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** 007 of the brand world
Author 007 of the brand world
Zhong Xuegao, who once claimed that "love is not wanted", finally no one wanted it.
Recently, the "sky-high ice cream" Zhong Xuegao has attracted attention again due to the freezing of his equity.
According to Tianyancha, Zhong Xuegao has added 3 new equity freezing information, and the frozen equity amounts are 20 million yuan, 10 million yuan, and 5 million yuan respectively.
This is not the first time Zhong Xuegao has been frozen in equity.
In 2023, Zhong Xuegao has successively added 4 pieces of equity freezing information, and the frozen equity amounts are 1 million yuan and 139 yuan respectively570,000 yuan, 139570,000 yuan, 1 million yuan.
In other words, up to now, the cumulative amount of Zhong Xuegao's frozen equity is as high as about 40 million yuan.
Along with the freezing of equity, there is a series of other negative news about Zhong Xuegao, layoffs, salary arrears, discounts**...
A series of signs show that the once glorious "Hermes of the ice cream industry", the brand cycle seems to have entered the countdown, and now it is just hanging a breath and struggling to hold on.
If you open the major social networks**, you will find that Zhong Xuegao, who used to be quite high-profile in marketing, is now only a piece of chicken feathers.
Zhong Xue's last tweet was on August 11, 2023. Xiaohongshu's official account and official Weibo also stopped updating on August 22 and September 14 last year, respectively, and the update was stopped for more than half a year.
In the era of eyeball economy, especially for those Internet celebrity brands that rely on online topics** to bring goods, stopping publicity is tantamount to "suicide".
But keeping a low profile seems to be Zhong Xuegao's best choice at the moment.
On the one hand, Zhong Xuegao may really not be able to pay the salary of the publicity and distribution department.
In October last year, a netizen who claimed to be an employee of Zhong Xuegao broke the news, making Zhong Xuegao, who wanted to be low-key, the focus of the world.
The netizen revealed, "The salary in August was said to be delayed, and it was not paid at the appointed time, there was no explanation, and no one could be found." A large number of employees who were laid off in the same batch or even in the previous batch could not get their hard-earned money, and losing money was even more ...... far away”
The time period when Zhong Xuegao's employees were exposed to "salary arrears" coincided with the suspension of his official social media.
On the other hand, Zhong Xuegao really can't sell anymore.
In the summer of 2023, Zhong Xuegao was exposed**"shrinking", and the official *** carried out a series of discount** activities. Now it seems that Zhong Xuegao has no intention of stopping the concession activities.
On March 5th, "Chief Brand Observation" opened Zhongxuegao Tmall's official *** and found that the ice cream that was originally 18-24 yuan was generally discounted, and the single ice cream fell to single digits after the discount.
For example, the original price of 181 yuan is 12 pieces of "family portrait series", and the ** after the coupon is 11942 yuan.
In a cold drink franchise store in Pinduoduo, Zhong Xuegao's 10 light milk ice creams are priced at 47 yuan, about 4 yuan each7 yuan; If it is a Zhongxuegao expiring product, ** has been reduced to 25 yuan a piece.
Internet celebrity is the only way to the brand, just as CCTV was the only way to the brand 20 years ago. Lin Sheng, the founder of Zhongxuegao, has publicly expressed his determination to take the route of single product Internet celebrity.
In fact, Lin Sheng has a lot of experience in being an Internet celebrity brand.
Lin Sheng, who came from the advertising industry, established a management consulting company in 2004 and served well-known brands such as Guanshengyuan, White Rabbit, and Master Kong.
What really made Lin Sheng famous in the industry was his packaging of the two major ice cream brands in Northeast China, Modern and Zhongjie, and allowed him to summarize the way to build an Internet celebrity brand in practice: tell a good brand story and detonate on social platforms.
In 2015, when he was in the first Modern Ice Cream, Lin Sheng focused on the ancient palace recipes and traditional crafts of Modern and excavated the cultural heritage of Modern from historical stories, so that Modern expanded from the original Harbin store to 30 stores in just one year, with sales exceeding 10 million.
In 2016, Lin Sheng was approached by Zhongjie Ice Cream, and he created a more high-end story for the brand by connecting Zhongjie with Zhang Zuolin, a prominent figure in the Northeast.
At Lin Sheng's suggestion, Zhongjie launched the "Zhongjie 1946" series of ice cream, with a range of 20 yuan, but through the promotion of platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Zhongjie 1946 has become the first generation of Internet celebrity ice cream brand, even if it is expensive, it is still sold in e-commerce channels.
Source: Zhongjie 1946 official WeChat.
The success of Modern and Zhongjie gave Lin Sheng the idea of creating a high-end Internet celebrity ice cream brand.
So, in 2018, Zhong Xuegao was born.
Lin Sheng has created an imaginative brand story for it:
Zhong Xuegao is composed of three surnames of traditional Chinese culture, which is also a homonym for "Chinese ice cream", representing his desire to create the highest quality ice cream brand in China; The unique tile design not only represents traditional culture, but also makes people unable to refuse the high value.
Source: Zhong Xue ** Wei.
At the same time, Zhong Xuegao planted grass frantically on multiple platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Station B, and expanded his popularity through big anchors to bring goods, Li Jiaqi, Luo Yonghao and other head live broadcast rooms have "gotten on" Zhong Xuegao's products, coupled with celebrity endorsements, Zhong Xuegao quickly became an Internet celebrity brand with social attributes.
On Double 11 in 2018, Zhong Xuegao launched the "Ecuador Pink Diamond" ice cream priced at 66 yuan, creating a record of 20,000 sales in 15 hours.
In 2021, Zhong Xuegao also launched a milk ice cream with macadamia nuts, chopped pistachios, and dried apricots, which was priced at as high as 160 yuan.
Source: Zhong Xue ** Wei.
Looking at it now, Zhong Xuegao belongs to a typical "debut is the peak".
In fact, if Zhong Xuegao adheres to the high-end route and is tough with brands such as Häagen-Dazs and Menglong, as a domestic product, it may be able to fight its way out.
But Zhong Xuegao's mistake is that he wants and wants.
In the summer of 2022, in order to increase sales, Zhong Xue's high-priced and low-priced ice cream was sold together, which made the wallets of many netizens who did not know the truth sting.
Since then, "* has become Zhong Xuegao's original sin, and the Chinese ice cream that was once wildly sought after has become the "ice cream assassin" in the mouth of netizens.
The 180° reversal of word-of-mouth is obviously not within Lin Sheng's expectations, and the sentence with full confidence in his interview, "It's just that**, do you love it" went viral on social platforms, and was criticized by netizens.
However, the last straw that really crushed Zhongxue's reputation was people's doubts about the quality of its products.
According to public information, Zhong Xuegao has been administratively punished twice by the regulatory authorities, both for false publicity.
One is that Zhong Xuegao advertised "pure milk frankincense" and other content in the webpage of a light milk ice cream product sold on Tmall. However, after official verification, the ingredient list of this ice cream product clearly contains drinking water ingredients.
On the other hand, Zhong Xuegao's red grape ice cream advertises that "it does not contain a single grain of sucrose or sugar substitute, and only uses special red grapes from the core grape growing areas of the Turpan Basin", but the inspection report shows that the red raisins are rated as "bulk grade 1".
In July 2022, a paragraph about "using a lighter to ignite Zhong Xuegao is suspected of not burning" went crazy on the Internet, and Zhong Xuegao was involved in food safety and other issues, and fell into various negatives again.
The product has been questioned repeatedly, but in fact, it reflects a common problem of Zhongxuegao's Internet celebrity brands - fatness.
Due to the over-reliance on story packaging, marketing hype and other means for the growth of influencer brands, there is very little investment in product research and development.
Source: Zhong Xue ** Wei.
Therefore, Internet celebrity brands often have a huge momentum in the early stage, but they can't withstand more stringent consumer trials, and once they fall into food safety issues and other first-class turmoil, they are like a building in the air without a foundation, and the building will soon overturn.
Internet celebrities can't "become popular", mostly because of this.
Lin Sheng once said, "If you can't even be an Internet celebrity, then don't be a brand."
Obviously, he overestimated the vitality of the influencer brand.
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