The logic behind internet celebrity brand marketing success!

The popular Wang Baobao is at the center of the new consumption vortex.

Wang Baobao was launched in May 2018. After becoming famous during the Double Eleven shopping festival, Wang Baobao immediately announced its Series A financing, led by Xiangfeng Investment and Source Code Capital, and followed by angel round shareholder DeXun Investment. In addition to the favor of capital, it has also quickly captured the cold brew cereal market with its distinctive product features. From the product packaging with DIY attributes to the colorful dried fruit combination inside, its high appearance has captured the hearts of young people.

We can't help but wonder, why was Wang Baobao able to break through the existing brand competition landscape and become an Internet celebrity in just one year? When multiple brands enter the competition field and old brands awaken, what should Wang Baobao do next? Based on the above problems, this article will analyze the Wang Baobao brand from the following three aspects:

• Sales exceeded 2 million in the first month of opening. How did Wang Baobao take the top spot?
• Wang Baobao became an overnight sensation and revolutionized the food market. What else does he have besides his good looks?
• Are there actually many hidden dangers behind the popular products of internet celebrities?

1. Leverage the power of mid-level KOLs

In August 2018, Wang Baobao officially entered Tmall.

On Double Eleven a year later, Wang Baobao’s sales in one hour exceeded 10 million yuan, making it the No. 1 in sales in the category, competing with international brands such as Calbee and Quaker. In addition to making efforts on e-commerce platforms such as Tmall, Wang Baobao is also expanding its presence on multiple channels such as Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu. The endorsement of big-name stars such as Liu Tao and Zhou Shen has made Wang Baobao's fame soar.

To a certain extent, Wang Baobao's use of the platform's potential is essentially the creation and use of KOLs.

In the era of information fragmentation, traffic is becoming increasingly dispersed, and media are also showing decentralized communication characteristics. Promotional methods such as celebrity endorsements by top KOLs can no longer meet the new media marketing characteristics of sinking traffic. Like Hua Xizi, Wang Baobao has been targeting mid-level KOLs in the middle of the pyramid from the very beginning.

Although mid-level KOLs are not as fast as top-level KOLs in building brand awareness, they have stronger user stickiness, and the costs of brand promotion and customer acquisition are relatively lower. To use high frequency to defeat low frequency, Wang Baobao set up a special operation team to be responsible for the screening and operation of KOLs, considering multiple dimensions from the production of promotional content to the maintenance of user relationships.

From the perspective of user relations, mid-level KOLs are closer to ordinary users, and most of them are also potential KOCs. They have a strong willingness to share, are highly active, and interact more frequently with fans. Relying on mid-level KOLs for promotion is a shortcut for Wang Baobao to quickly seize the market. There are more than 200 internet celebrities who have reached cooperation with Wang Baobao, with a total of tens of millions of fans, widely distributed on popular platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo.

The construction of brand and user relationship is a two-way interactive process.

According to relevant statistics, 81% of consumers require brands to speed up their business response, 76% of consumers hope that brands can meet their personalized needs, and 68% of consumers expect brands to provide a consistent consumer experience. Achieving this healthy interactive relationship requires a long-term and gradual process, and the existence of mid-level KOLs actually accelerates the speed at which brands reach users and the speed at which users determine their brand choices.

Internet celebrities who are mid-level KOLs have now become a new profit growth point for major e-commerce platforms and a traffic entrance that major brands are competing for. However, how to continue to generate traffic after obtaining it and how to convert fans of mid-level KOLs into fans of the brand requires returning to the product itself. Wang Baobao selected internet celebrities whose tone matched that of the products, and used their accumulated fans to carry out targeted marketing for the products, converting fans into purchasing power, thereby increasing the conversion rate of product users and ultimately achieving sales profitability.

From the perspective of content production, most of the content that Wang Baobao puts in mid-level KOLs is based on real consumer experience of the brand. He understands what kind of content can better reflect the selling point of the product without making the hard advertising atmosphere too strong. This brings the brand closer to users while increasing users' trust in the brand.

2. User-oriented principle

When promoting products, KOLs operated by Wang Baobao often focus on the visual appeal and taste experience of the products. Unlike traditional dried fruit combinations, Wang Baobao cereals add large chunks of freeze-dried strawberries, dried cranberries, coconut flakes, dried mangoes, etc., and are paired with good-looking packaging, which has captured the hearts of many young people.

The reason behind this is simple. In the era of the eye-catching economy, a product’s high appearance can often win more attention from consumers . This is also the first step for many brands to engage in differentiated competition. The food industry that Wang Baobao is in has entered the red ocean era, and with the rise of Generation Z as the main consumer force, how to create unique advantages for products based on high appearance is what Wang Baobao needs to think about.

The rise of those born after 1995 and 2000 has injected new uncertainties into the original consumer groups.

They have strong purchasing power and prefer products with distinctive personality characteristics. The punk-style health regimen of "overeating while taking stomach-strengthening and digestion-promoting tablets" has become the new synonym for this group. This also means that the market trend has changed. The most obvious manifestation is that young people's new consumption concept has brought the meal replacement industry into the spotlight. According to relevant data, in 2006, the proportion of staple food consumption in China was 84.3%, which dropped to 81.9% in 2016. The proportion of substitute staple foods and snacks increased from 8.7% and 7.0% ten years ago to 9.2% and 8.9% respectively.

The hot meal replacement market represents a decrease in the proportion of staple food consumption, and consumer demand for meal replacement foods and leisure products such as snacks is constantly increasing. In this regard, Wang Baobao uses oats rich in dietary fiber as its main ingredient, and innovatively adds oligofructose. Oligofructose is a water-soluble dietary fiber. When mixed with oatmeal and baked using low-temperature technology, the baked oatmeal will have a crisper texture than naked oats.

Taking into account the different consumption scenarios and user tastes, Wang Baobao collects feedback through interaction with consumers. After repeated and diverse research and development tests, it will finally determine the formula and start mass production. In addition, we meet the diverse needs of consumers through products with different packaging and different flavors. To give a simple example, in order to make it easier for people to carry, Wang Baobao launched small-package products during the May Day holiday.

Maintaining a high innovation frequency of launching new products every two months is another secret of Wang Baobao. Up to now, Wang Baobao already has cereals with different characteristics, such as dry cereals and instant cereals, as well as various derivative products such as purple sweet potato and taro puree and barley leaf jelly. In the view of Zhang Jihong, director of Wang Baobao and investor of Source Code Capital, Wang Baobao has redefined consumers' perception and imagination of cereal at multiple levels, including products and marketing.

3. Despite the explosion, there are still concerns

From a time perspective, it took only a few months for Wang Baobao to emerge and become popular among young people.

While it has quickly become a hit online, can the enthusiastic recommendations from a large number of KOLs generate long-term traffic? Now that old brands such as Quaker are familiar with Wang Baobao’s market strategy, can Wang Baobao maintain its strong momentum? The food industry has a low threshold and fast iteration. How much room for growth does Wang Baobao have? These issues all need to be considered urgently.

Looking at the domestic oatmeal market, several leading companies represented by Quaker and Calbee present an oligopolistic competition situation. In the past two years, the market concentration of the breakfast oatmeal industry has been declining. As shown in the figure below, the market share of the top three companies accounts for only 41.3%, and Wang Baobao's total market share has not yet exceeded those giants.

Due to the constraints of its instant consumption characteristics, Wang Baobao, which has extensive online sales, is somewhat weak in offline layout. Compared with old brands such as Quaker and Calbee, Wang Baobao's offline operation experience and brand awareness are not enough to compete with them. Online sales can obtain consumer feedback in a timely manner, and while having positive interactions, it can quickly improve products based on consumer demands. However, the communication efficiency of offline sales is not as good as that of online sales, so Wang Baobao's advantages in brand operations are limited.

In addition, it is good to win traffic with low-cost mid-level KOLs, but as stated in the book “Growth Thinking, How to Become a Growth Master”, “We have multiple dimensions for evaluating traffic. Winning traffic is good and the cost is low, but it has obvious adjustments and high uncertainty. No one dares to promise that a certain fission activity or a certain product modification will definitely bring user growth.” The traffic that Wang Baobao currently obtains from online sales does have obvious boundaries. The popularity of online sales cannot guarantee the smooth expansion of offline sales channels, nor can it guarantee the sustainability of online traffic.

This is indeed the case. Currently, Wang Baobao is focusing on exploring IP collaborations with well-known brands. For example, Wang Baobao and Anjia Milk Powder jointly launched the "4 fruits and 3 vegetables" health-preserving green bars with the slogan "Super good-looking and energetic meals, nutritious, delicious and less burdensome", and carried out heat integration and leveraged marketing based on the matching of brand tone.

IP collaboration is still a means of competing for traffic, and the effectiveness of Wang Baobao’s future strategies such as incubating sub-brands and complementing multiple categories remains to be considered. Wang Baobao, who once relied on marketing methods and user-oriented principles, created astonishing sales results, but its thinking and strategies are not impossible to replicate. If it wants to extend the brand life cycle and continuously enhance the brand influence, Wang Baobao needs to seek new outlets.

Author: Jiahui

Public account: Xinmo