Text | Slightly larger reference, the author | Ermao, Editor | field
"The Eight Precepts of the Brilliant Spring Pig" has such a plot:
Chang'e brought out a plate of mooncakes in the Guanghan Palace to entertain Taibai Venus, and as a result, the mooncakes were too hard, too Platinum Venus could not bite, and she chopped her hands like a knife on it, and then broke it hard, only to taste the taste of the mooncake, and then loudly praised: Delicious!
This shows that the immortals will also lie when they want to make a girl - I don't believe how delicious the frozen date mud mooncake in his hand can be.
Although it is a traditional custom to eat mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, there are probably not many people who really love mooncakes now, especially young people. What they love is either a light meal that looks healthy, or a hot pot that is too addictive to spicy hot pot, mooncakes, and seems to lean on either end.
But mooncakes still have a chance to become popular – when their identity is social currency, not just food.
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01 Stemming
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Food is often available, but social currency is not often available, this year, the moon cake that can be out of the stem is a good moon cake.
So, just after autumn, people lined up in a mental hospital in Shanghai.
No. 600 Wanping South Road once carried the anger of Shanghai citizens: "Nong should go to No. 600 to live!" This sentence is equivalent to the "silly X" in the national curse, because No. 600 is located in the Shanghai Mental Health Center.
People flocking to the queue, of course, are not for check-in, but for the mooncake printed with the logo of "Shanghai Mental Health Center", because it can be covered with the harmonic stem of "spirit cake".
In the case of young people eating mooncakes, fun is much more important than good food.
In this way, the "spirit cake" has become the hottest social currency in the Mid-Autumn Festival this year, and the notes on the "spirit cake" on the Little Red Book have been 8300+ articles.
"Doctor, I'm not in good spirits, can you prescribe me two courses of spirit cakes?" "Is it too late to register?" "I have serious mental problems, apply for priority registration" "Eat the spirit cake, must not be mentally ill" ....... They actively post the "spirit cakes" they buy, or interact with users who post pictures, and gain a sense of participation by participating in the most fashionable mooncake topic of the year.
The price of this sense of engagement is not cheap.
The original 78 yuan a box of mooncakes was once fried to 1288 yuan a box. Because mooncakes are only sold to employees in principle, purchasing agents soon appeared on Taobao. However, all the stores are labeled as out of stock, and some sellers said that they will not arrive until September 28.
In other words, one week after the Mid-Autumn Festival, the "spirit cake" can be shipped.
Before the "spirit cake" took the place, Zhihu's "jet cake" sat firmly in the C position of this year's mooncake - because of the replacement of sucrose and glucose with maltitol to highlight the health of low sugar, Zhihu this custom mooncake. Many big V friends who received gifts had diarrhea reactions, and "eating mooncake diarrhea" quickly appeared on Weibo hot search first, and related paragraphs also flew all over the sky.
As for knowing what kind of filling and taste of the mooncake, no one cares.
For a long time, the sense of engagement has been a popular tool used by manufacturers to attract young people.
"Showing off and having a sense of existence are the most obvious group consciousness characteristics on the Internet, the blender of the post-industrial era and the digital age," Li Wanqiang, one of the founders of Xiaomi, once emphasized.
Today it has evolved into a social currency. These two years of fires in new consumer goods. From xi tea, Nai Xue's tea to tea beauty, they have added the attributes of social currency to themselves. It's not just a cup of milk tea, it's also the identity label of the city and young people — just as the Statue of Liberty for a long time represented the American Dream.
In layman's terms, everything that can be discussed by people has the value of becoming a social currency, and the same is true for mooncakes.
In fact, the mental health center in Shanghai has been making mooncakes for more than a few years, and it is not the first year that they have used mooncakes to maintain relationships, and an accidental incident has become the key to breaking their circle. The root cause is that these accidental events just hit the high point of young people and became the material for the paragraph.
Social currency has finally made the mooncake into the eyes of young people.
02 Face value
Open the Little Red Book, search for "mooncake", and a sea of stars will appear in front of your eyes.
There are too many types, and those with higher popularity are often more beautiful. Also, in the world of pictures and short videos, the value of the face is more expressive than the taste.
Little Red Book blogger Sweet Yan Mi Yu has developed a set of starry sky chocolate mooncakes, and 8 mooncakes are plated with rainbow colors, and each mooncake almost has 3 colors, and it is different. With a super high appearance, in the absence of brand blessing, the message interaction of this content has exceeded 10,000.
Holly has launched a mooncake with NASA. These two combinations are destined to focus on the packaging. The packaging design takes the theme of "cosmic roaming" and designs the packaging of the mooncake as a planet, which is also very fashionable at the moment of the cosmic theme fire.
In the young people's market where traditional mooncakes can't be taken, new-style mooncakes rely on their appearance to kill everyone.
Reforms over the taste of mooncakes are also underway.
Pang Bo expressed his incomprehension of milk tea in "Talk Show Conference": a cup of milk tea can contain glutinous rice, oats, taro paste, cheese, bean paste, and even a whole salted egg yolk, which is obviously not drinking milk tea, but drinking rice dumplings.
These ingredients, which are familiar to young people, are now stuffed into the mooncake gift box.
For example, this year's mooncake gift box of Heytea is jointly launched with the seesaw coffee brand it invested in, and the main feature is a fusion mooncake of green tea and coffee, of course, the recipe is also indispensable to the popular elements of mochi, taro puree and cheese.
Just by looking at the ingredient list, you may have a hard time distinguishing whether you're eating milk tea or mooncakes.
For these new consumer brands, tradition is used to subvert, and mooncakes are used to redefine. They also know that young people are not buying mooncake flavors, but brands, i.e. social currencies.
In the Internet factory, the mooncake gift box has another identity. Like the badge, it is an integral part of the pride of the big factory.
Although the Internet factories under the strong pressure of supervision are not as bright as in the past, in the matter of mooncake gift boxes, each family still brushes up on the sense of existence.
Tencent's highlight is environmental protection, which uses bagasse to make a mooncake gift box. After the mooncake is eaten, it can be turned into a flower pot or a storage box, even if it is thrown away, buried in the soil after 6 months, it can be degraded.
Ali has spent a lot of effort to promote waste utilization. This year's mooncake gift box is made of food-grade materials, and after eating the mooncake, it can be used as a lunch box, or for storage and fish farming.
ByteDance designed the mooncake gift box as a puzzle of the Yongle Ceremony, and the company invested 10 million yuan this year to repair the Yongle Ceremony; JD.com's gift box design this year is Dunhuang theme, full of respect for traditional Chinese culture.
These careful thoughts are all to make the young people of the big factory get more sense of identity. The mooncake gift box is the workplace totem of young people. When byte's badge can be sold on Taobao for 20 yuan, when Tencent's cultural shirt becomes the father's daily wear in his hometown, the fancy mooncake gift box is also the best proof of "good work" in the mouths of relatives and friends.
Young people in big factories who are becoming increasingly bald under the pressure of overtime need such small highlight moments.
03 Track
In the matter of fighting for young people, many long-established brands in the mooncake industry have not chosen to lie flat.
The live broadcast room has become the key battlefield of their deployment.
Xinghualou is a well-known long-established mooncake in Shanghai, and before that, its influence only stayed in the Shanghai area. It competed in e-commerce in 2017, and in 3 years, it jumped from the 30th place in the whole category of mooncakes in Tmall Mall to the third place in the whole network last year, second only to the two traditional mooncake "big households" of Maxim's and Daoxiangcun.
Self-media "Business" introduced the rules of the mooncake industry in "The Life of the Mooncake Changed by the Live Broadcast Room", a mooncake in the market from layout preheating to formal circulation, often takes 2 months, and the final strength of which relies on sales channels and promotion personnel. However, in the past two years, the mooncake has accelerated in the anchor's "3~2~1" to complete this process.
The taste is a metaphysics, it has always been difficult to adjust, the same is true for moon cakes, all places have their own preferences, Hebei people who are accustomed to eating Wuren mooncakes will feel that cloud leg mooncakes are not worthy of being called "mooncakes", and the black sesame mooncakes in Quzhou will also make many foreigners feel more like some kind of burnt cakes. The excessive abundance of categories also makes it more difficult to sell across regions.
But these problems have been eliminated in the Internet, just like the mooncakes in Xinghualou, which were once only sold in Shanghai, and after being expanded to the Internet, sales in Beijing, Guangdong and southwest China accounted for 30% of total sales.
More brands have put the live broadcast room of the mooncake on the production line, directly displaying the birth of a piece of mooncake, satisfying the consumer's right to know, and creating a feeling of "placing an order with confidence".
When the old-fashioned mooncake began to exert force on the line, the Matthew effect of the mooncake industry began to appear.
Jingdong's 2020 mooncake sales data shows that Wufangzhai and Guangzhou restaurant Likou Fucheng are the largest dark horses in terms of growth rate, with a growth rate of more than 60%. The top five online sales of mooncakes contracted for last year's Mid-Autumn Festival are: Daoxiangcun, Huamei, Wufangzhai, Guangzhou Restaurant, and Xinghualou.
High brand awareness and low price may be the most critical reason why old brands can play. When the mooncakes of new brands are often 30 or 40 yuan a piece, the unit price of traditional old mooncakes is less than 20 yuan a piece, which is still very fragrant.
Mooncakes, which debut once a year, are not popular tracks.
It's more like an exam. Before the opening of the examination, brand owners should plan for their future, which includes: the investigation of young people's taste preferences, the summary of popular elements, the standard assessment of design aesthetics, and the precipitation of cultural heritage, at the same time, it is also necessary to find good partners, supplier choices of ingredients, and cross-border joint partners.
After the birth of the mooncake, brand owners should dig up selling points, sell cute, play handsome, play the stem and create a trend, online and offline omni-channel operation.
In order for young people to eat that mooncake, brand owners must practice eighteen martial arts.
However, after experiencing the chaos of flowers gradually becoming fascinating, returning to basics may become their most simple pursuit.
The best mooncake I've ever had, in our village.
On the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the village committee will give two pieces of mooncakes to the elderly over 60 years old, white puff pastry, and the flow of white sugar. The concentration of the flow center is controlled just enough to flow out, but it will not be thick enough to panic.
A box of mooncakes is 120 yuan, containing 60 pieces of mooncakes, and sometimes Grandma can receive a few more pieces, so she will stay and wait for us grandchildren to see her and share them with us.
I ate it once and fell in love with it ever since.
Some netizens commented: Life is a process of eating Wuren mooncakes - hating Wuren mooncakes - feeling that Wuren mooncakes are delicious, just like the hometown in the distance, in the heart of the wanderer, I have also experienced a reincarnation in this township - people are suspicious of dogs - the moon is the reincarnation of the hometown Ming.
Mooncake now has many identities, it is a tool for merchants to make money, it is the currency of young people, and it is the glory of big factories.
But during the Mid-Autumn Festival, it ultimately symbolizes the reunion of individuals.
This night in the mid-autumn moon, clear light 100,000 homes. Friends, I wish you a happy Mid-Autumn Festival in advance.