In 2024, Luckin is still inseparable from Lu Zhengyao

Mondo Social Updated on 2024-02-24

According to the just-released Luckin 2023Q4 quarter and annual financial report, Luckin will add 8,034 new stores in 2023, almost double the 8,214 stores at the end of 2022. The annual operating income was 24903.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 873%。

2023 is undoubtedly a highlight year for Luckin, under the co-branding boom of the entire coffee and tea industry, Luckin and Moutai's "Sauce Latte" is the first to be popular, with sales of more than 5.42 million cups on the first day of launch, sales of more than 100 million yuan, and the stock price also rose by more than 5% on the next day.

Behind the big expansion, as an Internet company,Luckin has been steadily exporting in marketing and product development。In addition to the above-mentioned joint myths, Luckin has also launched raw coconut latte, a marketing hit with a taste of evergreen, as the basis, and small hits such as raw cheese latte and meteorite latte; In the private domain marketing circle that relies on acquaintance social networking and WeChat system, Luckin is also well-known.

Even back in 2020, when Luckin admitted financial fraud, the sentence "cut American capital leeks and invite Chinese to drink high-end coffee", directly turning the crisis into an opportunity to lay the foundation for passers-by and national popularity.

However, in addition to marketing and product development,For an instant drink brand, what is more important is the ** chain and the store opening model

This has to mention Cudi, a coffee brand founded by former Luckin founder Lu Zhengyao, which had less than 100 stores at the end of 2022 and nearly 7,000 by the end of 2023, and the number of store expansions last year was not much different from Luckin. But as a newly founded brand, Cudi is a little more fierce.

On the surface, Cudi's brand homepage generously stated that the management came from Luckin, and Cudi's expansion was inseparable from Luckin's foreshadowing; Judging from the performance of 2023, "New Position" believes that Luckin is even more inseparable from Cudi.

After all, if the concept of Chinese coffee wants to expand wildly, if only a single brand is alone, it is often easy to dodge.

Talking about Luckin in 2023, "sauce latte" is an unavoidable keyword.

Last year's instant drink co-branding boom,Luckin is not only doing the right thing about this craze, but also understanding the true meaning of catering and entertainment behind it.

If it is said that Hey Tea and luxury Fendi are co-branded, it can be regarded as a novel collision of different cultures among young people and mutual promotion; However, the marketing mix of Luckin and Moutai is to confront the current hotly discussed cross-age beverage culture conflict, and cater to young people to entertain them.

On the one hand, there is liquor that young people can't drink, and on the other hand, there is coffee that middle-aged people can't understand, and the combination is extremely impactful. When baijiu breaks away from its original cultural context, relies on coffee culture and the Internet, and enters the control area of young people, buying it no longer means that it echoes the original baijiu culture, but is an adventure and a new taste.

Coincidentally, a similar case is the Korean turkey noodles that sell well in the United States. According to Samyang's financial report, its sales in the U.S. in Q3 2023 more than doubled year-on-year. Americans, who originally couldn't eat spicy or even didn't like instant noodles, uncharacteristically actively embraced turkey noodles, which is undoubtedly related to the "spicy challenge" set off on TikTok, "spicy" has entered the field of vision of young Americans through TikTok carrying a new cultural context, and "eating spicy" has become an adventure for warriors.

Of course, the success of "Sauce Latte" did not happen overnightLuckin's years of marketing accumulation have created this natural selection case

"Sauce Latte" is undoubtedly a single product with greater marketing meaning than product taste, and a single product that satisfies both the dual meaning of taste and marketing has long been "another choice" for Luckin consumers - raw coconut latte. The combination of coconut water and latte is naturally not the first of its kind in Luckin, but Luckin has standardized the taste of this combination and brought it to the public and has become its own signature.

From the beginning of the metaphysics out of the circle, to the raw coconut latte, to the sauce latte, three marketing myths in four years, and then superimposed on other small explosive products, co-branded marketing activities, "Rui today", "Are you Rui today" ......Unlike coffee brands such as Starbucks and Mstand that focus on cultural space, Luckin, which basically does not do cultural space, has become the most widely used cultural symbol in the domestic coffee industry.

And Cudi, who is always one step slower in marketing, is not so comfortable.

After last year's "Sauce Latte", Cudi launched the "Wuchang Rice Coffee" series on the shelves within a few days, which is a joint name of Wuchang Rice and Cudi; In addition, on November 27, Luckin officially announced Yi Yang Qianxi as the spokesperson, and on January 5 this year, Cudi officially announced Wang Yibo, who is comparable in coffee position, as the spokesperson.

It makes sense that the two with similar positioning have similar marketing methods. But the key point is that marketing is often the most difficult link to replicate.

In terms of novelty, the novelty of Wuchang rice and coffee combination is comparable to that of "sauce latte", but because of the missed marketing opportunity, consumers began to "see it".

Choosing a marketing approach that stands out to itself is a must for every brand, but Cudi clearly has some way to go in this regard.

One of the things that Cudi Coffee is talked about is that "many of the core team are from Luckin", among which Lu Zhengyao and Qian Zhiya are the most typical, respectively, the original chairman and CEO of LuckinAnd the core competence of these two core figures naturally also represents the core competence of Luckin in the early stage and the current Cudi.

In the eyes of the outside world, even if Luckin is completely out of the circle in 2020, it is still a question whether it can survive, and of course Luckin cannot confidently think that it only relies on "cutting American leeks......"This kind of tricky argument can really turn a crisis into an opportunity. In the months that followed, Luckin's core management was shaken up.

It was also during this period that as the core founders, the "Lu faction" led by Lu Zhengyao and Qian Zhiya completely lost control of Luckin.

Judging from Lu Zhengyao's previous experience of founding Shenzhou Special Car and going public, and leading Luckin to be listed on the U.S. stock market, it is not difficult to speculate what Cudi is best at: he likes to use capital to tell new stories.

And Qian Zhiya, another core figure of Cudi, is Lu Zhengyao's old partner, and the original idea of founding Luckin was based on her, and she received support from Lu Zhengyao in all aspects such as funds and venues at the beginning. According to her speech at the time: "Luckin wants to make a cup of high-quality coffee and make a new retail model through the Internet, and our goal is to beat Starbucks (in China)." ”

One is good at telling good stories with capital, and the other is good at building models with Internet thinking. Cudi continued to precipitate on Luckin's side, and started to engage in a joint venture model. The joint operation model is a business model that does not charge a fixed fee for the associate in addition to the cost of decoration, equipment, raw materials, etc., but takes a cut from the gross profit margin, which is tantamount to upgrading the expansion speed again, which is why Cudi, which was just established in 2023, can open nearly 7,000 stores a year.

It's just that this model is strongly linked to real-time sales, and marketing largely determines sales, and a Cudi associate once publicly said on social **, "It's okay usually, but once Luckin has a hit on the market, I obviously feel that the number of orders in my store has decreased." ”

So it is inevitable that the current situation will arise:Marketing is Luckin's comfort zone, and even if it is borrowed by Cudi, it has limited results; Expansion and evolution is Cudi's killer feature, but it can be countered frequently by Luckin.

According to Luckin's overall financial report in 2023, Luckin Q1Q2 added 1,137 and 1,485 stores respectively, while the number of new stores in Q3Q4 was 2,437 and 2,975. On the other hand, Cudi has opened more than 3,000 stores in the first half of 2023. In the first half of the year, there was "Crazy Cudi" as a model, and I believe that Luckin, which was originally in the stage of seeking stability, will not be too frightened to open 5,412 stores in the second half of the year.

In most cases, the stores of the two will be not far away, although Luckin began to engage in the joint operation model of 0 franchise fee in 2021, but Cudi used it in the first year of its establishment and almost implemented it to the end.

According to a recent ** report, Cudi said: "At the moment we have safe cash flow,We have been planning and financial models for 5 years to ensure the smooth construction of the first-chain system, the implementation of the human-machine collaboration strategy and the brand marketing activities. However, judging from Lu Zhengyao's background, it is worth pondering whether this sentence is really full of confidence, or just to appease the outside world.

It is said that in 2023, Luckin will not be comfortable being forced by Cudi, the profits of both sides will be low, and the franchisee and associates will complain. But from another perspective, in 2023, when low prices are king, many consumers took the initiative to change from 15 yuan a cup of milk tea to 99's milk coffee, Ruiku's "business war" at the same time as snatching each other, but also snatching the milk tea market.

If there is no Cudi, as the only domestic coffee brand with the size of 10,000 stores, whether Luckin really has the ability to bite the coffee takeout market in China and even the world alone, and whether it will have the courage to open so many stores in 2023, I am afraid that even Luckin itself will have to draw a question mark.

In this way, Luckin needs Cudi more.

Of course, it's not just Luckin who needs Cudi, but also consumers: "I will support Cudi from time to time", "Without Cudi, where can Rui's 9."9”。

Cudi is undoubtedly backward in terms of marketing, not only the lack of big hits mentioned above, and the slow pace of hot marketing, but Cudi, a brand that writes "young" on the homepage, does not have Luckin to understand young people. Cudi, which is making a lot of noise these days, asking affiliates to sell Moutai in stores is a typical case. In addition, Cudi also has luck in marketing, such as his sponsorship of Messi's Argentine football team, and now Messi is deeply in the negative**.

However, Cudi's radical exploration of the model is another trial and error stone for Luckin, not only the above-mentioned crazy store opening in the joint venture model, ** war, etc., Cudi's human-machine collaboration strategy proposed at the beginning of 2024, as well as the official announcement of the second brand of tea cat, are all things that Luckin dares to think about but does not dare to do in the stage of seeking stability.

Perhaps Luckin himself has to admit that in this critical period of transition brought about by AI, under the wave of instant drinks going overseas, many new stories will be staged in the rapidly changing era, so it is not a good thing for Cudi, who is keen to tell new stories, to try and make mistakes, and to keep up with Luckin, who seeks stability.

In 2020, Luckin, who tried his best to get rid of the "Lu faction", has experienced 2023, but in fact, he still needs the "all-continental" Cudi.

The title picture and the accompanying pictures in the text** are on the Internet.

Related Pages