Produced by Tiger Sniffing Business Team

Author|Gegentana

Title Map|CFP

People who often use short video software know that the figures of celebrities are getting lower and lower.

Whether you are a food blogger, a car blogger, a beauty blogger, or a couple blogger, as long as you have a certain number of fans, you will have the opportunity to co-produce Douyin with celebrities. Sometimes, the star’s purpose is to promote the movie, and more often, it is the hot pot restaurant, barbecue restaurant, and milk tea shop platform opened for themselves.

Starting from Chen He’s Xian He Zhuang hot pot, the celebrities’ catering sideline has almost run through 2020: In June, Sun Yizhou’s barbecue brand “Zao Menkan” opened, and his good brother Chen He was invited to the opening ceremony; In July, Zheng Kai’s hot pot brand “Huofengxiang” officially opened; in September, Guan Xiaotong launched the milk tea brand “Natural Dai” as a “store manager”; in November, Huang Xiaoming also launched the barbecue brand “Shao Jiangnan”.

Without exception, when each brand opens, there is a large wave of short video marketing to cooperate, and the stars will also stand for each other’s new stores. In 2020, when the catering industry is wailing, the sideline business of the celebrities’ catering industry is prosperous.

When Chen He and Huang Xiaoming’s brand stores open, they will cooperate with a large number of Douyin bloggers to shoot short videos

Stars in a circle are intensively devoted to catering, and all brands have the same marketing methods…Behind these brands, there is the same “catering MCN”-Sichuan Zhishan Brand Management Company. Before cooperating with Chen He’s Xianhezhuang, the most famous brand under Sichuan Zhishan was Tan Yaxue.

A person in the catering industry close to the Sichuan Zhishan team told Huxi that, compared to other catering companies, Zhishan is very good at marketing and invests more than 100 million yuan in marketing every year.

What is the origin of this “dining MCN”? What are the calculations of the stars who have plunged into the catering industry and tinkered with their sideline?

“Trader”‘s self-awareness

As the trader behind this series of star restaurant franchise stores, Sichuan Zhishan’s emphasis on “marketing” has long been seen.

This company was established in 2011, and its predecessor was Chu Er Ge Catering Management Co., Ltd. Its group chairman Zhou Yang started as a frying master. Therefore, the first two brands under the group are all hot pots.

The opening site of Xianhezhuang Chengdu Store, with Zhou Yang on the left and Chen He on the second, picture source CFP

In 2018, Zhishan’s “Tan Duck Blood” brand quickly became popular with the opening of 100 new stores in 9 months. By the end of 2019, it had 175 stores nationwide. It is undeniable that Tan Yaxue’s positioning is very accurate: it has a pot bottom and uses duck blood as the main product, which is in line with the trend of “focusing on single products” in the catering industry in recent years. It is in line with the existing hot pot brand (under the sea). Fishing, baru, couco, etc.) differentiated competition, in a short timeOutstanding.

But the key secret to its expansion is also due to the franchise model and vouchers subsidized marketing. In the initial stage of Tan Yaxue, the radical subsidy model of “38 yuan deducts 100 yuan”, in line with the celebrity’s momentum to check in in the store, Tan Yaxue quickly opened up the situation.

Picture source CFP

After enjoying the sweetness of marketing, Sichuan Zhishan began to delve into new ways of marketing—in-depth alliance with celebrities, to maximize the passenger flow and brand awareness brought by celebrity traffic, and to quickly shop in franchise mode.

Take Xian and Zhuang as an example. Chen He, singer Ye Yiqian and host Zhu Zhen co-founded Xianhezhuang Hot Pot in 2015, but they have never become a large chain brand. Until 2019, Zhishan and Chen He’s Xianhezhuang jointly established Chengdu Xianhezhuang Company and began a round of publicity: Chen He cooperated with Douyin’s various Internet celebrities to shoot short videos in the Xianhezhuang store, and At the time when a new store opened, a large number of short videos were released. Up to now, Xianhezhuang has more than 600 stores nationwide.

Zhou Yang said in an interview with cover news at the end of 2019 that he positioned Sichuan Zhishan as a “hot pot brand incubation catering company”-from his first brother Chu Chu, to Tan Yaxue, and then to its subsidiary. The new brand Xianhezhuang and so on are all hot pot brands “hatched” by him.

In the above-mentioned interview, Zhou Yang believes that “the development of catering to this day, brand building is holistic, good products are the foundation, but also to provide added value. For example, our brand positioning is entertainment. Create popularity through celebrity building.”

However, judging from the degree of activity of these celebrity brands on short video platforms such as Douyin in the past year, Zhishan is not so much incubating hot pot brands as it has become a pure catering MCN.

In Zhou Yang’s conception, the hot pot category is naturally highly social, only to provide diners with enough excitement and enough points