Speaking of tea, you may think that when you were a child, your mother always enthusiastically served a cup of hot tea when you came to the house; or when the old cadres flipped through the books and read the newspaper, they never forgot to put a steaming cup of green tea on the table.
Tea in China has a history of thousands of years, tea is not only a thirst-quenching and refreshing drink, but also a carrier of thinking, national culture, spiritual concepts, or simply put, a "culture".
But in recent years, some changes are taking place in China's traditional tea market, and young people are getting farther and farther away from traditional tea drinking.
Taking the tea industry brand transaction volume ranking released by Tmall Double 11 in 2020 as an example[1], the sales rankings of traditional tea brands such as "Yifu Tea", "Eight Horses", "Tianfu Tea", "Tea Horse Family" and "Small Pot Tea" have all shown a downward trend.
Among them, the fastest decline is "Yifutang", which ranked first in total sales in 2014 and ninth in 2020; "Tianfu Tea" ranked 5th in total sales in 2015 and was directly thrown out of the list in 2020.
On the contrary, more and more young Chinese people like to make tea bags.
The box is a traditional tea brand with a clear decline, and the round shape is a tea bag with a clear rise
Since 2017, in the tea category sales ranking, there has been a figure of tea bags, and brands such as ChaLi Tea, Dayi and Correction Yunzhi have risen rapidly in sales in the past 4 years (2017-2011) and occupy the top position in the Sales List of Tmall.
Among them, Dayi tea sales have occupied the top spot for many years, although Dayi tea is a traditional tea brand, the best sales on Tmall are fruity tea; ChaLi tea ranked 4th in the Tmall sales list in 2020, this tea bag brand that has been established for only 7 years has sold nearly 600 million tea bags[2], and the total sales of Dayi and ChaLi on Tmall far exceed the long-established tea brands such as Zhang Yiyuan and Wu Yutai.
On the other hand, traditional tea brands such as Yifutang and Rainforest have also entered the field of tea bags in recent years, and the tea bag business has achieved good results.
As the birthplace of tea culture, China has thousands of years of tea culture, and tea bags are equated with "cheap" and "inferior" in the eyes of China's old tea customers, but why do more and more young Chinese people like to follow the tea bag as a way of drinking tea?
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="01" data-track="15" > bags of tea are welcomed by more and more young people in China</h1>
What's going on with the young people?
Lipton's share of the Chinese tea bag market has been ranked first for many years, and through Lipton's performance in China, you can feel the growth trend of tea bags in China.
Lipton revealed to the Small Food Reporter that "in the past few years, Lipton's compound annual growth rate has been double digits." And Lipton said that it is "optimistic about the Chinese market and gives higher growth expectations for the future." [3]
On the other hand, in recent years, China has continuously emerged tea bags, including Dayi Tea, Twinings, Bag Watch, Chali, UMTEA, TEAONE, Yanchuan and other well-known brands, the tea bag market presents a situation of a hundred flowers, and we can see these brands of tea bags through Tmall, selling red hot.
Even later, even Internet celebrity brands such as Hey Tea, JuCha, and NaiXue's Tea, and traditional bottled beverage brands such as Nestlé and Unity began to expand across categories and join the tea bag market.
According to Ai Media Consulting data, the online market size of China's tea bags has grown rapidly from 230 million yuan in 2015 to 5.03 billion yuan in 2019. In 2020, the online market growth rate of China's tea bags was as high as 156%, and the market size reached 12.87 billion yuan.
It can be seen that tea bags are rapidly rising in China, and more and more young Chinese people are starting to drink tea bags.
However, in the eyes of many old tea customers in China, tea bags are low-end, "only people who do not understand tea drink tea bags, and only inferior tea leaves will be made into tea bags."
If tea bags are so despised in China, why are they popular with young people? This starts with another cultural form represented by tea bags.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="02" data-track="99" > bag of tea in China' origin: star hotels</h1>
Originally, tea bags originated in the West, and the enlightenment of Chinese young people to tea bags originated from The British afternoon tea culture. However, English afternoon tea has little to do with the tea bags, and even the target audience is completely opposite.
In an origin story of afternoon tea, Anna Russell, an English aristocratic lady, invented afternoon tea as a way of life to pass the afternoon in the 1840s, and it quickly became popular among the british and European aristocrats.
In 1904, the New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan wanted to reduce the cost of business, decided to put a small number of tea samples into a small bag, sent to potential European customers to try, after receiving these strange small bags, doubtful customers have no way to start, they soaked them in boiling water, the result is completely unexpected, customers think that tea in small bags are very convenient to use, orders come and go. Sullivan's inadvertent actions have fulfilled the dream of working people to drink tea at any time.
However, these two completely contradictory tea derivatives have been successfully met in Star Hotels in China.
In the wave of consumption upgrading in China in the past few years, the hotel industry has launched afternoon tea packages in order to improve the utilization rate of self-operated restaurants.
Afternoon tea is packaged as a new way of life, and in the hearts of Chinese consumers, afternoon tea represents a leisurely afternoon, exquisite quality of life. As a result, afternoon tea has attracted a group of middle-class consumers who have good expectations for their future lives, and obtained a sense of satisfaction and self-identification by imitating the British aristocracy's way of consuming afternoon tea.
Initially, most of the hotel's afternoon tea packages focused on the "dim sum" that looked better and more likely to form a social chip, and the tea that was difficult to be intuitively presented by Internet celebrities was not so attentive.
Some star hotels directly use tea bags to make tea in afternoon tea packages of several hundred yuan - after all, one of the most important sales channels of tea bags in China is the hotel's breakfast room and room standard.
This is extremely absurd in the eyes of the old tea guest: no matter how delicate the refreshments, as long as a tag is stretched out in the teapot in the corner of the photo, it will make people feel that there is no "sense of nobility".
After all, no matter what aristocratic temperament there is in Chinese or foreign tea bags, this is a compromise product invented for portability like instant coffee. Imagine if in the purple sand pot of the Qianlong Emperor or an old tea guest, hanging a bag of tea (especially broken tea), what would it be like and how would they react?
Zhen Huan passed on the stills
It doesn't just look ridiculous to Chinese tea drinkers, it's also true for the British. Because tea bags have only one purpose - that is, convenience.
Using tea bags to make afternoon tea is the opposite of the leisure and delicacy conveyed by afternoon tea as a way of life. Buckingham Palace, the Queen's official residence, does not use tea bags at any formal meeting. Even the average Briton will try to avoid tea bags when preparing a ceremonial tea party. It is absolutely necessary to use tea bags to make tea at the tea party, but also to brew the tea in the kitchen to ensure that the teapot or tea cup on the table does not appear in the tea bag tag.
But it is undeniable that the introduction of hotel afternoon tea and afternoon tea culture has indeed made many young Chinese consumers begin to notice the existence of tea bags. I also began to pay attention to the original meaning of the appearance of tea bags - convenience.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="03" data-track="100" >why are Chinese young people increasingly fond of tea bags? </h1>
Before explaining why more and more young Chinese people like to make tea with tea bags, let's review the traditional way of drinking tea.
Traditional way of drinking tea, before drinking tea, you need to preheat, wash cups, wash tea, brew tea, the process is a variety of rules, and the tea brewing method of various tea leaves is not the same, according to the traditional way of drinking tea, brew a cup of tea in the morning. Although in reality, many people do not go through the complete process, sometimes just grab some ordinary tea leaves in the thermos cup - but in the eyes of young people, traditional tea culture represents "slow", this impression can not be washed away.
After brewing tea, tea tasting is also exquisite, and the external requirements must have a comfortable and quiet environment. If it weren't for quenching thirst, but for tea tasting, an old tea guest wouldn't be willing to drink tea in a noisy environment. Internally, tea culture also has requirements for people: the spirit is clear and calm, and the taste is delicate and slow.
With the rise of China's economy, the pace of urban life is getting faster and faster, time is precious for many young people, and modern life no longer allows young people to follow the traditional way of drinking tea.
At this time, the tea bags stand out in front of the eyes of young people. Young people's requirements for tea are not so high, they pay more attention to the fact that drinking tea is convenient and fast, go anywhere, at any time you can take out a bag of tea, drink with the bubble, drink directly after drinking, eliminating the complex procedure of warm cups.
This is not to say the step of "picking tea".
There are many varieties of traditional Chinese tea, the quality is uneven, the price is not easy to measure, coupled with the existence of serious information asymmetry in the traditional tea market, the price is inflated, and consumers are deceived. The experience brought by good tea is naturally unattainable by tea bags, but being tricked into buying foreign trade goods of the same quality as tea bags at a high price is a completely different feeling.
The purchase of traditional tea is a very high threshold for most young consumers, after all, it is unrealistic to require a new consumer to visit a tea garden and tea factory to learn the doorway.
In addition to meeting the fast-paced tea drinking needs of young people in the new era, tea bags also cater to the trend of faster and faster consumption decisions.
For a long time, tea bags were made of crushed tea or tea powder, which was mainly done to make the water-soluble substances in the tea more rapidly precipitated, but later brought another benefit to the tea bags - consumers have a clear upper and lower limits on the quality of tea bags, and consumers are not too worried about being cheated by the pit when buying tea bags.
Specifically, the quality of tea bags will not be too high, because the price of high-quality tea leaves in China is very high, and no one will chop high-quality tea leaves and use them to make tea bags. If anyone does this, such a company is expected to die, which is the upper limit of the quality of tea bags.
The lower limit of the quality of tea bags is also obvious, as long as it is a slightly well-known brand, the raw materials used in tea bags will not make consumers feel too lost. Because the price of tea bags is very cheap compared to tea, to Lipton, which is still the first in the industry, as an example, the 100 bags of tea bags on Tmall only sell for 45 yuan. That's an order of magnitude cheaper than the instant coffee in the next industry, which also wins at a low quality and low price.
The above situation has led to tea bags in the hearts of Chinese consumers, and there has always been a feeling of cheap and low quality. However, in recent years, the newly emerging domestic tea bags are changing this impression.
Traditional Chinese tea has a history of thousands of years, but unfortunately young people have a limited love for traditional affairs. Young people who have grown up in the new era are rebellious, like to oppose tradition and authority, and try novel things.
The newly emerging domestic tea bags brands use a variety of raw materials to blend and blend to make tea bags to cover up the embarrassment of broken tea, but also have a greater attraction to young people. For example, common tea bags include chrysanthemum pu'er tea, rose pu'er tea, lotus leaf white tea, peach wumei tea and other flavors.
The quality of loose tea leaves may be good, but the taste is not so "fancy". For tea drinkers, either they have to stock up a bunch of loose tea and ingredients with different flavors, otherwise it is difficult to meet the need to change the taste at will.
Some new tea bags, and even design different products for different scenes, such as a brand for the morning design of "breakfast vitality" tea, noon drink of "afternoon degreasing" tea, afternoon drink of "Yishen" tea, the market response is good, daily sales of 800,000 copies, during the epidemic in the e-commerce channel monthly sales reached 20 million.
More and more young people choose to drink tea bags, not because young people have abandoned traditional tea, but because the old-style tea culture tied to bulk tea leaves has abandoned young people.
Tea has a long history in China and is endowed with too much culture and significance, and even in Chinese universities, there is a major called "tea science". Whether it is tea ceremony or tea science, on the one hand, it builds up a huge and complex knowledge system, etiquette norms and action standards, but on the other hand, it ignores the experience cultivation and aesthetic education of young people on tea. Before saying they "don't understand", think about it, they don't have much chance to understand.
Now most young Chinese people have no time to choose and taste good tea, nor are they willing to spend energy squeezing into the culture constructed by the previous generation of tea consumers, such as tea tables, purple sand pots, and tea pets, which eventually leads to traditional tea leaves getting farther and farther away from Chinese young people.
Instead, traditional tea has become a drink that only the leisurely and wealthy bosses and retired cadres can enjoy.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="04" data-track="101" > shifted from traditional culture to national tide culture</h1>
But the tea culture did not break the generation, but took a road of "learning from the east to the west".
China's tea bags are the first in the market, but in the new round of the rise of the national brand of tea bags, Lipton is losing the favor of C-end consumers rather than becoming more acceptable.
After 2017, new local tea bags have risen rapidly, growing and selling better than Lipton in the retail market directly to ordinary consumers.
We inquired about several local tea bags on Tmall, taking CHALI Tea as an example, the top three products sold 39,000 pieces per month, with an average single product price of 60 yuan, while Lipton's top three products sold only 29,500 pieces, with an average single product price of less than 50 yuan.
That is to say, in the service industry such as wine tourism and restaurants, Lipton still occupies a very important position, but for young people who take the initiative to buy tea bags, domestic tea bag brands have more advantages.
This has a lot to do with the new brand of tea bags trying to combine the "convenience" of tea bags with the "thickness" in traditional tea culture.
For example, CHALI Tea co-branded one of China's biggest media outlets, Chali Tea, and wrote "Serious Love Words" in the packaging with Southern Weekend's text style on Valentine's Day promotion.
Southern Weekend is now a memory of the childhood of many consumers, in that era of lack of information, they can almost only understand the whole world through Southern Weekend. Chali Tea is jointly named with Southern Weekend, which is easy to establish an emotional connection with consumers and increase consumers' likability.
As it turned out, the effect was good. Although the price of CHALI tea is much higher than that of the international big brand Lipton, it is still sought after by many consumers, which was completely impossible in the past.
Using Chinese local elements to gain consumer favorability, the most representative brands are Li Ning and ANTA. In 2018, Li Ning imitated the previous American "national tide" style, replacing the thick lines and messy patterns of street graffiti with visual elements in Chinese tradition, such as high saturated colors, red and yellow collocations, thick brush characters, Sun Moon Mountain river and Guan Gong, etc., with great success. ANTA also launched the Li Bai concept in 2020, integrating the elements of the poetry sword into the design of sneakers.
Sneakers or sneakers, storm jackets are still storm jackets, you can't always say that the jacket is China's traditional culture, but using traditional Chinese elements to make sneakers, at the same time to meet the needs of young consumers and cultural needs.
Similarly, Naixue's tea is jointly named with Want Want, and from today's point of view, although Wangzai Milk is no longer as popular as before, it still hits the hearts of many consumers.
I still remember that in the past, on TV commercials, every day there would be a little boy with his tongue spitting out, and he would say mischievously, "Look again, look again, look again, and I will drink you off." Wangzai Milk represents the sweetest collective memory of Generation Y Chinese consumers in their childhood.
At that time, many children who achieved good grades would be rewarded with a bottle of Wangzai milk – although from today's point of view, it was just a very ordinary drink.
Naixue's tea and Wang wang joint name, only from the data point of view, attracted 59 million consumers to watch and read, 38,762 discussions, during the joint event, Nai Xue's tea and Wang Zai milk activity product sales have increased significantly. [4]
Some foreign consumer brands have obviously seen this trend and accelerated localization, but they are one step slower than local brands. One step slowly, one step slowly.
For example, in November 2018, Lipton co-branded Line friends, launched the Brown Bear glass set, and in September 2020, Lipton co-branded Doraemon, these joint names did not successfully evoke the collective memory of Chinese consumers in childhood.
For multinational companies, it is difficult for local marketing teams to participate in the actual development of products. If the people actually in charge of product development are not Chinese, it is difficult to distinguish which collective memories are good and which collective memories are actually not wanted to be remembered.
This makes it difficult for foreign monks to compete with new Chinese brands at this point. This is also the reason why Lipton's growth rate in China has slowed down, and more and more young people are choosing local tea bags.
In fact, the example of the newly emerging domestic tea bag brand replacing the international tea bag brand is not only applicable to the tea bag industry, but also applicable to other categories in new retail, such as the perfect diary we see, Anta and so on.
The replacement of international brands by local brands has happened once in Japan 20 years ago, and this process will be repeated in China.
bibliography
Hu Wenlu.The 2020 double 11 tea industry category ranking was released, and big data reached a new high. [J].Mingbian Think Tank.2020-11-13
A case study of China's tea bag industry in 2020: CHALI Tea Li. [R].Ai Media.com.2020-08-21
He Danlin. Lipton sells 2 billion cups of tea a year in China! It is still growing at a high rate. [N].Small Eclipse Generation.2020-10-27
[4] Wang Wang x Nai Xue's tea cross-border marketing case. [R] 11th Golden Mouse Digital Marketing Competition.2019-05