The era of scale growth is over, and the growth of the new era is value growth.
This article is a transcript of the speech of Yao Zhe, founder of Hezhonghe and strategic planner of chain restaurants, at the "2024 4th China Catering Brand Festival".
Many people don't know what the difference between barbecue and hot pot is, and when it comes to barbecue, everyone often talks about hot pot, why? Because everyone thinks that these two are social dinner categories.
Actually, there is a big difference between a barbecue and a hot pot.
The first is the difference in the mode of production. Both hot pot and barbecue are produced by the customer, but barbecue is not. What is the difference between hot pot and barbecue? When eating hot pot, you can eat four or five dishes at the same time, and you can only roast barbecue one by one.
The second is the difference in consumer behavior. It's a pleasure for a group of people to have a meal and shabu-shabu, but a group of people eating barbecue will have a problem – someone needs to grill it. When having a dinner, barbecue can't be like a hot pot, giving users so much time to play by themselves.
So this differentiates into another model - barbecue, which is produced and supplied by the kitchen, providing a variety of choices.
I have been in the catering industry for ten years, from a service company to a catering investment, to today's focus on product innovation, and I have also made some of my own insights. Today, I would like to share with you the "Crisis and Opportunity of the Barbecue Track".
△ Yao Zhe, founder of Hezhonghe and strategic planner of chain restaurants
Barbecue is a good entrepreneurial project,
Easy to personalize
What is the situation in the barbecue industry? Let's look at the big data of catering first, everyone shares the cake in a big market. What industry is the biggest and the most people doing it? First, of course, snacks and fast food, many people do it; Second, baking, beverages, and hot pot are also done by many people. Now, the size of the barbecue industry is about 200 billion, and there are many people who do it.
With a barbecue track of 200 billion, how mature is the market?
There are three things that are inseparable from any category: category maturity, customer maturity, and market maturity.
The more mature the category of consumers, the higher the requirements for products and brands. Northeast barbecue, the category is very developed, but who is the first place in Northeast barbecue? Can't tell. How many brands are there in the barbecue space with more than 1,000 stores? Not a single one.
In different markets, the maturity of the category varies greatly. For example, the maturity of the barbecue category in Guangzhou is not high, and there are not many brands, so a wooden house barbecue came out. Because consumers in the Guangzhou market have different evaluations of barbecue, he doesn't know what a good mutton is.
In addition, the demand for products is different in each place, and the more mature the market, the more complex the product structure of barbecue. For example, Nanchang barbecue should have chicken feet, Hunan barbecue should have butter skewers, and Northeast barbecue must have mutton skewers.
From a market perspective, the barbecue category has a high number of business registrations, but the scale is low. Regional innovation is easy, but large-scale replication is difficult because back-end operations are relatively complex.
Many barbecue brands have encountered challenges when developing nationwide, because the supply chain is extremely fragmented, and once it grows to the whole country, the logistics cost is very high. If you don't take root in the regional market and open stores intensively, you basically can't do a chain.
The focus on the region should meet the needs of consumers through the convenience of purchasing channels, or engage in online takeaway to form a multi-point reach; Or do it well and make a good effort in a high-quality shopping mall.
So, barbecue is actually a particularly good entrepreneurial project, it is very large, and it can be personalized in the area.
From the perspective of business model, barbecue is definitely better than kebabs, because barbecue is produced by the customer. The back-end is minimalist, and only two categories in China are hot pot and barbecue. Other categories such as lo-mei, milk tea, and baking are all intensively produced at the back end, which is a "front store and back factory" style, and these categories are also easy to do on a large scale.
Judging from the scale and number of skewers and yakiniku, there are relatively many yakiniku stores because they are easy to replicate.
Whether a category is mature or not can also be seen whether there are brands in multiple price bands in this category. Is there a brand in the hot pot industry with multiple price bands? Is there a brand in the beverage industry that has multiple price ranges?
Every category has its price band behind it, and the key to starting a barbecue business today is whether you can focus on your price band. For example, if you make barbecue, you can make 500 restaurants for 60 yuan of barbecue, 300 stores for more than 120 yuan, and 50 stores for more than 200 yuan.
The same is true for kebabs. In addition, kebabs also have the attribute of supper, and the city's supper is not vibrant enough, and you make less money. For example, Suzhou has a very developed economy, but the nightlife is very average, and there is no one on the street at ten o'clock at night, and the money you can make from making skewers is very limited.
In recent years, the barbecue industry has been doing category integration, the barbecue in Sichuan and Chongqing must be grilled with fish, some people do barbecue + grilled lamb chops, and some people do barbecue + stir-frying. From the perspective of opportunities, which barbecue restaurant can solve the problem of desktop cooking first, that is, after the customer orders, it does not need to be produced by the backyard, and it is directly served and cooked, which will usher in more development opportunities. For example, Japanese-style sukiyaki and Korean-style rice cake pot will not occupy the production relationship in the backyard.
In this process, the problem for brands is to find a balance between consumer demand and production efficiency, so that you have more time to produce good barbecue products.
Now make a barbecue,
The tonality should be upgraded, and the price should be downgraded
Let's look at the user portrait of barbecue, first, the user's usage scenario, many people think that barbecue is eaten by men, but in fact, it is not, and the proportion of female users is slightly higher.
Second, during the meal period, the barbecue dinner time accounted for 79.2%, which means that noon is wasted. What's in danger with barbecue? One of them is here. Today's fast food is full-time, Haidilao has sold hot pot dishes, can barbecue do some business at noon to reach users? Now some barbecue restaurants are already doing takeaway, and they are also making innovations in staple foods, such as selling barbecue rice.
Third, the core users of barbecue are relatively old, mainly 31-40 years old. The barbecue will be a little different, and the proportion of young users aged 18-23 in the self-service barbecue is higher. There are fewer and fewer young people now, how can there be so many young people in the next decade? In its place was an energetic old man like me.
Yesterday I ate a restaurant called "Qingchun Pumen", which is a vegetarian restaurant that costs more than 100 yuan and can make 200,000 yuan a day. Ten years ago, this kind of restaurant couldn't survive in shopping malls because users were catching up with trends at that time, but today it's different, and consumers have changed dramatically.
Specifically, what are the characteristics of today's consumers? For example, because housing prices have fallen, wages have fallen, and they are afraid of being laid off, many consumers are panicked about consumption itself, and they will give bad reviews if they are in a bad mood, so we have to be kind to him.
For another example, the user expectations of many restaurants are completely different, and they used to need to consume more dry, but today many people's expectations of consumption have decreased, but they have higher requirements for what they have obtained by buying.
In addition, many consumers now refer to a lot of reviews when making purchases. Among them, the biggest impact on users' purchase behavior is not advertising, but family and friends, which is called word-of-mouth influence. Many people will focus on doing a good job of members and doing a good job of their own repeat users, which is actually the fission of word-of-mouth.
Two days ago, I posted a video saying that today the guests we serve are no longer single users. For example, if a user comes to eat a barbecue and spends 200 yuan, if this user gathers all his friends here for barbecue during the year, he is the annual purchaser.
I used to drink Starbucks and consume 30,000 yuan a year, but after Luckin came out, I only spent 6,000 yuan a year at Starbucks. Starbucks didn't lose me as a user, I still drink Starbucks, but from high-frequency consumption to low-frequency. Today's brands must first ensure the frequency of users and the total amount of purchases, and the same is true for barbecue.
Let's talk about the change in consumer consciousness, because household spending has peaked and income expectations are insufficient, many consumers have lower consumption spending, but they want quality assurance.
Therefore, now the user's consumption demand is cost-effective. The reason why everyone says that it is very volatile and wants to reduce the price is because the dimension that consumers pay attention to has changed. In the 1.0 era, consumers thought it would be nice to be able to buy it, but now everyone is paying less for better things, and the focus is shifting to innovation and features.
To sum up, now to be a barbecue brand, the tonality should be upgraded, but the price should be downgraded, and the quality should be very high, but the price should not be high.
Low prices are not sustainable,
Five directions for the growth of the barbecue category
With overlapping competition and economic downturn, how to find a new breakthrough in the growth of barbecue category?
First, characteristic segmentation. I built a shop in Beijing, and at that time everyone was selling lamb skewers, and it sold chicken wings. When everyone sells mutton, there is a consensus that all barbecue restaurants should sell mutton, and I don't need to advertise it. I sell chicken wings and lower the price to 8.8 yuan a string to anchor the price/performance ratio, so that the price of other products is equal to that of the competition.
In the past, my pricing must have been based on my opponents, and when the opponents were strong, I didn't dare to be more expensive than my opponents. But if I have something that is much cheaper than my opponent, the rest of the products can be the same as my opponent, so that the profit is higher, and now this brand that sells chicken wings has opened more than 50 stores in Shan Cheng.
The subdivision positioning of barbecue products has always existed, and any category with a large number of goods purchased by users can be positioned with a single product. For example, the chili stir-fried meat of Hunan cuisine, such as barbecued lamb skewers, beef skewers, chicken wings, chicken feet, etc. We want to form a reason to go to the store through the cheapest products, why was the skewer hot pot able to rise back then? A string of 7 cents 7, a meal of 70, 80 yuan.
Specialty segments come from ingredients, products, and regional markets. For example, you can't do Xinjiang barbecue, because there are many Xinjiang locals who do it. But Inner Mongolia barbecue can be dry, everyone advertises that Inner Mongolia lamb is good, but there is no Inner Mongolia kebab brand.
This is an opportunity for category positioning, don't go with everyone. Now everyone is playing low prices, low prices are not sustainable, this is just a choice that there is no way to make after today's economic downturn.
The second is category expansion.
What's more? Is it good to add grilled fish? Is it okay to add seafood? Everyone has explored it, and a lot of questions have arisen. In the regional subdivision to supplement the format, we must not make the format more and more complicated, so it is better to do dry stir-frying.
Many of the surviving regional barbecue brands are added to stir-fry, barbecue + stir-fry, which has both dinner and dinner attributes. Therefore, barbecue should add categories, and give priority to adding stir-fried vegetables, although it is very complicated, but it will live for a long time.
The extension of the category also includes the excavation of new ingredients, and the ingredients can be mined if they cannot be invented.
Third, model innovation.
Now that everyone is exploring self-help, why is there self-help? It turns out that the customer's unit price is not uniform, there are 90 yuan, there are 130 yuan, everyone is reluctant to do self-help. Today, there are obviously more people who spend 90 yuan and 100 yuan, and as a brand, users who want to lock in the middle price band with a greater probability are better to do self-help.
So in the last two years, the chain rate of self-service has increased by 5 times. The core of the growth rate of the top 10 barbecue brands comes from the "self-service model + high cost performance".
Fourth, scenario expansion. For example, a long time ago, lamb skewers were also open at noon; Wooden house barbecue for takeaway, satellite shop.
Stores must have the ability to continue to acquire customers. As I said earlier, word of mouth is the first, and we must do a good job of localization. Then it is necessary to have a certain ability to innovate, in the market, all brands that have been lying flat in the trend for two years will close stores, because others will imitate you, it is easy to homogenize, and you must continue to innovate at this time.
Fifth, region is king. For example, Lao Jin barbecue and Yanxu barbecue. Yanxu does Anhui people's own barbecue, which is straightforward, and it is not bad locally.
Summary
There are 6 levels of evolution in catering, from staking to the era of explosive products, value-added services, brand leadership, value circulation, and then to precise matching. It's not that today is in stage 6, you just do the things of stage 6, you must have what you should have, and you have to do everything in front of you to get to stage 6.
The era of scale growth has passed, and the growth of the new era is value growth! Today you give a user a 10 yuan thing, don't think it's just a commodity, but think about what kind of use value it actually provides to the user. If you go to Fat Donglai, you will know that it is definitely not just thinking about how to sell products, it is thinking about how customers use products, which is very important.