In the first half of 2021, capital's enthusiasm for new consumption reached its peak.
According to incomplete statistics, in the first half of 2020, there were more than 120 financing incidents in the domestic consumer sector, with a total financing amount of about 19 billion yuan; in the same period of 2021, the two figures were more than 400 and 30 billion yuan, respectively. The number of new brands has grown exponentially, and the entire industry has been blindfolded.
In the second half of the year, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse. Not only has the number of financings for early-stage projects in the angel and seed rounds fallen off a cliff, but even for some brands that have already stood out, capital has begun to rethink. Optimistic media and enterprises described this as a "new consumption into the second half, into the stock competition" of the race to grab the place. Stock competition is not false, but the term "second half" limits the potential of new consumption. You know, consumption is a historical dividend track that has been repeatedly verified and can cross the cycle. Over the past 20 years, the consumer industry has experienced multiple peaks and troughs. At present, new consumption has not been cold, but it has been overheated in the early days, and now rationality has returned. In the face of "calm and restrained" VCs and consumers, new products have become the fulcrum of the brand to leverage the market.
The data shows that in recent years, the total number of new products on the Tmall platform has doubled year by year, and more than 30% of the large-scale trading volume is driven by new products, while the average unit price of new products is 1.3 times that of the overall market, bringing more value to the brand.
On January 10th, Tmall Little Black Box joined hands with 36Kr to invite well-known domestic new consumer brands, senior media people and platform operation experts to open the "Tmall Little Black Box 2022" New Product Consumption Forum" to Xinli.
This is a forum with extremely fine information particles. In just 120 minutes, 14 guests took the stage one after another, or expressed their chests and expressed industry insights; or in-depth dialogue and collided with the spark of thinking. In their view, new products are not only new, but also require long-term, full-link operation. In order to realize the "new" transformation of new products to "heng", it is indispensable to tap the "new needs" of users, establish "new standards" in the industry, and realize the "new concept" of the brand.
Mature tracks and emotional selling points
Thanks to the borderless market brought by technologies such as mobile Internet and Internet of Things, in just a few years, new consumer brands represented by daily black qiao, pidan, rational and small stoves have entered the public vision. Their success has a commonality, that is, it satisfies people's needs and yearning for a better life.
Forum 1: According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the number of empty nest youth in China will reach 92 million in 2021, and the lonely economy will rise rapidly. With the characteristics of "both convenient and fast", takeaway has been the optimal solution for workers to eat three meals a day for a long time, until the emergence of self-heating food. Huang Wei, the founder of KaiXiaoZao, believes that the heat of self-heating food is inseparable from the appeal of "a bowl of hot rice that Chinese cannot be separated from". Although there are many similarities between takeaway and self-heating food, in terms of time cost, the characteristics of self-heating rice that can be eaten "anytime and anywhere" are much stronger than takeaway. Of course, this market did not appear out of thin air. Huang Wei's first touch came from a user review of the Tmall flagship store. "What else can you do but make noodles?" The backlash from the user side makes the birth of the small stove an accident. "Innovation and creativity sometimes don't come from businesses or entrepreneurs, but from consumer reminders. Creation is not out of thin air, but an innovative way to reshape the original needs of consumers, so as to create popular goods that meet the current era. Huang Wei's interpretation of the new demand resonated with other brands present. For example, a foot into the male personal protection "no man's land" of the rational. "There are not many products developed specifically for men on the market, and most of the target customers are women, which meets the needs of women who give gifts to men. The problem caused by this is that most brands directly copy the logic of women's personal care products, but lack insight into the needs of users - men. Founder Huang Weiqiang believes that the core of the competitiveness of male personal care products lies in the difference between men and women, and should be redefined and developed by men's physiological structure, way of thinking, aesthetic taste, and usage habits as the starting point. Some needs are explicit, such as food, clothing, shelter and transportation. Some needs are implicit and require brands to dig deeper: for example, "diamonds are eternal, one is eternal" links diamonds to marriage; chocolate, which also symbolizes love, is often sold out on Valentine's Day. But can chocolate only be a holiday exclusive? At least daily black coincidence is trying to break this "conventional wisdom". Co-founder Lin Xi said that in the chocolate market lined with giants, daily black qiao chooses a sub-category that represents health and rapid growth - dark chocolate cut-in, and interacts with daily life at a high frequency to meet the taste and emotional needs of users such as cutting-edge white-collar workers, exquisite mothers, and GENZ. This path has proven to be the right choice. In September 2020, Daily Black Qiao launched oatmeal milk dark chocolate on Tmall Small Black Box Super New Product Day, refreshing the sales of new products in the entire chocolate industry and also winning the first place in Tmall fresh food sales.
Pidan, who occupies a unique corner of the pet track, is well versed in the principle that users' demand for products is becoming more and more professional and refined, and is dominated by the mental appeal of the demand side, triggering the deep transformation of pet supplies. Ma Wenfei is the founder of Pidan, but he has another identity - "superuser". "According to my observation, the reason why people and cats are so harmonious is because contemporary people especially need to enjoy the power of calm, which is a spiritual need. The initial mood of all our sales behavior is that you may need me. From the "2021 Online New Product Consumption Trend Report" released by Tmall Little Black Box, it is observed that this year's consumers are more concerned about the emotional value brought by new products, and we are eager for every "part" of the body and every "low tide" of the spirit to be carefully cared for. Under such a "big" demand, the creative potential of the brand is also infinitely stimulated. Among the products that were selected to debut on the Tmall small black box last year, there were explosive products such as Cabana's wireless portable flower bud lamp, rock zoo essential oil soaking foot ball, and uncarded Christmas tree elk cat scratch ball. They are not only eye-catching in sales data, but also more easily recognized by consumers on a spiritual level. Since the development of new consumption, brands are no longer obsessed with discovering the "blue ocean", but are better at finding differentiated corners in mature tracks. The advantage of entering the track is that the market demand is stable and mature, and there is no need for education. What brands have to do is to find a unique selling point, which not only emphasizes functionality, but also to meet the emotional needs of users and "three views of empathy" with consumers. At the forum, Ximei, general manager of Alimama Digital Wisdom Strategy, gave a summary based on long-term operation: to achieve a leap from single product outbreak to long-term operation, it is necessary to build the ability of sustainable product iteration, sustainable content output, and sustainable operation of customer groups.
Lead standards and deep resonance
For new consumer enterprises, through user insight, mining new consumer demand and creating new consumption scenarios is only the first step, if there is no product and service that can meet user needs, everything is empty talk. As an important consumer experience carrier, whether the product can provide consumers with an upgraded experience has become extremely critical, so product research and development and innovation capabilities have become the core barriers of consumer enterprises. Good Boy, Quest Tech, Bruker, Genji Wood Language, Winona think deeply.
Forum 2: Incredible new standards vertical core technology polishing level, "product-driven" has become a long-term path for the development of new brands. Take Goodbaby, for example, a long-established baby carriage brand with a history of more than 30 years, which has exploded the global market with a baby carriage that is both safe and lightweight. "You see that the stroller is very light, but the investment in technology research and development inside is the heaviest." Jiang Rongfen, CEO of Goodbaby China Market, gave a set of data: At present, Goodbaby has 8 major R&D centers in the world, has more than 10,000 patents, and has won 51 world-class design awards. Coincidentally. Founded less than 5 years ago, Chasing Technology has played in the field of smart cleaning with its world-leading high-speed digital motor capabilities. In the first half of 2021, the performance of Chaomu Technology has approached 2 billion, and its products cover more than 100 countries and regions including the United States, Germany, France, and South Korea. As the "ceiling" of the domestic sensitive skin field, Winona penetrates the vertical category by creating the "ultimate large single product", and the subdivision category is the ultimate, clarifying her brand characteristics. "For the past decade, Winona has been talking about and only talking about one point, which is Winona = sensitive skin = special cream." Dong Junzi, co-founder of Bethany Group, said that trust is particularly precious in the functional skin care market, and Winona has set her sights on the source standard, with the depth of plants and medicine as the brand moat. Not long ago, the Winona Research Institute and five major industry associations jointly issued a new guide for the functional skin care industry.2
At the horizontal category expansion level, the brand occupies a new category through the core selling point, and then enriches the product type to build a product matrix. Lead the new track with new products, occupy new groups of people, and expand market boundaries.
Nowadays, GoodBaby is not only a stroller, but also a one-stop service for different parenting scenarios; in the field of building blocks, Bru can quickly occupy the young children's market through original large-grain rounded bricks and IP animations, and form a differentiated competition with industry giant Lego. At the same time, in the face of the growing and non-negligible adult player market, co-founder Sheng Xiaofeng said that Bruker is also actively laying out, and it is expected that this year will cover six major plate groups such as early education, fun play, coldplay, fashion products, technology, and architecture. Genji's wooden language completely renews the design of solid wood furniture, so as to break the circle of young people. "Consumers want both rugged and trendy furniture, and Genji Wood is just right. At present, based on different types of indoor home scenes, we subdivide our product lines into different styles such as new Chinese, French light luxury, and quiet wind. Founder Zhang Ye said that by digging deep into subdivided categories, it has effectively accelerated the performance growth of Genji Wood Language. It can be seen that in the face of diversified and segmented scenarios, brands are paying more and more attention to technological deepening and category expansion, and in this way, they quickly open up the market and gain consumer recognition.
There is data on the Tmall small black box as evidence: in the new products launched last year, the Cherry MX3.0S wireless mouse integrates a unique new technology CAWT line technology, with a nearly "zero" latency experience, to meet the needs of demanding gamers, the transaction volume exceeded one million within 2 months; there is also oATLY,oATLY, the oat milk brand OATLY, which proposes that everything can be OATLY, widely applies products to different fields of the food industry, and a cup of oatmeal ice cream won the annual new product.
Short-term outbreaks versus long-term growth
No brand wants to be short-lived, and so are new products. For brands, when polishing a new product, they must not only think about how to achieve explosive victories in the new stage, but also take a long-term view and operate the goods for a long period of time. Whether the goods can be demanded for a long time depends on two points, one is how big the market space is, and the other is how deep the user's cognition is. Let's start with the market space, which physically determines the upper limit of new products. Usually, new large category opportunities can give birth to large consumer enterprises, such as coffee is a large category, which is not only a large number of giants, but also a latecomer like Yongpu to catch up. How big a brand can do and how far a product can go is often determined by the category market space. Let's talk about user cognition, that is, the precipitation ability of the product. This is a very vague concept, but just give an example, everyone understands: Coke. Coke is equivalent to Coca-Cola in almost everyone's minds, even Pepsi, the world's second-selling company. The successful link between the cola beverage category and the brand "Coca-Cola" relies on Coca-Cola's occupation of the user's mind.
Forum three: The new concept that has never been forgotten is specific to the level of method, and Yao Qidi, the founder of Ramen, gave the answer: "If product power is the core strength of the brand in the market, then marketing is the lever that amplifies this unchanging kernel, which can quickly establish the mind of the brand and the category." Since the launch of its first product in 2016, Ramen Has been on top of almost every marketing outlet and has successfully grown the brand from nobody to fast food. Li Xiangguo subtracted the outer packaging to convey the "authenticity" of the ingredients to the user with clean vision, copywriting, and ingredient list. At the same time, the spokesperson Jiang Wen was launched, through Jiang Wen's ultimate pursuit of film and television, the image analogy showed the high-quality requirements of Li Xiangguo for products. This effect is also directly reflected in sales. Lin Dong, vice president of LiXiangguo, said that during the Double Twelfth Period last year, the number of consumers increased by 1,000% year-on-year, and the repurchase rate of new products remained at 20%-40%. There is also Yongpu, who is good at "joint names", and initially relied on more than 400 joint names to break the circle. In the later stage, the core vision of Shi Duanzheng was used to form a difference with other brands, and to communicate with users in multiple dimensions. "We have done a lot of stone decent peripherals to send to users; at the same time, in the community, with stone integrity to communicate with users." Everyone will feel that this is an IP with temperature, and this sense of temperature will be grafted onto the brand and enhance the brand value. In the view of The iron skin, the founder of Yongpu, the value generated by the emotional connection between IP and users will be a long-term value. The essence of marketing is communication, so as to promote users' deep understanding, trust and empathy for brands and products. In the past, the "information reach" mode of single arrow has been unused by users, so it has gradually shifted to the interactive mode of two-line communication. Only when brands firmly grasp the underlying ability to communicate with users, and continuously meet the needs of users' personalized and emotional attachment, and continue to innovate on the supply side, can they form a sustainable development of the new consumer market.
As a new position of observation of the market for many years and the brand's first choice, Tmall Small Black Box also understands this truth.
At the just-concluded 4th China New Product Consumption Ceremony, Tmall released a new digital upgrade strategy. Under this strategy, the core matrix composed of Tmall Small Black Box, TMIC, Tmall U First, etc., has built a full-link enabling escort system for brands from data guidance research and development, new pulling, trial, and repurchase. TMIC is responsible for research and development, based on the big data of Alibaba's e-commerce platform, timely capture and even one step ahead of the insight into new consumer trends; Tmall U is first responsible for pulling new, to try to pry the big promotion, from thousands of users of the "trial report" for brand growth to find the answer. The small black box is responsible for linking new products and chasing new users. In the process of pushing the new, through a wealth of marketing tools and new ways of playing, the small black box assists brands to reach target users with new products, combines successful experience and cutting-edge insights, and becomes a reusable guide, further helping new consumer brands to increase the possibility of new product potential outbreaks, thereby promoting brand deposition of long-term potential energy. The data shows that in the past 3 years, the success rate of new product incubation in Tmall small black box has increased from 5% to more than 60%. The number of new people chasing new people around the Tmall small black box has also reached nearly 200 million. In 2022, The Little Black Box is expected to help merchants shorten the incubation cycle of new products by 35% through digital incubation of 5 million new products. Finally, to borrow from what Li Yang, chief content officer of 36Kr, shared at the forum: "We can't foresee which brands will continue to exist in a hundred years. But what is certain is that brands that are good at finding 'subtle, yet natural' trends will continue to create new product myths. ”