Produced by | Tiger sniffs the commercial consumer group
Author | Zhou Yueming
Caption | Visual China
Camping has become a high-frequency word on May Day.
"A place is difficult to find" and "a camp is difficult to buy" are the troubles encountered by many consumers. Data from travel and tourism platforms shows that since the Qingming holiday in April, searches around campsites, camping equipment, and camping instruction have exploded.
The boom on the consumer side has made the practitioners of the camping jianghu think in addition to excitement.
The lack of personnel in the factory has become the biggest headache for the owner of the tent factory, Zhang Xiuji, recently. "Orders have not been able to line up, produce a batch of sell a batch, who does not want to borrow this wind to make more money." When communicating with Tiger Sniff, Zhang Xiuji could not hide his happiness.
Unlike many tracks that have been shut down during the epidemic, the "camping track" has entered a booming production season, and Zhang Xiuji's tent production plant is a microcosm.
Many people refer to 2020 as the first year of style camping (also known as exquisite camping). Due to the epidemic, "can't play at a distance" is considered to be the catalyst for the industry's popularity. In the past year, "camp is difficult to order" and "products are out of stock" have become strange for many camping enthusiasts.
In front of the people in the camping jianghu is a rich but difficult to swallow banquet: more complex situations and measurements have also begun to be placed in front of all walks of life, want to eat the camping dividends, and the stakes are heavy.
"In business, it's ultimately a cost balancing and ROI game." Brand marketing expert Li Leilin told Tiger Sniff that the base increases, and the gradient of consumer groups is bound to be more dimensional, but the revenue growth brought by new customer groups does not necessarily mean profitability.
At present, the key challenge facing people in the camping circle is how to accurately and continuously "catch" the demand after the explosive growth of demand, and become bigger and stronger.
Prudent "keepers"
Spring River Plumbing Duck Prophet.
Before the exquisite camping was popular, the "ducks" who were already in the water had already sensed this trend, but some of them were more cautious.
"When everyone is doing exquisite camping, do we want to change?" Zhang Xiaohui, the marketing commissioner of the domestic sleeping bag brand Blackice Black Ice, raised this issue when facing tiger sniffing, and there are many domestic traditional outdoor brands that are measuring this new change like Black Ice.
These outdoor brands, which are often established for many years before the rise of style camping in 2020, hold one or several market segments, and the users are mostly male customers who love adventure and extreme sports.
Compared with outdoor sports with higher thresholds, exquisite camping pays more attention to leisure and relaxation, and the proportion of female customers and young people is also increasing. So although on the surface it is all the growth of the outdoor industry, for these brands, it is not the same group of people.
They are more like a group of "keepers", how to catch this wave of new traffic, how much new traffic can be undertaken after capture, has become a question for these brands. After all, adapting to different customer groups means changing the chain, and the cost balance point must be reset from the production end to the promotion end.
The first level is whether you can keenly capture the new needs of new users and make product improvements.
For example, it is necessary to re-measure the functionality and "refinement" of the product.
Several brands described to Tiger Sniff "the experience of changing products for more aesthetics." Wang Jigang, the head of the soul of freedom of the domestic tent brand, told Tiger Sniff that some tents need snow skirts, but snow skirts will make the entire product appear cumbersome, in order to pursue simple beauty, the function of snow skirts will sometimes be abandoned. Zhang Xiaoyu, the manager of the outdoor stove brand Huofeng, also shared a detail with Tiger Sniff, the traditional visual color of the original pot is mainly orange because it has the function of early warning and safety, but in order to balance the function and aesthetics, more new colors have also been added.
In addition to making trade-offs in refinement, many brands have also weakened the outdoor attributes of their original products in order to adapt to more casual scenes.
For example, the sleeping bag brand Blackice black ice Zhang Xiaohui mentioned that leisure camping sometimes does not need to spend the night, for which there will be some thinner, smaller grammage sleeping bags or small thin blankets; zhang Xiaoyu, the manager of the outdoor stove brand Huofeng, told Tiger Sniff that in order to adapt to more extreme outdoor scenes, the gas tanks were mostly alpine gas tanks, but the previous year also began to integrate the common long gas tanks in the hotel into the research and development of new products; Wang Jigang, the director of the Soul of Freedom, said that the traditional hiking camping values the characteristics of small weight. But family-style camping is more spatial, with large tents welcoming and weight less important.
It is worth noting that due to the influx of female and young customers, in order to compete for this part of the customer base, some brands are also playing more and more volumes.
For example, the pathfinder of outdoor listed companies began to do joint names last year. Pathfinder outdoor vice president Han Ye told Tiger Sniff that in the first four months of this year, pathfinder female users accounted for more than half for the first time, in order to seize the new customer base, last year and this year with TEENIE WEENIE joint camping products, and Doraemon joint camping products have also been launched, and recently invited Hermès designers to cooperate to create a light luxury camping series with Hermès pattern.
Product improvement is the first step to reaching new users, providing them with more space to "land" on the brand.
But challenges always coexist with opportunities, and behind product changes, there is a need for a more sensitive design and development team to support, and this is still a risk of replacement costs.
Black ice Zhang Xiaohui sniffed to the tiger, every additional SKU, it means that the design, research and development and other aspects to increase a lot of workload, whether to do or not to do a lot of research and decision-making.
Some brands have also realized the restrictions on talents in the rapid development period, and Zhang Xiaoyu, the manager of Huofeng, admitted to Tiger Sniff that their biggest constraint at present is that there are not enough talents, "Although we have done some things early, the outdoor professional talents previously reserved are still insufficient." ”
Balance of new traffic
Traffic is the second hurdle in front of camping brands.
There are many differences in the communication schemes preferred by users of different platforms, such as Xiaohongshu's preference for planting grass and Vibrato's more entertainment attributes, which invisibly increases the requirements for the brand marketing team.
Zhang Xiaohui, a marketing specialist for Black Ice, once described the changes in his work to Tiger Sniff, "I may be used to outputing different content at each stage, which means that I have to communicate with different bloggers, and my time cost will increase a lot." ”
And, while spread is often difficult to quantify, it's still about ROI (return on investment). "But at present, for many outdoor traditional brands, it is often the small white customer group with the most unstable ROI to deal with." The little red book blogger who used to be the marketing director of outdoor brands, "Uncle Lei takes you to see the stars", told Tiger Sniff.
When a market is hot, small white players are often the largest group of incremental, but their understanding of the market is shallow, and they need to pay more education costs to catch them.
"When Xiaobai suddenly poured in, we had to do a lot of preparations, such as telling them why our down sleeping bags were more expensive than cotton sleeping bags, or why we chose more vivid colors like red." Black Ice Zhang Xiaohui said to tiger sniff.
In addition, because the small white group has not yet formed a deeper understanding of their own needs, their preferences are often more uncontrollable and elusive, which also adds a lot of disorder to the dissemination of the brand.
Wang Jigang, the director of the Soul of Freedom, told Tiger Sniff that for Japan and South Korea, style camping has a history of more than ten years, and users already know what they want and will be relatively rational. But the country is still in its infancy, and consumers' ideas are still more jumpy, such as from the color, like some high-grade purple Japan will not be particularly sensitive, but it is very popular in China.
For some of the more "ambitious" brands, grabbing new traffic to sell doesn't satisfy them. Taking advantage of this window period, improving their sense of existence, seizing their own user minds in subdivided categories, and building brand power are their "ultimate goals".
Black Ice Zhang Xiaohui mentioned to Tiger Sniff that there are two models of branding, one is brand orientation, we want to convey more product concepts and brand genes to everyone, try to build a lifestyle, and establish associations with the brand; and the other is sales-oriented, more focused on large-scale exposure diversion to the platform to sell goods.
"Such brands tend to be more idealistic, which is also related to the philosophy and genes of the founders." Brand marketing expert Li Leilin told Tiger Sniff, but he also reminded that although building brand power and seizing user minds is a more sustainable strategy, it is also a complex and three-dimensional project, which is a test of the brand's scale and financial ability, especially at the moment when communication is increasingly fragmented, integration means a lot of costs.
"At present, I have not seen any outdoor brands launch and exposure on a large scale, and it is a pity to miss the window period." Li Leilin said that in addition, he also mentioned that some head brands with a wider industrial chain sometimes have a sense of existence as brands that subdivide categories.
In fact, for these "defenders", since the beginning of the change, this kind of decision-making or not to do has been constantly flooded with them, and how to balance ambition and prudence is a problem that brands will encounter when they want to grow. Doing means new cost pressure, not doing it means giving up the incremental space that may exist, and how to grasp complex decisions is the key to whether you can eat dividends.
Constraints on the backend
It is worth noting that for some brands, in addition to front-end products and traffic, the back-end raw materials and production capacity problems have faced many challenges.
For example, for some smaller brands that do not have their own independent factories, insufficient production capacity has become a constraint on their further development and growth. With the popularity of the industry, factory orders have soared, and the position of such brands is more passive.
Hong Chen, sales director of Nuke, once revealed to Tiger Sniff that many overseas factories could not open full production capacity due to the epidemic, and a large number of overseas orders flowed back, which in itself increased the domestic supply pressure. Now many factories have been scheduled until July and August, and the orders behind them cannot be received at all.
One measure to solve such capacity constraints is to build or expand factories by themselves, but the Little Red Book camping blogger "Uncle Lei takes you to see the stars" told Tiger Sniff that small brands would rather choose a conservative route that exceeds supply than risk opening up a new continent because of concerns about the cost of expanding production capacity. However, although the shortage of supply and demand is a good phenomenon on the surface, it often means missing out on more markets that should have been eaten.
In addition to the constraints on production capacity, raw materials also bring problems to some enterprises.
Han Ye, vice president of Pathfinder Outdoor, told Tiger Sniff that rising raw material prices will put more pressure on producers. For example, the raw materials for the production of tents, aluminum and PVC are rising in price. The increase in commodity prices directly affects the industrial chain, increases the operating costs of upstream manufacturing companies, and squeezes the profit margins of enterprises.
Some brands that focus on the high-end market have also encountered procurement challenges due to the epidemic. Wang Jigang, the manager of the domestic tent brand Freedom Soul, told Tiger Sniff that 70% of the supply chain of the Soul of Freedom is overseas, and there are not too many suppliers of more exquisite raw materials in the world, such as leverage in South Korea, there may be two or three in the United States, when purchasing some high-end leverage, it is very limited, and the delivery time of these factories has reached 24 months. Some high-end categories can not meet the production in a short period of time, in this case, we can only focus on entry-level tents, but the proportion of high-end categories in revenue after 2020 has been higher.
In addition, it is worth noting that with the popularity of the industry, the number of entrants has increased, and the battle for raw materials has also begun, especially the resources of superior quality are more limited, and when the supply of good materials is in short supply, low-quality products have also begun to flow into the market.
A senior industry insider shared several details with Tiger Sniff, such as the wood used in the tables and chairs that often appear in the exquisite camping scene, which is controlled and other factors, the annual production capacity is limited, and many woods are placed in the north for half a year to a year, and can be cut after dehydration, which is bound to mean that many "new wood" enters the market, and the quality of the wood cannot be guaranteed. The same is true of metal production capacity such as metal rods used for tents and metal trimming for tables and chairs.
In this way, when the dividend period comes, there is a complete supply chain system, which is the premise of "eating more", otherwise even if the front end attracts more traffic, there is nowhere to put it.
Some larger companies will have fewer concerns in this regard. For example, pathfinder told Tiger Sniff that the company has a whole industrial chain in camping equipment, and the supply chain side is also fully prepared and energy storage. Nuke said to Tiger sniffing that there are currently reserves with a number of suppliers, in addition to in-depth cooperation factories also need to expand production capacity.
Of course, for listed companies and enterprises that are more concerned by capital, there are also challenges to be faced, such as in the period of rapid development of the industry, it is necessary to quickly follow up and react in order to give investors and capital an explanation.
Pathfinder told Tiger Sniff, "At present, exquisite camping products account for 40% of the overall camping products, but the rapidly changing consumer demand will bring more pressure to manufacturers." Nuke said that in order to make a more rapid market response, more manpower and material resources will be invested in the preliminary research, and almost every category has a corresponding team to conduct multiple rounds of testing and experience.
"Catfish" poured in
Of course, for a market that is just beginning to explode, there will always be a group of people who just want to make a quick buck, and these entrants are like catfish, stirring up the market.
Pathfinder related sources told Tiger Sniff that with more manufacturers joining, there has been vicious competition such as plagiarism between some brands, and slightly "improving" the products developed by others can shorten the research and development time and research and development costs, and be more in line with market-oriented companies.
For example, the addition of some factory "white cards" will have an impact on the original price system of products, but they often have no brand attributes.
The emergence of these "catfish" is also because after the market base becomes larger, the gradient of consumer groups provides them with living space. In particular, small white players who are still relatively vague in their understanding of the product are often more likely to be attracted by lower-priced products, which also opens a gap for the influx of "catfish".
"The most uncomfortable people are the entrepreneurs who have ambitions, design skills and love for the outdoors." Zhang Xiaoyu, the manager of the stove brand Huofeng, told Tiger Sniff that their appeal is not strong enough, their ability to resist risks is poor, and the rise of the factory's "white card" may accelerate their death.
For some "keepers" who have experienced the ups and downs of the outdoor industry, the impact of "game breakers" is relatively calm.
"The biggest challenge is ourselves." Wang Jigang, the owner of the soul of freedom of the original domestic tent brand, admitted to Tiger Sniff that the market has been decades old, many structures have been relatively mature, and it is the most difficult to make more breakthroughs in products and let the market accept.
Zhang Xiaoyu, the manager of the stove brand Huofeng, said that the worst time was that even the market could not be seen, and everyone began to like and identify with this lifestyle, which was a very fortunate thing for us.
At present, the domestic camping industry, compared with the overseas markets that have been developing for many years, is still slightly immature, and after the outbreak of the industry, it has not only brought dividends to the people in the bureau, but also countless challenges of large and small sizes. For local camping brands, this is not a "lying win" moment: the history of China's consumer goods industry for more than three decades tells us that when any outlet hits, the last to survive is a few with hard power, and most of them are just morning dews, and eventually die with the wind.