textZhu Zhicong.
Creating a new brand is like racing on a narrow track: with giants in front and a storm looming behind, the helmsman of the brand needs to find every gap between them, cut into every fleeting opportunity, and achieve overtaking in corners.
In the outgoing year of 2023, opportunities and challenges coexist in the new consumer market. Someone has risen to fame, someone has been shuffled out;There are the steady and steady plays of the leaders, and there are the Jedi counterattacks of the latecomers.
As many people fall, as many as they sum up their experience and start again. Data shows that in 2023, the number of new merchants on Tmall will increase by 70% year-on-yearDuring the Double 11 period, 1,606 brands within three years of creation won the championship of the trend new category. "World Online Business" also observed that on different tracks, there are cutting-edge brands that stand out with unique product innovation, market insight and business resilience, and take advantage of the "trend" of the times to grow rapidly.
On December 28, the world's online merchants held the annual conference of the "2023 New Online Business Summit", and invited Luo Weibo, founder of the sports technology brand "Merrick", Zhou Chongyi, founder of the cheesecake brand "Kumo Kumo", Xiao Mu, founder of the handmade siu mai brand "One Dog Doge", and Jin Yuanliang, founder of the massager brand "Miaojie", to come to the scene. In the past year, the sales of these new brands have reached hundreds of millions or even 1 billion yuan.
Xiong Weilin, general manager of Tianxia e-commerce, had a one-hour roundtable discussion with the four founders of the new brand. During this period, we have seen the ever-changing innovation of products and channels, the marketing strategy that keeps pace with the times, the courage and business wisdom of entrepreneurs, and the inexhaustible motivation of new consumer brands.
The wheels of the times are rolling forward, and countless "momentum makers" and "spoilers" are enthusiastically appearing. They cut through every treacherous bend and used the ever-changing situation as a boost to seal the final victory.
Everyone doesn't understand why Miaojie can turn a 10-year-old product into a phenomenal hit. Jin Yuanliang, founder of the Miaojie brand, said with a smile.
Differentiation is an eternal question that every new brand has to face when creating a brand. In the mature track with a stable audience, the new brand can only avoid head-to-head confrontation with the giants by relying on its unique product strength. Blindly piling up fierce materials and rolling up research and development is not the only solution to this problem.
The "product 10 years ago" mentioned by Jin Yuanliang is the physical massager that Miaojie sells 40 million yuan a year. The appearance of this product is simple and the technical content is not high, but Jin Yuanliang asked rhetorically: When consumers use massagers to relieve body aches, do they really need Bluetooth, **gorgeous shape and expensive leather?
Miaojie chooses to do subtraction in reverse, cutting off the function of "bells and whistles", and only meticulously polishing the core position such as the massage head, "the ultimate simplicity." Jin Yuanliang believes that respecting consumer needs and using good steel on the blade can achieve the prototype of popular products.
Jin Yuanliang, founder of the Miaojie brand.
A doge has a similar idea. Xiaomu, the founder of the brand, said frankly that buns, dumplings, glutinous rice balls and other categories have basically been occupied by giants, and a dog doge cuts into the sub-category of "handmade paper skin siu mai". At present, the lightness and thinness of the "paper skin" cannot be replicated by machine products, and a dog doge has set the weight of a single siu mai at 90 grams, which happens to be stuck in the upper limit of the weight of 80 grams of mechanism siu mai.
This is the product barrier of a dog, "It is a moat to avoid the big guy from catching up." ”
Finding a category that has been ignored by the "big guys" and relying on the unique product tonality to start the brand voice in one fell swoop, such counterattacks have been repeatedly staged in the new consumption track.
Merrick's approach is the same: avoid the hottest category in the field of fitness equipment - treadmills, and also avoid the most common "involution" trap between brands - competition parameters, and instead start from "appearance" to make a batch of white and wood grain fitness equipment, which is more suitable for modern home decoration style.
According to Luo Weibo, the founder of the Merrick brand, the company has also launched a complete set of fully intelligent adjustment solutions for the movement resistance, speed and other parameters of the equipment, which is evenly shared, and the cost has only increased by 30 yuan, but it has effectively boosted sales and customer unit price. At present, Merrick's rowing machines, elliptical machines, and spinning bikes are all No. 1 in omni-channel sales.
Kumo Kumo, which started with offline stores, is even more aware of consumers' "sense of experience". According to Zhou Chongyi, the founder of the brand, Kumo Kumo emphasized "subversive visual design" when opening the store, boldly using an all-orange color scheme, which was nicknamed "Hermes Orange" by consumers. In addition, Kumo Kumo also added details such as rattles and cake branding, "to make the experience the extreme." ”
In the final analysis, the core of differentiation is nothing more than "considering the needs of consumers". But only by understanding and grasping the most sensitive and core needs can new brands tear open the cracks in the seemingly saturated market and find their own foothold.
Where is the "potential energy" of new consumption?Every brand has a different understanding of this.
From a macro point of view, the brand has its own "time and place", and it is even full of irreproducible coincidencesIf the focus is on the individual, outstanding results are often the result of "following the trend". When the time comes, brands can even take the initiative to "build momentum" and drive change in the entire industry.
For a dog, self-** and live e-commerce are its most important "potential". Xiaomu introduced that a dog doge was founded in 2020, when the dividends of self-promotion had not faded, and the influence of live broadcast e-commerce was also very high.
In the first two months of a dog's brand, live streaming accounted for more than 70% of the sales generated by omnichannel. Kogi said that such opportunities are hard to come by, "[new brands] will be very slow to gain momentum if they don't do a concentrated explosion." ”
A dog, the founder of the DOGE brand, Kogi.
In contrast, when Miaojie launched the first batch of promotion, it chose two more vertical groups: lawyers and postgraduate bloggers. Jin Yuanliang believes that these two types of KOLs have a greater influence in the fan group, and their audience's potential demand for massager products is also higher.
After "Extreme Simplicity", this is the second card played by Mystic World: Extreme Scenario. To this day, Miaojie is still committed to finding subcategories, cooperating with middle-waist anchors, facilitating transactions and cultivating fans in a "very small live broadcast room". Jin Yuanliang said that this is all the "dirty work" that online brands disdain to do, but it is these trivial channels that support the monthly sales of up to 40 million yuan.
Like Myojie, Kumo Kumo is also trying to take a more "decentralized" route. In Zhou Chongyi's words, the brand's momentum is based on offline stores, and the second is to catch up with the dividends of the platform.
This bonus is "sharing". From Moments, Weibo to Xiaohongshu, the importance of a sharing out of the circle to brand promotion is self-evident. To this end, Zhou Chongyi asked Kumo Kumo's offline stores to do one thing: let all the people who take pictures look good, "good-looking ** naturally loves to share, and there is traffic." ”
Founder of the Kumo Kumo brand, Zhou Chongyi.
In the process of finding potential energy, brands will also encounter a variety of heart-warming **. Different routes can fundamentally change the face of a brand, or it can lead to a dead end.
Luo Weibo mentioned a "mistake" that impressed him: in 2021, Merrick caught up with the fascia gun. During that time, fascia guns once accounted for about 80% of the company's GMV, and Luo Weibo's friends all said that Merrick was a fascia gun brand. He felt "it's over" and "our goal has always been to do indoor fitness. ”
"Potential energy" is a coin, and one side of this coin is "surprising" and the other side is "upright". Surprisingly, the sword is on the wrong side of the sword, helping the brand to win short-term benefits;Shou is to hold the heart and patiently guide the brand to the right future.
Xiong Weilin, general manager of Tianxia E-commerce, pointed out at the 2023 New E-commerce Summit that brands can be divided into four levels: white label, repurchase brand, category brand, and mental brand. From "first-class driven" to "mentally driven", it is the process of establishing the new brand's own position, and it is also the ladder to gradually seek brand premium.
Most of the new brands that can emerge today have passed the first three stages and become the best in one or several categories. However, in order to leap to the "mental brand", entrepreneurs often have to solve more "metaphysical" puzzles such as culture, personality, and value.
Gamification is a key that Merrick has found.
Luo Weibo admits that it takes a lot of determination for sports brands to go down the path of gamification. He believes that all innovations in hardware and content can be imitated, and that the real threshold comes from "doing what others can't do". To this end, Merrick assembled a team of 50 people – they wanted to combine the "anti-human" business of fitness with the "human" side of games.
This move also leads to a larger goal. Luo Weibo said that in the future, games will be combined with AR and VR, "We may get tickets for the fitness metaverse." ”
The founder of the Merrick brand, Luo Weibo.
To Luo Weibo's surprise, Jin Yuanliang also went to Merrick's booth at the 2023 Sports Expo. At present, Miaojie has set up several teams to wait and see the direction of personal care and health care, family health and other directions. In the long run, Jin Yuanliang hopes that the brand will further extend the service chain, running through the whole process from early protection to later maintenance.
Jin Yuanliang said that the direction of Miaojie in the next three years is "cross-border integration". One example is that Miaojie is investing heavily in categories such as gua sha instruments and hot compress meters. These small innovations are expected to form a holistic set of health solutions in the future.
"Expanding the territory" is the basic action of brand upgrading, but the landing point is different. Some people choose to attack adjacent categories, and some people reflexively deepen R&D and production, and ask for efficiency from the first chain.
In 2022, a dog, Doge, decided to build his own factory. The brand started with the common glutinous rice siu mai in East China, relying on the factory's right to speak on the raw material side, a dog doge can not only customize glutinous rice varieties, but also extend to organic rice, selenium-rich rice, and even use coarse grains to make healthier low-gi siu mai.
According to Kogi, different regions in China have different preferences for the taste of siu mai, for example, pure meat siu mai is popular in North China, and seafood is popular in Cantonese siu mai. In the future, One Dog DOGE will continue to refine the product of handmade siu mai, and strive to create "the most complete type of siu mai in China".
Kumo Kumo, a new generation of Internet celebrity cheesecake brand, pointed out two key words: "large quantity" and "high frequency".
In Zhou Chongyi's plan, in 2024, Kumo Kumo will open franchises, and the number of offline stores will reach 500, which is four times higher than the sum of the past three years. In addition, Kumo Kumo will expand more snack categories based on cheese, and distribute products to e-commerce, convenience stores and other channels, "so that consumers can buy our products at their doorstep."
Channels, products, and the number of stores are three-pronged, and the ultimate goal is to go deep into the lives of consumers as much as possible to obtain high-frequency cognition and high-frequency consumption. To ascend to the throne of "mental brand", this is also an indispensable link.
There is also a chance in the Red Sea, and there are champions in the most detailed categories.
The fact that these new brands can reach the top spot in the big or small track is not only inseparable from the boost of the times, but also depends on the efforts and determination of the founding team, and also witnesses the inclusiveness of the new consumer market from the side.
Water is impermanent, and there is no established route for "potential" to follow. As summarized by the 2023 New Online Business Summit of the World's E-commerce Merchants, e-commerce gameplay has profoundly influenced the brand-building ideas of a generation, and the future of the new consumer market belongs to those brands that "follow the trend, take advantage of the trend, and rise from the momentum".
The new year is about to begin. The growth story of a new brand is always ongoing.