new tea drink with financing to get soft?
DoNews: The troubles behind the Genki Forest
Stone Business Review: The "popularity" logic of the Yuanqi Forest
Mantis Finance: Lemon tea that has been "beaten" out of the circle, can it withstand a swarm of bees to "fight"?
The forefront of entrepreneurship: 370 new brands added in 180 days, lemon tea turned into an Internet celebrity?