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Source: IPRdaily Chinese Network (iprdaily.cn)
Author: Ah Yan
Original title: The Trademark Story of Tea Drinking (VII) Lipton out of favor, the emerging "tea"
According to the "2021 China Tea Market Report", the size of China's tea market in 2020 will reach 403.3 billion yuan, with a compound growth rate of 7.2% in the past five years, and it is expected that by 2025, the total size of the tea market will reach 764.5 billion yuan. This includes the milk tea track that has been hot in the past two years, and there is also the original leaf tea market represented by tea bags and tea leaves.
China is the origin of tea culture, tea drinking is accompanied by a long social and historical development, and the Chinese people have always followed the cultural sense and ritual sense of tea drinking in this process. In contrast, the development of tea in the West is adapted to commercial promotion, and tea bags made of tea powder are used to meet the convenience needs of consumers. When Western tea bags entered China, the birthplace of tea culture, it also triggered new changes.
1. Lipton: The opener of convenient tea bags
When it comes to tea bags, Lipton is one of the names that pops into many people's minds.
As the world's largest tea brand, Lipton's origins can be traced back to 1890. Thomas Lipton discovered that Ceylon tea was a very popular drink for the British, but at a high price that only the upper class could enjoy. Therefore, he believes that if black tea can be introduced into the daily life of the public in a more convenient and low-cost way, there will inevitably be a very good prospect for development.
Standardization and branding are the core keywords of Lipton's growth. When Lipton uses standardized production and a complete industrialization model to make tea into FMCG, it breaks the seasonal and regional shackles of tea, and the way consumers drink tea has become a unified standard - directly brewing with tea bags, eliminating the cumbersome process. At the same time, Lipton has been using the bright yellow trademark to convey the brand image of "bright, energetic and natural and beautiful fun" to consumers, which not only produces memory points in the minds of consumers, but also allows consumers to perceive the temperature of the brand.
As a brand of Unilever, Unilever began to apply for tea-related patents around the world in 1967, covering a wide range of regions, paving the way for subsequent global expansion. In terms of a series of cold brew teas, capsule drinks and a series of other tea drinking methods that have become popular in these years, Lipton also began patent applications as early as the end of the last century.
In 1992, Lipton officially entered the Chinese market. In the face of the Chinese market with a long history of tea and a thick tea culture, Lipton aims at the young consumer group, especially the white-collar population market, and its products are mainly European-style black tea and milk tea, which are less involved in traditional Chinese tea. For Chinese consumers, Lipton not only opens up a new way of drinking tea in China, but also represents an international and modern lifestyle. By 2012, Lipton's share of similar products in the Chinese market exceeded 80%.
But after 2015, Lipton's growth in China began to slow. On the one hand, the main convenient Lipton tea bag uses tea powder, broken tea gives people a low-end impression, although young consumers who do not pay attention to tea culture do not care, but it really makes the brand trapped on the road of high-end transformation. On the other hand, under the impact of new tea drinks and new Chinese tea brands in recent years, Lipton seems to be less sought after by young consumers.
In response to this series of crises, Lipton began to respond to the diversified needs of users to make transformation adjustments. In September 2020, Lipton applied for the trademark "Tea Language Warmth" and launched a high-end series of "Tea Language Warmth" canned loose tea a month later. This loose tea is different from traditional tea and is a new type of flavored tea, namely white peach oolong, grape matcha green tea, lychee flavored black tea and coffee hanging ear. The mixing and collision of fruit and tea can make the sweetness of the fruit reduce the astringency of the tea leaves and enhance the taste of tea drinking.
Based on the insight into the current trend of young people's punk health, Lipton has made a new attempt - based on the segmentation of consumption scenarios and population needs for product positioning, launched a series of daily herbal teas. For example, lotus leaves help to reduce swelling and slimming, Lipton's "fiber Yang Tea" uses lotus leaf white tea, mainly aimed at people who usually want to eat and drink wantonly but are afraid of edema and greasy, becoming one of the ace SKUs of Tmall's flagship store, focusing on zero sugar and zero calorie without energy. In addition, there are "barley tea" that dispels dampness and "Qingheng tea" that reduces fire.
This is indeed a wise strategy, because more and more young consumers value "utility" when drinking tea than to subdivide the differences in the origin and taste of different teas.
In March, Lipton parent company Unilever said in its 2020 annual report that it would divest Lipton's tea business, and the separation plan would follow the usual approval process and was expected to be completed by the end of 2021. The declining growth rate of the main business black tea, the hidden label of "old" and "historical sense" and the rapid growth of other beverage categories other than tea bags may be factors considered by Unilever.
However, the potential of China's tea bag track seems to be accompanied by the emergence of a number of new Chinese brands, and new development opportunities have emerged.
Second, Lipton, who gradually fell out of favor, rose to the "tea"
For a long time, China's tea has faced the dilemma of low industry concentration, small scale, low degree of standardization, large product fluctuations, unstable quality, heavy processing and light marketing, and it is difficult to highlight the advantages of the brand. The old tea bags represented by Lipton are subtly considered obsolete and old-fashioned, and in this context, a number of new Chinese tea brands that focus on freshness and health, high value and convenience have begun to rise.
Value-ism is the key to meeting the preferences of contemporary young people. New-style tea brand in the packaging to cater to the aesthetic tendencies of young people, tea or small pot tea, are focused on the use of pink, yellow, green and other candy color packaging, tea is the national tide and popular integration into the packaging, the launch of the "Mountain and River Splendid Embroidery" series will have a rugged beauty of the landscape painting with folding fan surface presented in front of the eyes, forming a visual impact; tea Xiaokong has created its own brand IP "Xiaokong", in the packaging to differentiate the brand recognition of distinguished, and integrated with traditional Chinese culture, Interact and resonate with consumers in a witty and interesting way.
Traditional tea is non-standardized, and old-fashioned tea bags cannot get rid of low-end labels, while new tea brands pursue a balance between standardization and high-end of convenient products.
The brand positioning of tea is a fashionable high-end tea brand in China, which uses the original leaf tea on the product side to create the core product of the original leaf triangle tea bag, and establishes a standardized grading system, including tea garden, picking, production, finishing and tea grading; also tries to use more diverse play methods, such as "breakfast vitality, after-meal relief, afternoon yishen" in the "Daily Tea" series, connecting the product with specific scenes, increasing brand association for the brand, and enriching the novel experience of consumers. In addition, in addition to the explosive tea bags, tea has also expanded new tea product categories, such as lollipop milk tea, collagen peptide tea jelly and so on.
In the face of the problem that the original leaf bag tea may be slower in the speed of tea, Tea Xiaokong has developed the "super extraction" technology, that is, by using single-cell stretching and physical wall breaking technology, a large number of loose and porous sponge-like structures appear in the cells of the tea leaves, so that the internal substances of the tea cells can be rapidly exuded. Under the ultra-extraction technology, the tea bag is brewed with room temperature water, and the drinking concentration can be achieved after about 20 seconds or 50 proper shaking in the cup, while still retaining the original leaf form and multi-layered flavor. The tea drinking experience has been optimized, and Tea Xiaokong has continuously developed products that are closer to the tastes of young consumers, including flower and fruit tea with diverse flavors, as well as "staying up late Yuanqi tea" for subdivision scenarios.
From Lipton's entry into China more than 20 years ago to open the domestic tea bag market, to the gradual rise of a number of new Chinese tea brands, tea bags have gradually got rid of the low-end and outdated stereotypes of the past and become a healthy, personalized, beautiful and convenient lifestyle performance. The tea culture that has been precipitated in China for thousands of years has fallen from the illusory "tea ceremony" and "Zen" spiritual realization in the past to a real sensory experience, and has rejuvenated new vitality and vitality in the collision with young people.
Editor: IPRdaily Wang Ying Proofreader: IPRdaily Zonghengjun