In the next decade, there are plenty of opportunities.
The past 2023 has been a difficult year for consumer goods to go overseas.
Product and supply chain resilience, brand and marketing strategies have all been tested in multiple ways. The market environment is volatile, consumer demand fluctuates, new platforms and models emerge, creating opportunities and challenges, and approaches need to be updated with tighter privacy regulations, AI tools, and increased marketing competition.
There is no doubt about the level of Chinese manufacturing, but there is a long road from winning the price of the product to shaping the brand mentality. At this time, it is especially rare for consumer goods companies that still show the growth potential of overseas markets.
In this context, in early January this year, Feishu Shennuo, a global digital marketing service provider, joined hands with Ipsos, a global professional consulting company, to select the top 50 cutting-edge consumer brands, including consumer electronics, pet products, sports and outdoor and other tracks. What do their abilities and experience have in common, and how can the two types of overseas forces, "local brands going overseas" and "domestic brands going overseas", continue to improve and move towards the goal of international leading brands?
In order to comprehensively understand the key to the sustainable development of overseas brands, Feishu Shennuo has built the "D-MES Digital Intelligence Driven E-commerce Development Potential Evaluation Model" to analyze brand competitiveness and improvement space in multiple dimensions, and analyze the growth path of benchmark brands, pointing out the way forward for latecomers.
Behind the list and model is the accumulation of experience in Feishu Sino since 2013 to focus on overseas digital marketing solutions. In the past ten years, Feishu has served different types and stages of overseas brands, and Feishu has formed three sub-brands: MeetsocialMedia, a media procurement service, BeyondClick, a global digital marketing service, and Meet Experience, a global digital technology service, which run through the whole chain of brand growth from strategy, channels to digital management.
The brand going overseas is still changing. Shen Chengang, founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group, gave an in-depth interpretation of the "new" environment faced by 36Kr going overseas: new categories, new markets, new technologies, new channels, and new strategies. These "new" trends pose challenges and create the potential energy of "new" brands. He believes that there are always opportunities, and in the next decade, excellent overseas brands will still emerge in different categories and markets, and continue to advance towards the mature form of "multi-channel", "digitalization" and "localization".
Note: The dialogue has been adjusted without changing the original meaning.
36Kr goes global: In 2022, Feishu Shennuo selected and released the "MeetBrands China Overseas Brand Value List", and this year's list focuses on "cutting-edge consumer brands".
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Sino Group: In 2022, Feishu Sino has been established for nine years, and our services have been deeply involved in the operational details of customers and have accumulated a lot of understanding. We hope that this understanding can bring more reference to the market, so we made the "Overseas Brand Value List".
However, there are more cutting-edge overseas brands, facing foreign markets and more scattered categories, and the domestic market is relatively difficult to understand, and it also has high growth potential. Therefore, this year, we focus on "emerging brands", hoping to help the market discover valuable enterprises. Based on the needs of these cutting-edge brands, we can also adjust our services and use our experience to help these companies continue to enter a new stage on the road to the sea, like the leading predecessors.
In my opinion, there are two main types of overseas brands: one is the original brand that goes overseas and does the international market at the beginning, such as SHEIN and Anker, and the other is the domestic brand that has already achieved overseas, such as Huawei and Xiaomi.
Overseas, these two types of brands have their own advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of domestic brands going overseas is that the team has a stronger understanding of brands and products, but the familiarity with overseas markets is a weakness, and the response to cross-border ecology is slower.
China's e-commerce is more mature, and it has the ability to reduce dimensionality with the help of e-commerce, and can immediately perceive whether the product can be sold, whether it sells well, and whether it can be expanded. This is a powerful tool in the new era, and cutting-edge overseas brands need to continue to optimize this ability and develop forward in combination with production and manufacturing capabilities.
36Kr going global: What are the differences between the digital marketing environment and marketing strategies faced by these cutting-edge consumer brands and those in the past?
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: First, marketing channels are expanding. In addition to mainstream media platforms, more featured platforms are also growing. E-commerce platforms are also more diversified, not only Amazon, but also Walmart, AliExpress, Shopee, Lazada, etc. In the future, when products go overseas, these channels may have to be used to maximize market value.
Second, the marketing form is more advanced. For example, technologies such as AI, AR, VR are used in videos, and more content-heavy marketing methods such as short dramas have also emerged in the field of short videos. The development of marketing is more in-depth, and it is necessary to use multi-channel, multi-form, multimedia, and digital management.
The third is to pay more attention to the balance between effect and brand advertising strategy. Only talk about the effect, and it will be difficult to grow when it reaches a certain scale, because users will never remember you, and the cost of traffic and the cost of acquiring new ones will become higher and higher. It is necessary to see how to combine the brand and the effect to create the best medium and long-term effect.
36Kr goes overseas: In addition to "new brands", the "2023 MeetBrands China Cutting-edge Consumer Brands List Report" also emphasizes "new markets". What are the overseas markets worth paying attention to this year?
Shen Chengang, founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: The overseas market is becoming more and more diversified. In the past, we paid more attention to markets such as North America and Europe, but now we see that North America and Europe are still growing, but the growth is slowing down. The rapid growth is in Southeast Asia, South America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, etc. In these areas, the number of mobile Internet users is growing rapidly, the penetration rate of e-commerce is increasing, and the e-commerce infrastructure is also tending to be perfect.
36Kr going global: How do different types of new cross-border e-commerce platforms and the rise of new cross-border models such as full custody and live streaming affect the pattern and marketing strategy of brands going overseas?
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: These platforms provide more marketing channels and marketing tools. For example, live broadcast is a relatively mature domestic business model exported overseas, and in a sense, it is also copy from China. But this model has also undergone several years of adaptation overseas. At the beginning, the cost of our overseas anchors was very high, but the effect of attracting users was not good. After continuous adjustments, we have gradually found a more efficient way to achieve more rapid growth in the existing market, and this year is expected to grow even faster. Many brands can also use this opportunity to break through the minds of users.
The full custody is to shake the market share of low-value products on traditional e-commerce platforms, and help some traditional supply chain sellers sell their products faster. However, if an enterprise wants to grasp the initiative of development, it still needs to develop its own brand. In the end, they will develop to a multi-habitat state, from independent stations to platforms, and build their own channel layout.
36Kr goes global: SinoClick, a cross-border e-commerce and brand marketing platform under Feishu SinoTrust, also lists foreign trade, factories and other transformation merchants as important service objects. What problems do they face and how can they solve them?
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: The biggest advantage of this type of business is the production capacity and iteration ability of products, and the weakness lies in the connection with the final consumer. Many enterprises only know the production, but do not know who the product will eventually sell to, why consumers want to buy the product, and what product will they like next? The initiative is in the hands of foreign importers.
To upgrade and transform, it is necessary to take back the initiative through e-commerce and build cognitive and management capabilities for end consumers. SinoClick, a subsidiary of Feishu Yitu, provides one-stop cross-border e-commerce operation and overseas marketing services, and will also provide services such as product analysis and market user insights based on massive data to help merchants analyze opportunities, see the market clearly, and improve the probability of success.
36Kr goes to sea: TikTok closed-loop e-commerce in the United States is in the process of advancing. For this channel, what is the current layout of Feishu Shennuo?
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: In 2023, we will already be TikTok's head partner in going overseas. In terms of business system, we have established a whole system from e-commerce management to marketing operations to help leading brands like Anker promote overseas TikTok Shop operations, and second, we have promoted the collaboration of global local talents: TikTok Shop's operation is relatively complex, and it is very necessary to localize and understand local languages and hot spots, and we have established local teams in the United States, Japan, Southeast Asia and other places very early. Only local people can do this well.
36Kr Goes Global: Expanding to Feishu Shennuo's focus on providing targeted solutions for e-commerce, games and applications, what are the characteristics of these three types of tracks and what challenges are they facing?
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: The e-commerce industry, as shown by cutting-edge brands, is covering more and more complete categories: home, outdoor sports, pets, personal care, etc., and penetrating into different consumption scenarios. I believe that in the future, in the more mature stage of e-commerce development, global Chinese overseas brands will emerge in different consumer categories.
In the game industry, I believe it is in a transitional stage of market adjustment and iteration: there are no particularly big hits, and the overall market growth is sluggish. In the past, a popular product would be quickly copied, but now the competition is to have new ways to play, to have the ability to grasp the trend, pay more attention to the quality of the game, and the investment cycle and cost of research and development are relatively larger, and it takes more time to precipitate. Without a particularly good product, it is difficult for a small company to survive.
Applications similar to e-commerce are also entering more sub-categories, such as fitness, reading, travel and other application scenarios. The more prominent hits from last year to this year are short dramas, which in a sense are also a small microcosm of China's cultural exports. However, short dramas are more difficult than novels, and they need to focus on the common humanity of the world, and they must be transformed into short video content that local users can understand, and the script must be adjusted, filmed with high cost performance, and successfully displayed. In addition, there may be more new overseas brands emerging from short dramas, or using this way for marketing.
36Kr going global: AIGC has become a general trend, what are the important applications in the overseas marketing process?What is Feishu's layout in AI?
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: Overall, the application of AI in the field of marketing is still in a very early stage, that is, the stage of scattered personalized applications. For example, AI design software is used more for creativity, which can assist in making designs faster. However, AI is not yet fully embedded in the workflow to form the value of continuous empowerment.
Our initial layout directions include: First, based on the ability to serve cross-border brands over the years, we will build a knowledge base and use AI to help everyone learn more quickly. We'll soon be opening up this knowledge base to our users so they can get answers to their questions faster, save us money on the cost of our services, and use AI in our marketing strategy and content. Our biggest advantage is the data accumulated in the past ten years such as creative content, marketing strategies, and user behavior observations, which are too large to be systematically learned before, and AI can learn based on these industry data to form capabilities in these aspects. In the future, we will also open up the corresponding capabilities and empower everyone on the platform.
36Kr Goes Global: Focusing on overseas digital marketing solutions since 2013, how will Feishu Shennuo summarize the changes of overseas enterprises and cross-border marketing in the past ten years?
Shen Chengang, Founder and CEO of Feishu Shennuo Group: This decade has been a very important wave for China to go overseas, taking advantage of the overflow of global mobile Internet traffic and China's manufacturing capacity. However, this stage is still from the stage of products to products, and there are still very few brands that can really leave a mind and impression on users.
We look forward to the emergence of more excellent overseas brands in the next decade. I think there are still a lot of opportunities in many categories, and they are opportunities in the global market, and every country has opportunities, and developed and developing countries have different opportunities to form dislocation competition.
With the development of the cross-border market and the maturity of users, Feishu will strive to provide service capabilities that are one step or two steps ahead of customer growth to help them succeed. For example, our marketing management capabilities, digital application capabilities, brand building capabilities, and international team capabilities enable customers to go overseas for the whole chain of business and become the best partner for customers.
(Article source: 36 Krypton goes to sea)