Author | Li Jinglin
"If you want to do something for a long time, you have to have both, and you have to want it." In April 2023, following the official announcement of spokesperson Yang Mi, Jiaoxia released the TVC "Six-Dimensional Standard for Banana's Sunscreen Clothing", in which Yang Mi wore sunscreen clothing and shuttled through different weather and scenes, telling about the "bottom-line standard" created by Jiaoxia for the sunscreen clothing category.
Last year's TVC "Stinging Order" and "Simple Love", and this year's spring equinox's "Back to the Outdoors", Jiaoxia uses a visual presentation method that advocates distinctiveness and free-spirited ideas to convey the "lightweight outdoor" scene and lifestyle to the outside world. And the TVC of spokesperson Yang Mi, which was just released in April, uses restrained expression to concretize the lightweight outdoor scene and tell people what is a qualified sunscreen clothing. Guo Xiao, CMO of Jiaoxia, told Chop Pepper that he hopes to explain the "six-dimensional standard of sunscreen clothing" with a professional and serious attitude, "The witty and humorous way may be more memorable, but the matter itself is serious, and I am afraid that it will be entertained." ”
At the end of March, Jiaoxia officially announced Yang Mi as the brand's latest spokesperson, and formed a double endorsement with Jay Chou. In the official announcement posters for two consecutive years, a strong label was not extracted from the artist to be used as a slogan, but focused on the product and brand action itself. In 2023, "Ouch, lightweight outdoor" and "Wind and rain, cold and warm, as long as a thin one" are talking about brand strategy and velvet jackets. In 2024, the six-dimensional industry standard for sunscreen clothing will be directly printed on the main visual of the official announcement.
In the past two years, we can sort out the brand's ideas in spokesperson marketing: select artists who are long-term red, have many masterpieces and are well-known by the whole people, express the expectations of the brand to go through the cycle and open the era, and make the marketing strategy fully serve the business value and business efficiency.
In 2023, Jiaoxia will start the road of "lightweight outdoor" branding, this ten-year-old brand that has cut from sun protection to outdoor embarks on a new journey, through the cross-era idol Jay Chou, shaping a different brand texture in the past, promoting the expansion of offline channels and the hot sales of autumn and winter products such as velvet jackets. Now that Yang Mi has been officially announced, it is the peak season for spring and summer sunscreen clothing sales, and the phased focus of Banana is placed on providing rational selection criteria and greater imagination space for sunscreen clothing categories.
In 2024, Jiaoxia's brand action will move from a big concept to a more specific mood and product. "The most important connection point between consumers and brands is the product." In the field of consumption, the transmission and extension of any brand concept is inseparable from the support of products. Brands that emphasize lifestyle and scenario-based concepts often need to be linked to popular products, and they need to rely on popular and leading products to make consumers aware of the concept advocated by the brand.
Sunscreen clothing, the most familiar category under the banana, has become the most important focus of the brand in the coming of spring and summer.
According to the data released by iResearch, in 2023, Jiaoxia will be the brand with the largest market share of sunscreen clothing, reaching 26.5%, with a cumulative sales volume of more than 10 million pieces in the past five years. The entire sunscreen clothing track still has considerable room for growth. The "White Paper on China's Sunscreen Clothing Industry Standard" released by iResearch predicts that the size of China's sunscreen clothing market will reach 55.4 billion in 2026.
Today's popular sunscreen clothing was first from the transformation of European and American skin windbreakers and windproof jackets from Bananaxia. Sun protection is one of the top needs of most Chinese when they go outdoors, and Banana has seen this and made it a business. In this track with considerable growth rate and its own first-mover advantage, consolidating its first-mover advantage will allow Jiaoxia to continue to penetrate the whole population.
But for Bananaxia, this is not an easy problem to solve.
Any market that is large enough will attract more and more competitors to enter the game. In recent years, traditional outdoor sports brands, vertical sunscreen brands, fast fashion brands, and even more countless white labels and factories are making sunscreen clothing. The market is getting more and more volatile, and each entrant has his own way of "rolling the industry": some people roll up to the price of 1,000 yuan to hit the high-end market, and sink to 49 yuan to buy a sunscreen clothing with a good style; some people roll up technology, volume value, with dazzling black technology and extreme data indicators, so that buyers are not aware of it; some people roll up the style, trying to use fashion sense and trend to pry sales.
But the strategy of Banana is to break out of this set of disorderly involution logic and be a "bottom line goalkeeper". In the new products of Jiaoxia in 2024, a series of products such as double-sided sunscreen protection, cloud coolness, light and thin storage, and sports heat training are all on the basis of comprehensive performance, and a certain index or technology is very prominent, such as the sun-proof series upgrades vinyl to sand vinyl and applies it to sunscreen clothing, which can achieve a real UPF value of 1000+, and the UPF value of the head, face and shoulders part even achieves 2000+, which can meet the needs of desert, The light and thin storage series weighs only 145g and can be put in your pocket. But Banana did not choose the volume technology and volume value, and spread it at a high level.
In 2024, Jiaoxia will be very different from the previous and other brands - instead of choosing the way of direct product promotion, it will establish norms for the industry and provide users with practical tools by establishing clear category standards.
Behind this is Jiaoxia's insight into consumer demand based on years of industry accumulation. On the one hand, the supply side is complex and scattered, which brings more choices to consumers, but at the same time, it also brings pain points and confusion to consumers - each company's marketing content style is very different, talking to themselves, consumers are looking for a needle in a haystack, how to not step on the pit and choose a suitable sunscreen clothing?
According to the White Paper on China's Sunscreen Clothing Industry Standards, there are three major pain points in the sunscreen clothing market. First, there is a lack of standardization, some brands will falsely label the sunscreen index data, and the actual product will not achieve the publicity effect at all; second, the lack of test reports, in short, is self-talking, lack of authoritative endorsement; third, the lack of comprehensiveness and transparency of the data, simply pursuing the sunscreen effect and ignoring the comfort of the sunscreen clothing is a good sunscreen clothing? Only magnifying one or two indicators, such as UPF, ultraviolet blocking rate, and ignoring the comfort of wearing, also has the tendency to mislead consumers to choose.
It's time for sun-protective clothing to set the industry standard.
Standardization is an indispensable element of any independent category of products, especially functional products.
The jacket that caught fire last year has also gone through the process from brand scuffle to the formulation and implementation of standards. On the complaint platform, many consumers have reported that some brands and merchants advertise their products as "jackets", but the tags are based on the textile industry standard for jackets - some jackets are just jackets that call themselves "jackets", which are not windproof or rainproof. On April 1 this year, the new version of the national standard for "Outdoor Sportswear Jacket" (GB-T 32614-2023) was officially implemented, and clear requirements were made in terms of moisture permeability, wear resistance, safety, color difference and other indicators.
There are similar problems in the sun-protective clothing industry, and some sun-protective clothing just refers to the outer layer of "sun-protective clothing". Recently, Jiaoxia and iResearch Consulting jointly released the "White Paper on China's Sunscreen Clothing Industry Standard", and was jointly proposed by "China Consumer Daily" to standardize sunscreen clothing products from six dimensions: UPF, washability, ultraviolet blocking rate, air permeability, cooling coefficient and gram weight. This is the industry's first numerical and quantifiable standard, providing consumers with a set of scientific and transparent practical purchase guidelines.
Jiaoxia told Chop Pepper that the original intention of making the six-dimensional standard for sunscreen clothing was that Jiaoxia would always do a user return visit survey and found that many users had the pain point of "not knowing how to choose". These six dimensions have always been an important angle to consider when developing products, and the publication of this set of "internal specifications" will help solve the pain point of consumers' difficult purchase decisions.
In addition, as the earliest practitioner, Jiaoxia has a deeper understanding of products and users, "according to the requirements of breathability, coolness, and lightness, the selected six indicators are universal standards and can meet the needs of most consumers." Product and consumer consensus is the benchmark for setting product standards.
Further dismantling this set of standards, the data is not extreme, even like the UPF value of 50+, many product indicators on the market are much higher than this. The standard threshold of sunscreen clothing launched by Jiaoxia is not high, and the focus is on the comprehensive coverage of the basic needs of consumers. For example, sun protection and breathability are inherently mutually exclusive, and only one of them can not bring consumers a good wearing experience, and only by balancing these six standards can we meet consumers' requirements for body feeling and function. As Xiao said: "Banana is the gatekeeper, beyond this threshold, we are peers." "The industry standard is not to set the upper limit of the product, but to hold the bottom line of the product and the industry. For sun-protective clothing, six standards are indispensable.
The all-round definition of the standard will also help Jiaoxia to further explore the outdoor scene.
Let's first clarify the two ideas of making sunscreen clothing under the banana, one is to gain insight into the potential of the seasonal product of sunscreen clothing to become a national single product, and the other is to standardize the bottom line of the category and protect the long-term vitality of the category, which will help to improve the upper limit of the category, and cooperate with the "scene" to make the demand for sunscreen clothing daily.
Banana believes that sun-protective clothing is a seasonal product, but not a gender product. As evidenced by the data, on the Taobao platform, the proportion of male consumers searching for sunscreen clothing keywords in the spring of 2023 will increase by as much as 180% year-on-year. In the short term, the main audience for sunscreen clothing is still women, but the proportion of men is increasing.
Sun-protective clothing is cut from the women's market. Sunscreen has always been the primary need for women's skin care, so the early sunscreen clothing basically focused on sunscreen performance, and more consumers will pay attention to style and design. However, with the increasing intersection of sunscreen clothing and outdoor and life scenes, consumers' demand for sunscreen clothing has gradually upgraded, becoming more comprehensive and more subdivided. With the gradual enrichment of product functions, the consumer group will naturally be opened. Today's sunscreen clothing seems to focus on women's minds, because the product is not perfect in the early stage, and it is not a long-term and future form. Just as people initially thought that driving was a man's thing, extreme sports were a man's thing, and it was also because women's products were not mature enough.
There is a cause and effect between the expansion of the gender of the audience and the fact that the item has become a must-have of the season. When outdoor life becomes the daily life of more people, the products for the spring and summer sunscreen scenes will have a wider application space, and the sunscreen clothing will embark on a development trajectory like the down jacket, which is expected to become a must-have for the whole people.
By formulating standards, more consumers who are wandering outside the door and entering this market for the first time will not deny the entire category because they buy substandard products, and the possibility of sunscreen clothing becoming a spring and summer down jacket will become more and more likely. What Jiaoxia wants to do is not to get more soup in this promising market, but to reverse the industry and make the imagination of the market bigger.
It is understood that in 2023, Jiaoxia will create 24 classics with annual sales of more than 30 million yuan. Not only sunscreen products, last winter, Jiaoxia successfully broke through in the hot jacket market, and nearly half of the consumers who bought Jay Chou's same jacket were men. This indicates that the autumn and winter seasons will become an important growth point for bananas in the future.
For Jiaoxia, it did not enter the game because the jacket became a trend, but when it proposed a lightweight outdoor strategy, it predicted the growth space of the outdoor market. When expanding to more dimensional outdoor categories, the logic of Jiaoxia is not to make single products according to trends, but to start from the scene and extend to more categories.
The scene is an important reference unit for market analysis and product analysis. Spring and summer are the peak seasons for cycling, citywalk, and camping, and in such outdoor scenes, consumers have all-round needs for sunscreen, and sunscreen clothing and sunscreen hats under bananas naturally enter this kind of scene; Starting from the scene, Banana Xia started with sun protection and gradually established an outdoor mind.
With sunscreen as the starting point, Banana has more opportunities to touch the outdoor scene. Guo Xiao told Chop Pepper: "We hope that everyone wears sunscreen clothing not because they are afraid of the sun, but to embrace the sun, in addition to the functional selling points such as sun protection, breathability, lightness, etc., we also hope to communicate with consumers about the good emotions of the outdoors." Sun-protective clothing is still a very important classic for lightweight outdoors, and sun protection is also a very important need for outdoors, it is a subset. ”
In spring and summer, the sunscreen category will be shaped into a super product with outdoor and lifestyle scenes, taking into account the functionality and sense of scene, and establishing a strong correlation with outdoor scenes, so that consumers can still choose outdoor products under bananas in autumn and winter. And borrowing Jay Chou and Yang Mi as spokespersons for the national effect, banana can continue to extend to the whole population, all seasons, and all regions.
This is also making up for the dilemma of continuous expansion of seasonal category brands. Consumers will form a certain stereotype of the brand because of their perception of the category, and once they want to expand the category, it will be difficult to impress consumers, and even trigger an emotional backlash. Starting from the scene can effectively avoid the above risks, and under the guidance of the brand concept, the subset of products can be continuously enriched smoothly.
Jiaoxia's series of actions in 2024 seem to have narrowed the foothold back to a single category of sunscreen clothing, but it is actually using the classic product of sunscreen clothing to leverage the larger consumption scene of "lightweight outdoor".
In an era of emerging brands with relatively limited life cycles and ongoing controversy, Banana seems to be a rare new consumer brand that has been less anxious in recent years.
For Jiaoxia, its lack of anxiety stems from a deep understanding of user needs, and all brand actions and marketing strategies are not generated by following trends and markets, but from the beginning to clarify their own goals and positioning. In 2023, Jiaoxia successfully broke through in the battle of jackets, and from the year before last, Jiaoxia made great efforts in the warmth and lightness of the velvet fabric, providing consumers with a cost-effective choice. In 2024, Jiaoxia will return to sunscreen and try to define sunscreen, and it hopes that consumers will make rational decisions to choose Jiaoxia because of their recognition of the six-dimensional standard of sunscreen, rather than because they want a "spokesperson with the same style".