Wen 丨 Tidal Business Review
New consumption has always been considered to be another powerful channel to TO C after the mobile Internet, and it is also regarded by capital as a candidate field that can give birth to hundreds of billions of market value companies in addition to the Internet, and after several years of hard work and brutal development, many classic cases have been born. Among them, there are "one-night myths", there are also "buildings and buildings", and even more " desperate times". Under the "baptism" of the epidemic in the past two years, the changes in the underlying structure of the industry, the new consumption in 2022 has restarted.
This time, "Tidal Business Review" looks from the outside inward, first observing the "change and invariance" of the "basic factors" that last from 2021 to 2022, and then explore the many possibilities of new consumption @ 2022.
01. Looking back on 2021, it is a year in which opportunities and challenges coexist
This year, new consumption flowers bloomed, and PUBG was born. For example, Yuanqi Forest is expected to release 180,000 smart freezers in 2021, and annual sales are expected to exceed 10 billion yuan, achieving a year-on-year increase of 270%. On the evening of December 9, 2021, luckin coffee released its financial report that the total net revenue of Luckin Coffee in the third quarter of 2021 was 2.3502 billion yuan, an increase of 105.6% over 1.143 billion yuan in the same period last year; the average monthly trading user of Luckin in the third quarter of 2021 was 14.7 million, a substantial increase of 79.2% from 8.2 million in the same period of 2020.
Figure/pexels
This year, the inflection point of new consumption appeared, and the times changed. For example, L'Oréal "hand tearing" Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, two brothers and sisters in the e-commerce live broadcasting industry, gradually removed the layer of "gauze" on the surface of the live streaming with goods, and consumers and brands have gradually disenchanted from the behavior of live streaming with goods, and this may also become an inflection point on the live streaming track. If the former is still a debatable conclusion, then Wei Ya's ban for tax evasion is definitely the end of an important era of e-commerce live broadcasting. This will have an absolute impact on the entire e-commerce industry, as well as the relationship between brands and platforms, consumers, and anchors, and at the same time reconstruct the consumption mode of the mobile Internet.
This year, the new consumption crisis is fraught with problems. For example, Nai Xue's tea food safety problems have been reported many times; three squirrels have evaporated more than 20 billion yuan at the end of the year because of the high market value of the advertising controversy; Zhong Xuegao has also caused controversy because of the "sky-high price" ice cream of 66 yuan a stick, and a misunderstood sentence of founder Lin Sheng's "love or not" has sent Zhong Xuegao to the cusp of the storm.
02, those "change and unchanged" constitute the development basis and inner texture of new consumption @ 2022
First, in the post-epidemic era, the pace of development has slowed down. According to Chaos Academy, in the first three quarters of 2021, compared with 2019, when there was no epidemic, the average annualized growth rate of total retail sales of consumer goods was close to 4%. In contrast, in the 10 years before 2019, consumption growth reached or even exceeded the annualized 10%. This shows that from the epidemic to the post-epidemic era, China's retail sales of consumer goods have not been well recovered.
Looking at the future from the present, in the post-epidemic era, the consumption concept, consumption capacity and consumption channels of users on the demand side will be affected to a certain extent, and the development of the production chain, logistics and transportation and offline stores on the supply side will also have certain limitations.
Second, the market dividend is exhausted, and the traditional path fails. From the second half of the Internet to the second half of new consumption, it is an indisputable fact that the domestic traffic dividend has been exhausted. From the incremental market to the stock market, the way brands acquire customers and customer acquisition habits will change, and the consistent "traffic thinking" is also facing innovation.
Where the wave of new consumption comes from, there is no conclusive conclusion, but in August 2019, a WeChat push by Diaoye "Don't doubt it, the "new consumption" is coming! The article proposes a formula: "new media (jittery little red book) + new channels (social / live e-commerce) + new products (extreme cost performance) = new brands" has become the "dogma" of many new consumer brands and is widely used in practice. At the moment when the tide recedes, it can only help complete the construction of the brand's "0-1", and "1-10" has a long way to go. Brands that rely solely on this traffic path are mostly stuck in growth woes.
It is foreseeable that video will be normalized and mainstream in the future. At this time, brands need to think about what kind of products are more suitable for video, and what kind of video is more able to reach users. On the other hand, the man-to-cargo route has also undergone important changes. In the past, consumers entered their desired goods in the search box, but now they recommend and guess that you like to occupy half of the traffic on platforms such as Taobao and Meituan, and users are more "lazy", the platform is more "smart", and the brand is more "smart".
03. Standing at the top of the wave of the new era, new consumer brands need to cultivate internal skills inward and build channels outward
First, brands need to stick to long-termism. The disappearance of traffic thinking is accompanied by the rise of brand building, and the "short life" of new consumption has become a common phenomenon. Even if you can use factors such as celebrities and small red books to form a single "explosive product", the brand is easy to fall into an unsustainable dilemma, the traffic is temporary, and the brand building is long-term.
For example, Perfect Diary is a typical company that quickly became a head beauty company with the help of traffic, but in 2019, it began to cooperate with the new generation of film actor Wen Qi and director Shunji Iwai to shoot micro-films, and then last year's official global spokesperson Zhou Xun, constantly improving and enriching the relevant tone of the brand. Coincidentally, Yuanqi Forest also tried to export the brand values of "challenger spirit" from the perspective of Chinese women's volleyball team and grassroots education this year.
Picture/Perfect Diary Official Micro
New consumers should be brands, not labels. In order to get rid of the fate of the short-lived, it is necessary to change in a timely manner at key nodes and build a brand image, brand story and brand tonality that can be recognized by users, which is the "sunflower treasure book" that new consumer brands can truly stand on, so as to truly become a friend of time.
Secondly, the beginning and end of online and offline, the infinite cycle of Mobius. At the beginning of the development of the Internet, it structurally transformed offline stores with the logic of connection, and new consumption often began with online e-commerce. For example, after its establishment in 2014, relying on the advantage of cost performance, in just three years, the company's sales of Tmall single products reached the first pet food - crazy puppy.
However, since the development of the consumer Internet, online and offline have become double arrows, and the development of offline stores also echoes the clarion call of the "experience economy". There are two main paths for the development of offline stores, one is the special construction of daily stores, such as bossie has set up a number of punch points in the store, including cafes, sticker photo points and cute pet areas; and the tables and chairs of three and a half stores have been customized design, and the space is changeable to meet the needs of different scenes. The second is the "third space", such as new consumers have many theme stores and concept stores, to promote the linkage between online and offline, also known as an important window for brand display.
Photo /Bosie official micro
Finally, focus on symbol value and value for money, close to the young people of the new era. "Individualism" is an important spirit of the Internet age, especially as the "indigenous" young people of the Internet, they are separated from the group, pay more attention to personalized experience, personalized demand has become the key to the new consumption breakthrough. The brands of new consumption are not necessarily the brands of everyone, but they should be the brands of some people.
And these young people pay attention to the symbolic value behind the product, but also pay attention to the cost performance of the product, so on the one hand, we must create product differentiation, build product characteristics with thickness, and at the same time keep the bottom line and do quality products.
Consumption is actually an ancient industry, but there has been a new shift in the Internet environment. It used to be able to ride the east wind with the flow of traffic, but how to soar up to ninety thousand miles still depends on whether there is a pair of tough and powerful "wings".
Some people say that "consumption in 2022 may not be as good as everyone thinks", but under the layout of the plot, it is also possible to start a new golden decade. As Tang Binsen, founder of Yuanqi Forest, said: "China does not lack consumption power, what is missing is good products." What is a good product, we believe that mining and meeting the underlying needs of consumers is a good product. ”