Author: Xiaoshidai
How can food and beverage brands break the circle?
As the foundation of people's livelihood, the food and beverage industry has always maintained a stable foundation in the consumer market, and has played an important supporting role in the recovery of consumption.
Gone are the times when "solving homogenization" and "creating new categories" can achieve a market leap, and how to efficiently link consumers, how to break the circle in the marketing field, and create topical explosive products have become a topic faced by many enterprises.
The core of food and beverage consumption is consumers, and to solve this problem, it is bound to accurately target consumers and deeply link consumers.
In this situation, scene marketing has become a means that has been widely concerned by the consumer industry, and it has shown great potential to tap consumer traffic in many cases, especially scene marketing empowered by social media, which has become a new trend in today's food and beverage industry game, and enterprises' enthusiasm for "scene placeholders" even exceeds that of "category placeholders".
Based on the in-depth insight into food and beverage consumption trends, on May 14, Xiaohongshu held a food and beverage industry summit in Shanghai with the theme of "Red Scene, New "Food and Strength", sharing six native red scenes and seven industry characteristic trend groups, and jointly released the "Node Scene Industry Insight Report" with Ruicong Consulting to explore more possibilities for scenario marketing on how to tap consumer demand and how to respond to changes in the consumption environment.
Scenario first
Xiaohongshu is known as a lifestyle community for young people, the source of food and drink trends, with a large population of food and drink, and has distinctive behavioral characteristics - love to share, love to follow, love to consume.
In the content trend of the food and beverage track, Xiaohongshu has insight into product competition is no longer limited to categories. Instead, it gradually leans towards the scene. We noticed that in 2023, Xiaohongshu will contribute a lot of native hot words to the food and drink scene, such as "dopamine food", "staying up late to maintain health", "cityeat", etc. These hot words are initiated and followed by users themselves.
This is the exclusive advantage of Xiaohongshu's content field - people who love to share, follow, and consume continue to share a large amount of content based on real experience and consumption intentions, and then it is searched, imitated, and followed, and finally it has become a trend, and some have even become a popular trend and lifestyle, and it still maintains the topic heat and traffic vitality until now.
Based on such a community atmosphere, Xiaohongshu's insight into the scene has a natural advantage. At this summit, Xiaohongshu refined six major food and drink red scenes, namely New Sensory Universe, Outdoor Escape, My COMFOOD, Mouth 007, Wrong Secondary and Other Years, and Coming to the Card Dinner.
Taking the "New Sensory Universe" as an example, people's eating behavior is usually based on the five senses of taste and smell, and in some cases it will also involve sight, hearing, and touch, but the "New Sensory Universe" is not limited to these five senses, and is different from the "sixth sense" that is usually mentioned, but an experience with "emotional value".
For example, for "fireworks", for "unexpected encounters", and for "relaxation", this is essentially the same as people's desire to eat and drink for pleasure, but Xiaohongshu explores and classifies this kind of demand through scene insights, and its significance to marketing is self-evident.
Mi Ou, General Manager of Xiaohongshu's Commercial FMCG Industry Group, said: "As the source of food and beverage trends, Xiaohongshu continues to pay attention to consumer growth trends. With the transformation of consumer demand and the refinement of demand, the marketing of the food and beverage industry has begun to evolve from 'category' competition to 'scenario' game, and food and beverage brands continue to find new business increments in Xiaohongshu with the help of trend scenarios. Xiaohongshu is becoming the first new position in food and beverage marketing. ”
Mi Ou, general manager of Xiaohongshu's commercial FMCG industry group
These six red scenes are a realistic projection of food and beverage consumption trends in the current market environment, a realistic portrait of consumers' emotional needs, an effective topic for deep links between brands and consumers, and a breakthrough stronghold for products and brands that are easy to defend and difficult to attack.
Through the insight into the diverse needs of consumers in these scenarios, seven major trend groups in the food and beverage industry of Xiaohongshu have been formed, namely the food early bird man, the food research monk, the texture gourmet, the food sentiment party, the fish and bear paw party, not only the gourmet, but also the food player.
For example, "Gourmet Early Bird Bird" is susceptible to new brand actions, and can generate consumption motivation on the premise that it is not an absolute preference, and new tastes, new packaging, and new marketing of products can become their reasons for consumption; On the other hand, "texture gourmets" have higher requirements for brand texture, and their consumption of food and beverage products is not only affected by taste, but also pays more attention to the texture and tonality of the brand, and is more willing to pay for high-quality products.
Released a white paper
Consumer trends, like fashion trends, change direction over time. How to locate the changes in the needs of trending groups and create, discover, and seize scene opportunities is also Xiaohongshu's innovative application of scenario marketing.
Xiaohongshu analyzes a large amount of native content produced by users through the Lingxi platform, excavates hot scenes and the underlying emotions in the scenes, completes the construction of new scenes, and adjusts and reconstructs them with changes in time and space.
In the "Xiaohongshu Node Scene Industry Insight Report" jointly released with Ruicong Consulting, Xiaohongshu proposes nine year-round festival node scenarios with different value cores to help brands obtain new marketing ideas, new inspiration and new opportunities from festival node scenarios.
He Xu, partner and deputy general manager of Ruicong Consulting, pointed out: "The festival node scene is an important force for food and beverage brands to open scene marketing. We have been paying attention to the new changes in the various holiday lifestyles of contemporary people on Xiaohongshu, and helping the food and beverage industry and even the pan-consumption industry to continue to explore new possibilities for effective dialogue with target customers throughout the year and achieve scene penetration. ”
Users are constantly updating their changing consumer and emotional needs on the platform, and Xiaohongshu uses data to understand and analyze these needs, and dynamically capture changes in demand according to the migration of time and space, helping brands anchor more value points.
For brands, the more frequent the scene communication, the more anchors are implanted in the hearts of users, the greater the sense of trust in the hearts of users, and the more prominent the long-tail value of marketing. Brands can leverage the Xiaohongshu festival scene map to build a customer communication context throughout the year through the method of scene x nodes, and achieve multi-dimensional marketing upgrades in an orderly manner.
Products and consumers go both ways
Scene marketing as a marketing method has a not short history, and has been widely used in domestic and foreign consumer markets, especially in the early functional drinks, there are successful cases, but Xiaohongshu's scene marketing ideas are different from traditional scene marketing, or in other words, Xiaohongshu's scene marketing is based on the deconstruction combination of social media platforms, and is an innovative application relying on its own platform advantages.
Pei Xi, head of planning and operation of Xiaohongshu's commercial food and beverage industry, said: "In Xiaohongshu, successful single-variety grass is never limited to a fixed and single scene, but with the continuous reconstruction and innovation of the scene, it finds a two-way path with consumers, so as to burst out diversified marketing inspiration, and empower and improve the efficiency of the whole chain operation from single products to brands." ”
Pei Xi, head of planning and operation of Xiaohongshu's commercial food and beverage industry
First of all, Xiaohongshu reconstructs traditional scenes, combining traditional scenes with new tracks, crowds, and nodes to find new collision points.
In last year's classic case, Xiaohongshu made a connection between Nestle's traditional scene, the ready-to-drink coffee scene, and the outdoor scene, the topic of "top stream", to create a scene of "going into the mountains". Ready-to-drink coffee is no longer limited to offices and workers, but plays the role of "spiritual oxygen pump" among people climbing, hiking, and cycling, enabling the brand to break the circle in new groups and new scenes, and also realize the scene renewal and occupancy of ready-to-drink coffee.
Secondly, Xiaohongshu innovated the original scene, and proposed to make efforts to "red scene X new people", and create a three-step marketing path for popular products of red products. Under this set of paths, the first step is to locate the combination of scenes and people, find the needs and interests of users on this combination, use the "red language" to carry out accurate communication in the scene, and deliver product differentiation buying points.
With the help of the Lingxi platform and Xiaohongshu search tool, enterprises can formulate advertising strategies based on the model to achieve accurate and efficient advertising effects, and finally create a differentiated scene experience of "red single products" and occupy the first and high ground of scene marketing.
Based on Xiaohongshu's rich scene permutations and combinations, the competition between different brands is not fierce. For different needs, Xiaohongshu's "Red Scene X New Crowd" can create countless permutations and combinations, and even for the same item, different scene designs can be carried out over time.
The core of consumption has always been people, and in the Chinese consumer market, no matter how the standard of living improves, people's pursuit of food has always remained the same, and this pursuit is also shared, followed and imitated on Xiaohongshu. Dynamically capturing scenes, providing emotional value, accurately anchoring consumers, and efficiently linking consumers - more and more food and beverage brands are looking for scenario marketing possibilities through Xiaohongshu.
Reconstructing traditional scenes, innovating native scenes, finding collision points with consumer needs, and allowing brands to break through from traditional scenarios with new communication methods, Xiaohongshu as an innovative marketing tool allows brands and consumers to go both ways, bloom new inspiration, and hope to dynamically find the optimal solution for people, goods and yards.