Written by丨Shaobo
Editor丨Wen Qing
Source | Jianfeng
Community, as the main position of user operation under the private domain system, it is rare to see a brand survive the operation cycle on an annual basis. As a consumer who has been pulled into countless communities, I often see brands attracting new people, brands promoting activity, and brand groups being cool.
In terms of brand communities that have passed through the operation cycle, such as a needle in the sea, they exist but are difficult to find. Yongpu Coffee's "islander community" is one of the few that exists - after more than three years of operation, the brand's actions are still undeformed, and users often respond.
The core lies in the fact that Yongpu's private domain does not directly sell goods, but establishes an "ideal country" to share lifestyles, and extends this system from the private domain to the public domain. In other words, Yongpu is constantly telling consumers through content, "The lifestyle you yearn for, I am already waiting for you in it".
Founded in 2014, Yongpu Coffee has undergone a series of product iterations and brand explorations in the past 10 years, and has created a heart-warming "Yongpu Universe" step by step: Yongpu Island, a unique IP stone and a small program that carries user bonds, and "Islander Monthly", which has no shortage of stories, at the same time, it also makes its own podcast, telling the lives of campers, fitness enthusiasts, and illustrators who love coffee, and sponsors some of its favorite anchors to open podcasts and ask them to tell the stories of commercial companies with similar tones to themselves.
In addition to perceptual marketing, Yongpu has also been on the top sales list of coffee liquid on the Tmall platform all year round, becoming the most high-profile dark horse in the coffee market.
In the third issue of today's global research topic, the in-depth selection of operations takes Yongpu Coffee as an example, and explores the content operation of the soul of the brand's global operation through its "lifestyle" sharing that extends from the private domain to the public domain. Here's how it can be deployed:
1. The "pyramid" structure of Yongpu Coffee
2. The global business matrix around WeChat
3. The endgame of a consumer brand, or death, or becoming a content company
01. The "pyramid" structure of Yongpu Coffee
When brands talk about lifestyle, it's actually a very abstract thing, let's take a look at how Yongpu makes this thing concrete-
It has set up an exclusive "Yongpu Island" for users, published the paper magazine "Islander Monthly", launched a business game "Island Coffee Shop", and held an "Inspiration Art Festival" every year...... At a time when the homogenization of new consumer brands is serious, Yongpu is building its own brand barriers in the form of seemingly "not doing business". Put the lifestyle that the brand is talking about at your fingertips.
For Tie Pi, the founder of Yongpu, "consumer brands should not only sell products, but also create a lifestyle to bring greater value to users." ”
Therefore, if we dismantle the brand pyramid structure of Yongpu Coffee, the top layer should be the cultural output built by the IP stone, the middle layer is the way of life that extends from it, and the bottom layer is to sell coffee, that is, to make good products recognized by consumers.
From a bottom-up point of view, the products produced by Yongpu's own supply chain are sold to users through online e-commerce such as Tmall, JD.com, and Douyin, as well as offline supermarkets such as Hema Fresh and Olé.
With the continuous operation of the brand, new branches and leaves will grow in each layer to fill in new channel touchpoints and content products, but the hierarchical structure will not change, forming a relatively stable brand pyramid structure.
Under the pyramid structure, let's take a specific look at Yongpu's global business matrix.
02. A global business matrix around WeChat
Shi Duanzheng - brand IP
In October 2019, Yongpu established its own IP "Shi Duanzheng", a "guardian saint - stone lion" with Chinese elements, which is cute and has a sense of justice, and at the same time interprets the brand values: to be a decent product and people.
IP has its own topic attributes, which have set off a lot of turbulence on social channels. In the early days, the topic of #石端正where# was launched through Weibo, and more than 300 people submitted it in half a month, accumulating more than 1,000 illustrations and creative pictures. At the same time, "Yongpu" also created the packaging design of the Planet series of technological elements, such as small flying saucers, gray dish bags, etc., which attracted other brands to compete for co-branding.
At every touch point that Yongpu Coffee comes into contact with members, whether it is enterprise customer service, WeChat applets, games, or developed peripheral products, it is exposed with the image and identity of the brand IP "Shi Duanzheng" to convey the brand's warm tonality and culture.
In the view of Mao Lizi, co-founder of Yongpu Coffee, "the long-term IP "Shi Duanzheng" has strong empowerment". The existence of the surrounding plate greatly reduces the probability of falling into the "coffee involution" - there is no need to fight a "price war", but to use IP stones to correct peripheral products to attract users, and use "life companionship" to impress users, of course, there is no need to consider the personnel changes and house collapse events that real IP will encounter.
Yongpu Island - Mini Program + Mini Game
At the end of 2020, Yongpu began to think about building Yongpu ecology and exporting brand culture.
As a result, a virtual island was established in the WeChat mini-program - Yongpu Island. Regardless of whether they spend or not, users can visit the island and collect points to exchange for gifts by checking in and other ways. The island also has its own virtual currency, the "Positive Coins", which can be exchanged for merchandise, as well as a virtual badge that rewards users.
"It may not be so strongly related to coffee, it is just a virtual world, and we hope that Yongpu Islanders will be more aware that they are here to get information in addition to consumption. This is the original intention of the founder of Yongpu for the establishment of the island.
For literary and artistic youths who like coffee, most of them have the dream of running a café, so Yongpu also launched the small game "Island Cafe" on the island.
Interestingly, fans can not only develop some creative drinks in this virtual café, but in real life, these drinks can also be reproduced, so there is a linkage between online and offline again.
Islander Community - Enterprise Micro Community
Yongpu Coffee CEO Tie Pi once mentioned that many brands now do a misunderstanding of the private domain, and let many people join the private domain group through rewards, such as 5 yuan cashback, etc., for KPIs. Harvesting users as leeks is selling things in the group, but in fact, it is difficult for such a group to be truly active.
In fact, many brands will fall into such an embarrassing situation when doing private domain, to do a fission or group buying activity, to maximize the number of consumers in, but the actual number of transactions in the end is far lower than the actual number, because most consumers come in for the purpose of receiving those free small gifts, red envelopes, samples, etc. Merchants want to cut consumers' leeks, and consumers also want to pick merchants' wool, and such a "private domain" cannot achieve the purpose of user retention and conversion.
Yongpu almost does not directly bring goods in private domain scenarios such as official accounts and communities, but brings huge brand recognition value through continuous user interaction certainty, attracts traffic to Tmall's flagship store, and realizes user connection and conversion. The founder of Yongpu also revealed that many users who repurchase more than 3 times a year are from Yongpu's private domain channels, and this proportion continues to rise.
Therefore, what can be seen at the moment is that more and more brands have begun to uphold the same private domain operation concept and strategy as Yongpu, even if they can sell goods in the private domain, they will not take discount promotion as the core goal and main value contribution of private domain operation, but take the use of private domain intensive cultivation of users to bring sustainable growth as the core key.
Xiaodao Radio Station - Official Account + Video Account
The official account and the video account are the content hubs of Yongpu, especially the video account, which connects the content forms such as video, audio, and expressions, as well as the conversion entrance of the store.
In the video content, Yongpu generates content with three themes: #小峮門門, #咖啡店1001种喝法, and #咖啡事小生活是大, all of which are about a small and beautiful lifestyle.
The anchor will not talk to users about the establishment of the brand, what they want to do, and how the product is, but more about life, understanding the role of coffee in life and anything that has nothing to do with coffee.
In the view of the host of Yongpu Podcast, I hope that coffee can appear in people's lives very down-to-earth like Chinese soybean milk, and gently convey the lifestyle that Yongpu believes in to users.
An extension of the "ideal country" in the commons
In addition to the private domain system built by WeChat, Yongpu Coffee also conveys the concept of a better lifestyle to user groups through public domain channels such as Weibo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Xiaoyu, and uses non-commercial content to build a spiritual island for brands and users.
03. The endgame of a consumer brand, or death, or becoming a content company
It is difficult for most consumer brands to be irreplaceable for users, especially at a time when product functions are homogeneous and users are overloaded with information.
If you want users to make a purchase, the premise is that users can see you, which means that the brand either has a huge terminal channel coverage offline, or can continue to have a sense of presence through content online. Relatively speaking, the latter has the effect of four or two thousand pounds.
To be a private domain, you have to think of yourself as a content company
Therefore, in the brand's private domain system, its essential value is not to provide shelves for "people looking for goods", which is what traditional e-commerce and offline supermarkets do, but to build a scenario of "goods looking for people", not to directly realize the flow of goods, but to focus on the realization of information flow, not traffic harvesting, but user cultivation.
In other words, what determines the activity and stickiness of a brand's private domain users is not the frequency of consumption or the unit price of customers, but the overall "content demand intensity" of users for the products and services operated by a brand.
Content refers to all kinds of information required by consumers to make purchase decisions, including but not limited to category-related, brand-related, product-related, service-related, purchase-related, lifestyle-related, promotional-related, public welfare promotion, etc.
To put it bluntly, users don't care about being bothered by your push messages, but only if you mechanically push product purchase links day after day, or push content that users just need to them.
Taking Yongpu as an example, the content pushed to users hides the expression of lifestyle, and when consumers find resonance from it, they tend to agree that the brand's products and services are excellent and more trustworthy.
Everyone agrees that the expression of "lifestyle" is very important, especially for consumer goods. But lifestyle can't just be lip service, it must also be perceived by users through content.
How to solve the problem of content production
Once content has been prioritized for brand management, the next thing that needs to be addressed is how to produce the content. The "content demand intensity" mentioned above can actually be split into "topic richness" ✖️ and "product richness".
The "intensity of content demand" depends first of all on the "topic richness" of the industry.
The higher the richness of the topic in the industry where the consumer brand is located, the higher the "content demand intensity" of users for the brand, which means that the stronger the brand's content operation ability, the higher the activity and stickiness of the private domain operation, and the greater the power and value that it can exert by using the private domain.
Taking Yongpu as an example, the coffee track itself is full of topics, from the origin of coffee beans to the roasting method of beans to the brewing method. Yongpu's choice is to combine the versatile characteristics of coffee liquid, and help users unlock more ways to use products by sharing various coffee special drinks.
In the introduction of Yongpu's video account, it is determined to challenge 1001 kinds of coffee specials, and has released 276 issues of special blending content so far.
From the perspective of "product richness", it is still taking Yongpu as an example, its SKU will be simpler, if it is not counted as a single package or a combination of such specifications, it is basically within 10. At first glance, Yongpu does not have a content advantage.
However, the strength of Yongpu lies in the fact that it uses a limited number of product SKUs to create more SKUs through co-branding and peripherals, which greatly improves the richness of products and has more raw materials for content production.
For Yongpu, who has made co-branding a daily operation of the brand, more concerned about the freshness and topicality it brings to users than the sales of co-branded models.
And the wonderful thing is that promoting new co-branded products in the private domain is not a consumption for users, but the best "energy supply". Because private domain operations require content, and co-branded models are one of the most favorite and needed content by users, and it is also one of the content that can best reflect brand power.
The best content is co-created
The content operation of the brand should not only rely on its own team, but also co-create with more users. And the content that invites users to participate in co-creation can also touch the users themselves.
Yongpu is also a loyal practitioner of user co-creation, starting from the IP-Shi Duanzheng image design, it has received thousands of users' return pictures in just half a month;
Then to the beginning of the school season and the Mid-Autumn Festival, Yongpu invites users to paint with Shi Duanzheng as the protagonist, some paintings are very professional, although some users are not professional painters, but they can see that they are very attentive;
In addition to painting, Yongpu also co-creates with users in terms of environmental protection, such as reusing express boxes and packaging boxes. Users have made express boxes and packaging boxes into a variety of storage boxes, and some have also made very powerful devices, which seem to have little commercial value, but they are establishing a deeper emotional link with users.
More than that, the "Islander Monthly", which has been published for 35 issues so far, was originally the content co-created by Yongpu colleagues with business time and some islanders, with the help of a series of beautiful things to convey Yongpu's brand values.
In the podcast, a user commented: "Yongpu is very good at publishing a magazine, it reproduces the attributes of the "literary" coffee shop that everyone wants to run in a relatively light way, and the scope is expanded to lifestyle, which sounds like it is still UGC-led, and it is easier to consolidate the core user base." As long as the coffee sells well, the magazine can be published on par with the IKEA Home Guide. ”
In addition to the above co-created content, through interaction with community users, you can often get first-hand market research information.
In an interview, when Yongpu Coffee was asked "how to do user demand insight", the founder Tie Pi said: "Usually everyone will answer 'research' and 'big data', but Yongpu is very simple, we have a 'Xiaopu Friends' community, everyone makes a wish in the group, and we will make the wish come true!"
This means that Yongpu can understand user needs more intuitively and upgrade products and operation strategies in a more targeted manner.
04. Write at the end
When a consumer brand completes the original accumulation from 0 to 1, in the process of moving from 1 to 10, it is usually faced with the choice of category extension, and there will be two ways in front of it:
One is kinship extension: based on the public's understanding of the relationship at the material level, the kinship category extension is adopted, such as expanding from the down jacket category to the sunscreen clothing category, which is a relatively safe way;
The other is cultural extension: starting from the spiritual level to establish a value and lifestyle, and produce cultural influence, so as to carry out industrial expansion, such as expanding from the outdoor clothing category to the fishing tackle category.
If kinship extension is a relatively safe means of extension, then cultural extension is a paradise for adventurers. Brands or businesses that sell lifestyle require the brand team itself to have a strong ability to control content and insight into human nature.
The advantage that enterprises can obtain is that they will no longer be bound by the competition of the original category and can enter a free development track. When a brand knows how to guide or create a lifestyle, then category extension will not only stay in the kinship category upstream or downstream of the category, but will enter all aspects of the life of the target group defined by the brand.
This is the case with Xiaomi, this is the case with Suntory, and there is also such a trend at Yongpu. As the founder of Yongpu Iron Peel said: "In the future, Yongpu Coffee will also become a lifestyle brand matrix, and the core is coffee"
"On a Slow Boat to Coffee" is Yongpu Coffee's brand slogan, which translates to "slowly arrive at the coffee realm". This kind of slowness can make the brand have more precipitation, and it can also make the brand have stronger vitality.
Shaping a lifestyle is destined to be a slow process, and the most important thing in a long time is to love life, which is the romance of Yongpu and the brand temperament that Yongpu shows in the whole domain.
Yongpu's business ideas for the current coffee industry may also be as predicted by McKinsey: Generation Z's consumption logic, sensibility and rationality coexist, not only pay attention to the quality of the goods, but also care about the appearance of the goods and the whimsy behind them, who can seize this consumer group, who can lead the future of the industry.
References:
Category Thirteen Laws丨Tang Thirteen, Tan Daqian, Hao Qidong
Those who get the private domain get the world, and those who get the category get the private domain丨He Xinghua
Interpretation of Yongpu's "brand ecology" paradigm丨Maixing Investment
Yongpu founder: What have we done to achieve 15 times growth in 3 years?丨New Retail Business Review
Dialogue with Yongpu: Logical and self-consistent companies are growing around a very philosophical core丨Chaos Academy