Text |Stinging Research Institute White Dew.2023 is destined to be a special year.
Businesses that have gotten rid of uncertainty are gearing up to look forward to consumers' "revenge consumption". However, behind the new round of market recovery is the rapidly changing consumption preferences of users.
The former Internet celebrity products have stepped down from the altar, and consumers have voted for the new "king of consumption" with their feet, and in the top ten Internet celebrity products that will disappear in 2023, we see a new trend that will determine the future development of the industry.
Disappearing popular fast food: snail noodles, vegetarian ramen In 2020, snail noodles accompanied many young people who couldn't cook and survived a difficult home life. also because of its unique smell and its own topic, coupled with the overall outbreak of the live streaming industry, it has become a double Internet celebrity popular product that monopolizes the hot search and sales list.
According to network data, from February 5 to March 6, 2020, snail fans landed on the Weibo hot search list 10 times in one month, with a cumulative reading of more than 2 billion related topics. According to the 2020 data report released by Douyin, "Liuzhou snail noodles" is the most popular snack purchased online by users. On Tmall and Tmall supermarkets, snail noodles have become the fastest-growing food on the first day of the 2021 New Year's Festival. Other statistics show that in 2020, the sales revenue of bagged snail flour in Liuzhou will reach 1099.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7574%, achieving the goal of exceeding 10 billion two years ahead of schedule.
In terms of products alone, snail noodles have the attributes of convenient and fast food and heavy taste, so they have become a rare stimulus in home life and are quickly bought. However, with the end of home life, consumers did not hesitate to rush to the hot pot, pizza, and ** chicken that they had missed for a long time, and convenient fast food was quickly left out in the cold. Without the support of Internet celebrity filters and platform traffic, snail fans are no longer frequent visitors on the hot search list.
Haohuanluo official website.
In fact, the "loss of flavor" of snail noodles is also related to the weak growth of e-commerce and the cooling of new consumption investment. Before the convenience fast food stepped on the "one-person food" outlet due to the epidemic, the new consumer brands represented by Ramen said held high the banner of "single economy", and increased the unit price of instant food from about 5 yuan in the instant noodle era to more than 20 yuan through heavy marketing and influencers, attracting Challenger Capital, Jiacheng Capital, Zheng**, Ziniu**, Vertex Investment and other institutions to enter the game.
However, investment institutions also quickly discovered that the first-class play based on online traffic was only a loss to make money, and Li Jiaqi brought goods in exchange for sales at low prices, but did not leave any assets for the brand. Coupled with the decline in consumer income expectations due to the impact of the epidemic, from the second half of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022, the scale of investment in the new consumption track plummeted from more than 50 billion yuan to 1366.5 billion yuan.
E-commerce brands lose their marketing budgets to continue to drive sales, and influencer products without traffic are facing rapid demise.
The disappearing offline queue kings: star hot pot, night buns"Eating hot pot can also meet celebrities", "Joining the hot pot restaurant, star shareholders came to cut the ribbon"...With these gimmicks alone, Xianhezhuang Hot Pot, founded in 2015 by actor Chen He, host Zhu Zhen, and singer Ye Yiqian, has opened up a new way in the catering industry in Daoshan and Huohai. Even in 2020, Xianhezhuang once opened 800 stores, and the franchise fee of 1 million yuan per store was calculated, and the scale of the franchise fee alone reached 800 million yuan.
However, in May 2022, Chen He, Zhu Zhen, Ye Yiqian and others successively announced their withdrawal from the shareholders of Xianhezhuang. The franchisees who wanted to rely on celebrities to catch the rich express only found that as soon as they got on the bus, the star shareholders jumped halfway. The most important thing is that Xianhezhuang, which has lost its star halo, is not very good in taste compared with other hot pot brands, and the franchise management is even more directly rotten, with negative news such as the ceiling smashing customers and the direct sale of stinky beef.
So in 2023, the news of Xianhezhuang's store closures across the country has frequently appeared on Weibo hot searches, and Chen He's 70 million fans have not been able to "pay with love" to save this star catering brand.
Xianhezhuang official website.
It is worth mentioning that Xianhezhuang has opened a perfect model of "star + ** chain company + franchisee". In the eyes of franchisees, the taste of hot pot is the same, and the real difficulty is how to make the queue at the door long and let the store bring its own traffic. Therefore, the emergence of star shareholders has solved the problem of offline traffic very well.
But what franchisees didn't expect was that in this perfect model, the traffic of celebrities could not serve the continuously growing number of stores. When Guangzhou, which originally only had Jiaxian Hezhuang, suddenly had 19 more stores, the hearts of franchisees were also half cold.
Similar to Xianhezhuang hot pot is also night steamed buns. By weaving the catering fairy tale of "breakfast and evening sale", Night Bun quickly occupied the C position of the night snack catering track, and also got nearly 10 million angel round financing against the trend in November last year. However, after tearing open the oily noodles of the night buns, people realized that the original "breakfast night sale" was not as real as imagined.
The Surprise Research Institute once wrote in "Selling Buns at Night, Will It Be More Profitable?" The article pointed out that the location strategy of Yebaozi with commercial streets and bar streets as the core determines that it far exceeds the hard cost of rent for community breakfast shops, and the too single SKU and high customer unit price of more than 16 yuan are also uncompetitive in the night snack market.
Therefore, when there is no longer a queue in front of the door, Night Bun no longer focuses on the model of "selling breakfast at night" for young consumer groups, but returns to the positioning of ordinary catering after removing the differentiated positioning of young people and night consumption scenes. It's just that when I looked up at this time, I found that other night bun brands with various prefix names had involved the sinking market in an uncontrollable copycat war.
The exit of star investors, the carefully woven "catering fairy tale" being beaten back to its original shape by reality, and the irrepressible cottage challenge of the sinking market, the "offline queuing kings" will collectively lose focus in 2023. This also verifies a truth: in the catering industry, there is no eternal king.
Disappearing rituals: mulled wine, tea brewed around the hearth, breakfast machineBack around Christmas in 2021, street stalls selling mulled wine can be seen everywhere on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai at night. Although the cost of a glass of mulled wine is at least 10 yuan. A "stall owner" said in an interview with ** that he had just returned to his capital after selling for a week. But this does not prevent young people from developing mulled wine into a ritual of winter.
Just one year later, the lingering aftertaste of mulled wine has not faded, and young people have fallen in love with the hearth tea from Yunnan in the winter of 2022. Looking at the red glow of the charcoal fire in the pottery oven, taking a bite of roasted peanuts, sweet potatoes or delicate refreshments, you will have all the warmth and ritual you need in winter.
By the winter of this year, the cooking of tea around the stove was also put into the cold palace, and a number of Chinese-style tea houses were on the verge of closure. As early as in "Can "Cooking Tea Around the Hearth" Win the Third Space? In the article, the Surprise Research Institute analyzed that as a unique way of socializing, making tea around the stove is actually selling a "third space" similar to Starbucks, so it will attract many young people who don't drink tea to experience the check-in, but the problem is that the consumption threshold of "cooking tea around the hearth" is much higher than that of ordinary teahouses or even coffee shops.
Previously, the results of the research institute showed that the ** price of most teahouses was about 200 yuan per person. If calculated according to a table of 2 to 4 people, the total price will range from 400 yuan to 800 yuan. In addition, tea, refreshments and fruit platters for 2-4 people** are usually priced between 400 and 500 yuan.
The excessively high consumption threshold makes making tea around the stove incompatible with the popular concept of rational consumption. In the competition with other "third spaces", there is no obvious advantage in brewing tea around the hearth, on the contrary, after the passenger flow of one-time check-in users disappears, it quickly enters a period of decline.
Maintaining a "sense of ritual" requires self-discipline or a constant sense of freshness. And the disappearing "sense of ritual" is the same as the breakfast machine that once became popular for a short time, without continuous freshness, and lost to the "laziness" of human nature. But the "sense of ritual" has not really disappeared, but has shifted to new forms of consumption.
Disappearing health placebos: sugar-free sparkling water, oat milkThe FMCG track has always tested the word "fast", and after successfully opening up the sugar-free sparkling water track, Yuanqi Forest became a unicorn with a valuation of $15 billion, and soon fell into a growth dilemma.
In August 2022, Yuanqi Forest launched "Cola-flavored sparkling water" in an attempt to create a second growth curve. However, in the year after the launch of the new product, both the market heat and the sales performance were less than expected. Even because of the sugar substitute turmoil, Yuanqi Forest, which originally took health and wellness as its core value, was tortured by users, and many consumers began to "change their minds".
Some consumers who continue to pursue health goals have begun to like tea drinks with more "refreshing" ingredient lists, such as Oriental Leaf and Suntory Oolong Tea. Another part of the "awakening" young people who consume it have re-embraced carbonated drinks and began to cherish the simple happiness brought by "happy water".
The "oat milk", which has been popular since 2020, has also undergone a process of disenchantment in 2023. According to data, in the seven months after the outbreak of the epidemic, the sales growth rate of oat milk reached 212%, ranking first among all food and beverage categories. Until March 2021, oat milk still maintained a rapid development momentum, with a year-on-year growth rate of 36947%。
From KOLs to chain coffee shops, oat milk is expensive, and Starbucks alone sells 62 million cups of oat latte in China a year. The market demand stimulated by this has even made oat milk brand OATLY call out the lack of production capacity and spend a lot of money to build a factory. This year, Oatly also successfully landed on NASDAQ and won the title of "No. 1 Oat Milk Stock" in the world.
oatly official website.
However, Oatly's financial report data shows that from 2019 to 2022, its loss reached 70.1 billion US dollars, and the first three quarters of 2023 are still 1With a loss of $1.8 billion, revenue in the Asian market fell 31% year-on-year in the third quarter2%。Compared to the new trend of oat milk that was once led, Oatly's name is more frequently associated with the "IQ tax".
The concept of oat milk's main plant-based drink is no stranger to Chinese consumers, and compared with plant-based drinks such as soy milk and coconut milk, oat milk lacks an audience base. Secondly, oat milk is usually 3 times more than regular milk. If it is placed in the context of the market dominated by consumption upgrading before the epidemic, maybe oat milk can be as popular as functional gummies for a while, but more and more rational consumers soon find that it is only a product that is inflated and has no characteristics in terms of actual experience such as taste, so it is difficult to pay only for the value point of "health".
Therefore, what everyone didn't expect was that on the track of health preservation, brands have begun to think about how to let themselves survive first.
Disappearing middle-class standards: Canada goose, camping, Sam's ClubIn 2018, Jack Ma made a public appearance in a green down jacket at an event and successfully finalized the Internet celebrity script for Canada Goose. At the end of the same year, Canada Goose opened its first offline store in Beijing, reportedly having to queue for 30 minutes to enter the store. It was also from this winter that Canada goose became the standard for the middle class.
However, in the 5 years since it became popular, as Mr. Ma retreated into the background, his popular Canada goose was also put into the cold by Chinese consumers because of the "double standard for returns" incident. According to the financial report data, in fiscal year 2023, Canada Goose's Asia-Pacific revenue declined in the first three fiscal quarters. In the second quarter of fiscal 2024, Canada Goose's revenue in the Asia-Pacific region increased by 13%, and while it still maintained the strongest momentum among several regions, the increase was much lower than the 52 in the first quarter2%。
At the same time that Canada goose has become a "paste coffee", domestic down jackets have begun to make efforts to high-end product lines. And in 2023, the college student special forces who crossed between the three mountains and five mountains directly brought out a batch of national tide replacement products such as "camels" with their jackets.
Camping, which is also the "standard configuration of the middle class", has experienced a burst of fire, and there has also been a phenomenon of coldness. At the beginning of 2023, a camp manager revealed that the overall traffic fell by more than half, of which individual visitors fell by more than half. Due to the unsatisfactory flow of visitors, many camps have made significant income** and are unable to maintain normal operations. Some camp managers even transfer all camp equipment at half price and quit the camping industry.
Perhaps it was not only the middle-class group who camped with fire at the beginning, but only after the dissipation of the individual passenger flow that a small number of "real middle-class" remained. The rest of the middle-class group may have to deal with middle-aged workplace anxiety and consider whether to spend a gapyear, so their interest in the "middle-class standard" has faded.
In the past, spending more than 200 yuan to get a Sam's Club membership card and driving to Sam's Club on weekends to make big purchases was the daily routine of the middle class. Today, however, Sam's Club has become a supplier to the "sub-packaging party". **On platforms such as Xiaohongshu, sub-packaging has become a real business, and sellers use the most simple way to play the limited value of membership cards, and they don't care that this will shatter the "middle-class filter" of Sam's Club.
Of course, compared with the collapse of the "sub-packaging party" to its membership system, the ** battle between Sam's Club and Hema completely wiped out the superiority brought by boutique supermarkets to the middle class. When the price of durian mille-feuille cake is from 128 yuan to 85 yuan, people should know that Sam and Hema ** still have a middle-class tone, in order to compete for middle- and high-income users in first- and second-tier cities, both sides have reached the point of bayonet red.
Although the victory and defeat were not scored, they could only run blindfolded in order to win.
Disappearing ** Assassins: Ice Cream Assassins, Snack Assassins2023 is probably the year of the biggest challenge for all kinds of ** assassins. The ice cream assassin represented by Zhong Xuegao has become the focus of attention in the summer of 2022. But no one expected that only a year had passed, and Zhong Xuegao had staged a exciting plot of "buy one get one free" and layoffs and unpaid wages. During this period, the 21 branches of the main company of the Zhongxuegao brand have been shown to be cancelled, and its assets of 5.5 million yuan have also been frozen.
According to the Red Star Capital Bureau, a number of supermarkets and ice cream wholesale stores in Chengdu posted advertisements for Zhong Xuegao to buy 1 get 1 free. On social **, many netizens also found that Zhong Xuegao's full range of ice cream, which was originally priced from 13 yuan to 18 yuan, was actually priced at 4The ** price of 99 yuan is a "big sale".
Zhong Xue ** Fang Weibo.
Time has changed, and the sudden changes in Zhong Xuegao's body show that under the wave of rational consumption, the Ecuadorian pink diamond of 66 yuan is not more than the green mood of 3 yuan. When down-to-earth domestic products are wildly consumed in the live broadcast room, the summer of 2023 has also become the most chilling moment for ice cream assassins.
Perhaps it is a lesson from Zhong Xuegao's past, BESTORE, which has been developing "high-end snacks" since 2019, will use the method of "cutting itself" in 2023 to reduce the price of 300 products by an average of 22% and a maximum of 45%, thus opening the "cost-effective era" of the snack industry. At the end of 2022, the three squirrels also clarified the core strategy of "high-end cost performance" for the first time, realizing profit overflow by optimizing the whole link of the ** chain, and at the same time transferring profits to consumers to achieve high quality and cost performance.
In the past, why did the snack assassins who "didn't have two or three hundred can't get out" "let go" consumers? The reason behind it is nothing more than the high **, which has led to a sharp drop in customer traffic, which has seriously affected the revenue of snack brands.
In fact, for a long time in the past, BESTORE and Three Squirrels were synonymous with high-end snack food. For example, Three Squirrels has won the favor of many young people in product IP through continuous brand launch. However, this high premium is not directly related to the product, on the contrary, when consumers tend to consume rationally, the brand premium is often regarded as an "IQ tax".
It is worth noting that when the snack assassins announced the implementation of the cost-effective route, the snack collection stores that seized the county market have penetrated the psychological cognition of consumers with down-to-earth brand positioning and cost performance, and in the long run, there will be a battle between the two. The disappearance of the "** assassin", on the one hand, shows that the consumer market has returned to the era of cost performance, and on the other hand, it also shows that in the past period of time, in the context of consumption upgrading, brands have only relied on high-end personalities and high gross profits created at the brand level, which has become an obstacle.
Sometimes, it is not high-end to be able to follow the market to increase the price, but when the market generally reduces the price, it can still maintain the original ** and consumers pay for it, which is considered high-end.
Disappearing young social scenes: escape rooms, script killingsThe escape room and script killing that were brought on fire by variety shows were still a veritable "young social scene" in the first two years. In particular, when the script killing track ushered in the entry of capital in 2018, it started a rapid expansion on and offline. Industry data shows that from January to December 2019, the number of script killing stores on Meituan Dianping expanded from 2,400 to 120,000 units.
During the epidemic, offline script killing was severely impacted, but players who had just entered the game were enthusiastic and flocked to a number of script killing apps such as "I Am a Mystery". The owners of the script killing stores also thought that after the lockdown, they could usher in the recovery of consumers. But the reality is that the recurrence of the epidemic has led to a discontinuation in the growth of script killing players.
During the period of living at home, the original mature players either developed new hobbies, or their interest in script killing was not as good as before, so the owners of script killing stores had to keep an eye on various costs such as rent, labor, water and electricity, while trying to find ways to bring back old players while trying to develop new players.
But like KTV and Di Bar, it has become extremely difficult to attract back users after missing the market cultivation period, so the escape rooms and script killing bosses who have been fighting for love power generation also choose to say goodbye to their entrepreneurial projects in 2023.
As one of the reasons for the decline of escape rooms and script killing, the special forces who "go wherever you want" that were born after the opening of traffic also made people see that brave young people began to be busy enjoying life, and the original intention of socializing has also shifted.
They sometimes boast of social phobia, or avoid communication under the pretext of being an "i-person". But the fact is that in the past few years, they have also developed a psychological state of insecurity and uncertainty about the future due to the uncertainty brought about by the epidemic.
Therefore, a considerable number of people will choose to reject the "ineffective socialization" that cannot bring them any pleasure or help, and silently say in their hearts "let go of personal qualities and enjoy a life without virtue", and only focus on social methods that make them feel calm and happy. Despite this, the social needs of young people are still there, and the most important question to answer now is what is the next scenario?
The Disappearing Smart Home: Smart SpeakersIn 2023, when ChatGPT has become a new outlet, intelligent and large models have once again become a new hot spot sought after by enterprises. Just compared with the specific applications in the current AIGC field, some smart homes in the past are becoming more and more like lies made up by hardware manufacturers in order to sell goods.
For example, smart speakers,The biggest highlight and function is voice interaction,In the environment of the whole house smart home,It can also be used as a voice "remote control"。 But the problem is,When the smart speaker first came out,Whole house intelligence is just a concept,So the smart speaker only acts as a voice song orderer more often。
This is also why the smart speaker market, which continued to explode from 2016 to 2019, will begin to cool down in 2020. According to the data of "Monthly Tracking of China's Smart Speaker Retail Market" released by Lotu Technology (RUNTO), in the first half of this year, the omni-channel sales of China's smart speaker market were 11.48 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 19%; The sales volume was 33700 million yuan, down 20% year-on-year, and each month showed a double-digit decline compared with the same period last year.
There are also some smart homes that refer to the smart speaker-style "useless mix and match" model. For example, "singing air conditioner" and "refrigerator that can see the best quality", through the grafting of product functions, a number of household appliances with intelligent functions and higher prices have been created, but the actual use experience does not meet expectations.
Users who return to daily life will find that energy saving is far more important for air conditioners than being able to sing, and no one will actually move a chair to sit in front of the refrigerator to watch dramas. In science fiction works such as "Westworld", people have also seen what the ideal smart home looks like: you can remotely control any electrical appliance in the room through voice interaction, and the system will intelligently adjust the temperature and humidity in the room according to different scenes, and even take into account your physical condition to formulate a menu and order ingredients for you.
All in all, consumers' expectations for smart homes are at least Batman Bruce Wayne's old butler Ah Fu, not a voice-activated speaker that can only sing "are you OK".
Disappearing retro consumption: CCD cameras, handhelds, feature phonesIn the past, retro has almost been synonymous with fashion, and the return of CCD cameras to the public eye is something that many people did not expect.
JD.com's sales data shows that in the first half of 2022, the sales of CCD cameras increased by 15 times year-on-year, while the number of CCD cameras bought by the Z world increased by 20 times year-on-year. It may be difficult for digital enthusiasts to accept, but CCD cameras have indeed become one of the most popular electronic products among young people today.
The Stinging Institute in "Young People Prefer "Old" Things? It is mentioned that the CCD camera is an efficient prop with a fixed filter for hipsters who take pictures for the purpose of taking pictures. But at the same time, it's a trendy object. Whether it's as a symbol of hipsters, or to feel the new trend in the purchase and use experience of "celebrity style", or even to provide social currency for personal account content releases, the cost of buying a CCD is not enough to match the value it generates.
It's cool when CCD is just a niche hobby, but once you become an internet celebrity, it will only speed up the trend change, and even attract the scythe of the people who are chasing the pop.
The price of CCD cameras in the second-hand market was no more than 100 yuan, but after becoming a "retro consumption", the market ** has increased by 10 times. The CCD camera on the second-hand trading platform** has stabilized between 400 and 1000 yuan. Some unscrupulous businesses will also use the shell of the CCD camera to put on the lens and parts of the chain car recorder, reassemble it into the CCD camera, and even form a complete set of gray industrial chain of fake and shoddy CCD cameras. This makes the young group who have no ability to discriminate physically and mentally exhausted.
Similar to CCD, there are also 3DS and Nokia feature phones. These retro consumption phenomena reflect the "difference-seeking" psychology of young people pursuing retro culture.
The German sociologist Zimmer once proposed that when people find themselves in tune with the rest of society, they adopt a new fashion to maintain their distance from their imitators. This new fashion that creates difference can make young consumers feel "different" and show their individuality.
There's nothing wrong with using retro consumption to make a statement, but nostalgia isn't always fun, and being an e-waste picker doesn't sound cool at all.
Disappearing draft variety show: "Idol Practice Xi" and "Creation 101"."Talent variety show" was once the "greatest invention" of domestic entertainment, which perfectly avoided business requirements and personal capabilities, allowing traffic stars to be rapidly marketed at a growth rate comparable to that of "white feather chickens". However, the speed of the collapse of draft stars is faster than the demolition of shanty towns, and the counterpart of the Xi students has become "stepping on the sewing machine".
From the perspective of the market, "talent variety show" is also a waste of resources to a certain extent. It is not difficult to find that although the contestants in the talent show eventually debuted in the form of a group, it is inevitable that they will disband after the group is formed, and almost all of them who can continue to be active in front of the stage are individuals. This means that from the beginning of program production to the later group debut and team marketing, it has all become a service for one person, but the return on investment is indeed considerable.
"Idol Practice Xi" and "Creation 101", which were launched in 2018, opened the curtain of the men's and women's comprehensive stage respectively. According to iResearch data**, the total industrial scale of China's idol market will reach 100 billion yuan in 2020, and the market size of girl groups will exceed 20 billion. And the total box office of Chinese films in 2019 was 6426.6 billion yuan, which shows that it only took 3 years for the talent show variety show to develop a new market comparable to the scale of 30% of domestic films.
However, the barbaric growth of fan circle culture has bred negative news such as "fans publicly raised tens of millions", "organizers ran away to mention seaview houses", and "scan code to pour milk incident". With the intervention of supervision, domestic entertainment talent shows have entered a freezing period, and the entertainment industry, which has always been impetuous, has become grounded.
The "absence" of traffic artists has led to the "return" of a large number of mature stars. Whether it is Wang Xinling, who blew up middle-aged male fans with a song, or the "0713 Reemployment Men's Group" that became popular with his true colors, or Ning Li and Zhang Songwen, who came out of the circle with their roles, and Phoenix Legend and Wu Bai, who dominated the "Circle of Friends Concert", have all become treasure singers or treasure actors in the eyes of the audience.
What's more, they don't need fans to vote, and the best-sold concert tickets and movie box office are the best way to support. This also verifies from the side that it is not advisable to promote the growth of seedlings, and the truth that "ginger is still old and spicy".
In summary, looking back on 2023, rationality has become the core of almost all changes in consumer preferences.
After experiencing the blow caused by the uncertainty brought about by the epidemic, people really felt the change in demand from consumption upgrading to consumption grading. When consumers tighten their wallets, they begin to learn to distinguish all kinds of consumption traps, and continue to learn from the "pits" they have stepped on in the past. The process of making consumption decisions will become longer and the demand will be more demanding. Even in terms of cultural and entertainment consumption, they began to care about whether the singer sang falset-to-lip outside the live atmosphere.
As for merchants, rather than looking forward to a new round of outbreak, perhaps they should consider how to discover more small fortunes in stability, so as to capture the current market trends with products and services that meet the actual needs of consumers.