How to break the offline defeat of new consumer brands?

In the past two years, some consumer brands targeting young people have emerged. Various brands that follow the current social trends have occupied the consumption habits of young people, such as the common "national trend", "0 fat", "blind box" and other categories;

1. The “new” of new consumer brands

The “newness” of new consumer brands lies in their audience and products, channels and traffic.

1. Audience and product

"Quality, health, eating alone, "her" economy, Generation Z, social attributes, internet celebrity effect, national trend culture..." These are all keywords of new consumer brands.

New consumer brands have accurately identified their target customer groups and are constantly exploring their changing consumption habits and preferences, which has refined and diversified consumer demand and brought about the prosperity of segmented categories, emerging brands, and innovative products. Although the audience group for each segmented category may not be large, each track is a real market.

New domestic beauty brands include Perfect Diary and Huaxizi, which were founded only three years ago; dark horses in the coffee world include Santonban and Yongpu; in the meal replacement and health product category, there are Xiaoxiandun, Wang Baobao, ffit8, and Haomaiduo, as well as low-fat and low-sugar brands such as Genki Forest, Jane Eyre Yogurt, and Daily Black Chocolate; and popular internet celebrity foods include Zhong Xuegao, Ramen Says, Zihaiguo, and Haohuanluo; with the upgrading of consumption, new brands have emerged, such as the high-value maternal and child brand Babycare, the men's health management platform Menxlab, and the designer home furnishings Pineapple Zebra and Zaozuo.

The creation of new consumer brands basically goes through the process of discovering new needs, proposing new propositions, launching new services and new products, and most of them have a reverse thinking of "breaking and establishing".

San Dun Ban realized that canned food is more user-friendly than strips, and freshly ground food is of higher quality than instant coffee, so it used high technology to create freshly ground instant coffee, and at the same time came up with more novel ways to taste instant coffee; Ramen Says discovered that Japanese ramen was always more expensive than local noodles, so it launched high-priced Japanese instant noodles, advocating "even if you are alone, you should be nicer to yourself", so eating instant noodles has become a ritual.

Find the market, grasp the demand, and create products: behind every new consumer brand is the imprint of the STP strategy.

2. Channels and traffic

New consumer brands have a sophisticated business strategy from their birth to success, and have gone from being unknown to becoming internet celebrities. The marketing methods of new consumer brands are cautious and traceable.

In terms of channel layout, new consumer brands are not limited to traditional e-commerce channels and supermarket channels. They focus on media social channels and live broadcast channels, and rely on high-value offline stores, new convenience stores, and pop-up stores to layout offline.

They were born on the Internet and distributed through traditional e-commerce channels such as Tmall and JD.com; they developed on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and WeChat, absorbing the essence of user UGC and gradually building a reputation; they increased their visibility through celebrity live broadcasts, Taobao KOLs, and Weibo influencers’ recommendations and promotions; and then used a large amount of advertising to increase exposure... (The most dangerous thing about this approach is that a large amount of money is spent on traffic and channel subsidies).

The east wind of the Internet has been blowing, and the fire of new consumer brands has been burning. This is a process of frantically planting grass online and winning over users. They are like invading alien species, penetrating every corner of the Internet. New brands are also exploring every moment: how to intercept more and more cost-effective traffic from the channels.

But everyone knows that the competition for user attention online has been in full swing for a long time; therefore, occupying stable offline channels, adopting appropriate offline marketing, and mastering real and stable sources of traffic are things that new consumer brands need to work hard on.

"After nearly two decades of development, online giants are facing the peak of traffic dividends and are more aware that offline retail is the ultimate battlefield for grabbing consumer traffic."

New consumer brands eventually moved offline. Yuanqi Forest entered convenience store chains such as FamilyMart, Lawson, and Convenience Bee; Santonban opened an industrial-style store in Changsha; Xue Zhonggao created the "Born like Summer Flowers" pop-up store... If you observe carefully, you will find that the way new consumer brands play offline is the same old trick that all brands have used in recent years to do omni-channel marketing.

Obviously, offline, new consumer brands have not explored a "new" path; this is why new brands are thriving online but have difficulty making any progress offline; offline growth does require new sales models, marketing methods, and digital systems to match them.

2. Some “outdated” aspects of traditional offline marketing

1. Offline promotion has a kind of "obsession": activities must be held in the atrium

What we usually call offline marketing is mainly pop-up stores, which are opened in the atrium of shopping malls. The cycle is 1 to 3 days, and the contract system is based on weeks, months, and quarters. According to the "White Paper on China's Pop-up Store Industry" report by Linhuiba, the project surveyed thousands of shopping malls in 82 first- and second-tier cities across the country, and counted the venue rental cycles for their pop-up events. 86% of the pop-up events were single sessions, and half of them were scheduled on weekends.

It can be seen that a large number of current offline marketing flash events are guerrilla-style, with short rental periods and a fondness for holiday traffic. Brands hope to target as many target customers as possible through a single super exposure.

In fact, for the price of a flash promotion in the atrium of some shopping malls, you can rent the corridor for a whole month.

For new consumer brands, they need rapid and sustained growth, low-cost and steady expansion, and a channel that combines sales and exposure. These "obsessions" of traditional pop-up stores will cause great harm to new consumer brands.

2. Traditional offline marketing still has a "pathology": not paying attention to data

Traditional pop-up stores usually simply treat the pop-up stores as an exposure or a public relations event with marketing purposes but no specific indicators. They do not collect on-site data and do not monitor the actual input-output effects.

We have to mention Dyson here. Dyson is an expert in black technology and a pop-up store fanatic. Dyson's pop-up stores will collect a lot of data, including: the number of users who see/pass by/enter the exhibition area, the number of consumers who communicate with staff, come into contact with products, experience demos, and complete purchases, etc. Use data to evaluate the effectiveness of pop-up stores and optimize internal displays and interactive aspects.

To some extent, Dyson has turned its pop-up store into a "slow pop-up store", which is usually open for one to two weeks. If the sales effect is good, it will be open for months at a time, and different products in different seasons will be displayed in the same place for a "second visit", using data to directly cover the customer base in the area.

For many new consumer brands, building an independent marketing system is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and is indeed a burden. They can use the data monitoring and analysis tools already available on the market to remotely monitor event sites in real time online to empower the marketing chain.

3. Break the old and establish the new, embrace digitalization

Digital stores have become the norm. When we connect the digital system to pop-up stores and incorporate it into every offline marketing activity to monitor on-site data, analyze user behavior, and evaluate activity effectiveness... then every investment in offline layout will be calculated clearly.

• Tradition: After a strong exposure and carnival, all the investment is burned down like a wildfire.
• Transformation: Be steady and cautious, proceed step by step, be meticulous, understand every inch of the data effect, and take root offline.

Therefore, in order for new consumer brands to break the offline defeat, they must develop innovative ideas for offline, use more flexible store formats, richer content presentations, and freer operating cycles to obtain more cost-effective offline traffic and stop being hurt by the traditional marketing system.

Author: Liu Liang

Source: Liu Liang