Lin Beibei and girlfriend Zhang Xiaomi, employees of two major Internet factories, respectively, they looked through the chat records of the two in the past two months, drank two words, and appeared more than 10 times. Another mutual friend jokingly called them women who wanted to drown in the internet factory in the wine tank.
Wen | Zeng Shiya
Edited | Golden Turn
The heart is hungry and thirsty
It was an irresistible mysterious force.
Every time she passes by the milk tea shop, 19-year-old Lillian will look up — if the store is crowded, the desire to enter the store will quickly decline, and she can breathe a big sigh of relief; but if you see few people in the store, the footsteps will involuntarily move, and the waiters and signboards seem to look at you and beckon.
Most of Zhang Wang's results are the latter – walk into the milk tea shop and order a cup of milk tea. Tea drinking is so fast, yesterday's popularity is hand-beaten lemon tea, today has been replaced by yellow skin fairy dew, these make Lilian addicted, two days a cup of drink, no exceptions.
Meng Yue's milk tea addiction is stronger, and the frequency is one cup a day. The summer vacation when she returned from studying abroad, Meng Yue drank 60 cups of milk tea in 60 days, and she was a little surprised to look at these purchase records later. During that time, in the group of friends, she uploaded a milk tea photo every day, a little bit, CoCo, Yihetang, Kawangka... In order to get rid of this milk tea addiction, she is even willing to take the subway for more than an hour to visit a legendary milk tea shop that is very delicious but located in the suburbs.
However, today, Meng Yue's milk tea addiction has become a coffee addiction, which is still the frequency of one cup a day, and no coffee can not support the morning. Caffeine rushed into the body, reminding Meng Yue to face her own day, to face the confusion, stress, anxiety and bitterness brought by the examination editor.
If these emotions are really piled up too much, like dark clouds pressing overhead before going ashore, Meng Yue will choose to rely on e-cigarettes to briefly forget. A cigarette bomb can be smoked for about 4-5 days. Before the change, the paper could smoke four cigarettes a day under pressure. Meng Yue feels that the use of electronic cigarettes is, in a certain sense, resistance to smoking addiction. In fact, she has quit smoking for 5 months, the reason for success is very simple, graduation, the pressure is gone, there is no need to smoke. But when it came time to find a job, she was pulled back into the smoke.
Among the reasons for the breakup between the post-95 girl Wu Wei and her ex-boyfriend, e-cigarettes accounted for one. The ex-boyfriend's e-cigarette never left his body, and from time to time he would take it out and take a sip. Wu Wei described her ex-boyfriend as an extremely gentle person who never saw him argue with anyone. The only time he broke the impression was when his ex-boyfriend said he had a big fight with his mother because her mother hid his e-cigarette.
Wu Wei does not understand that the packaging of e-cigarettes is written that smoking is harmful to health, why everyone is blind and deeply involved. One explanation meng Yue gave was that the lung pictures printed on the cigarette packs and the statistics about the harm of tobacco addiction had made her afraid and worried, but I was more afraid and worried about the panic brought about by the uncertain future.
E-cigarette packaging box has obvious nicotine content and addictive tips. Image source Visual China
Wu Wei has tried to understand her ex-boyfriend, who herself is an addict to low alcohol. But in her opinion, the two are incomparable. The pleasure of e-cigarettes is instantaneous, will slide to uncontrollable extremes, low alcohol pursuit is a little bit into a slight drunkenness, a controllable state, I will drink three or four times a week, drink one or two cups, controlled in the range of no impact on health.
She loves the sour sweetness of low-grade cider, no bitter taste of raw wort, and no groggy intoxication, but her favorite is herself in a slightly drunk state. She was asked by her graduate supervisor to complete more than 100 pages of English PPT a week, and under pressure, she drank a few glasses of fruit wine. Alcohol amplifies emotions and stimulates the brain, and after standing on the balcony and crying, she returns to the computer and finally finishes her studies. Wu Wei felt that low-grade wine had liberated the soul under the mask, and since then, her many nights and mornings have been wafting with the smell of fruity wine.
Lin Beibei and girlfriend Zhang Xiaomi, employees of two major Internet factories, respectively, they looked through the chat records of the two in the past two months, drank two words, and appeared more than 10 times. Another mutual friend jokingly called them women who wanted to drown in the internet factory in the wine tank. Lin Beibei is the most basic type of employee of the big factory, and the formation and disappearance of new business at any time will make her work content and reporting objects change frequently. Zhang Xiaomi's recent annoyance is that the new leader ordered her to find a way to make the soft text on Weibo hot search, and it must be at no cost. The night she received the order, she complained in the three crowds: Drink to death.
If alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea candy are addicted by stimulating physiological functions to reach spiritual enjoyment, then the blind box is a direct poke at the psychological happiness brought by randomness. On Chen Xu's desk were placed sixty or seventy blind boxes, densely packed to build a delicate villain country. There are still hundreds at home, which should be up to hundreds. In addition to buying it himself and giving it away, he did not count the money he spent on the blind box, for him, these blind box handmade is not only a toy, but also a stimulus of uncertain results. Therefore, outside the blind box, the lucky bag, the gacha, the reward... Similar to the blind box mechanism of the game, he enjoys it and feels very decompressed.
In materially abundant societies, there are thousands of stories of young people's addictive consumption, but the cause of addiction is more or less the same: to relieve stress or emotions that have nowhere to go. As David Courtlight wrote in Five Hundred Years of Addiction: The addiction trade prevails in a world where hungry hearts replace hungry bellies.
This sentence is no exception to today.
Young people continue to enter bubble mart stores to choose and buy blind boxes. Image source Visual China
Manufactured demand
New consumers are becoming the soul catchers of young consumers, telling young people in various ways that you need milk tea, you need coffee, you need low-grade wine.
Marketing advertising is probably where all the tricks are most concentrated.
On the Little Red Book, search for girls' wine, more than 120,000 notes will appear. Low-grade wine is placed in a variety of dreamy scenes: it is a must-have ritual for entering the summer, a 24-degree air-conditioned room, nostalgic music and movies, a glass full of ice cubes... After layering the mat, drop the pen in a sip of XX wine, enjoy the pleasure of slight drunkenness.
Some low-grade liquors are advertised as good night liquors that can save insomnia, and the copywriting says to add some sugar to tonight's dreams. It also claims to be a necessity for girlfriend gatherings, from the packaging of the pink and literary bottle to the crystalline liquid flowing inside. A brand has also launched a sugar-free sparkling wine with 0 sugar and 0 fat, which is the consumption psychology of young women who are worried about drinking too high calories.
Most of the notes on girls' wine in the Little Red Book are exquisitely literary. Image source phone screenshot
The story of Ketch has touched many consumers. In the first quarter of 2021, among the sales channels such as Tmall and Taobao, 2449 liquor brands maintained a sales growth rate of more than 100%, of which low-grade liquor categories accounted for 57.8%, and 1415.
In the field of milk tea with a wider audience, stores are live advertisements. Michelle Ice City has opened more than 10,000 stores, all over the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou and eighteen-line small cities, which have an advantage in appearance and perception, which also means that the tea industry has officially entered the era of ten thousand stores. In Changsha, a shopping mall can concentrate 4 teas at the same time, which is a kind of forced occupation of the consumer's mind. Lillian talked about the reasons why she didn't consciously walk into the milk tea shop, and the first one was: the milk tea shop has blossomed everywhere, and I can't ignore its existence.
Behind those stores, a prosperous landscape has also been constructed. In December last year, after the first tea in Wuhan was opened, a cup of milk tea in Wuhan was sold for 500 yuan on the hot search to drink tea in Wuhan for 8 hours. Evolution to today, the latest hot search, cross-city shopping for milk tea business has come into being. Although Cha Yan Yue has always been the party that shouted to stop, there are still netizens who suspect its hype. After all, several rounds of hot searches have brought traffic dividends, and some netizens have indeed been moved, asking for a purchasing group in the comments of related news.
Earlier, Xicha had been caught up in the question of hiring people in line and starving marketing. Founder Nie Yunchen was interviewed by Uncrowned Finance, came forward to clarify and negated the doubt. In the same interview, he even directly expressed his dissatisfaction with the identity of the internet celebrity, the internet celebrity store is a derogatory word in my mind, and I very much do not want to see such an evaluation.
While brands are anxious to deny the hearts of Internet celebrities, they are trying to create explosive teas. The co-branding of milk tea can be from a generation's childhood memories of the great white rabbit, Ahuatian to this summer's net red fruits lemon, coconut, oil orange, yellow peel, cross-border cooperation can be from popular popular programs, game products to unmatched beauty, online car, digital cameras, such as Lele Tea recently launched and OLAYA co-branded coconut white series, known as the niacinamide into Q bomb coconut white water light jelly material. Young consumers will not resist these sweet soups that are customized according to taste and held in front of them, and they will not pursue whether this is an IQ tax - after all, shortly after the quality problems in Mi Xue Ice City, the brainwashing melody of you love me and I love you has been successfully publicized, and today, the first cup of milk tea in the autumn has once again swept the major social networks.
The small ingredients in lele tea's new products are said to be fused with edible niacinamide. Image source Lele Tea official WeChat platform
The same logic applies in the coffee world. Luckin's raw coconut latte is the top stream of coffee in the last summer, and behind the top stream is the harvest of the two streams of internet celebrity coffee and draft stars. The Luckin advertisement that invited Liluxiu, who claimed not to want to open for business, had brushed 2.01 million plays on the B station, and the bullet screen floated by YYDS, interspersed with a few words of Luckin finally found the right spokesperson to buy Luckin's brand recognition.
As for e-cigarettes, which have been banned from advertising through mass media and public places, they also made a big splash before the arrival of the policy. WONTON e-cigarette marked with a little wonton, a little inspiration slogan, FreeMax e-cigarette on the product poster directly wrote the real cigarette experience, healthy accompaniment, magic flute electronic cigarette, and 4.6 billion box office "The Wandering Earth" out of the joint model. On the Internet, e-cigarettes are packed into a shell that is healthier than flue-cured tobacco. Until November 2019, the policy closed the online channels of e-cigarettes, and marketing methods such as slogans, posters, and free trial smoking appeared on street corners of the city.
Two months after the policy was implemented, RELX Yueke, a subsidiary of e-cigarette head Fogcore Technology, opened the world's first flagship store in Shanghai and launched the new retail 361 plan - in the next three years, a total investment of 600 million yuan will be opened and 10,000 stores will be opened. By June 2021, this target has been exceeded. In the earnings conference call of Wuxin Technology in the first quarter of 2021, the number of Yueke stores has exceeded 15,000 - another 10,000 stores in the consumer track.
Online, offline, publicity, obscurity, everything that makes young people addicted, in the system built by new consumption, pervasively invades the life territory of the young generation, creating one demand dream after another, breeding a bush of consumption desire.
Behind the boom
Behind the prosperity, in fact, there is a set of traditional business logic.
In the 18th century, Mandeville likened human society to a hive in the Fable of the Bee, and in this bee country, each bee was pursuing its own interests almost madly, and the evil virtues of vanity, hypocrisy, and fraud were fully expressed in each bee, but the entire hive showed a surprising prosperity.
In the last century, Baudrillard quoted this fable in his Consumer Society. It is written in the book that consumption is through the symbolic relationship, allowing people to enter a consumption game that they desire deeply desires, and spontaneously generate integrated unconscious discipline through competitive purchases that you chase after each other, and thus the logic of consumption realizes its own domination.
It also applies to today's new consumption, especially addictive consumption.
Wang Chen, an investor in a private equity fund, told People that a project that can make people deeply addicted is certainly not an ordinary consumer goods project, but a better consumer goods project. This is a default guideline for investors.
Wang Chen was once very close to Bubble Mart. In 2018, a person who did anime IP licensing approached him and said that there was a company called Bubble Mart that was doing some IP and asked him to consider investing. At the time, he felt that IP authorization was OK, but he did not see better prospects. Until the day when Bubble Mart submitted the prospectus, Wang Chen opened it and saw that the turnover had risen several times, and he felt incredible. Nowadays, the blind box mechanism is used in air tickets, hotels and other eating and drinking projects, and the blind box rush activities of Ctrip and Qunar have also been on the hot search, and the psychology of gamblers has spawned a surging wave of consumption.
Waves are always wave after wave. Addiction brings repurchase, and repurchase brings more money dreams. Coffee, milk tea, e-cigarettes, low-alcohol, every track is the heart of capital.
Naixue's tea has become the first share of milk tea, and the valuation of the unlisted Heytea has exceeded 60 billion yuan, refreshing the record of new tea drinks. Aunt Shanghai also recently received an A+ round of financing of nearly 100 million yuan. The niche milk tea brand Future Tea WAVE WILLCHA and Plant Label, which may never have been heard of by the youth of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, also received two rounds of financing in the first half of this year. Among these financiers, there are many big-name investment institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Tencent Investment, and Zhen Fund - the new tea drinking track has long been rolled in.
In the coffee industry, Manner, the most eye-catching this year, has reached a valuation of 2.8 billion US dollars after completing 4 rounds of financing, and the olive branch is glamorous capital such as ByteDance and Meituan Dragon Ball. In the past July, M Stand, which became popular in Shanghai and Guangzhou, also received a B round of financing of 500 million yuan, with a post-investment valuation of 4 billion. In June, the online coffee brand received hundreds of millions of yuan in new financing for three and a half times, and its post-investment valuation reached 4.5 billion yuan.
Customers wait in line at the MANNER coffee shop. Image source Visual China
Although the money dream of addictive consumption has been shattered, the next one will soon appear. Just when people thought that the e-cigarette outlet would pass after the policy, a smell of tobacco wafted from the track of low-alcohol alcohol. According to relevant reports, since the first half of 2020 alone, at least 6 founders or senior executives of e-cigarette companies have participated in the entrepreneurial project of low-alcohol. Chen Yicheng, the founder of Xuejia e-cigarette, founded the low-grade liquor brand Horsepower Ton, and Liu Shuo, the former head of national channel sales of Xuejia e-cigarette, founded The Walking Qing Brew. Behind the sparkling wine at ten o'clock is Liu Zhe, a former executive of Fluke e-cigarettes, and behind Lanzhou Fruit Liqueur, is Zheng Bohan, the former partner of YOOZ e-cigarette products - these projects have also been financed, repeating the stories that have happened before.
Desire is there, business is there.
Wang Chen heard a widely circulated passage that a foreign investment bank set up a sin fund to invest in gambling, red light districts and other projects with the most inflated desires, and eventually made a lot of money. Which money-making business is not stepping on the weakness of human nature? The most unfit for the knowledge of the weakest pay, but does it make money? Even if you make money, don't you rely on selling anxiety? Wang Chen asked rhetorically. He feels that investors do not set a lot of ethical frameworks for themselves, and that all projects allowed by law can be invested.
Lillian, 19, is already well aware of these truths. She said: "Addictive consumption is a business that targets the weakness of human nature and brings easy-to-obtain, short-term happiness. However, happiness also comes at a price. Lillian has tried to motivate herself to learn by drinking a cup of milk tea and writing a set of rolls, and has also tried to induce vomiting after drinking milk tea to prevent fat. That day, she stood by the sink and took her hand to pick her throat and eyes, even if the nose and throat produced a burning sensation, but the feeling of emptiness in the stomach would reduce the psychological burden.
She described milk tea as the sword of Damocles hanging overhead. Not sure when I'll regret not quitting it. But for now, the happiness it brings to me is still too harmful.
When addicted new consumers hunt young people, they consciously jump into the consumption trap and fall into sweet dreams. Even if it is a demand created by marketing advertising, a business that makes money by stepping on the weaknesses of human nature, few people will restrain it, and what everyone needs is the satisfaction brought by consumption, to erase the pain of reality.
(The interviewees involved in the article are pseudonyms)
Source TV series "Sudden Holiday"