Source: Chief Brand Officer
The catering industry is half flame and half seawater.
On January 17, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that the total retail sales of consumer goods in 2023 will 471495 billion yuan, an increase of 7.2% over the previous year. Among them, catering revenue reached 5,289 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.4%. A number of interviewed catering enterprises and industry associations said that catering, as an important part of consumption, will lead other industries in terms of growth in 2023, marking a significant recovery of the mainland catering industry.
But the opportunity doesn't fall on every brand. According to the data of enterprise inspection, a total of 1.2653 million catering-related enterprises nationwide have been cancelled and revoked, a year-on-year increase of 113.23%. Behind the steep increase in the number of bankruptcies is the homogenization of various brands, price wars and other silent contests, and the industry is falling into involution.
So, how to "break the involution" in 2024? This has become a question that the entire catering industry is thinking about.
In 2024, the catering anti-involution will detonate the brand popularity value with short videos of celebrities visiting stores
In the past, we saw catering brand roll products, roll menus, roll decoration styles.
In the past two years, more and more brands have begun to roll up on Douyin. Open Douyin, users can see the official accounts and store sub-accounts of many catering brands, playing the content matrix card. Through the operation of short videos on official accounts, food experts visiting stores, etc., they have enjoyed the traffic dividend of 600 million daily active users on Douyin.
It's clear that F&B businesses are looking for ways to achieve consumer communication through innovative content and matrix management.
In 2023, the GMV of short video payment in Douyin's life service catering industry will increase by 71% compared with 2022, and the GMV of live streaming will increase by 341% compared with 2022.
But a real problem is coming, there are currently more than 4.5 million life service-related physical stores operating on Douyin. When everyone starts to be a talent and visit stores, it takes some new ways for a single brand to stand out.
How to find a new way to attract users' attention in addition to visiting the store? Content marketing represented by the short video of celebrity store exploration gives a new answer.
There are actually three obvious advantages to doing celebrity content marketing on Douyin:
First, Douyin short videos themselves have the advantages of wide reach, fast dissemination, and interesting content.
Second, in Douyin, celebrities have a lot of traffic. Douyin produces 1 billion+ entertainment content every year, which is a high-quality traffic pool for brands to develop new users.
Third, Douyin stars have strong fan stickiness, and have the characteristics of high loyalty and high spending power. With the help of celebrity influence on Douyin, you can reach celebrity fan groups and even a wider range of people.
It is reported that in September 2023, Douyin Life Service will launch the [All-Star Taste Plan] for the whole market, with a series of gameplay methods such as "Star Scouting Shop", "Star Dinner" and "Star Store Manager", with the help of Douyin's short video content ecological advantages, to explore a new entertainment marketing model for merchants.
For a time, the short video of celebrities visiting stores has triggered a new wave of marketing in the catering industry.
A number of catering brands such as Luckin Coffee, Chabaidao, CoCo Duke, Nai Xue's Tea, Mixue Bingcheng, Mi Miao, and Hou Hot Pot have all started celebrity short video marketing on Douyin, trying to leverage the attention of more people with the influence of celebrity content.
To solve the 4 major marketing pain points of catering, celebrity store visits are not limited to traffic
What business and marketing demands can celebrity store visits help catering businesses solve?Brother Pin roughly summarized the following 4 points:
1 Star x content power, start the seasonal marketing of catering brands
Catering is an industry that is obviously affected by the season and peak season.
For example, coinciding with the end of the winter year and the beginning of the year, Chinese New Year's Eve and Spring Festival have arrived one after another, and it is the important marketing season for tea brands, and merchants naturally begin to show their talents. So, the question arises again, in such fierce competition, how to achieve a concentrated outbreak and seize the market?
The short video of the celebrity visiting the store gives the answer.
@周洁琼发起了 the "Zhou Jieqiong's Warm Winter Tea Bureau" series, in the form of recording Vlogs, in the scene of life, with friends to check in the New Year's new products of various brands.
For example, I drank Luckin's Chu Orange Latte with friends who came to the set to visit the class, met with my sisters who hadn't seen each other for a long time and ordered Mixue Bingcheng, Yantai Filming invited the team to drink CoCo Duke's strawberry Dafu, and saw netizens break the ice with tea and strawberry custard at the end of work...... Every new tea brand is known and purchased by more fans and friends in Zhou Jieqiong's check-in Amway, and has become the preferred guide for warm tea drinks in winter.
Next, "Zhou Jieqiong's Warm Winter Tea Drinking Bureau" has completed 5 episodes, received 400,000+ likes, and the cumulative number of views of the series of videos exceeded 10 million. After reading Zhou Jieqiong's winter heart-warming drink recommendation, many netizens called "I want to get the same style!", which detonated the new taste trend of winter tea drinks for a while.
In fact, light food categories such as tea and baking have younger and trendy users, and the scenes are rich and diversified, which is highly consistent with the audience of entertainment marketing.
It can be said that the short video model of celebrity store visits can obviously more effectively drive the expansion of young consumer circles. Especially during the seasonal peak season marketing period, you can stand out from a large number of homogeneous marketing content and be the first to reach potential consumers.
Driven by the influence of celebrities' personal IP, the drainage and planting effect of various brands has doubled, which has set off a New Year's fever in the tea industry.
On the other hand, with the arrival of the winter hot pot season, talk show actor @王勉 also formed a "Wang Mian's Boiling Hot Pot Bureau" and invited friends to eat hot pot and chat together.
When inviting He Guangzhi to eat hot pot, Wang Mian specially picked the Xufu beef hot pot that was not too spicy. In the video, the talk show talents of the two were not delayed at all, and after eating the hot stalk pretending to pay the bill, fans commented and watched at the bottom. But this also brought enough traffic to the brand, the video was sent out and received 44,000 likes, and some netizens even said that they wanted to go to Xufu Niu to eat the same style as Wang Mian.
After that, Wang Mian ate the hot pot with edamame, and invited Qiu Rui to eat Arun with the side stove. Using the "star dinner" marketing method of "star + dinner", merchants showed a variety of dinner scenes through the influence of celebrities, and even drove the sales of popular packages and classic group products.
It is reported that during the hot pot after Wang Mian and Edamame's appointment, the brand also participated in the "Boiling Hot Pot Festival" activity launched by Douyin Life Service. Under the multiple combination of gameplay, the single sales volume of the official live broadcast room of Hou Hot Pot exceeded 28 million, ranking first in the national group purchase list (weekly list) on Douyin and the first place in the Sichuan and Chongqing group purchase list (weekly list).
In fact, the innovative gameplay of "Star Dinner" focuses on the consumption scenarios that capture users during the peak season. Coupled with the influence of celebrities and personalized creative content, it can open the flow valve of catering brands to the greatest extent.
And this kind of "scene-led consumption" is not only applicable to the seasonal peak season, but also will be exploded in the peak season of the festival node.
2 star x content power, kicking off the outbreak of the festival node of the catering brand
At every festival node, there must be a marketing war for the brand. However, during the May Day and National Day holidays in 2023, many restaurants said that there were indeed more people on the street, but the number of people entering the shops did not increase.
The answer may lie in marketing, as customers may have made decisions online before they arrive at the store.
During the 2023 National Day holiday, the hot pot chain brand Miaoxiang stores across the country received more than 700,000 customers, and the queuing time in many stores also increased significantly. Behind this, we see the figure of celebrity marketing.
Actor @薛凯琪 explores the store and lets him seize the consumption dividend of the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday nodes. In the video, Xue Kaiqi eats a bowl of coriander alone, and was rated by netizens as "it looks like a spicy pot, but it is actually a coriander pot". This interesting short video of visiting the store has 56,000 likes and interactions, and the topic # has been greedy by Xue Kaiqi's late-night hot pot and has been on Douyin hot spots. According to the data, the Douyin search index of the day also increased by 59.86% month-on-month.
Duan Yixuan, a @SNH48 girl group, invited her friends to City walk to take a walk and eat, and checked in the new autumn persimmon peanut series launched by Fresh Taro Fairy. Often praised by users as "girl's heart", the brand tonality of Xian Taro Xian is particularly suitable for the youthful and energetic character of the SNH48 girl group. After the video was released, it landed on the TOP2 hot list of Douyin in the same city, and the Douyin search index of Xian Taro Xian also increased by 54.4% month-on-month.
In various festival nodes, the "Star Scout Store" meets the brand's demand for refined grass planting with scene-based content, and can directly introduce merchant benefits and node promotions to fans, providing users and friends with a good place to eat, drink and have fun. Such a short video of celebrity marketing is an effective way for catering brands to grab attention in many marketing campaigns during the festival.
At present, the Spring Festival marketing has started, and I believe that many brands will invite celebrities to visit stores during the Spring Festival to achieve the dual effect of "grabbing market share + hitting explosive products".
3 Star x content power, new product booster officer of catering brand
We all know that brand relaunch is a kind of marketing, looking forward to attracting and sticking customers with product updates.
However, it is undeniable that many brands need a cold start every time they launch a new product, and it is difficult for new product information to quickly penetrate the audience. How to achieve the explosion of new products has always been a headache for catering brands.
On the day of the Qixi Festival in 2023, Zhen Huan passed on her sister to @斓曦打卡了奈雪的茶杭州门店, and ordered Nai Xue's new tea product lychee rose buffalo milk milk tea, and also got Nai Xue's tea Qixi peripherals. Holding these peripherals, she cut and pasted them onto a white gauze skirt and transparent umbrella. Decorated with red and white, Huanxi was rated by netizens as "delicate but not demonic", very good-looking, and the sales of new Qixi products reached 300,000 cups on the first day.
Through the personalized creative content output of celebrities, the selling points of new products are amplified in the ingenious gameplay, carrying the influence of star IP, so that the "new product" is listed as a "hot product".
The value of the brand is precipitated by the content, rather than simply promoting and selling goods. And this kind of content, especially in the brand's anniversary, annual meeting and other influential activities, is particularly important.
4 Star x content power, detonating the brand anniversary
Anniversary marketing is the annual marketing node of each catering brand. It has an important impact on shaping brand tonality, strengthening consumer awareness and even brand profitability.
But as long as you search for "anniversary", you will find that many restaurants are asking the same question, how to do a good anniversary?
The marketing method of Nanjing's big brand stalls is refreshing. The 29th anniversary celebration of Nanjing's big-name stall invited Nanjing's local Olympic champion women's volleyball player Zhang Changning to visit the store.
In the video, Zhang Changning came to Nanjing on National Day to visit how to eat, and introduced his taste of "from snack to big" to everyone. Walking into the Nanjing big brand stalls, Zhang Changning specially showed the decoration style and unique menu of the store, and introduced the store's signature dishes such as salted duck, champion vegetable chicken sauce white fish, and the long-established Meiling porridge one by one.
The data shows that this store visit video landed on the top 2 of Douyin and the top 17 of Weibo on the hot list of the same city. Through the "Star Scouting Store", the search index of Douyin, a big brand in Nanjing, increased by +60.95% month-on-month.
It is not difficult to find that celebrities are becoming a new fulcrum for catering to leverage growth, and through the "spontaneous" Amway planting of stars, the traffic from the content crowd is detonated.
Through highly personal video content, coupled with the fission of the fan base, they can quickly cover the target group of pan-entertainment. Similar to the anniversary, an important node of the brand, with the help of celebrity influence, the brand's "anniversary" has gradually become a "carnival day" for mass users, and the concept and culture of the brand have gradually penetrated in this process, enhancing the brand loyalty of existing fans and attracting new fans to plant grass.
The competition of catering has entered the competition of resources and content power
Catering is becoming more and more volatile, and it has become a consensus. Next, brands have extended from competing for space, aesthetics, and products to how to spread these values to the audience.
In the video era, creative and resonant content can continue to increase brand favorability, and behind the detonation of content power, more resources are needed. It is particularly important that you have talent resources and star resources that match the brand tone and user portrait to convey the content.
Douyin Life Service clearly has insight into this. Whether it is "Zhou Jieqiong's Warm Winter Tea Bureau", "Wang Mian's Boiling Hot Pot Bureau", or other celebrity store exploration projects, in fact, Douyin Life Service is based on the whole scenario of merchant marketing, providing differentiated resources for merchants, improving the core supply and transaction increment of merchants with "marketing power", and virtually realizing the crowd expansion of "brand user circle" and "celebrity fandom".
It is not difficult to find that doing celebrity content marketing on Douyin brings different value points to catering brands:
The first is to truly contextualize brand values. Most of the traditional catering industry is more doing than talking, and few brands can communicate with the market in consumer language. With the help of Douyin's content ecology and celebrity store visits, the message that the brand wants to convey can be naturally conveyed.
The second is the unity of quality and efficiency brought by the influence of celebrities. The addition of star resources is the most obvious plus point for the brand. First, under the celebrity fan economy, it can help brands better improve conversion rates and drive transaction growth, and second, celebrity creative content can precipitate brand content assets, attract new users and deliver brand value to the greatest extent, bringing long-term influence to brands.
Finally, it helps merchants build a content marketing "moat". Douyin's rich star resources and creative and diversified gameplay help brands build a different content force, which is a moat that the industry can't roll in.
In short, for catering brands, with the help of celebrity content marketing and mining the value of Douyin content, catering brands may open up a new growth path in the era of involution in 2024.