Wen Heyou: Is selling IP still a good business?

Text | Sting Institute, author | Lu

With the decoration and atmosphere full of age, people are pulled back to the 80s for a second, plus NPCs wearing costumes of a specific era are interspersed among diners, and from time to time a Broadway-style song and dance repertoire is staged... With this immersive dining experience, Wen Heyou, known as "Dining Disney", went from Changsha, which has been entrenched for a long time, to the whole country, and for a time became a cultural place where everyone competed to punch the clock.

But just like the bad reviews given by diners on Wen Heyou's dishes, Wen Heyou's practice of combining catering and tourism to sell IP culture has also been questioned as "vain", and the continuous flow of tourists punching cards still makes Wen Heyou's door long queue. This contrasting contradiction and contrast inevitably makes people wonder: Is selling IP culture in the catering field a good business?

Wen Heyou and its imitators

Wen Heyou's Internet celebrity charm does not need too much to describe, and it really became popular after repositioning itself as a "cultural company".

In 2015, Wen Heyou has hatched the catering IP with local characteristics of Changsha, such as the Old Changsha Fried Society, the Old Changsha Lobster Restaurant and the Old Changsha Sausage, and it is also in this year that Wen Heyou positioned himself no longer as a "catering company" but as a "cultural company".

In 2018, Tang Renshen's strategic financing of up to 70 million yuan made Wen Heyou let his imagination fly. The "Super WenheYou" built at a cost of 100 million yuan landed in Changsha Hisense Plaza, covering an area of 20,000 square meters, gathering 100 merchants operating local snacks in Changsha. Since then, "Super Wenheyou" has become a tourist punch card with the same name as Yuelu Mountain, Orange Island and other famous scenic spots in Changsha.

After that, whether it was because of the single-day queue to take 20,000 tables on Weibo hot search, or became a popular filming location for short videos to punch cards, Wen Heyou received more attention, and during this period, a group of "imitators" who had the same magic as Wen Heyou also emerged.

For example, it is said to dig deep into the taste of Chengdu in the 80s, and use a spicy and hot meal to search for skewers of incense on the side of the road with memories of the era thirty years ago. In the form of murals, the limited space in the store depicts the appearance of the city in the 1980s, from the dining table and tableware to the staff uniforms, all of which are customized according to nostalgic and retro themes. Combined with the skewers of this food with Chengdu's local characteristics, no matter where the store is opened, it can make diners feel as if they are in Chengdu.

For example, with reference to the various Hong Kong style "eating companies" that appear in Hong Kong tea restaurants, not only the name is quite similar to the famous Hong Kong restaurant "Australian Milk Company", but also the colorful neon signs and mosaic tiles are used to highly restore the stylish tea restaurants in Hong Kong films. Coupled with the Hong Kong-style meals such as silk stocking milk tea, Xiduoshi, and egg noodles provided in the menu, it is easy to give people a feeling of time and space interlacing.

However, the above-mentioned "imitators" are still only wearing a layer of emotional clothing to divert the flow of their own catering business, and there is still a big difference between them and Wen Heyou in terms of business model, and Wen Heyou is actually doing the business of "two landlords".

The "two landlords" model is hard to hurt

Super Wen & Friends is essentially the manager of the food court, and its revenue source is mainly through the collection of rent and property fees from the merchants in the store, or directly from the store's revenue share. This means that part of the risk of opening a new store in Wenheyou is jointly borne by the tenants.

In addition, because Wenheyou takes the localized IP culture as the core, it strives to create a city culture scene. Therefore, in terms of investment promotion, it is often mainly small-scale merchants with small local fame. For example, when Guangzhou Super Wenheyou opened, it invited the famous "three masters of the ground stall" in guangzhou's supper circle - Grandma beef offal, wind pipe Hui and fried luoming.

But for these itinerant hawkers, known locally as "ghost stalls", they already have a lot of old fans and repeat customers, and there is no problem of business difficulties. The way of settling in and operating not only makes them need to carry higher costs than before, but also requires them to leave the street side that has been operating for a long time before, which makes it difficult for many small-sized catering merchants to give up, so the willingness to settle in is not high. Previously, there were media reports that in order to attract merchants to settle in when Guangzhou Super Wenheyou opened, it directly waived the entrance fees such as shop rent, and only charged water and electricity bills, while the requirements for merchants were only 30% of the turnover share.

Weng Donghua, general manager of Super Wenheyou, once said in an interview with the media that in the situation of the general eviction of mobile vendors, Wenheyou not only "solves the problem of survival and inheritance for merchants", but also provides shelter for vendors, but also "inherits the culture of the city and preserves the atmosphere of urban fireworks". But on the other hand, in addition to the store decoration that highly restores the background of the times, Wen Heyou itself also needs to rely on the entry of local merchants to truly realize the sale of local IP culture. This makes Wen Heyou's title of "Disney in the Restaurant Industry" seem somewhat unworthy of its name.

As a world-renowned "IP big player", Disney's IP image usually has a very high influence, even in the absence of original works, Disney still launched a well-known IP image such as "Ling Na Belle". The super Wen Heyou, who is only the "second landlord", obviously cannot create a catering store that gathers local characteristics and is recognized by local residents through only his own efforts.

It's not a question of ability, it's a pattern hard wound.

In July 2020, the spirited Super Wen and You entered Guangzhou, but only two months later, well-known merchants such as "Feng Guan Hui" left one after another, and the main reason for leaving was the decrease in passenger flow and a significant decline in turnover. When Guangzhou Super Wenheyou first opened, some merchants could reach 50,000 or 60,000 per day, but after more than 2 months, the daily turnover dropped to about 20,000. Some netizens joked that Wen Heyou has become a place that locals will not go except for tourists punching in and taking photos.

Does dining require IP culture?

Regardless of the starting point of the selling feelings, the early Wen Heyou did succeed in the circle with the highly restored IP culture of the 80s, but this practice is essentially no different from the various ritualistic links carefully planned by some restaurants.

For example, when the Tan duck blood old hot pot is fired at the bottom of the pot, it will sound the gong "Kai Hong Luck" and say two auspicious words. When the Wangshun Pavilion fish head bubble cake is served, it will beat the gong and drum to lift the fish head up. Some catering brands, such as Beijing Palace Banquet, in order to emphasize the sense of ceremony, even provide dress-up and makeup services when customers are light. This is naturally a particularly novel experience for first-time customers. But from the perspective of the catering industry, this kind of thing that is too formal cannot become the core competitiveness of the brand itself.

A typical example is that after Wen Heyou successfully went out of the circle, a commercial space called "Li Youcheng" appeared in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Slightly different from Wen Heyou, Li Youcheng takes the old Wuhan culture of the 70s and 80s as the theme, creates a nostalgic atmosphere, interprets the old Wuhan culture, and provides catering specialties. In terms of special links such as decoration style and immersive interactive song and dance performances, there is almost no obvious gap between Li Youcheng and Wen Heyou. Even on the review site, Li Youcheng also received the same comments as Wen Heyou complained about "bad taste" and "Internet celebrity marketing".

This also reflects from another perspective that the Wenheyou model itself has no differentiated advantages, and the successive defeats in Guangzhou and Shenzhen have repeatedly shown that non-local enterprises sellING IP culture to local users is not an axe, but the replicability and completion are extremely limited.

From the perspective of commercial form, Wenheyou and Liyoucheng themselves are the highlights of the scene, attracting customers to experience the offline experience and providing corresponding catering or other services, and this business model has been repeated countless times in countless commercial streets wearing IP cultural halos such as Wangfujing in Beijing, Confucius Temple in Nanjing, Hubu Lane in Wuhan, and Kuanzhai Alley in Chengdu. Compared with these already famous attractions, how much advantage can the newly created commercial real estate of "Wenhe Friends" take advantage of "culture"?

When we return to the perspective of the catering industry, we will find that if we only use the scene with IP cultural symbols as a tool, the core goal is still to provide differentiated catering services, and the reproducibility becomes higher. This is also the reason why the skewers of incense on the side of the road and the Hong Kong-style restaurants, although small in scale, can still survive independently in the catering markets around the world.

Just like many chain catering enterprises today can blossom everywhere through a highly standardized prefabricated vegetable supply chain, the catering industry always has to think about how to reduce costs, how to pull new, promote vitality, and increase customer unit prices. Instead of using "scenic thinking" to be busy harvesting one-time traffic.

It is worth mentioning that while the super Wenheyou encountered unfavorable development, Wenheyou also launched a smaller "Wenheli Large Food Farm", and the merchants for it were mainly chain franchise enterprises and small businesses. Compared with the super Wenheyou, Wenheli Large Restaurant reduces the initial input cost and investment difficulty, but what has not changed is the identity of the "second landlord", whether it can continue to make a profit, still have to be marked with a question mark.

Perhaps in Wen Heyou's beautiful imagination of the future, it will become a "catering Disney" that covers the food IP culture across the country, but it forgets that behind the IP culture is the brand impression obtained by the accumulation of long-term user experience. Just like the mobile vendors who have no fixed stores but can become the legend of Guangzhou's supper food, the influence of IP will make people can't help but dress up late at night to go to the streets to find the legendary delicacies, rather than just taking photos and punching cards. This is perhaps the greatest value of IP in the catering industry.