This article is from the public number: Li Meng (ID: imslimeng) , author: IMS founder Li Meng, from the title figure: Figure insects creative
In previous articles, shareAfter my views on “night economy”, “tracking economy” and “addictive economy”, let me talk about “sleep economy” today.
Three major pains of modern young people-hair loss, insomnia, and weight gain. Among them, insomnia indirectly leads to hair loss and weight gain.
Perhaps insomnia is the first major pain of young people. Do you know how bad the sleep quality of modern young people (especially after 90s) ?
The 2019 China Sleep Index Report shows that at least 300 million people in China have sleep disturbances. Among them, the post-90s young people are the hardest hit areas. Among them, 3/4 fall asleep after 11pm and 1/3 are 1am. Point to sleep.
People’s Net has a description: “Post-90s” has been the main consumer of sleep aid products, steam eye masks, soundproof earplugs, gravity blankets, sleep meters … fully armed from head to toe, but still can’t sleep. In 2019, the number of imported sleep aids purchased by the “post-90s” population in China increased by more than 100%, exceeding the total number of consumers of other age groups.
Why do young people “can’t sleep”? I think social networks may be blamed.
1. Because social networks are connected anytime and anywhere, the boundaries between work and life are gone. Returning home does not mean that the work is over. As soon as a phone call, an e-mail, or a message about you being @, you have to deal with work at once.
2. Social networks always disrupt your time rhythm. It is not that the workload ambassador is anxious, but that the rhythm of work is too chaotic, which directly leads to a sense of stress and anxiety. Important tasks that are temporarily arranged interrupt your rhythm, which will stimulate your emotions to some extent, which is normal.
Time is becoming less and less. In order to resist this lost emotion, post-90s young people tend to “revenge stay up all night”, this behavior patternIt is called “procrastination before bed”.
Before bedtime, most of the post-90s will play mobile phones, and many of them play mobile phones for more than an hour before going to bed.
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Alibaba’s “Night Economy” report shows that the highest peak of Taobao transactions is after 21:00, accounting for about 45% of the day’s consumption. In the middle of the night from 23 o’clock to 3 a.m., tens of thousands of people “took the latest night and bought the most expensive eye cream” on Tmall.
You do n’t feel sleepy, it ’s really “expensive”!
OK, post-90s young people can’t sleep well. It’s an obvious pain point. User pain is the driving force behind business.
01 Have you paid for “sleep economy”
It is said that the current “sleep economy” has catalyzed a huge market of hundreds of billions of yuan. The statistics are not important, the focus is on the business logic behind them-what are the consequences of long-term insomnia, and how can business innovation address these consequences?
The consequences of insomnia based on physiological logic
The human brain is like a city. There are many high-rise buildings in the city, and they will shrink many times at night to facilitate the removal of metabolic waste debris. If you do n’t sleep well for a long time, you just do n’t let the metabolic debris clear up. The long-term consequence is Alzheimer ’s disease. (Alzheimer ’s disease) The consequence is a split personality. The consequences of insomnia based on management logic
The greatest value of employees is to focus on things, and long-term insomnia can hardly make people focus. When you are trapped, you have to do things hard, and the efficiency will be very low. Time magazine statistics show that poor working conditions caused by insufficient sleep in the working class in the United States will lead to reduced productivity and increased risk of death, which can cause losses of about $ 411 billion a year.
Aiming at these costly insomnia consequences, a large number of business innovations have brought new business models, product logic and traffic strategies:
02 Business Model Innovation
Many companies, including Google, Facebook, Huffington Post, Huawei, Alibaba, etc., provide employees with a “sleep cabin” service.
Many small and medium-sized enterprises in Japan have converted vans into bedrooms and provided them to overtime employees. Toyota, Honda and even actively participated in these modification designs.
In the “sharing economy” bubble period in China, there have been some “shared sleep warehouse” companies, mainly for overtime workers of IT companies. The shape is a bit like a space capsule. The bunk space is private and independent. There are wireless networks, fans, reading lights, charging sockets and other facilities, and disposable bedding is provided. However, due to some technical bottlenecks, the industry has not done it.
Last year, two forms of internet celebrity bar restaurants-“Siesta Bar” and “Sleep Cafe” were particularly popular in many countries.
The threshold for starting a nap is particularly high. The key words are prime business locations + busy nobles.
For example, a nap bar “Siesta & Go” located in the central financial district of Madrid, Spain. (after a midday departure) , nearby are HSBC, Google, Deloitte Waiting for big companies, there are only 19 beds in the store, equipped with exquisite sheets, earplugs, slippers, you can wake up and drink a refreshing drink in the coffee area before leaving.
“Sleep Cafe” is an innovation of Nestlé challenging Starbucks. For example, the “Sleep Cafe” in Ginza, Tokyo also provides “Sleep Service” and “Siesta Service”. Guests will drink decaffeinated coffee before bedtime. It is generally believed that drinking coffee before bedtime will prevent sleep, but it does not contain caffeine Coffee can maintain sleep quality.
03 Product Logic Innovation
The spread of “procrastination before bedtime” is making nighttime diets popular. This “nighttime diet” is not the supper you and I often say. It is mainly a product that helps people relax and sleep better , Such as adding chamomile, lavender and other herbal formulas to tea drinks.
This is an era when focus is increasingly important to consumers. The food and beverage industry has long been targeting innovations in diet products that promote the soothing and relaxation of the human body at night, and even play more healthy functions.
For example, Mengniu recently launched a “good night” chamomile-flavored milk drink with a formula that focuses on soothing and sleep-aid effects. Brands even look forward to opening a window of opportunity for “new social retail”.
In recent years, many hardware brands have also actively participated in the market segmentation of the sleep economy, mainly from the direction of sleep monitoring, such as monitoring sleep quality through wearable devices such as bracelets. Samsung, Apple, and Xiaomi are entering this field with high profile. Even wearable devices cannot solve insomnia, but collecting hardware sleep data from users is only the first step, and these big data will be useful for future smart homes, AI applications, mobile health, etc. The development of the industry will be a great help.
04 Traffic Strategy Innovation
In recent years, sleep assistance has become part of the “traffic strategy” of many Internet companies. For example, in addition to a hypnotic sound effect, a domestic app called “Snail Sleep” can also record snoring dreams, monitor the depth and quality of sleep, and also develop sleep assistance products such as music smart pillows; Windy, a popular sound effect software in the United States It is through wind sound and 3D scene map to help you relax the visual and auditory nerves; Swedish sleep aid sound software Spotify, by playing the sound of rain, office air conditioning sound and so on to create a hypnotic atmosphere.
Among them, Spotify started with audio products, similar to the domestic Himalayan app and get app, the difference lies in the traffic strategy.
The business model of domestic audio apps is mainly IP payment (knowledge payment) , and Spotify started out as a music company and is in the sleep assistance market. In business, using sound patterns such as the sea, birdsong, bonfires, mandrills, and forests to help insomniacs relax and quickly fall asleep. It was later discovered that the maximum traffic window of the app is video podcasting, that is, video and audio must be operated together.
So, Spotify bought three podcasting companies in one breath and invested $ 400-500 million, which quickly caused the number of podcasts on the Spotify platform to exceed 500,000. Last year, Spotify ’s traffic revenue rose by 40%. . According to Spotify himself, “the conversion rate is too good”, so good it is hard to believe it is true.
It can be seen that the reason why the current traffic cost is getting more and more expensive, and what kind of traffic dividend is exhausted, the main entry point is not found right. The sleep economy is likely to be a new traffic entrance for a period of time in the future.
05 the two major exits of the “sleep economy”
In recent years, the main way for domestic Internet companies to discover the “sleep economy” bonus is online applets and apps. For example, night listening, snail sleep, small sleep, etc. are all based on content output and psychological massage. These companies are well aware of the pain points of users on this track, but often do not have good operations, which is a big regret.
In the whole year of 2019, the financing of companies related to the “sleep economy” has declined significantly. Only about 200 sleep brands have successfully raised financing. So, where is the exit of the “sleep economy”?
I think the domestic “sleep economy” related companies have lost two main points: one is that they don’t have a good sense of operating rhythm, and the other is that they can’t really understand the users.
What is “operational rhythm”
Liang Ning, director of product modules at Lakeside University, once said that some Internet companies have no sense of operation.
For example, if you travel to the United States, you just need to buy something. Open the APP and see a list of LOGOs on the page: Lancome, Dior … want to have afternoon tea, and on the APP page is a list of supplier brands: Starbucks, Man Kee Dessert, Xu Liushan …
Does the user feel a lot of words like this?
What does it mean to have a sense of rhythm? The travel and shopping app Liang Ning wants should be opened at first glance and you can see that “the legendary *** is just 1 kilometer away from you”, “***”, “Dirty Girlfriends ****” are full of thrilling product pictures, I feel that the price difference between China and foreign countries that I lose if I do n’t buy it, and a sense of superiority that I ca n’t see in China … >
The app for afternoon tea should be playedAt first glance, you can see the detailed pictures of food that will drown when you look at saliva, and you will lose weight when you drink, it will be beautiful when you drink it, and you will have temperament if you drink it for a week. If you buy a cup yourself, you will feel that your life is too hard, your work is boring, you have no friendship, and you are not happy …
Similarly, if the app of a domestic “sleep economy” company seems to be a knowledge payment service, psychological comfort service, online information service, or partner introduction, product recommendation … Which user will feel it? ?
Recently, domestic lychee podcasts described in the listing prospectus submitted by NASDAQ: As of 2018, the number of users in the audio market in China is 377 million. The “audio” in this includes podcasts, radio, and audio Books, live audio and social networking, etc., the number of users will reach 900 million in the next five years.
I think this expectation is reasonable. With the advent of 5G, various user scenarios have been developed, and the market inventory of a single smart speaker will be several times that of today. At present, audio content is not integrated with artificial intelligence and big data technology. It can be expected that the peak user traffic of these smart products in the future must be before work + Sleep time accounts for about 70% of the day, but has little development value. .
No matter how the technology products evolve and iterate, the focus will never be on the technology itself, but on the high-density refreshing sense of “operational rhythm.” Just like some TV shows, even serious academic forums such as “Hundred Schools” require a refreshment every 30 or 50 seconds. This is the rhythm of operations.
How to really understand the user
In the early days of Apple ’s launch of Airpods in 2016, they suffered a lot from spitting and ridicule. Airpods have been regarded as sleep aids by many people. They look strange and easy to lose.
In a few years, Airpods has become the fastest growing of all Apple products. This is already an explosion of tens of billions of dollars in sales.
If you just use Airpods as a headset, listen to something during the lunch break in the office or sleep on the high-speed rail, and assist you with sleep, it will be meaningless.
Airpods are actually accessories similar to earrings, necklaces, and watches. And wearAirpods means that you must have an iPhone in your pocket, which is a social signal. Some people ridiculed that Airpods were used to show off wealth and show status after the 90s.
Sleep, generally belongs to everyone’s privacy time, and does not want to be seen by others. But with Airpods, I want to be seen by more people-as a social currency, this is the real user demand.
Someone wants to make their company’s aromatherapy machine enter the sleep market, focusing on aromatherapy to help sleep, and an advertisement appears in the advertisement to give you a baby-like sleep effect. Because I don’t know the user, for a long time, the product has not been concerned.
The products you sell are sleep products, but this is not a simple problem of sleep aid function, nor is it stress before going to bed, need psychological comfort and so on.
In fact, many user needs are a matter of identity and scenario. Later, the company that sold the aromatherapy machine changed its strategy. The main spa room, (Health Health Room) , has aromatherapy machines, which injected social scenes and gradually sold. turn on.
The problem of insomnia is almost a well-known pain point for users. Instead, only Apple (Airpods) and Amazon (Echo smart speakers) These world-class companies have a real breakthrough.
Ordinary people tend to fall into a kind of “Edison dilemma”. Edison invented epoch-making products including gramophones, movie cameras, tungsten electric lights, etc., but never successfully served users.
Edison’s only time to directly develop the consumer market, commercialize and promote civilian DC technology, and soon lost to Tesla’s AC technology.
Exploiting the pain points of users is not their ability. It will continue to give users a soft and refreshing feeling. That kind of rhythmic operation is the real breaking point for exploring the opportunities of “sleep economy”.
This article is from the public number: Li lemon (ID: imslimeng) , author: IMS founder Li Meng