Recently, I often saw my partner in the company take out a box of medicine bottles full of English letters after a meal and swallow a pill, I guessed that this is a health care product, but when I knew its name, I was still shocked by the development of the current health care product.
Called Swisse Bowling Capsules, this health supplement full of English letters claims to have antioxidant properties that help support skin firmness and elasticity, promote collagen formation and integrity, and protect skin against free radicals. Colleagues jokingly called it "the elixir of immortality."
A brief check of the information found that it has launched more than 100 kinds of health products such as men's health, women's health, muscle health, anti-aging, liver health and so on according to the different needs of people. Last year, Swisse ranked first in China's cross-border e-commerce market share of 5.8%, and this year's total sales of 618Swisse also ranked first in the Tmall health product industry. If you go to Douyin now to search for Swisse, you can also see a lot of small videos introducing its various products.
Swisse launched a subdivision of health products for the anxiety of young people about their bodies and appearance, and influenced consumers through social media content, directly completing sales online.
To a certain extent, the rapid development of Swisse represents the development path of new consumer brands, such as Yuanqi Forest, Xicha, Zhong Xuegao, Sandun and a Half, Plum Qiluo Lion Powder, Swisse and other young fast-moving consumer brands have similar characteristics, and they are becoming the choice of many young people.
The reason why these young brands are called "new consumer brands" is because they are different from Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and other consumer brands with tens or hundreds of years of history, they have a new way of playing in product building, brand marketing, channel selection, etc., and win the market in a shorter period of time.
To understand the way new consumer brands play, we still need to draw inspiration from historical comparisons.
01 Consumer brand marketing three-piece set: positioning, advertising, dealer channels
The success of consumer brands in the last century depends on their mature and stable play, which we are not unfamiliar with, and I call it the three-piece set of marketing: positioning, advertising, and dealer channels. In order to distinguish it from the new consumer brands in the back, I added a "big" word in front of these three sets, that is, big positioning, big advertising, and big channels.
What do you mean?
It is the brand anchoring a category, occupying the only mind of this category, and then placing a large number of advertisements on centralized media such as CCTV, and finding channels in a large number of agents across the country, so as to achieve success.
Typical representatives such as Procter & Gamble, P&G incubated Haifeisi according to market demand, occupied the anti-dandruff shampoo mind, and then bombarded in CCTV advertising, the country from large supermarkets to mom-and-pop stores quickly laid products, occupied the shelves, and soon the brand became the first brand of anti-dandruff shampoo.
In the 1980s and 1990s, after the positioning theory spread to China, many brands were born that succeeded in playing, such as the herbal tea brand Wang Laoji, the real kung fu fast food created by Ye Maozhong, and the Nongfu Mountain Spring created by Zhong Sui. Here is an example of Nongfu Mountain Spring.
In 1996, Zhong Founded Nongfu Spring, at that time, he wanted to have no advantage in the mature pure water market and hard steel such as Wahaha and Yibao. Zhong Used Three Moves to Completely Stabilize the Market.
The first trick is to position itself as natural water, and name the bottled water Nongfu Mountain Spring, the word "mountain spring" directly reflects its own positioning, that is, "natural".
At the same time, a public relations war was launched, setting off a dispute between "natural water" and "pure water". Zhong "shelled" pure water, saying that long-term drinking of pure water is very harmful to health, making the public panic about pure water and tending to natural water.
The second trick is to create the advertising slogan "Nongfu Spring is a little sweet" and run advertisements on a large scale to strengthen the positioning of their natural water.
The third trick is to develop agents on a large scale and let the products cover the whole country.
The three tricks cooperate with each other, and in just a few years, Nongfu Spring has become the boss of natural water.
The success of Nongfu Spring represents the typical path of the success of the previous generation of consumer brands, and this set of playing methods is almost invincible. The success of brands built by companies such as Ye Maozhong, Hua & Hua, and Trout depends on this.
02 The era of consumer brand marketing has changed
The success of the previous generation of consumer brands is closely related to the environment in which they live, and the three sets of positioning, advertising, and distributor channels have their prerequisites for the functioning.
First of all, the premise of positioning is that the competition of single category brands is not fierce, or even vacant. In the early stage of reform and opening up, basically the market was in a seller's market, when brands were scarce, competition was not fierce, and once a brand occupied a certain category, it was easy to form an advantage.
Speaking of advertising, centralized media channels are necessary. CCTV's golden age advertising has made many brands famous overnight, in the final analysis, because the audience at that time had no choice, a CCTV gold advertisement can let hundreds of millions of people see and remember. When I was young, almost everyone would repeat a few advertising words, such as "Dabao Tian see you every day", "Mom I want to drink wahaha calcium milk"...
The third is the dealer channel, the brand has established a national dealer channel, which cooperates with advertising, which will make consumers more impressed and pay.
Today, these preconditions are almost non-existent.
Nowadays, the large categories of the market have basically been occupied by the head big brands, and the competition of the first few brands has been very fierce, and the backward brands want to get a piece of the pie and need to pay a great price.
In the era of fragmentation, consumers' attention has been seriously distracted, centralized media no longer exist, and the situation seen by hundreds of millions of people in an advertisement is almost invisible.
In terms of sales channels, the sales channels of goods have been extremely diversified, offline supermarkets, convenience stores, mom-and-pop stores, online Ali, JD.com, Pinduoduo, as well as content platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, and even the official official website, Mini Programs and other channels are playing a role, controlling the previous offline channels, does not mean controlling all channels.
In such a situation, the three-piece marketing of consumer goods is gradually declining.
03 New consumer brand marketing three-piece set: small positioning, customized social content, direct marketing
It is undeniable that many new consumer brands have achieved a certain degree of success in the market, such as three and a half meals, empty carving, Wang Full, Luobawang snail lion powder, etc. have already obtained good sales.
From the perspective of development path, compared with the previous generation of consumer brands, their playing style has a certain commonality, basically their marketing is based on the improvement of the previous generation of marketing three-piece sets, I call it the new consumer brand marketing three-piece set.
Small positioning: Start with the subdivision of large categories
In today's increasingly fierce competition, it is basically difficult to find the blue ocean market for large categories, and the main share of the market is firmly occupied by the head brand, which is difficult to shake, such as Nongfu Spring and Yibao in drinking water, Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola in Cola, Mengniu and Yili in milk. As mentioned above, winning some markets in these big categories requires a great price and is not necessarily successful.
New consumer brands must anchor a small category for a certain group of people from the big category, and use this as a breakthrough to tear a hole in the market of large brands, which I call small positioning.
Take fast food noodles, Master Kong and Unity have occupied the largest market for instant noodles, at this time to enter this market, basically equivalent to suicide, so the new consumer brands are from the fast food noodles of the large category into a small category, such as sanyang turkey noodles only for consumers who like spicy taste to do turkey noodles this category, snail king snail lion powder only for consumers with unique tastes to do snail lion powder this category.
Empty deliberate noodles cut out the category of pasta from the market of instant noodles to make a brand.
Chinese did not eat much pasta in the pasta before, but with the advent of consumption upgrades, consumers' demand for food types and tastes is becoming more and more diverse, and pasta has become the consumption object of many young people, which is the embodiment of the quality of life that young people value. It just so happens that there is no head brand in the traditional sense of the market, so it can be said that it is very discerning in this market.
Founded in September 2019, in 2020, sales will exceed 100 million yuan, according to statistics, as of November 2020, the empty carving has occupied 77.3% of the market share of the Tmall pasta market, it can be said that it has become the top 1 of pasta in the Chinese market, in time, eating pasta to find the mind of empty carving, it is estimated that it can be formed.
The strategy of small positioning of the empty deliberate face, many new consumer brands are using, such as the daily black coincidence in chocolate, the daily C juice in the juice, swisse is infinitely subdivided, specifically for liver protection, staying up late and so on to launch products.
They do not focus on the big category, but on the small category, which I think is very important for new consumer brands, and can even be said to be the most critical factor that determines whether the new consumer brand can win the market in the early stage.
The reason why the strategy of small positioning works is determined by the current market environment, and the category brands of small positioning are not looked at by large category brands at the beginning. When small positioning brands have formed a rapid growth trend, large category brands are powerless, they compete with small category brands, often have a sense of cannon fire, and finally they adopt a strategy of only acquiring or allowing it to encroach on the market.
China is different from most countries in the market is very large, in the market of 1.4 billion people, almost any unique category does not worry about consumers, for example, in France, only do snail powder brand, potential consumers may only have a few million, and in China there are tens of millions, the goal of small positioning is to win the next France, Italy or Germany.
Remember, this is the most important and decisive point in the new consumer brand three-piece set.
Customize social content: Influence niche groups first
In today's media fragmentation and aesthetic diversification, a brand is more difficult to penetrate all markets and groups of people with an advertisement, compared to the previous generation of consumer brands, new consumer brands rarely do CCTV's "big advertising" at the beginning, but pay more attention to the needs of their potential users, to develop their favorite content, these users are relatively small crowds.
In this case, platforms such as Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin are the objects that brands continue to cultivate, on the one hand, they have long output good content on these content platforms and affect consumers, on the other hand, in terms of delivery, they take more KOC groups to formulate different content to deliver different consumer strategies.
For example, on Weibo, Hua Xizi invited the Times Youth League to send blessings to the candidates before the college entrance examination, obviously such content is not aimed at everyone, but only for consumers who like these boy bands, which used to be called subculture, and now subculture is no longer a circle that no one notices. The following content is still very surprising to me.
In this way, the previous generation of consumer brands often took the form of mass stars such as Jay Chou to advertise against the most popular audiences.
Similarly, like Perfect Diary, a case that was once widely circulated was not to find a head star, but to find a large number of mid-waist KOCs to develop different content and put them on different user groups, which usually contain a variety of accounts such as plot, beauty, and good things recommendations. Making good use of mid-rise KOLs and KOCs is one of the means by which Perfect Diary is rapidly emerging.
The social content of new consumer brands often does not seek a piece of content to cover everyone, but only to cover and continue to influence a certain type of person, and then let such people influence each other to form a circle of influence.
If you take an analogy, the advertising strategy of consumer brands in the previous era was to move a large stone to the center of the lake to create the biggest movement, while the content strategy of the new consumer brand is like throwing out a small stone in the lake, so that the ripples stirred up by the small stones will eventually be connected.
Direct operation: content, interaction, sales D2C
The previous generation of consumer brands in the channel a large number of development agents, and rely on agents to occupy the market, before the emergence of e-commerce, their model is essentially to wholesale goods to dealers to deal with themselves, although consumer goods are 2C, but this model is 2B.
Today, the whole life cycle operation for users is becoming more and more important, and user data has become an important asset, so any new consumer brand wants to operate its own users for longer-term value.
In addition to offline sales, new consumer brands are more important channels online, whether it is JD.com, Tmall, Douyin e-commerce or Weibo, WeChat Mini Program, although they are operating on third-party platforms, but on these platforms, they are their own stores and brands, and the people who talk to consumers are people of the brand's own company.
This model is essentially a D2C, which is de-channeled, through which brands will better understand user behavior and data, not only to provide a basis for optimizing their products and marketing methods, but also to achieve long-term accumulation of consumer assets.
Broadly speaking, you can even think of tesla, Weilai and other new car-making forces as new consumer brands, they are different from the traditional car dealer model, but through e-commerce + direct sales and service to consumers.
Like the Swisse brand, its products are divided into many categories according to the different needs of consumers, the brand through long-term sales and operation, combined with its feedback and word of mouth on social media such as Weibo, Douyin, etc., can analyze the differences in the needs of the population targeted by each product, so as to provide a basis for promotion strategies and even for new product research and development.
In terms of marketing, Swisse's live broadcast on Douyin e-commerce is very representative, it is a fixed live streaming every day, directly selling goods to consumers (which is actually a regular practice of many brands), while providing them with a series of guarantees, so Swisse is also a more successful cross-border brand on Douyin e-commerce.
Brand live broadcasting is a very representative feature of D2C, and the above-mentioned empty deliberate face is also carried out at a fixed frequency for brand live broadcasting. If in the past on Taobao, the brand was only face-to-face with consumers in the form of stores, today on Douyin e-commerce, the brand has directly faced consumers with real people.
04 Is it possible for new consumer brands to swallow elephants?
As mentioned above, successful new consumer brands basically use a three-piece set in their marketing strategies: small positioning, customized social content, and direct marketing, of which the most important is the small positioning based on market segmentation, and other means are extensions on this basis.
Some people may say that cutting into small categories may be able to win a certain market in the early stage, but after all, its market is limited, and the future ceiling is relatively low, which makes some sense.
There are reports that in 2020, Yuanqi Forest achieved sales of nearly 2.9 billion yuan, which is of course very good, but compared with Coca-Cola's 2020 revenue of 33 billion US dollars, it can be said that it is not worth mentioning.
But don't forget that Yuanqi Forest is still developing more sugar-free categories, in addition to burning tea, more categories may be launched in the future, every time a new category is launched, there is an opportunity to double its sales, with the help of Yuanqi Forest brand to build a comprehensive category brand that sells more and more sugar-free categories, and will gradually increase sales, its goal is to do a sugar-free empire. In theory, Genki Forest is not without a chance to compete with Coca-Cola.
A good start is half the battle, and for most new consumer brands that want to enter the market, what should be considered is not how low the ceiling is, but on the contrary, it should be aimed at a market segment that the giants have not paid attention to, and take the lead in this market, once this strategy is successful, the new consumer brand is half successful.
Author: Space-seeking Marketing Apocalypse Business Observer, Social Marketing Explorer.