In the past 2021, the investment and financing heat of the food and beverage industry has not decreased.
IT orange data show that from January to November 2021, there were 310 investment incidents in the mainland food and beverage industry, with a total investment amount of 56.236 billion yuan. From the perspective of investment rounds, 78.4% of investment events are concentrated in projects in series B and below, and behind the figures are the emerging cutting-edge brands.
If the time dimension is extended, it can be clearly seen that since 2020, the total financing amount of the food and beverage industry has drawn a steep growth line, and the preference of capital is clear at a glance.
Giant Arithmetic &36Kr Research Institute: 2021 China Cutting-edge Brand Development Research - Food and Beverage Industry Report
According to QuestMobile data, in the whole year of 2020 and the first half of 2021, among the cutting-edge brands that have raised more than 10 million yuan and IPOs, food and beverage brands accounted for the highest proportion, reaching 56.1%.
Under the new consumption trend, the reconstruction of people, goods and fields has brought new opportunities for the development of cutting-edge brands. In the food and beverage industry, the diversified needs of different groups of people, the rise of the concept of national tide and the more prominent trend of consumption scenarios have stimulated the birth of new categories and the introduction of new products. Emerging new brands are looking for market gaps and digging demand pain points, while conforming to the general trend of interest in e-commerce, striving to innovate in marketing play, and constantly shaping the new pattern of the consumer market.
Recently, the "2021 China Cutting-edge Brand Development Research - Food and Beverage Industry Report" jointly released by the Giant Arithmetic &36Kr Research Institute revealed the development trend of the food and beverage industry in the new consumer era, through these changes, how to highlight the siege of the new brand, and obtain the traffic and sales code under the new trend also has an answer.
Cutting-edge food and beverage brands are rising in the wind
According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on January 17, in 2021, the mainland's per capita GDP was 80,976 yuan, converted at an average annual exchange rate, reaching 12,551 US dollars, which has exceeded the world's per capita GDP level. This is also the third consecutive year that the mainland's per capita GDP has exceeded 10,000 US dollars.
Wealth growth is driving the iterative upgrading of consumption. In an November 2021 report, KPMG China pointed out that after the per capita GDP exceeded 10,000 US dollars, consumption began to pursue quality, personalization and cost performance, and showed diversified characteristics.
At the same time, demographic changes brought about by intergenerational changes are also driving the prevalence of new consumption concepts. The new generation of people represented by the post-90s and post-00s pay attention to personalized self-expression, and their tolerance of diversified products has opened up space for the growth of cutting-edge brands.
The increase in income, the improvement of cognitive level, and the young consumer group becoming the main force in the consumer market have jointly created a general trend of consumption iteration and opened a new stage of consumption.
In such a new stage of consumption, the food and beverage industry products are rapidly iterating, and the report of the Institute of Giant Arithmetic &36Kr summarizes three major characteristics of food and beverage products: products are healthier, consumption scenarios are more prominent, and the concept of national tide is emerging.
With the concept of health becoming more and more popular, food and beverage products from nutritional ingredients to functional ingredients are more and more concerned by consumers, low sugar, low fat, low calorie and product categories with specific functions are increasing. The increasingly diversified dietary health needs have brought dividends to the development of food and beverage cutting-edge brands, multi-dimensional product innovation not only meets the personalized needs of consumers, but also enables start-up brands to continuously break through from the subdivision track, and then achieve a breakthrough from 0 to 1 through product iteration, extension and brand marketing.
In addition to the product dimension, in order to increase the market share of vertical segmentation tracks, more and more brands are also creating innovative products around specific consumption scenarios. New tea drinks at parties, "one-person meals" late at night, small snacks for afternoon tea... There is always no shortage of well-cultivated brand owners in popular scenes.
In addition, high-value packaging, idol endorsements, etc., are also valued because of consumers' concerns. In order to meet the emotional and social needs of consumers, cutting-edge brands also pay more attention to giving emotional value or cultural connotation to products.
The popularity of guochao brand food and beverage products is the result of matching supply and demand. According to the survey data of the Institute of Giant Arithmetic &36Kr, 68.3% of the respondents have recently purchased Guochao brand food and beverage products.
Among them, the old domestic brands represented by the great white rabbit and Wangzai have refreshed their brand recognition through cross-border cooperation and innovative products, and won the favor of mainstream consumer groups. Driven by nostalgia and curiosity about old brands and new products, more than half of the consumers in the survey said that they had recently purchased old domestic brands.
The new national brands represented by Yuanqi Forest, Zhong Xue Cake, etc. are more loved by young people aged 18-23, and the main path of their rise is through category innovation or explosive products to break through, lock in the target group and then extend the exhibition circle. In the supply chain model, there are also more and more cutting-edge food and beverage manufacturers such as Yuanqi Forest and Zhong Xue Cake, upgrading from OEM to OBM to achieve the extension of the industrial value chain and obtain higher added value.
From product breaking to content breaking
For a long time, the marketing of the food and beverage industry has mostly been product-centric. In the report of the Huge Arithmetic &36Kr Research Institute, three mature marketing models in the industry were summarized: one is the golden single product drive model, which mainly achieves high investment and high return through the continuous dissemination and exposure of a single product of the brand, thereby feeding back the enterprise itself; the second is the new product listing drive model, the brand obtains market increment through the form of new SKUs to achieve the transformation of new user groups; the third is the core channel drive model, that is, the concentration of resources to establish competitive advantages in a single sales channel and create marketing barriers under specific consumption scenarios.
In the era of interest in e-commerce, the development of new categories, the promotion of new products and even the breaking of new brands are inseparable from the warm-up and promotion of online content. Self-heating food is a typical example.
Self-heating food originated from single soldier rations, after years of improvement, now developed from hot hot pot, self-heating bento, self-heating snail powder and many other categories. Behind the hot sales of self-heating food is the high popularity gathered by high topics. According to the huge arithmetic data, from January to October 2021, the number of likes on the Top 10 topics of Douyin self-heating food has reached tens of millions.
Especially for new brands, when developing new categories through product research and development and technological innovation, whether they can successfully enter consumer cognition is not only closely related to product positioning, but also depends on whether the brand has the ability to achieve "content breaking", and the key to breaking the content is to quickly establish consumer interest and trust in the brand with the help of short videos and live broadcasts.
Take the health tea drink brand tea Xiaokong as an example. Founded in August 2020, and entered the Douyin store broadcast in March 2021, after establishing the positioning of "new generation health", it successfully created a single-day million live broadcast room for the health tea category, and the star products have been listed on the "Douyin Nourishing Health Tea Explosion List" for many consecutive months, and have also won the Top 1 of the Douyin Health Tea Category for many consecutive months.
In order to achieve rapid brand growth, in addition to store self-broadcasting, Cha Xiaokong uses short videos to plant grass to stimulate consumer interest, and at the same time quickly enhances consumers' trust in the brand through cooperation with talents. According to the data of huge arithmetic, the cumulative number of tea xiaokong cooperation talents has reached 300+, including super head masters such as Lao Luo and Qi Wei and drunken goose lady, Liu Fang and other middle-waist masters, and the combination of product and effect in the closed loop of planting grass and pulling grass.
Content breaking is not only a weapon for the incubation and growth of new brands, but also makes online channels an incremental field for the food and beverage industry.
According to the Mob Research Institute's "China Short Video Industry Insight Report", in the past year, the number of new short video users has approached 100 million, while there is still room for 300 million sinking users to grow.
Under the decentralized marketing model, short videos have long been a must for brand owners. According to the huge arithmetic data, since the beginning of 2020, the number of douyin food and beverage related content submissions and the number of creators have been showing a steady growth trend. During the period from January to October 2021, the number of Creators of Douyin food and beverage related content increased by 18.3% year-on-year. Exporting high-quality content online, stimulating user interest, and expanding brand influence has become the consensus of emerging brands.
At the same time, as a means of zero-time difference transaction communication, live e-commerce provides more opportunities for brand owners to tap new users and trigger new product demand, and has also become one of the biggest growth points in the e-commerce market. According to the huge arithmetic data, between January and October 2021, the number of Douyin live broadcast creators increased by 35% year-on-year.
More and more food and beverage cutting-edge brands are using live broadcasting to obtain increments, and most brands have laid out corporate self-broadcasting. Taking the Douyin platform as an example, the huge arithmetic data shows that during the period from January to October 2021, the number of Douyin food and beverage brand enterprise numbers increased by 473.7w, an increase of 94.4% year-on-year, and the start rate of Douyin Food and Beverage Blue V increased by 10.7% in the same period.
The head merchant is more familiar with the goods/distribution of the talent. According to the Huge Engine "Food Industry Douyin Live Consumption Report", among the Douyin Top 20 with goods, 70% of the sales champions are food and beverage industry experts. It can be predicted that the future space for live broadcasting is still quite considerable.
In the era of interest e-commerce, the secret of the rapid rise of new brands of food and beverage
The underlying logic of the cutting-edge food and beverage brands from product breaking to content breaking is actually the transformation of e-commerce from "people looking for goods" to "goods looking for people".
The growth of wealth and the great abundance of commodity supply make it easy for consumers' explicit needs to be met, but in the traditional e-commerce shopping path, in the face of massive commodity information, users can only define deterministic needs through text search, implicit vague needs and potential needs cannot be touched, and endless innovative products are outside consumer cognition and cannot reach target users.
The content planting grass can tap the potential shopping needs of users through the stimulation of interest, and continue to attract the attention of users, and finally complete the purchase conversion. Under the general trend of consumer personalization and circle layering, content planting not only achieves the best matching between people and goods, but also builds a cognitive and emotional connection between users and brands, and fully releases the influence of products.
Taking the bear cookies that exploded in Douyin as an example, a Douyin user found that shaking the bear cookies for 15 minutes would knead together and turn them into balls. The brand keenly captured this hot spot, immediately launched the snack topic #Bear Cookies into balls, and invited more than 20 Douyin head masters to participate in it and carry out various related creations. In the end, the eating method of bear cookies evolved from a person's "secret recipe" to a delicious game for the whole people, and the topic was played to nearly 400 million.
This is a story that belongs to the era of interest in e-commerce.
In April 2021, Douyin E-commerce defined "interest e-commerce" as an e-commerce based on people's yearning for a better life, satisfying users' potential shopping interests and improving consumers' quality of life.
In the era of interest in e-commerce, consumers' shopping starting point is no longer limited to search, they often have no clear purpose before shopping, but because interest is stimulated and ordered, a new shopping path such as planting grass - placing orders has gradually formed. Under the general trend, integrated e-commerce platforms have built and cultivated their own content communities, planting grass through content, and improving the efficiency of finding goods.
As a gathering place for users and traffic, short videos are undoubtedly the best choice for content planting, and thus become the birthplace of interested e-commerce.
According to the "2021 China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report", as of December 2020, the scale of online audiovisual users in the mainland reached 944 million, of which the user usage rate of short videos reached 88.3%, the user scale was 873 million, and the per capita single-day use time was as long as 125 minutes.
From an incremental point of view, from June to December 2020, there were 49.15 million new netizens in the mainland, of which 20.4% used short video applications when they first went online.
In addition to the huge user scale, the advantage of live broadcast and short video is to make the product display more intuitive and vivid, which in turn helps consumers define vague needs and stimulate potential demand, which not only reduces the threshold of consumption decision-making, but also satisfies potential shopping interest, and even unconsciously leads a lifestyle and improves the quality of life.
In February 2021, the 47th Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network released by the China Internet Network Information Center showed that users who had purchased goods in e-commerce live broadcasting had accounted for 66.2% of the overall e-commerce live broadcast users, of which 17.8% of the users' e-commerce live broadcast consumption accounted for more than 30% of all their online shopping consumption.
Huge arithmetic data also shows that the more users like the food and beverage-related content of the Douyin platform, the higher the purchase penetration rate. The penetration rate of users who like related content more than 20 times can reach 33%. Since March 2020, the GMV of Douyin live e-commerce food and beverage products has been growing steadily, and the growth rate has also increased, and watching live orders has penetrated into people's daily lives and become a consumption habit.
Short video and live broadcasting are the background of the rise of interested e-commerce, and they are also continuing to change the form of e-commerce, while providing more possibilities for the incubation and growth of cutting-edge brands.
In the era of interest in e-commerce, when emerging brands master how to use the power of content platforms to stimulate interest through interesting content gameplay, accurately find target users, and meet the personalized needs of subdivided people, they will also find a major secret of the rapid rise in the subdivision track.