8 routines = 1 "Internet celebrity" brand

In 2021, the concept of "new consumption" swept the Internet industry and brand circle, and was also favored by capital. According to incomplete statistics from New Consumption Daily, as of May 31, 2020, new consumer brands had raised a total of 271 financings, while the number of financings in the entire year of last year was only 195. In just 5 months, the number of financing times was 38.97% higher than the whole of last year, which shows how hot the market is.

This enthusiasm has even extended to mature brands and traffic platforms. On the one hand, mature brands are hoping to create new brands from their own systems through investment, mergers and acquisitions, and incubation.

On the other hand, traffic platforms, such as Tencent and Alibaba, have launched a series of traffic support plans, growing together with new brands from the beginning of the establishment of new brands to the scale of hundreds of millions, and becoming deeply bound partners.

So, where do the “new consumer brands” that everyone wants to grab come from? In order to gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics of new consumer brands, Morketing has identified eight “routines” in their development process, starting from product development and brand marketing.

1. Entering the segmented track

When it comes to choosing an entrepreneurial track, the vast majority of new consumer brands make the same decision - to enter from a niche track.

According to Tmall’s 618 sales statistics this year, a total of 459 new brands took the top spot in their subcategories. Whether it is the "Santonban" brand, which is positioned as a boutique instant coffee, or the large-size underwear "Nutty Candy Pie", or the fruit wine brand "MissBerry"...

They all find niche areas with market gaps and development potential, and enter the market by developing new products that are not available on the market or that are differentiated.

In the eyes of new brands, the era of blockbuster products that appeal to all ages is gone. By delving into a niche market, they can also make tens of billions of dollars.

These new opportunities can be said to be the "space" left by mature brands for new entrepreneurs.

For mature brands, due to the limitations of the group's size, developing a new product for a niche market or a specific group of people and selling it in first- and second-tier cities or third- and fourth-tier cities is often not as effective as developing a product that can be sold nationwide.

At the same time, compared with the risk of failure in new product development, mature brands prefer to boost sales of existing products through marketing and promotional means.

In addition, mature brands have money and strength. Instead of competing with new brands for the market, it is better to wait for new brands to develop and then choose to invest, acquire, or set up internal teams to incubate new brands. Now Unilever, Budweiser...

2. Listen to the user’s voice

In addition, being good at listening to users is a very important feature of a new brand. These brands will initiate user product experience during the product development process, and understand the most real user needs at the content and service levels.

"Santonban" has a "Navigator Program". According to the official introduction, the navigator is the person who points out the path and direction for the product, that is, the so-called "product reviewer". As long as dozens of navigators make the same suggestion, "Santonban" will make changes to the product.

Including the rice wine brand "Mi Ke Rice Wine", the product packaging design of its rice sparkling wine series is also jointly decided by the brand and users. "MiKeMiJiu" will provide different pictures for users to choose from in response to some questions and collect user feedback.

Another company that has adopted a similar approach is Hua Xizi. "Long before Hua Xizi was launched on the market, we started the 'user co-creation' project, inviting users to become product experience officers and participate in evaluations," Hua Xizi said.

In addition, new consumer brands have made their user communication more humane. "We have added online consultations with registered dietitians to the brand and user communication process. Through one-on-one online communication with users, the brand and users can share deeper experiences other than products and sales. This is also an important reason why Xiaolu Lanlan can be recognized and accepted more quickly and widely after its launch," said Li Ziming, CEO of infant food brand Xiaolu Lanlan.

These new brands not only want users to participate in product development and optimization and iteration, but also in services and content. In short, these brands hope to grow together with their users by listening to their voices.

3. Create super single products

Based on user feedback, the products launched by these brands are often more popular among their target groups.

On this basis, another obvious feature of new consumer brands in creating "single products" is to achieve category innovation. There are two main types of category innovation:

1. There is a gap in the market or it has not been tapped , such as Yuanqi Forest’s sparkling water and Wang Baobao’s baked oatmeal;
2. Think about more convenient usage scenarios . For example, you used to need to boil water to make instant noodles, but now you don’t need to do that. You can just buy a self-heating pot, pour in cold water, and wait a few minutes before you can eat it.

At present, these super products account for most of the sales of new brands. For example, Yuanqi Forest currently has about 9 SKUs, and it relies more on popular items.

However, for new consumer brands, success or failure depends on popular products.

The advantage is that popular items have high turnover and large sales. The downside is that the sales volume of other products is extremely low. Once they are eliminated by similar products in the market, the sales volume will decline severely . In fact, if the track is too small, you will soon reach the ceiling.

Facing this problem, there are 2 solutions for reference.

First, after Perfect Diary quickly gained brand awareness, Yatsen E-Commerce bought some cosmetics brands through investment and mergers and acquisitions, while incubating new sub-brands internally. Taking advantage of the popularity of Perfect Diary, it quickly promotes other sub-brand lines and prepares multiple Plan Bs for itself.

Second, mix and match, expand the track, and then create explosive products. At the beginning of the brand's development, Canban's best-selling product was the "Internet celebrity toothpaste" made from "caviar, bird's nest" and other raw materials. Now it mainly promotes "mouthwash" and focuses on the oral track. Canban is constantly looking for new untapped product categories in the oral market in order to expand sales. It is reported that in June, the monthly sales of Canban exceeded 100 million.

In addition, Bananain also adopted the same approach to expand its market share, changing its original promotional focus from "body sensing technology" to now emphasizing "basic models." Taking advantage of the popularity of hit items, these new consumer brands are moving from more segmented tracks to larger areas to expand their SKUs or markets.

4. Seize the Appearance Economy

In addition to category innovation, the high appearance is one of the important selling points of these super products.

With the upgrading of consumption and the change of public aesthetics, in order to cater to the needs of the audience, unique and high-value packaging has become a powerful tool to enhance product added value and market competitiveness. The "Generation Z Insight Report" released by QuestMobile mentioned that paying attention to "appearance" has become a typical characteristic of Generation Z, so this also brings more market for business models that use "appearance" as an entry point.

For example, the "Santonban" packaged in a mini "coffee cup", the "Yongpu Coffee" packaged in a flying saucer, the "Zhong Xuegao" in a tile shape, the "Hua Xizi" embossed lipstick...

They all spent a certain amount of time and energy on product appearance to break through and disrupt the traditional packaging types in the market.

These distinctive and good-looking packaging designs have formed a unique and exclusive styling symbol for the brand, making the brand more recognizable and more popular among consumers.

In the appearance economy, consumers not only want beautiful people, but also beautiful things and beautiful spirit.

In other words, consumers want to use skin care products/cosmetics to make themselves more beautiful, and they also want the items in their daily lives to be more stylish and good-looking. At the same time, they also expect these things to bring spiritual value.

5. Early stage traffic thinking

At the same time, new brands entering the market will use traffic thinking to launch their brands in the early stages due to limited funds.

Except for some wine and beverage brands that focus on offline channels, or use traditional saturation (rich) investment methods, others basically first conduct precise customer acquisition in various channels.

Due to the limitations of segmented scenarios, it would be more strategic for new brands to find the first batch of seed users. Most of them start by targeting a certain group of people, becoming loyal users, and then continuously expanding this base. For example, "Little Deer Blue" focuses on the core maternal and infant population on Tmall, and then expands to the population that is most likely to generate purchases and conversions in this category...

After having a basic user base, new consumer brands begin to expand their circle and attract more people. Finally, it comes down to brand influence and brand building, such as IP collaboration, variety show placement, and celebrity spokespersons. For example, Bananain and Neiwai have carried out some campaigns with "core value" in brand building, and signed celebrity spokespersons to expand their brand influence.

6. Focus on influencer marketing

While maintaining its users, the new brand also makes good use of influencer marketing. KOL recommendation is an important means of their "brand promotion" and "brand marketing". So, how do they do it?

First, destroy a single channel. Second, use the live streaming videos of internet celebrities as promotional advertisements and broadcast them in large quantities.

In terms of channels, the brand concentrates resources such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Zhihu, and focuses its communication efforts on 1-2 core media.

After determining the traffic channel, place a few top KOLs as the starting point, and then place hundreds or thousands of mid-level and tail KOLs as the auxiliary, using a saturation strategy to frequently appear in core media within a certain period of time to achieve high coverage.

In addition, new consumer brands also take advantage of the coverage capabilities of top Internet celebrities and their own social credibility to place more advertisements on new traffic.

For example, after cooperating with Li Jiaqi, many brands will capture videos of Li Jiaqi’s live broadcasts as promotional advertisements. These videos will appear on new traffic platforms and be labeled with labels such as “Even Li Jiaqi Recommends”, trying their best to maximize the value of the internet celebrity’s live broadcast videos. On TikTok, users can often see this type of advertisement.

In addition to top KOLs, a large number of live videos of mid-level influencers are also released, which temporarily creates an atmosphere that "this brand frequently appears in different media" and eventually forms a "trend."

7. Make good use of brand crossover

In addition to influencer marketing, new brands often use brand co-branding to divert traffic to each other with the slogan “you help me, I help you”.

"Since the establishment of the brand, we have done more than 400 brand collaborations and were called the 'collaboration maniac' by Tmall," said Tiepi, the founder of Yongpu Coffee.

Yongpu Coffee has cooperated with coffee shops, Xiaohongshu, Rishiji, Xiaoman Handmade Noodles, QQ Music, Van Gogh, "U Can U Bibi", "New Weekly", "Memory Master", "Better Days", "Assassination of Novelist"...

Different IPs cooperate to obtain traffic. "During the 618 shopping event two years ago, we collaborated with more than 30 brands on Weibo for more than two months, spending less than 20,000 yuan in total. The results were very good and brought a lot of free online traffic to Yongpu Coffee."

Morketing also observed that many brand joint activities can be seen on the official Weibo accounts of brands such as Nayuki, Wang Baobao, Chali, and MissBerry. For light product gift box sets, award-winning koi are selected from products of multiple brands; for heavy products, the characteristics of two brands are combined to launch joint gift boxes.

8. Become a topic of conversation

Finally, making product purchases a topic of conversation in consumers’ lives is an important feature of new consumer brands.

At present, there are two reasons why new brands can become the topic of conversation for some consumers.

First, new brands spend more time on product packaging or product recycling.

As mentioned above, first of all, the product is good-looking and high-priced, which will create a style that is more "high-end" than other homogeneous products, providing consumers with initial conditions that are worth posting and showing off.

Secondly, the brand focuses on promoting environmental protection, focusing on product packaging recycling, and launching regular recycling activities, so that consumers can obtain benefits. This not only provides consumers with the social value of "I am a person who cares about the environment" that can be shared on social media, but also obtains additional benefits.

In addition, new brands often use internet celebrity marketing tactics, which makes the brand inherently "internet celebrity" attributes. As a result, buying internet celebrity products has become a trend, and naturally more consumers will follow suit. For example, when you go to Changsha, you will queue up to check in at "Cha Yan Yue Se" and go to "Super Wenheyou".

Second, some new consumer brands are endowed with their own brand value and culture from the moment they are born. for example:

• Gold jewelry brand "YIN", the brand value focuses on "pleasing oneself", a gift for oneself;
• Fitness food brand "ffit8" tells the story of a healthy lifestyle;
• Lingerie brand Neiwai encourages women to be free in body and mind.

After consumers identify with a brand’s values ​​and culture, they are usually willing to purchase its products and even recommend them to their friends, thus conveying the brand’s values.

Generally speaking, if a brand can tell a good story about "lifestyle", it can often make consumers feel more identified with it, thus bringing more premium space to the brand.

After all, compared with the previous generation, this new generation of consumers has stronger purchasing power and is willing to accept more value-added products.

IX. Conclusion

Overall, although new consumer brands have many development routines, their rapid development is also closely linked to the favorable environment.

• The outbreak of lazy economy, appearance economy, and national trend economy;
• The rise of major online platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, Zhihu, and Bilibili;
• The diverse demands generated by the new generation of consumers are booming...

These different conditions provide new brands with more opportunities for entrepreneurship and breaking out of the circle, and also create a "fertile ground" for their rapid growth.

Author: Morketing

Source: Morketing