Text/Wang Xinxi
Today, new consumer entrepreneurship has become a new hot project, and it is also the focus of the current capital market, and even giants such as Tencent Byte are frequently investing in new consumption. According to IT Orange statistics, the investment and financing amount in the new consumption field in 2020 reached nearly 45 billion yuan, and there were 286 projects that received financing.
The new consumer entrepreneurship game is getting closer and closer to the Internet playing style. In the beverage market, from coconut milk to sparkling water out of the circle, in fact, there are some commonalities, we from the coconut milk market Fino to the sparkling water market good hope water, may be able to look into some new consumer market entrepreneurial methodology.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" >From coconut milk to sparkling water, why can Fino and Good Hope water go out of the circle? </h1>
This summer, from the explosion to the out-of-stock, Luckin's raw coconut latte has become the favorite of many consumers, its raw coconut series products have sold more than 10 million cups in a single month, and Xicha's raw coconut milk jelly has entered its top 5 new product sales last year.
According to the statistics of Curry, from the beginning of February to the end of July this year, more than 160 new products from more than 20 beverage brands have used coconut elements, from coconut water, coconut milk, coconut milk to raw coconut milk, thick coconut milk, and its presentation methods are also constantly iterating.
What makes the "raw coconut latte" burst into flames is a layer of thick coconut milk covered on it, this thick milk makes the coconut fragrance of raw coconut latte more intense, and after combining with coffee, it becomes better in taste and flavor, luckin's raw coconut latte is repeatedly sold out of stock, but also because of its ingredient innovation.
The first to make Houye Milk was a startup called "Fino". Why does the thick coconut milk made by Fino have a "golden" effect on raw coconut lattes? We have to look at the market environment.
From the perspective of the beverage market environment, one of the wind directions of the beverage market in recent years is the rapid rise of plant "milk". The data shows that the growth rate of the plant protein beverage market in 2020 is as high as 800%, and the contribution rate of this category in the beverage market is 15.5%, while coconut flavor is the fastest growing among all flavored beverages, up to 109%.
Coconut drinks were originally very popular with the Chinese people, but in the new market environment, traditional brands such as Coconut Tree and Happy Home, which have dominated the market for decades, are a bit outdated in terms of packaging, style and consumption scenes, and these traditional brands have not developed the potential of coconut drinks very well.
As a coconut-based plant milk brand, Fino did not take the traditional brand to focus on direct drinking, meals, gifts and other consumption scenarios, but to change the focus, the main coffee, tea and other consumption scenarios preferred by young people, and actively explore offline coffee, tea channels, Feno thick coconut milk has successfully settled in more than 8,000 offline cafes, and cooperates with a number of first-line tea brands.
The naming of "raw coconut" also establishes the association of natural health and fashion, which is easy to occupy the minds of young consumers.
In addition to targeting new people, Fino has created a new concept of "thick coconut milk", the core of which is to transform and upgrade the product formula. It uses a cold-pressed juice process, which combines fresh coconut meat + coconut water to juice, and the coconut flavor is more pure and rich. Fino's thick coconut milk is able to go out of the loop, which is not unrelated to its recipe and cold-pressed juice process.
From the point of view of ingredients, although it is only one more "coconut water" than traditional coconut water, coconut milk has a higher content of coconut juice because of the cold pressing technology, and freshly squeezed coconut juice and coconut water through a golden ratio, so that the taste becomes more mellow and thick, and after matching with coffee and tea, it fits the young consumers' pursuit of new taste and new fashion of coconut drinks.
For popular tea products, many consumers like DIY, after all, making drinks by yourself is also a pleasure. But the obstacle to DIY coconut dairy products is that the operation and production costs of extracting coconut meat are too high. Fino's self-developed fusion technology allows consumers to easily go to DIY and automatically disseminate the finished product of DIY, which has formed a trend.
The popularity and popularity of coconut milk is similar to that of another player in the sparkling water market, Good Hope Water.
After the yuanqi forest became popular, many new players emerged in the sparkling water market, and the sales volume of the overall industry is also growing rapidly, according to the data of Zhiyan Consulting, the sales of the sparkling water market in 2020 will reach 5.81 billion yuan.
It is reasonable to say that in today's giant sparkling water market, not to mention standing out, even survival is not easy, and Good Hope Water is one of them. In 2020, the annual transaction volume of Good Hope Water reached 120 million yuan, and the cumulative financing amount has exceeded 100 million yuan.
The good hope water can survive because it cuts to the pain points and shortcomings of the current traditional drink. The first is that many traditional beverages are aging, and it is difficult to meet the standards of young people from quality to appearance. Secondly, a large number of traditional beverages are often the main retail products, and do not cut into the market segment, which gives new brand players the opportunity.
"Good Hope Water" avoids the hard confrontation with the traditional beverage taste and scene - in the current beverage market, there is no special soft drink that is suitable for de-spicy, degreasy and refreshing, and for this market vacancy, its first step is to cut the greasy demand and launch the main product Wang hawthorn.
In addition, it avoids the main commercial supermarket channels of traditional beverages, starts from offline, and cooperates with B-end restaurants such as Tan Duck Blood, Xianhezhuang, Xiaolongkan, etc., to penetrate the scene of de-grease.
As it opened up in the B-end dining scene, it launched products such as "Wang Peach Blossom" and "Wang XingFu" to improve the taste line. Here, the logic of Good Hope Water's expansion of the product line is to occupy more subdivided scenes through specific individual products. "Wangshan Hawthorn" cuts people's needs to relieve the needs of the spicy; "Wangxingfu" cuts the wedding banquet scene, and "Wang Peach Blossom" plays the afternoon tea scene.
Looking at the current successful new consumer brands, good face value design is almost their commonality. The American psychologist Locchins once proposed the concept of the first-glance effect, which means that the first impression formed by the two parties to the interaction will bring about the effect of "preconceptions", and it has also been widely used in commercial marketing.
Compared with the traditional brand to maintain the old face of the past, from the Yuanqi Forest to good hope water, there are obvious youthful, net red style, yuanqi forest is "fresh Japanese", good hope water is full of national style design, from the packaging design in line with the first glance effect.
Today, young people prefer high-value drinks that are "photogenic" and "high in film production", and young people will voluntarily do secondary communication for them. Even restaurant owners like this drink, because compared to the price cost of traditional drinks and high marketing promotion costs, this new consumer drink from the formula to the appearance, are in line with the needs of young people, the promotion is not difficult, the profit is better.
Because of this, its online dissemination is also faster, when the launch of Wang peach blossom, Wangxingfu, Good Hope Water launched the strategy of Internet celebrity marketing, inviting a large number of KOLs in many fields to expand consumption scenarios such as homestays, picnics, and afternoon tea, further occupying the consumer mind and online channels.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="55" > from sparkling water to coconut milk, where is the underlying logic and revelation of the two gameplay? </h1>
From Fino to Good Hope Water, their circle has a common methodological path - that is, to find the pain points of traditional market segments, stagger traditional channels, and launch super items to occupy the minds of young people.
Good hope water is to see that the traditional beverage market does not have a greasy, spicy single-product drink, from the B-end catering scene into the main young high-value drinks, Fino is to see the traditional coconut drink market in the packaging and taste of obsolescence, it found the thick coconut milk this new taste, the main coffee and tea scene of the new consumer crowd.
The market logic of Fino's fire coconut milk drink revolves around two aspects:
On the one hand, it is to reposition the crowd and consumption scenarios and find new application scenarios - to match with trendy drinks such as coffee and new tea. In the overall coconut milk beverage market is in the time window of consumption upgrading, the B-end C-end makes concerted efforts, from standard customized products to DIY drinking methods, to meet the diversified needs of consumers.
On the other hand, through technology research and development, we can upgrade the taste of products to create a new concept and establish a process barrier for new tastes.
Good Hope Water is the net red three-plate axe, which is first of all to find a subdivision track, rely on super items, and occupy the mind. Secondly, when it becomes the category representative of the market segment, it will expand the breadth of the category and improve the product taste line. The third is to hit the brand among young people through online and offline marketing and high-value, youthful packaging design.
It was found that the main healthy new tastes and new groups, high value, sufficient subdivision are its commonalities. In the beverage market, healthy fruit ingredients are already standard, such as Fino's main thick coconut milk claims to be rich in trace elements, minerals and dietary fiber, rich in medium-chain fatty acids that help antioxidants and improve metabolism, 0 lactose, friendly to vegetarians, Good Hope Water main "herbs + bubbles", emphasizing the health attributes of the product.
This main line of thinking will remain mainstream in the future. From today's point of view, white peach and coconut have become the "top stream" of the beverage industry, from white peach flavored sparkling water, cheese white peach oolong to raw coconut latte, etc., new tea shops are staring at these popular flavors in the iteration of products.
For new consumer entrepreneurs, in addition to realizing that "cool + healthy" is the standard mainstream, the next step is to find the shortcomings of the traditional market, grasp the potential market segment market demand vacancies, and on this basis, transform and upgrade the original product tastes on the market, find a new taste that is more suitable for the needs of young people, and can detonate the new taste of consumer fashion.
Of course, this requires a certain amount of market insight and an understanding of user needs.
The second is to strengthen in a sufficiently subdivided track, and then think about expanding categories, reverse expansion of channels and supply chains - with the popularity of subdivided channels to feed back online and offline traditional channels, this is the way of playing Good Hope Water, but also the idea that entrepreneurial players can learn from.
The purpose of identifying market segments is twofold, one of which is to find a low-key growth space for yourself, and you can quietly survive outside the coverage of traditional giants, which is actually a kind of Internet thinking - dislocation competition.
This essence is to avoid the mainstream scenes and playing methods of traditional mainstream players, first vertically and then break the circle - from Fino thick coconut milk to Good Hope Water, its gameplay is to first bundle the product with a strong connection with a certain vertical scene, and after accumulating channel resources in the market segment to establish brand recognition and occupy the user's mind, then break the circle and push it to all channels such as online, supermarket, new retail and even consumer DIY.
The third is to establish a marketing style with a sense of networking. Today's young consumers are more confident in culture, they do not blindly worship foreign big brands, they are more inclusive and receptive to domestic brands, and they are also Internet natives, which is a great benefit for domestic emerging brands.
Because the essence of new consumption is to internetize traditional consumer brands. The Internet here is not actually equivalent to saying that it is online, but to let the brand have some of the personality characteristics of the Internet and grasp the potential needs of users.
For example, the marketing model should adapt to the emerging content platform - content platform grass has become the standard. It focuses on the preferences of young consumers, caters to the aesthetics of young people's appearance, focuses on the social scenes of young people - "photogenic", "high film rate", and has the attributes of online and offline social po photos; the main concept of "sugar-free and low-sugar" caters to young people's consumer psychology of both stimulation and health.
The net sense play that Fino is worth learning from is that it is not only a stable output of customized thick coconut milk products to the B-end, but also a variety of drinking methods for C-end consumers, so that the essence of diy by consumers is to drive the social sharing trend of tap water and bring traffic to the brand.
But market conundrums remain. Because in the beverage track, especially the bubble beverage track is a very low threshold industry, the imitation of follow-up, mutual copy operation is the norm, a new product and taste will soon usher in the follower, the market will quickly enter the homogenization pattern.
At the moment when the "sugar control" and "low-carbon" trend is prevalent, there is no new story in the sugar-free beverage market, and many traditional giants are also joining this new track: Nongfu Spring launched tea π, Xiao Ming classmates, Coca-Cola took out the small universe sparkling water and the new AHA, Pepsi Cola also followed up with the launch of bubly sparkling water, and Xicha launched 0 sugar sparkling water in the morning to set up a Viya live broadcast room...
Today, when the market enters the red ocean from the blue ocean, the difficulty for entrepreneurs to succeed has undoubtedly become greater.
New consumer brands also have the attribute of Internet celebrities, the "lifespan" of brands is often extremely short, many Internet celebrity brands are explosive single events, how to maintain its brand recognition is a great problem. From continuous iteration of products to maintaining brand life, the key is to occupy a new taste of consumer cognition, and this taste cognition in the product process is difficult to imitate. How to establish barriers at the product supply chain and formula and process level is still worth thinking about for entrepreneurs.
However, the market segment + super large single product is still the basic idea, how to stagger the original market mainstream channels and gameplay, find new subdivision categories and scenarios is still the key, taste iteration is still the core of determining whether a product can attract consumers. This depends on luck, but also depends on the market sensitivity of entrepreneurs and the grasp of potential demand, from the perspective of Fino's thick coconut milk juice process innovation, the barriers and thresholds of process innovation, creativity and speed are also necessary conditions.
The popularity from sparkling water to coconut water is the tip of the iceberg for new consumer entrepreneurship. Where is the next outlet for soda? In what form will it appear in front of consumers, and who will be the next blockbuster flower? It's hard to predict.
But there is no doubt that the new taste that impresses consumers is bound to be a new way of playing that is not subject to the shackles of traditional channels and brands, nor is it a low-threshold game that is a trick to eat and change the sky, and next summer, there may be new answers.
Author: Wang Xinxi TMT senior commentator This article is not allowed to be reprinted without permission My WeChat public number: hot micro-comment (redianweiping)