Author: Xiaoshidai
Looking back at 2023, the economy is at a critical stage of consolidating the foundation for recovery, and the consumption of the food and beverage industry shows the characteristics of stable growth in market demand.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the per capita consumption expenditure on food, tobacco and alcohol will be 7,983 yuan in 2023, an increase of 6.7%, accounting for 29.8% of the per capita consumption expenditure. The proportion of this rigid demand consumption continues to increase, indicating that the food and beverage industry has maintained a certain degree of resilience.
However, the food and beverage market is also showing new and more complex trends, such as consumer demand becoming more fragmented, consumption scenarios becoming more fragmented, the pursuit of cost-effectiveness has made consumers more rational and cautious, and after the epidemic, people are also paying more attention to the acquisition of health value and emotional value.
Whether it is the change of the market environment or the competition of subdivisions, for food and beverage brands, it is a test of their adaptability and development resilience.
Behind the test, it is not easy for brands to find an efficient growth model. In the face of new trends, how to carry out accurate and effective marketing, how to find consumers and quickly break through the circle of brands and products, the "Xiaohongshu Food and Beverage Industry Insight Report" released by Xiaohongshu's commercialization team and Ipsos may be able to answer these questions.
Dig deeper into new opportunities for consumption
In the past, consumers made a simple shopping decision, often receiving product information, then weighing the value or price, and then making a judgment to make a purchase.
However, with the increasing abundance of media touchpoints and diverse sources of information, social media has become an important platform for people's leisure and entertainment, so consumers are increasingly preferring to use social media to help make consumption decisions.
It is precisely in the observation of the above changes that after a large number of researches, the Xiaohongshu commercialization team and Ipsos jointly released the "Xiaohongshu Food and Beverage Industry Insight Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Food and Beverage Report").
The Food & Beverage Report points out that the role of social media is escalating, and social media has covered the entire chain of the food and beverage consumer journey, from cognition, planting, purchase to sharing, and has played an influential role in every link.
The consumer decision-making chain is changing.
Many consumers learn about consumption trends on social platforms, are planted according to real consumer feedback, etc., and then consume, and when they consume, they will also share their experiences on social platforms, and these experiences will be spread again to achieve wider diffusion, which will have an impact on other people's shopping decisions, forming a "stratosphere grass".
According to the "Food and Drink Report", from the identity of the grass planter, compared with the grass planting of the big V, people are more willing to believe the real feedback of the Internet partner on the food and drink products, 71% of Xiaohongshu users feel that the public users are more credible, and consumers are generally willing to get the "stratosphere" suggestions on social media as a reference.
From the level of grass planting content, the content that people are more willing to be planted with grass is mostly real feelings, or analysis of ingredient parties, such as ingredient analysis, product evaluation, etc.
In addition, consumers share their experiences and feed back their experiences to their circles, forming a community with a sense of reputation and trust.
Xiaohongshu has always encouraged users to share sincerely and friendly, and this community atmosphere has also allowed more real individuals to feel and share more content, and this kind of "stratosphere planting" and feedback are more valuable for reference. Brands can also get more effective information from it and grasp the refined needs.
At present, social media, represented by Xiaohongshu, is showing an increasingly important role. According to the "Food and Drink Report", Xiaohongshu is the first channel in the selection of content related to grass and food, and has become the "first stop before purchase" for many food and beverage users.
As the saying circulating on the Internet "Xiaohongshu is undecided", when you can't make up your mind, a large number of real shares and suggestions on Xiaohongshu can better help consumers make consumption judgments. And these real sharing and suggestions are gathered together to influence more and more consumers through the "stratosphere", and consumer trends have emerged.
Meet the opportunity to break the circle
In fact, it is not difficult to find that the hot trends and new scenes of food and beverage consumption in recent years, whether it is day coffee and night wine, dopamine food, and CityEat, have all emerged in Xiaohongshu.
Based on Xiaohongshu's big data insights and Ipsos' research and data analysis, the "Food and Beverage Report" also released six major trends.
- From #convenience store DIY# (reading increased by 802% year-on-year) milk tea to #homemade fairy drink# (more than 6.91 billion readers), many young people have become "food and drink explosion players";
- #Childhood Snacks# (Reading increased by 144% year-on-year) #Time-honored brand# (more than 140 million readers) resonated among consumers of different generations, and people took the "Childhood Food Light Machine";
- #Zibo barbecue# (reading increased by 4473% year-on-year)#Taste of hometown# (more than 410 million readers) became popular, and "awakening the local Chinese stomach" became a trend;
- Food and beverages are also a source of emotional value for people, which is comparable to "food blood packs";
- Under the trend of "food and drink for literature", people also pay more attention to food and beverages that conform to tastes and values;
- In pursuit of health, many "food octax observers" have emerged among food and beverage users, driving hot topics such as #Organic snacks# (reading increased by 256% year-on-year) #Ingredient list is clean# (reading increased by 1423% year-on-year).
In other words, people not only care about the functional value of consumer products, but also look forward to the emotional value brought by products or consumption scenarios.
By studying these trends, we will find some commonalities: most of them come from very specific and diversified scene needs; these contents are often based on the real life of individuals, reflecting the living conditions of young people, with strong practicability and reference, and have stronger grass planting power; and from the new characteristics and new needs of the food and drink population.
The new characteristics of the food and drink crowd include a return to rationality, fun release, and authentic expression, and these characteristics are more obvious among Xiaohongshu's food and drink users, so the above trends can be clearly understood.
For example, 53% of consumers will take the initiative to understand the effect and impact of products on the body, and 45% of users have purchased new trends/products with new technologies in the past year, which is more than the overall number of survey users, so they are in-depth participants in the output of the above trends, and these groups are extremely valuable to brands.
Xiaohongshu continues to aggregate a large number of individual sharing, gradually shaping and reflecting the food and beverage consumption trends of the new generation of young people, which is why Xiaohongshu continues to become a "trend source".
When the trend continues to circulate and amplify, it becomes the vane of life consumption, which effectively influences the consumption decisions of other users, and also provides brands with an opportunity to gain insight into industry trends and establish an effective communication bridge with target users.
This also reminds brands that, on the one hand, they must understand trends, carry out product innovation and track layout according to Xiaohongshu's category trends, user trends, and core groups, find products and content that users are interested in, plant grass accurately, and improve the efficiency of new products;
How can food and beverage brands find more possibilities in the trend?
Taking Suntory Oolong Tea as an example, this product has infiltrated sugar-free tea into the more diverse life scenarios of young people, meeting the diverse needs of consumers.
In the past, the drinking scene of sugar-free tea may have been relatively simple, but under the trend of Xiaohongshu's "explosion of food and drink" (as of the end of last year, there were more than 6.91 billion readings under the Xiaohongshu topic #Homemade Fairy Drink#, and the reading volume of Xiaohongshu's topic #convenience store DIY# increased by 802% year-on-year), Suntory Oolong Tea saw more opportunities to take advantage of the situation.
Specifically, sugar-free tea conforms to the trend of "eating and drinking explosive players", co-creating content with KOLs on Xiaohongshu, and generating a lot of creative and novel gameplay. This broadened the citywalk dining scene represented by the convenience store scene for the brand. With its trend-grabbing style, Suntory Oolong Tea attracted many UGC to participate in DIY and share notes during the event, gaining more than 350 million impressions.
Continuously gaining insight into changes in consumer trends on social platforms and quickly identifying opportunities to capitalize on them is the key to Suntory's brand differentiation among many sugar-free tea brands.
Chun Zhen has seized the current health trend.
According to the Food & Drink Report, 45% of users said they had purchased more products with health effects than last year, and 51% of users would take the initiative to understand the effects and effects of product ingredients on the body.
The trend of consumers' high demand for healthy food and drink continues, and in the just-concluded Little Red Book Snowman Festival, Chun Zhen seized this trend and continued to amplify the selling point of Chun Zhen 0 additive* and pure formula.
In the event, Chun Zhen created an interactive check-in device with the concept of a yogurt shop, set up a tasting area for new products with 0 additions, and extended a richer consumption scene from the selling point of the product through offline interaction with consumers.
In addition to strengthening the health and taste spread of yogurt with 0 additives, Chunzhen also echoed the concept of innocence with the pure white "innocence" of ice and snow life, making the way of planting grass more ingenious and natural.
Through the creation of offline marketing events for the Snowman Festival, Chunzhen mainly reached the outdoor circle of people, and this kind of people just pay more attention to the "0 addition" of products, which further catalyzes the rapid and large-scale breakthrough of the brand, so as to complete efficient grass planting.
In other words, with the help of Xiaohongshu's hot trends, it is easier for brands to capture the growth of voice and word-of-mouth.
We have also observed that the recently held "Eat" Xiaohongshu Food and Beverage Market focused on the "Six Trends of Xiaohongshu Food and Beverage", and through innovative scenario marketing activities, we can join hands with more food and beverage brands to connect brands and consumers more closely.
Such offline activities can cleverly link brands and traffic, run through online and offline links, help brands get more marketing opportunities, and further enhance brand awareness and market share.
Consumers use food and drink as a medium to share emotional scenes about healthy life, food and drink attitudes, and more about food in the fireworks in the world.
For food and beverage brands, how to face the ever-changing market trend and how to break the boundaries of consumer groups to effectively break the circle are all difficult challenges.
At present, the competition of brands has shifted from the competition of consumer demand behind the scene to the competition of consumer demand behind the scene, and it is possible for brands to capture more "scene share" from the same category or even neighboring categories on the basis of maintaining their existing market share by refining and grasping the core consumption needs of different scenarios.
Xiaohongshu, on the other hand, relies on a wide range of corresponding people, and can obtain more precise needs for consumption scenarios, and has become a position that can fully build momentum and communication, thus providing a way for brands to respond.
On the one hand, the abundance of real users, the content they generate and the interactive behavior data generated on the Xiaohongshu platform are like a gold mine, with rich consumer groups, insights and market trend clues, enabling brands to find the right place to exert their strength.
On the other hand, relying on the crowd anti-funnel model, brands can accurately target seed users, and use their word-of-mouth communication power and real feedback to conduct rapid trial and error and optimization, so as to improve the overall marketing efficiency and user purchase conversion rate.
Xiaohongshu is like a mirror in the food and beverage industry that looks into the future, reflecting various opportunities under market changes, and can help brands seize opportunities and empower in the fierce competition to achieve sustainable and steady development.
*0 flavor, 0 color, 0 gelatin, 0 latex, 0 complex ingredients