The secret of brand growth from 0 to 1

This article simply summarizes Wonderlab's growth path into four steps, summarizing the secrets of 0-1 growth for new consumer brands. Enjoy~

It’s been a long time since I shared with you how to build a new consumer brand from 0 to 1. This time, let’s talk about the meal replacement industry. Recently, I have been all over the internet with news about a meal replacement brand called Wonderlab - first it was a collaboration with HEYTEA, then it was featured on a live broadcast by top anchor Viya, and then I saw it on Weibo, TikTok, and Xiaohongshu.

Wonderlab’s advertising in Wei Ya’s live broadcast room and on Douyin

According to a small-scale survey among my friends, everyone has been "touched multiple times and their minds have been formed." The last brand that dominated my screen like this, I remember, was Perfect Diary. What exactly is this meal replacement drink? Driven by curiosity, I couldn't help but do some research and learned that Wonderlab is a brand that was only established last year. In the first year last year, its sales reached 60 million, making it the number one among new consumer brands of meal replacements.

Wonderlab started to make large-scale investments this year, and it is said that its monthly sales even reached 50 million in 2020.

I looked at the growth path of this brand, which can be said to be a textbook-level model. I can smell a scent of P&G in its approach. Similar approaches are exactly the same as those of HFP and Perfect Diary, which were also born from P&G.

So I couldn’t help but write about how Wonderlab grew from 0 to 1. In fact, its approach can also be applied to many other categories.

I simply summarize Wonderlab's growth path into four steps:

• The first step is to choose a potential track: accurately choose a fast and flat track;
• The second step is to understand the pain points and enter the market by segmentation;
• The third step is to penetrate deeply and quickly build the first mindset of the category;
• The fourth step is to expand the quadrant outside the category and enhance brand awareness.

01 Choose the track of "Post-95s women love beauty"

Many people like to study traffic when analyzing consumer products, but I think we should first look at what ecological niche it fills. As the saying goes, choice is more important than hard work - Wonderlab's ecological niche is very interesting. The meal replacement market that Wonderlab entered last year can be said to be a fast-growing market - that is, the market is vast, the growth rate is fast, and there is a vacancy at the top.

The major players are either out of touch, too old, or off the mark. The increasingly Internet-based e-commerce environment also provides excellent opportunities for meal replacement sales.

According to data from Euromonitor International, the global meal replacement market reached US$66.16 billion in 2017. Among them, the share of China's meal replacement market alone can reach 57.11 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 120 billion yuan in 2022. The market prospects are very broad.

The "Tmall Food Industry Trend Analysis Report" also indirectly confirms the potential opportunities in this track. The report shows that the overall sales of meal replacement foods on Tmall have been growing steadily, with an annual growth rate of more than 50%.

Meal replacement is still an emerging industry in China, especially the bottled meal replacement category, and there is no absolute leading player. In this blue ocean market worth tens of billions of dollars, Herbalife, a long-established meal replacement powder brand that focuses on fitness and body shaping, has a market share of only 7-8 billion. Some other well-known meal replacement powder brands, such as the Chinese meal replacement player Wu Gu Mo Fang, have a market share that fluctuates around a few billion.

Wonderlab's store ranking and WeChat index ranking

It is precisely because the meal replacement market has not yet formed an industry monopoly that new meal replacement brands like Wonderlab have the opportunity to enter the market, seize the minds of consumers, and then seize market share and get a piece of the pie. The growing e-commerce sector is also an important prerequisite. In the past five years, China's e-commerce channels have maintained an annual growth rate of 70%. There is an old saying that change is opportunity. China's traffic pattern is constantly changing, and where traffic is growing fastest, customer acquisition efficiency is also improving. In addition to the favorable overall environment, there are several potential structural changes in the meal replacement market.

The first is that the target audience has changed.

The first wave of post-90s have officially entered the 30-year-old mark and are starting to turn 40. The main force of consumption is no longer the post-80s who were once influential. The post-90s who have established families and careers have begun to become the consumers of the new era.

Consumers in every era have their own values, and consumers in every era also need their own consumer products. It's not just food here. Everything from beauty products, toiletries to toys will be upgraded due to changes in this population, which is why new consumer brands have opportunities.

China has had meal replacements for a long time, and they are actually the kind of whole grain powder.

Black sesame paste, a representative of traditional Chinese breakfast

But to put it bluntly, this kind of meal replacement is prepared by mothers for their children to eat for breakfast. In the impression of today's young people, this kind of meal replacement is just "old-fashioned". There are also meal replacements in the West, but those are used to supplement protein for muscular men during exercise. Or there is Soylent, which is very popular in the United States. In fact, its main target audience is programmers who are too lazy to eat. (When I was in Silicon Valley, I received a few boxes of Soylent as Christmas gifts - please see the psychological shadow area) I have always said that whoever wins the women wins the world. In fact, the two meal replacements mentioned above do not hit the newly emerging core group - the young female group.

In fact, there has always been a lack of meal replacements for young Chinese women born after 1995.

The second is that the demand has changed. Meal replacement has changed from "replacing regular meals" to "losing weight".

In the past dictionaries, meal replacements were created to replace regular meals in order to “solve the problem of not eating.” But there are so many delicious foods now, why shouldn’t I eat?

In the dictionary of Chinese women born after 1995, meal replacements do not actually solve the problem of whether to eat or not, but solve another need - losing weight and becoming more beautiful.

Eating meal replacements for the purpose of losing weight is basically equivalent to losing weight in China.

Combining the above two points, I think that when Wonderlab entered this market, the key point for its takeoff was not the efficiency of its delivery, but more importantly, it chose a brand-new, growing and potential post-95s female economy market, and it targeted a core appeal - "becoming beautiful".

Rather than saying that Wonderlab chose the meal replacement track, it would be better to say that it chose the meal replacement category in the beauty track of post-95 women as its primary entry point.

02 Insight into pain points and enter the market through segmentation

After discovering these structural changes, the next step is to fill the market gap with a "solution". I have said in my brand-effect marketing model that the essence of a product is to find a group of people, discover their pain points or pleasure points, and use a product to solve their problems, solve their pleasure points, and achieve pleasure points. Marketing is essentially about finding this group of people, discovering the pain points that still exist in their current solutions, and then conveying the features of your own product.

Women's Knife Skills·Brand-Effect Marketing: "Consumer Task Closed-Loop Model"

What kind of products a brand creates to enter the market is closely related to two factors: one is the insight and understanding of user needs and pain points; the other is to create its own differentiated characteristics and directly address the pain points. As mentioned above, the smart thing about Wonderlab is that it has accurately identified its customer base: new consumers who aim to lose weight and pursue novelty and fashion. These characteristics directly point to those "post-95 women who want to be beautiful." Unlike the old meal replacement brand Herbalife which targets straight men and fitness men, and unlike WuGuMoFang which targets mothers, Wonderlab directly targets the fastest growing group of people.

Thanks to various social media, women nowadays can put a lot of effort into becoming beautiful.

The first stage is external beauty, which improves appearance through cosmetics and light medical beauty; the second stage is upgrading to internal beauty, which is the stage of oral beauty.

If cosmetics are sugar-coated bullets for women, then oral beauty is the arms race for women.

Girls born after 1995 are the group with the strongest demand for beauty nutrition and oral meal replacement products, which can be seen from the changes in content on Xiaohongshu.

In the first half of 2018, Xiaohongshu's female beauty content was still focused on cosmetics. In the second half of the year and early 2019, Xiaohongshu's oral beauty-related content grew significantly.

The number of oral beauty products on Xiaohongshu is increasing

After determining the target audience, the next step is to determine the features of your product. Here I would like to mention a marketing theory of P&G: First Moment of Truth (FMOT) and Second Moment of Truth (SMOT). The so-called first moment of truth is the feeling consumers have when they first see the product. It is important to capture it.

The second moment of truth is that after consumers receive and experience the product, they must fall in love with it. In fact, it is a bit like the "Aha Moment" of growth hackers.

To put it bluntly, it's just like falling in love. When I see you for the first time, I will be attracted by your appearance, and when I go on a date with you, I will be fascinated by your personality.

Wonderlab’s first moment of truth is the ambiguous visuals and the little fat bottle. The second moment of truth is the taste and chewiness of milk tea and the hit.

I saw a lot of people refer to it directly as "little fat bottle" in posts on Xiaohongshu, and call Wonderlab "that delicious little fat bottle meal replacement." This "little fat bottle" has become a major brand memory point for Wonderlab.

Although they also registered the trademark for the Little Fatty Bottle, later I found that other meal replacement brands on the market also used the Fatty Bottle...well...

Secondly, Wonderlab's painting style is also quite interesting. They always ambiguously reveal a small part of a woman, such as a slender collarbone, or deliberately reveal slender arms and a waist.

The skin exposed in the poster creates a sense of yearning for weight loss

After putting in enough effort in the design, the next step is to find ways to polish the product and create the second moment of truth. But it is difficult to establish addiction for meal replacement products. Because losing weight is actually very anti-human. Wonderlab's main points in creating an "addictive" taste are:

1. Associate with the flavors most popular with women (e.g. milk tea)

In terms of taste, Wonderlab went against the grain and capitalized on the fact that “the blood of girls born after 1995 is made of milk tea” to create meal replacements.

When WonderLab first entered the meal replacement milkshake market, it had already grasped consumers' "urgent need for milk tea" and launched milk tea flavored meal replacement milkshakes. Among the six popular classic flavors, the Earl Grey milk tea flavor became the single flavor sales champion after it was developed and launched.

In the one year since its launch in 2019, Wonderlab has undergone five iterations of its full product line, optimizing the entire line in terms of taste, sweetness, solubility, and scientific distribution.

In 2020, Wonderlab simply pushed the flavor of milk tea to the extreme and collaborated with HEYTEA to launch the "milk tea that won't make you fat".

2. Upgrade the existing perception of meal replacement flavors

Secondly, Wonderlab’s other traditional flavors are also based on the most popular flavors of traditional meal replacements. Their innovations include international flavors and new Chinese flavors.

Screenshot of Tmall meal replacement category flavor sales in 2018

3. Upgrade and iterate on satiety

Another interesting thing about Wonderlab's product is that it specially sprinkles some small cookies and the like, so you have to chew it after drinking it. It also specifically highlights this feature - "chewy milkshake".

03 Large penetration, quickly occupying the first mind of the category

After selecting the track and target audience, and creating products that correspond to the pain points, the next step is the third step: let them all know, AKA, cast a wide net in the meal replacement category, with a small budget, large penetration, and high walls. In this regard, it is actually the P&G approach, which is the famous "HBG large-scale penetration theory". What is the HBG penetration theory? You can read a book called "How Brands Grow". Since time is limited, I will translate it for you: it means spending money like crazy.

Use large-scale marketing penetration to occupy consumers' minds and enhance brand exposure. Then we distribute the products everywhere, use channels to penetrate and sell them, and use e-commerce platforms to harvest traffic, so that you can see it and buy it everywhere.

I summarize Wonderlab's approach as the new P&G approach.

It’s just that in the past, people attacked television media, but now in the era of social networks, they use social media more accurately.

Of course, we don't just smash whatever we see. We still have to divide the areas into different circles. First penetrate into the category, then attack outside the category. It is not about spending money recklessly, but about achieving widespread penetration within one's capabilities no matter how much the budget is.

Wonderlab can be seen as a golden example of "how a small budget can penetrate a large area". Its penetration can be divided into two stages:

The first stage: penetration within the category, which is to make all those who are accustomed to meal replacements change from choosing the original brand to choosing Wonderlab.

The solution is to use their own appearance or high cost-effectiveness to attract users of other meal replacement brands and get them to switch to the Xiaopang bottle.

This stage mainly follows the approach that Wonderlab used last year. Its main strategy at the time was to use category keywords within the Taobao system and place KOC ads on Douyin.

Explode the keywords of the category to quickly attract traffic within the category, then use the first moment of truth to convert and the second moment of truth to encourage repurchase.

When you type the keyword "meal replacement" in Taobao, the first two search results show

The second category of external penetration is to get people who have never tried meal replacements and those who want to lose weight to buy Wonderlab. Wonderlab made its big move this year. After achieving a certain level of popularity within the category, you need to break out of the circle. At this time, it is useless to just use the keyword "meal replacement". Instead, it is necessary to establish a relationship with consumers' known associations, such as milk tea, weight loss, beauty, etc.

This year's Wonderlab is actually trying to make a circle and loudly announce to the world that it is the king of meal replacement drinks.

So it does the following series of actions:

(1) Brand crossover with HEYTEA to enhance brand potential

A lever is needed to expand the user base among those who have no knowledge of the meal replacement market and meal replacement products, and many people who are still using old methods and dieting for weight loss and fat reduction, body shaping, general exercise, meal replacements, etc.

Heytea is a good lever: high brand potential, strong communication power, and young people are very receptive to it.

Milk tea as a drink has its own traffic, and the fattening property of this drink is actually in conflict with meal replacement. This hardcore combination can make people's eyes shine and help Wonderlab to successfully break out of the circle.

(2) Large-scale online traffic and exposure Here comes our recent online advertising that has been all over the internet, according to my incomplete statistics and anonymous contributions from fellow knife friends. Wonderlab's distribution channels cover the entire Internet, including Weibo, WeChat (friend circle + big account), Xiaohongshu (information flow CPC + influencers), and Douyin (information flow + influencers), and it has also leveraged the resources of many top anchors. It first found Wei Ya, who has a huge traffic, to do live streaming and sold more than 40,000 sets that night. It even did not let go of MK Liangliang, which had just premiered.

Weibo placement:

Wonderlab Weibo data contributed by knife friends

The main TikTok campaigns also broke out on April 1:

Douyin data of Wonderlab Heytea co-branded link, from Chanmama

During the official announcement stage, we focused on top KOLs. The Heytea co-branded product was launched on 4/1, and the product was promoted on Wei Ya’s live broadcast on 4/2. During the promotion period, we mainly invested in the tail accounts to continuously accumulate water and maintain word of mouth. Within one week of the launch, the sales volume of Heytea co-branded product reached 56,000 sets. After some inquiries, I heard that the overall ROI can reach more than 1.

Tracking of Chan Mama’s Douyin advertising data

I was also curious and checked its Douyin advertising, and found that it not only launched the Heytea co-branded products, but also vigorously promoted its own other line products. For example, its most classic meal replacement set currently has 11 related videos on Douyin, with nearly 400,000 views on April 21. The Heytea co-branded version also boosted sales of the classic version.

(3) Cleverly using keywords Wonderlab used the keyword “drinking milk tea that doesn’t make you fat” in its creative. It targeted girls who “want to lose weight without working out and love to drink milk tea”… These people are really fat otakus.

Wonderlab used the keyword "drinking milk tea that won't make you fat" on Xiaohongshu and Weibo.

In order to break out of the circle, in addition to the collaboration with HEYTEA, the company also relies on expanding its product categories. In early April, I saw that Wonderlab launched vitamin effervescent tablets on Tmall, starting to play the health card and enter the health industry. Wonderlab has big ambitions. As I said at the beginning, it is not actually making meal replacements, but is trying to carve into a large market for oral foods for women to be more beautiful. Meal replacement is just the first category and a stepping stone.

After increasing its brand awareness with its meal replacement bottle and achieving first place in the category, it is slowly upgrading from a fine consumer category of meal replacement to a personalized lifestyle for young women, integrating its brand philosophy with consumers' pursuit of "beauty" and continuing to enhance its brand potential.

04 Growth model from 0 to 1 for new consumer brands

In summary, from the perspective of business advisors, Wonderlab started its business in May last year, and its overall sales have more than quintupled every month since Double Eleven, and have doubled again since the beginning of this year. It can be said that I completed my journey from 0 to 1 very quickly. In this article, I used Wonderlab as an example. In fact, you can clearly see from its entire process the model of new consumer brands wanting to grow from 0 to 1——

• The first step is to choose a potential track: accurately choose a fast and flat track;
• The second step is to understand the pain points and enter the market by segmentation;
• The third step is to penetrate deeply and quickly build the first mindset of the category;
• The fourth step is to expand the quadrant outside the category and enhance brand awareness.

Wonderlab's success in the 0-1 stage stems from its market selection and subtle insights into consumers. But looking ahead, Wonderlab still has a long way to go if it wants to enter the trillion-dollar female oral beauty market. Especially since the beginning of this year, many meal replacement products with similar packaging and flavors have entered the market. From 1 to 10, this is not only a battle of marketing efficiency, but also a battle of barriers.

Where does women’s yearning for beauty extend to? Last year, the beauty and cosmetics market has quickly changed from a blue ocean to a red ocean. Will there be huge waves in the oral beauty market this year?

It’s really a question worth thinking about.

Related reading:

Marketing promotion: from short videos to selling products through live streaming!

10 Misconceptions About Marketing Promotion!

Marketing promotion: innovative ways to achieve big marketing with a small budget!

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Author: Han Jingyi

Source: Daojie Doris (ID: doriskerundong)