Source: Wen Wei Po
Pay attention to the kinds of mooncakes that get the most likes in the circle of friends, we will find that a mooncake can become popular, and behind it must be some of the elements: the creativity of the brain, the bearing and innovation of traditional culture, the double boost of traffic and capital, the eyeball effect of marketing hype... Behind every "C-bit debut" small mooncake contains new business logic in the new consumer environment...
In Pujiang Town, Minhang District, the production workshop of Xinghualou is rotating continuously. This year, this production workshop has completed an intelligent upgrade, a total of 16 mooncake production processes, 98% have been automated production, even the "fine work" of brushing egg liquid has been handled by the machine. "After the intelligent equipment, the labor is reduced by one-third, the production capacity is increased, and the large production cycle of the moon cake season is precisely controlled at 50 days." Shen Quanhua, the fifth-generation inheritor of xinghualou Cantonese mooncake making skills, said.
After these mooncakes "jump" from the production line, they will immediately go to traditional stores, e-commerce and other channels. Outside the door, the Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake market is in full swing, creativity, taste, channels, marketing... No one can be less, and half a point cannot be slackened. But it is clear that the business logic of today's mooncake market is somewhat different from the traditional.
Creative power
Mooncakes in the "belly" of vientiane updates
In the dimension of traditional seasonal goods, mooncakes are one of the few products with a sharp increase in market size in recent years. According to data, China's mooncake sales increased from 13.18 billion yuan in 2015 to 20.52 billion yuan in 2020, and are expected to further rise to 21.81 billion yuan this year.
The biggest "secret" of the market size soaring has only two words: innovation. The mooncakes, which were once labeled as "just gifts" and "sweet and not delicious", have stepped out of the traditional fighting method of mooncake coupons, and have been accepted and sought after by young people by innovation, and then found a new "growth pole". Therefore, the annual mooncake season is also the national audition time of the "Mooncake Creative Competition", whether there is a new taste and good creativity, which determines the brand's "eyeballs" and competitiveness this year.
Innovation makes new and old brands stand on the same starting line. This year, Xinghualou cooperated with coffee giant Nestlé for the first time in order to bring a new breakthrough to the mooncake. One of the mooncakes was filled with coffee for the first time, and the meat had a coffee flavor in the skin. Another mooncake is the first to use Nestlé's Jiazhi cuisine plant-based products.
Plant-based filling is a highlight. "The traditional Wuren mooncake must be fattened pork to be authentic and delicious, but this year's Wuren mooncake replaces the fat pork with Jia Zhi plant meat." Zhi Jing, deputy general manager of Xinghualou Food and Catering Co., Ltd., told reporters that the R & D personnel spent half a year to make adjustments, and the taste of the new products is comparable to that of traditional Wuren mooncakes, and it is low-fat, zero-cholesterol, and very healthy. This joint cooperation gift box is composed of 2 coffee mooncakes, 2 bean paste mooncakes and 2 Jia Zhi plant meat Wu ren mooncakes - "Fashion Coffee" has become a new label for mooncakes, and also clarified the target group: young people.
According to a survey from Ai Media Consulting, taste is still the most concerned option for consumers to buy mooncakes. Among them, 33.3% of teenagers prefer special flavors of mooncakes; more than 40% of users aged 25 and below prefer grains and grains. In order to seize the market of young people, today's mooncakes are pushed forward by novelty flavors, from crayfish to crab powder, from snail powder to stinky mandarin fish, and the "belly" of mooncakes is renewed.
Compared with old brands, new retail is easier to start with new tastes to fight the market. Hema, which has always been a big brain, has developed innovative flavor mooncakes such as purple potato egg yolk, cloud leg meat floss, mustard salmon, whiskey five kernels and so on over the years, and this year it has targeted the cold pot skewers, and refreshed the industry's cognition with rattan pepper flavored crispy beef mooncakes: Wrap the cold pan skewers into the mooncakes and then bake them to eat? Tian Xi, head of research and development of Hema Workshop, introduced that the inspiration comes from Sichuan's cold pot skewer eating method, "Cold pot skewers have always been a snack that young people like, this year is the Year of the Ox, for which we have integrated 7 cattle-related products, 2 skewer vegetarian products, with vine pepper flavored soup made."
In order to "package" the creativity into the mooncake, the R&D team of Hema Workshop also took a lot of effort. The filling is solid, the puff pastry is not pinched when wrapped, the technical difficulty is large, the mouth should be smooth and not leaking the filling, and the strength should be pinched when knocking the seal to ensure the unity of the shape of each month's cake. According to the person in charge of sales, this new flavor of mooncake is currently sold in the Suzhou, Zhejiang, Shanghai and Postal Areas, and the daily sales volume of each store is more than 1,000, and it has been sold out in the morning.
Analysts pointed out that every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, innovation is a major measure for mooncake manufacturers and brands. In the past few years, innovative flavors, including crayfish mooncakes and pickled fresh mooncakes, have changed from "net red" to "long red", which is to some extent to expand, improve and upgrade the mooncake team.
The packaging of culture
This mooncake is too "cultural"
A small moon cake must rely on the two elements of appearance and taste to attract consumers externally, and rely on the cultural aura to trigger consumer resonance inward.
In 2017, the Palace Museum launched the Forbidden City Mooncake for the first time, which was originally a small test knife, but it became a hit, it seems to bring inspiration and inspiration to the cross-border innovation of traditional cultural bearing places such as museums, and it also adds enough imagination space for the traditional cultural heritage pursued by the mooncake industry. One of the best proofs is that this year more and more museums are "marrying" with mooncake brands and meeting in the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Following the popularity of "Da Ke Ding Ice Cream" this summer, the Shanghai Museum opened ip for the first time and carried out cross-border cooperation with the mooncake circle. On the Cantonese mooncake cooperated with Laiyifen, the reporter saw that there was a triangular ding engraved on it, and at a glance, it was known that it was the treasure of the town hall of Shangbo, "Da Ke Ding", and the "cake pattern" of another mooncake was also very exquisite, engraved with a "imitation Han lion", which was carefully examined, and it was one of the stone lions in front of the Shanghai Museum.
"In the Bronze Age, the Ding has always been an important food vessel in ceremonial occasions such as sacrifices and feasts, and it is carved into a cake pattern, which symbolizes a beautiful and healthy blessing, which is very compatible with the scene of the Mid-Autumn Festival." Feng Wei, director of the Cultural and Creative Center of the Shanghai Museum, said the original intention of cooperation, because it has the same artistic conception, so the Shanghai Museum decided to open up the IP of the treasure of the town museum and bring more cultural relics knowledge to ordinary people in a more interesting way.
Laiyifen CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Yang Shang is a "post-90s", especially understand the preferences of young consumers - young people want to buy a moon cake, in addition to the value of the points, pay more attention to cultural resonance, hope to eat the moon cake in the mouth, have their own stories to tell, can feel. This year, while cooperating with the Shanghai Museum, Laifen also cooperated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to turn "William the Hippopotamus of Ancient Egypt", "Terracotta Vortex Amphora Cup" and "Unicorn in the Garden" into "Pie Pattern".
Throughout the country, the Shanghai Museum is not a unique crossover. In the Zhongyuan Building of the Guangzhou Museum, a series of exhibits from Guangzhou's foreign trade exports in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty are displayed, including a qing dynasty black lacquer depicting gold sewing box, which is now transformed into a "mooncake box", and the mooncake in the box is from the museum's century-old "Recipe for Making Mid-Autumn Cake Materials", which restores the "disappearing mooncake". Similarly, this year, the Suzhou Museum and the Songhe Tower "held hands" and launched the "Mid-Autumn Festival to the Moon" mooncake gift box inspired by Wen Zhengming's "Three Absolute Picture Scrolls".
In the past, the relationship between mooncakes and culture mostly focused on the traditional connotation of mooncakes themselves, the scope is relatively narrow, and it is difficult to exert fists, but through the enlightenment of cultural media such as museums, mooncakes have inadvertently completed the role transformation from "folk inheritors" to "cultural promoters", giving more possibilities to this seasonal commodity.
Just on September 1, a "dictionary mooncake" appeared in a bookstore in Shanghai, attracting the attention of consumers. At the first sight of this "dictionary mooncake", people are likely to be confused: 勥 (jiang), 槑 (mei), 忞 (min), 奣 (weng), 扅 (yi), 呇 (qi)... Two mooncakes per box, the strange words on it are random, and this "blind box" mooncake is out of stock on the market. Originally, it was only sold in Shanghai and Hangzhou, but because it sold too well, it was launched nationwide a week later.
The mooncake is still the mooncake, but what is popular with consumers is actually the interesting Chinese character culture on the mooncake. Partner Xinhua Media said that these rare words that are not common in life have various online interpretations, but the real pronunciation and meaning of words are not known to many people. For example, the glyph of "槑" is strange and interesting, and it was made into an emoji by netizens early in the morning, in fact, the word itself is a variant of "mei", and the pronunciation is the same as "mei", "In the past, the purpose of mooncake engraving was only to distinguish the variety of mooncakes, but this time it was to convey Chinese character culture." ”
The driving force behind marketing
Quality keeps up with the speed of concept packaging
The popularity of a mooncake, in the early stage, needs to gather materials that can become "net red", such as excellent design, novel taste, cultural power that can be carried, automated production, etc., and later needs to rely on marketing, capital promotion, live broadcast blessing, but also to make the mooncake a necessary means of "explosive style".
On September 11, Xinghua Lou invited Via to do live streaming with goods, with the blessing of the top stream, a network limited edition of the tin box mooncake of more than 100 yuan sold more than 60,000 boxes in just over ten seconds, with sales of 6 million yuan. Lu Jun, deputy manager of the new marketing center of Xinghualou, has been staring at the background, satisfied with the results, which is also the result of real-time marketing strategy adjustments - before September 2, WeiYa brought goods for the first wave of Xinghualou, a Jinqi mooncake gift box was listed in just 15 seconds, and sales exceeded 6 million yuan. "The same is more than 6 million yuan marketing amount, the price of the first product is a bit high, the second lowers the unit price of customers, can circle more fans."
"Circle fans" is to embrace more young consumers. Last year, Xinghualou set up an e-commerce center, a daily network live broadcast, which has become the standard for the daily work of the e-commerce department. This year, the number of live broadcasts across the mooncake season has not only increased to 80, but companies have also partnered with big data companies. "The data is really useful." The Army admitted that the data company gave a portrait of the consumer population for the Alibaba platform, which can be refined to the dimensions of consumption time and consumer goods. The data shows that users aged between 35-45 account for 63%, 20-30 years old users account for 22%, and other age groups account for more than 10%, "On the network, we want to attract consumers aged 20 to 30, let the old brand be younger, and let marketing dock production." ”
Rubbing the big IP of the Mid-Autumn Festival, many new brands that have been blessed by capital, including Plum Ziqi, Xi Tea, Nai Xue's Tea, Guan Tea, etc., have also joined the mooncake war across borders. Although the new brand does not have the accumulation of the mooncake industry, its advantages lie in sitting on young consumers, being able to play with social media, having a high degree of product recognition, and having a good marketing card.
Li Ziqi, who started with an antique style, follows the ancient style for young consumers. A toast invites mingyue mooncake gift box design combined with "Han Xizai Night Feast Map", priced at 278 yuan / box; another moon full of mountains and rivers mooncake gift box, designed with the Northern Song Dynasty famous painting "Jiangshan Lou Guantu", priced at 168 yuan / box. For example, the mooncake of Xicha has a strong "milk tea flavor", and its mooncake gift box contains 6 flavors, including brown sugar Bobo Liuxin Mooncake, Jinfengzhi Zhiliuxin Mooncake, etc., with a strong Xicha style.
New brands with capital blessing, old brands with process blessings, and the collision of new and old brands is equally fierce. However, it is precisely because there is too much marketing, hype, heavy planning and light production on this track, and there is also a new chaos.
For example, concept hype is a necessary part of marketing, in recent years, low-calorie low-sugar mooncakes have become popular, circulating on the Internet that "a mooncake is equivalent to a hot meal", how to meet the needs of young consumers "want to eat but don't want to be fat"? In addition to the mooncakes themselves "slimming", low-calorie, low-sugar, low-fat and other main healthy mooncakes have attracted market attention, but also derived new flavors such as sugar alcohol mooncakes and probiotic mooncakes.
But sometimes, the speed of concept packaging far exceeds the speed of controlling the quality of mooncake production. Not long ago, some netizens exposed the situation of diarrhea after eating a customized mooncake on a certain platform, which is the scourge of "low sugar". Subsequently, in its apology statement, the platform admitted that "the staff in the procurement process is inexperienced", which was intended to purchase healthier low-sugar mooncakes from the products provided by the supplier, but ignored that the maltitol used to replace sucrose will cause some people to become intolerant.
@KellyWeaver, who knows that he is certified as a "Doctor of Epidemiology and Health Statistics Ph.D. student at Peking Union Medical College", said that the cause of diarrhea is not the unhygienic mooncake, but "the typical manifestation of sugar alcohol fermentation in the large intestine and causing osmotic diarrhea". After the incident came out, some media combed and found that there had been many cases of diarrhea caused by consumers eating "sugar-free mooncakes" before. To this end, the market supervision departments in many places have also issued a reminder of mooncake consumption, do not trust "health care" and "sugar-free" mooncakes.