Image source @ Visual China
Text | Satisfied company, author | Gawaine, edited by | Huang Xiaojun
Now the small pot of tea, everyone always feels that it is inseparable from the label of IQ tax.
"Will the little pot of tea master be tired?" At the beginning of last year, a question on Weibo put consumers in bengbu.
Someone calculated a simple and intuitive account: according to the 2 billion sales volume announced by the small pot of tea, the price of 500 yuan and 80g, 8 masters have to fry 250 million tea a year, all year round and guaranteed to fry 1466 pounds per day.
As a phenomenon-level tea product, the fans of the two factions of small pot tea are fiercely pinched.
One faction believes that the emergence of small pot tea is a model for solving problems in the domestic tea industry that has been large and not strong for many years, and the other school questions the wisdom and cost performance of small pot tea, calling it marketing tea made by outsiders. At the "Scientific Tea Report Meeting" two months ago, founder Du Guoyao's response to "marketing tea" was that the profit of small pot tea in the past ten years was indeed 0.
Professional tea connoisseurs have not made a loud brand in the industry, but they have been picked up by an outsider, but people will brag more. Through the business model of small pot tea, it reflects the unanswered questions of the domestic tea industry.
What is the tea industry like now?
In China's tea industry, from the rough statistics of quantity, there are 60,000 or 70,000 large and small enterprises; In the current situation, it is far less loud than a foreign brand.
According to the data released by the China Tea Circulation Association, in 2021, the total domestic sales of Tea in China will be 2.3019 million tons, the total domestic sales will be 312 billion yuan, and the average price will be 135.5 yuan / kg, that is, only about 67 yuan a catty.
But it has also touched the best average price that domestic tea can sell, because the export situation is more difficult: in 2020, the average export price of domestic tea is 5.84 US dollars / kg, more than a dozen yuan a catty.
Such a low price shows the embarrassment of domestic tea:
First, domestic tea is not widely recognized abroad, although China is the first country to produce and use tea, but the recognition of black tea in foreign markets is in the Uk, and the recognition of green tea is even in Japan.
Therefore, the export of mainland tea is still dominated by unprocessed mao tea, which cannot be sold at a price.
Second, as the world's second largest tea exporter, the main market for domestic tea exports is African countries dominated by Morocco.
Among the tea exporting countries counted by customs in 2018, the top three are: Morocco, Uzbekistan and Ghana. At the level of economics of these countries, their markets are also basically inclined to low-priced tea.
Third, not all of the high-consuming countries that import domestic tea are drinking.
Taking Japan and the United Kingdom as an example, although the purchasing power of these national markets is strong, most of the imports of domestic tea are directly used for processing cosmetics, food, etc. Therefore, the demand for high-end tea is very small, and cheap hair tea is enough.
The road of domestic tea is basically only circled in the local market.
Ouyang Daokun, executive vice president of China Tea Industry Business School, once summarized several major types of domestic tea enterprises: First, long-established types, such as Wu Yutai and Zhang Yiyuan; The second is the vertical product type, such as Bama Tea Industry, Wenxin Tea Industry, etc., specializing in a certain category, dividing the middle and high ends; The third is the horizontal product type, like small pot tea, although not specialized but encompasses the whole category, the product is not graded, for most consumers.
Among them, the number of second type tea enterprises is the largest, but the third type of tea enterprises are obviously more popular with consumers, and the difference between the two, from the surface, is the difference between the number of categories and the level of grade, but it is actually a completely opposite business model.
What is the current business thinking of the tea industry?
For a long time, the business thinking of tea companies has been within the scope of consumer choice.
The tea industry is ancient, and the habits of thinking in the past hundred years make whenever consumers want to buy a piece of tea, the first thing to think about is whether to choose West Lake Longjing, Xinyang Maojian, or Liu'an Gua Tablets.
Therefore, what tea companies have been doing for many years, how to make the best West Lake Longjing, Xinyang Maojian, and Liu'an Gua slices.
Which category is most popular among consumers, which category of tea companies can earn more money than their peers, and when the market of a certain category is not good, a bunch of tea companies that are mainly engaged in this category will work hard in vain.
Therefore, although there are ten famous teas in China, there are not even ten famous brands. Even if some brands that can be called by consumers are mostly famous only in a certain tea category, such as Tieguanyin's Eight Horses, Richun, Jin Junmei's Zhengshan Hall, and Pu'er's Great Benefit. Very few brands in the whole category have made brand awareness.
Although it sounds a bit clumsy, "product orientation" is a portrayal of the business ideas and conditions of the vast majority of Chinese tea companies today.
Product orientation refers to the fact that the business scope of an enterprise is limited to the operation of a certain stereotyped product, and it tries to find and expand the market for the product without engaging in or rarely engaging in product renewal. Product-oriented enterprises only regard enterprises that produce the same variety or specification of products as competitors.
Most tea companies are accustomed to starting from the tea gardens, hills and technologies they own or can reach, first enter the production field, and then look for the market. That is, starting from the upstream to the downstream, getting the source of goods, trying to process it well, and then going to find someone to sell.
Putting the core on the production end, such a "agriculture-industry-business" business order is the business idea of domestic tea enterprises for many years, and it is also a typical agricultural economic thinking.
In the hands of the current tea enterprises, the positioning of tea is still agricultural and sideline products - the main geographical distinction, the origin brand is strong, and the enterprise brand is weak; Loose tea characterized by wholesale is flooded all over the country, and the average added value of tea leaves does not go up at all.
The incremental market that can be sold has long been ended with the planned economy, and in the stock market of overcapacity, agricultural and sideline products are all doomed.
Because the industrial chain is extremely unoptimistic:
Upstream of the industrial chain: package production to households, small farmer economy. The model is too old, and the enthusiasm of tea farmers is not high.
Midstream of the industrial chain: poor degree of industrialization, weak quality control capabilities. Because it is not advocated, there are few industrialized tea efficient assembly lines, thus lacking the corresponding quality system management, and the quality of tea is uneven.
Downstream of the industrial chain: poor branding ability, low brand concentration. Once consumers' awareness of the brand is weak, they can only move towards a price war or channel war between the same category.
What is the business mindset that consumers need?
Through the phenomenon of small pots of tea can be mapped, to meet customer needs, increase customer value for the positioning of the starting point of enterprise operation is more needed, that is, "consumer-oriented".
The most complained about in small pots of tea is "people who really understand tea who buy small pots of tea". Indeed, because the audience of small pot tea is the majority of people who do not understand tea and want to drink tea and send tea.
Similar words have been criticized for many years in Starbucks, "people who really understand coffee who drink Starbucks", the consensus is that people who understand coffee drink American. How many people love to drink American style, the largest coffee community in China, Luckin, its research and development department has obtained data of 7%. The remaining 93% are "coffee-not-knowing star people" who love to drink syrup, and drink Ruixing back to life.
Similarly, most consumers with purchasing power want to drink tea simply and conveniently, and have no interest in becoming tea experts; Many people need to give gifts with tea even if they don't drink tea, and want a standardization.
After all, for consumers who do not understand tea, giving them too many choices will only make them unable to choose. The complete unity of the small pot of tea in terms of process, price, and packaging directly helps this group of consumers feed the rice into their mouths - no need to tangle, standards and decisions are all done for you, and you can buy it with your eyes closed.
If you are changed by the required thinking, the order of business will naturally change with you.
The popularity of small pots of tea represents the opposite logic, that is, the running of "business-worker-farmer". Transform tea from the positioning of agricultural products into consumer goods and even light luxuries.
In 2012, when the "outsider" small pot tea team first entered the tea industry, it had more than one billion yuan of entrepreneurial funds in its hands. With the financial strength at that time, it was a matter of closing one's eyes or turning a glass of tea or building a processing plant to buy a mountain or a circle of tea gardens.
Instead, the team started from a business perspective and spent nearly four years conducting a detailed survey of the Chinese tea market. Specializing in the tea industry without brand, no standard blank, with industrial production instead of agricultural workshops, standardized products instead of casual products, from the consumer demand side to the upstream to make tea.
In 2017, two years after the launch of the small pot of tea, sales reached 700 million yuan a year before it began to put into production and establish a factory.
This order of operation is common in countries with developed industries and commerce, and it is similar to the strategy of new consumer brands today - to organize resources and provide products based on market demand.
That is, first find out who to sell to, and then customize the corresponding goods. Enterprises formed with the consumer end as the core are often more efficient in the backward push of the industrial chain, so the incubation of new consumer brands is faster than the other.
Write at the end
It can be seen that the difficulties of the tea industry are obvious, the market has long been commercialized, and the industrial chain model and thinking mode of tea are still stagnant in agriculture. The separation of mode and demand makes tea companies always feel that their fists are on cotton, and it is clear that the real money and silver are making products with their hearts, and consumers actually do not pay the bill.
Compared with the understanding of tea, any tea company owner is probably better than a small pot of tea. Why those who understand tea have not done tea, but they have not done tea, which fully shows that in the tea business, it is better to understand tea than to understand customers.
Selling tea is not to build a car, and the position of not requiring knowledge and technology is too high. Why do the bosses in the industry, although they can't sell it, they also look down on small pots of tea, just like the main room looks down on the outer room. The dignified and serious main room painstakingly educates consumers on what is really good tea and laboriously provides; The flashy outer room directly does not talk about Wu De when licking the dog, and consumers who do not understand tea think that what kind of tea is good, it will make what kind of tea, hook consumers always want to buy it.
Shifting mindsets and business sequences starts with stopping asking consumers to be experts.