Brand Marketing Promotion: How does HEYTEA build its brand?

The core result of a business's operations lies in the minds of customers and influences their choices. This core result is the brand.

This article shares with you "How to inject brand sense into brand names".

1. Brand connotation

Just looking at the two words "喜" and "茶" does not sound very cool. When Royal Tea was forced to change its name due to counterfeiting, many people disagreed with the change to "喜茶" because they thought it was not cool enough.

But after several years of hard work, Heytea's brand image has been deeply rooted in people's hearts and has become a brand highly sought after by young people.

How do we inject brand sense into HEYTEA? This is what I wanted to share.

Speaking of brand names, we can review those classic brands.

Now, when we mention Apple, most people’s first reaction is the iPhone, Steve Jobs, and the bitten apple, rather than the red apple that hit Newton on the head.

When we see the big hook, our first reaction is that it is Nike, it represents the unremitting sportsmanship of “just do it”, rather than just a hook indicating correctness.

If you break away from your existing impression of Apple and Nike, do their names sound nice? The reason why people think their names are cool today is because they are given brand value and a whole set of VI, etc.

Today, when we talk about Heytea, it is not just a cup of tea, it also represents a new tea culture.

How do we do this at this level?

At the beginning of our business, we knew clearly that what HEYTEA wanted to do was to make tea drinks younger rather than upgrade milk tea.

Tea has cultural connotations.

What is the most important thing about HEYTEA to consumers?

We believe it is an overall brand centered around products.

We are building a brand based on products. On the basis of good products, we hope to do more, such as giving it a sense of design, giving it concepts, and finally forming a brand.

A brand cannot be copied; it is subtle. Its formation comes from multiple levels, from the accumulation of every little thing in the development process, the founder's character, the product's visual image, etc. It is a complete system.

Before we started our business, young people were not keen on drinking tea, and there were no tea drinks developed for young people on the market, and milk tea was not positioned high among young people.

So, what kind of brand do we want to create?

Heytea’s brand positioning is cool. Many people may say that “cool” is a very abstract concept. It is precisely because of this abstract concept that it can be used as a brand positioning.

If you define a brand too specifically, it will become narrow and easily become outdated.

Cool is a very abstract word, so we further concretize “cool” into “inspiration” and “Zen”.

The inspiration comes from the "functionality" of tea since ancient times. Tea and wine are used by many poets, lyricists and other creators to inspire inspiration. It is also what we have always insisted on since we started our business - doing things based on inspiration.

Our entire entrepreneurial and brand development process is based on developing new products based on inspiration, and then gaining market recognition and moving forward step by step.

Therefore, our current design, presentation and slogan are more based on the two keywords inspiration and Zen, especially inspiration.

So we are not saying that Heytea is the best tasting tea or the tea made from the best ingredients, but rather that it is a tea of ​​inspiration.

So our official account is not used to show off our technology to everyone - we are good-looking and good at design, but we hope to embody the concept of inspiration.

The official account is very important. It is not a promotional medium, but the online part of the brand.

2. Online carrier

Official accounts are very important carriers of cultural transmission. If a brand treats the official account as a medium and all it contains is discount information and event information, there will be no sense of brand.

We regard the official account as a carrier for brand content output. Promoting new products is just an opportunity, a starting point that gives you a reason to create content.

Promoting a new product is just an opportunity for you to create content and gradually convey the feeling to consumers. This is our experience.

Let me give you some examples of how to operate a public account, especially how to better showcase the brand.

First, determine the style

For example, if we want to launch a new series, we must first decide on the style - which main visual style we would like to use for this promotion.

For example, we are going to launch a pink litchi series, which is a fruit tea, and each fruit has its own unique temperament.

The poem that lychees remind people of is "A horse gallops through the red dust, and the concubine smiles, but no one knows it is the lychees coming", which is from ancient times.

The color of lychee is pink. In the general direction, we will use Chinese style, and the new Chinese style, combined with current popular elements.

With pink and spring, we’re going for a lighter feel overall. But at the same time, the overall presentation cannot be too popular and should have the feeling of Heytea.

Based on this concept, we set a general direction, and the overall style is Chinese.

At the same time, if you want it to feel lighter and fresher overall, use lighter colors.

After deciding on this direction, we started designing packaging materials and conceiving copy, and then took product photos. Based on this association,

Second, pay attention to the hard photos

The picture is very important to the entire tweet, and we are very strict about the requirements for photos.

This includes what kind of models, facial features, makeup to choose, and how to show the conflict with modern style, all of which will be studied.

Photos carry content and are the reader’s first impression, conveying style and feeling.

Photos should have tension, and the overall design and layout can polish and strengthen the theme. The copy is part of the content and complements the photos.

We also consider the choice of fonts, which must be consistent with the overall style.

Third, the style of tweets

We will design a complete style for tweets, down to the details of what font to use and the matching copywriting style.

You can see that this is also our tweet. It has a rough style. Isn’t it in stark contrast to the Chinese style?

Thick lines are also a popular style nowadays, and their application scenarios can be very wide.

The overall feeling it gives is very friendly, and the colors used are very rich with high saturation. It is also very interesting to make animated images. Through illustrations, you can also create a sense of scene that cannot be interpreted by taking pictures.

This was our first tweet when we first entered the Hong Kong market.

What do you think of when you think of Hong Kong? Stacked signs, bus stops, Victoria Harbour, etc.

You can see that the entire tweet is designed like this, with a strong sense of stacking, which actually restores the intricate feeling of Hong Kong’s street signs.

We extracted the red, blue and yellow main visual from the Hong Kong style, and reproduced the stacking feeling of billboards in the design. The materials also include station signs, snakeskin bags, etc. Even the font continues to use the classic Hong Kong sign font to strengthen the overall retro Hong Kong style.

3. Offline carriers

You may be curious whether consumers will have trouble remembering such a variety of styles.

Actually no, it's like the relationship between a person's skin and soul.

The soul core we want to express is very clear, that is, inspiration and Zen, and the design technique we use is skin.

Design techniques can be passed down, but we cannot be overly rigid about them. Otherwise, we will fall into a vicious circle and be one step away from being conservative, and we will never be able to make any progress.

For example, when thinking of tea culture, the images that come to mind may be big red lanterns, Chinese calligraphy and other Chinese-style images. If you stick to these expression methods, it will not be cool at all. This is a reproduction rather than inheritance. Inheritance requires progress.

As long as the core remains unchanged, inspiration can be dressed in different clothes and have different forms of expression.

The same is true for the entire tea culture. For example, when people think of tea, they may think of brushes, mahogany furniture, etc. This association is the most primitive or simplest.

Culture needs to be passed on, but skin can be renewed.

Many Japanese brands do a good job in this regard.

This is the Uniqlo brand. Even without a sign, you can recognize that it is a Japanese brand. There are no Japanese elements or kimonos in its skin, the color tone is not Japanese, and there are no rockery, etc.

Because its expression method is modernism, and its core is Japan, with many right angles and straight lines, which is the core of Japan's reserved rules and is a very important point in the culture.

The same goes for MUJI, they used different skins, but the overall feel is very Japanese, including the logo.

Heytea does the same thing. Many people may not be able to feel our style, but no one will confuse us with Starbucks.

Our color scheme tends to be white and gray, and there are also some dead trees and gravel in the store. Each small area reflects a scene. The design is relatively empty, without many special elements. This is the Zen concept we have distilled.

In terms of materials and expression techniques, it doesn’t mean that every store has to use dead wood. There are also many metal materials. In the end, I feel that it still revolves around the two points mentioned above.

Space is the carrier and starting point of brand culture. Consumers may first come into contact with you through this space. Space is not only a place to provide seats, but also a place to interpret culture.

We regard each space as an attempt to interpret inspiration.

Take Hangzhou, where we are today, as an example. We have 8 stores in Hangzhou. These 8 stores have different styles, and each store has a unique design.

Hangzhou is a place with beautiful natural scenery. These classic cultures are integrated into the space and expressed through space.

Some use the superposition of many circles, making the entire space look still because the circles are rolling, but they are still here, hoping to convey to everyone: forget the existence of time in this space, it is like being still.

The circle is also a very important concept in ancient culture, so it was extracted from it and used to present a space.

These design concepts are consistent with the concepts of the official account.

In addition to expressing the essence of ancient tea culture in a modern way, it also combines the local cultural essence and makes some designs based on the theme of urban elements. This is the creativity of the space.

I don’t know what HEYTEA will look like, but it will continue to change in the future.

We hope that culture will evolve. If culture does not evolve, it will be eliminated, people will get tired of it and will be trapped by a fixed style and unable to move forward.

Looking back, what is the core and what we most want for our entire brand? The goal is to make the tea drinking culture younger.

The younger interpretation of tea drinks is to make tea cool so that young people will like it.

I believe that what attracts young people to try Heytea for the first time must be because it is cool, not just because it is a cup of tea.

Products and brand are the two things we value most.

Heytea’s store space conveys the brand culture, and the content of the official account and continuous cross-border activities are also strengthening the brand, ultimately to strengthen an abstract brand concept, which is “cool”.

But cool is very abstract, so we further represent it as "inspiration" and "Zen".

The inspiration comes from the "functionality" of tea since ancient times. Tea and wine are used by many poets, lyricists and other creators to inspire inspiration. It is also what we have always insisted on since we started our business - doing things based on inspiration.

The same principle applies to Zen.

A brand is something that is difficult to quantify and difficult to establish all at once. That is why brands are difficult to copy.

When you first started your business, you advertised how good your raw materials were, and these promotional copy were easily copied by others.

But once you create your own brand feeling, no one else can copy it.

Because brands need to be interpreted with daily details, brands need to be placed in our space and can only be felt in combination with our cognition and our actions.

Providing products that are truly popular with the public, creating a brand style based on the youthful tea culture, optimizing the consumer experience through the Internet, reversing the public's stereotype of traditional tea drinks, and truly making the brand deeply rooted in people's hearts and influencing people's lives are very meaningful things in our hearts.

Now is a good era and Chinese brands have the opportunity to go global. We believe that as long as we do well enough in China, we will have the opportunity to go global.

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Author: Noteman

Source: Noteman