The epidemic will eventually pass. For consumer products companies, products, flows and brands are still long-term propositions.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Inspur New Consumption” (ID: lcxinxiaofei) , author Lin Sheng, reproduced with permission.
For consumer companies, the two issues that matter most in the epidemic are two things:
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1. How to continue life?
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2. How to grab the first chance and get back quickly?
There are also many discussions in the market around these two issues, but after communicating with more than a dozen consumer entrepreneurs, we found that everyone is still eager for the mature practices and thinking of head companies.
In addition, the epidemic will eventually pass. For consumer products companies, products, flows, and brands are still long-term propositions.
On the evening of February 15th, during the first lesson of the New Year for Inspur new consumer members, Lin Sheng, founder of Zhong Xuegao, shared the above issues and shared in depth for more than an hour.
Lin Sheng is a Tmall single product Top1 player, who once traded Madel and Zhongjie 1946, is the driving force behind almost all popular ice cream brands in China.
The full text is more than ten thousand words. This article only intercepts one third. The following is the text:
Hello everyone, my name is Lin Sheng, the founder of Zhong Xuegao. I am very happy to make a new purchase today at Inspur and share with you some of our methodology on epidemic situation and brand.
We mainly make mid-to-high-end ice cream. Zhong Xuegao means to make Chinese ice cream, using a homophonic sound, not the three bosses named Zhong Xinggao.
First, if the preparations that should be done now are not made, this year will be completely abolished
1. The worst is not the fear itself, but the unknown
The epidemic situation came out, and we feel quite deep. We will really find that whether it is an individual or an enterprise, in the face of such a serious disaster, everyone is particularly small.
I often see a lot of startups talking about stress in my circle of friends during this time, but we will remind each other internally and the team that this kind of pressure is beyond our personal ability. Worrying cannot solve the problem. Try not to worry.
But in the face of such a sudden epidemic, there are two points that are particularly important: one is whether you can respond very quickly; the other is whether you can adjust your mentality and make some preparations.
The last thing I want to see is that everyone is complaining, speculating, and worried when they encounter the epidemic. The external pressure first crushed them. If you have n’t done the preparations, once the epidemic has passed, you continue to start in a mess, this year is completeWasted.
When we started telecommuting on the 3rd, we made an important move and started the internal PR. The main thing is to tell you what the company is going to do, and how you need to cooperate during the epidemic. The core is to pass on: we are together, not on the pressure from top to bottom.
On the 9th, our management held a conference call to discuss the worst possibility and financial risks. At the same time, we also prepared a plan, and communicated this plan to all members, so that everyone can do it. Know in your heart.
Why do these actions? Because the worst is not the fear itself, but the unknown, and everyone will gradually panic in the unknown guess.
Whether it is employees or management, everyone has their own circle of friends and information sources, and everyone is guessing what kind of chain reaction will be caused by the epidemic.
Some employees have their doors closed and cannot go out, including the news of salary cuts and layoffs from various companies around them. These unknowns will slowly make people panic.
So we tried our best to tell the team what the company planned from the beginning, both good and bad.
It is more important to convey confidence through these actions. When the company has confidence, the individual has confidence. Now the mood of our entire company team is relatively stable, which makes us feel more at ease.
2, in what way to meet the rebound in consumption
I think consumer goods will have a huge rebound after the epidemic has passed. As long as I can survive this period, I think that consumer goods companies will have new opportunities in the second half of the year.
In the face of new opportunities, there are two forms, everyone should pay attention:
First, innovative consumption forms and innovative products will bring more attention.
When all people are in a state of depressing consumption, once they open a door, he will start to rebound consumption, and he would like to see something new. This is human nature.
Second, many companies may have to face a large number of sexually priced products to hit the market.
Because of the impact of the epidemic, many brands will have a large amount of inventory. The thing they are most willing to do after the holiday is to destock, which may bring some fluctuations to the original market order.
I think all companies can find their own opportunities from these two points, which is how you choose to meet this wave of consumer rebound.
Second, hard-core dry goods: Zhong Xuegao’s marketing and branding methodology
1. Methodology for detonating products: product breakthrough + content breakthrough + external momentum
Regarding how to detonate a product or market, everyone wants to ask the methodology. We have concluded that there may be three: the first is a product breakthrough, the second is a content breakthrough, and the third is the peripheral momentum.
Today ’s market is no longer a pure marketing and communication, You can make good times for yourself.
In the final analysis, consumption upgrade or mainstream, consumption degradation does not exist, and everyone must pursue better and more valuable products and lifestyles, which is human nature.
If you want to better meet the needs of consumers, you must first have a better product, and you must have a breakthrough in the product.
Product breakthroughs and content breakthroughs are closely related, because content breakthroughs mean that you want to send a better and more impressing message to consumers. This is almost all from how your product breakthroughs are.
Your product can provide more materials, topics, and fresh points, which will constitute a very strong factor in content breakthrough. The so-called content breakthrough is not publicity, but has a foundation.
So we said that the first point of this methodology is that there must be differentiated products. The more details of this differentiation, the better. With so many details breakthrough, you have more topics to create in the content communication.
The third peripheral builds momentum. This is a conventional means and a means to fight for resources. How many resources can you find KOL, stars, or find endorsements to add to your brand.
With an example, you may have a more intuitive experience.
We have a long working relationship with Li Jiaqi. One day I watched the live broadcast very clearly. When Li Jiaqi was selling lipstick, you would find that he had a lot of things to talk to you about, including the color number and composition, what effect it had on his own hands and mouth.
But when he sells our ice cream, he is particularly speechless. He held an ice cream, and after selling it, he had nothing to say. He took a bite and said that it was delicious. From then on, I felt particularly bad.
The material points we give to the product are still relatively small compared to many products, which makes it difficult for him to have more topics to pass to the user.
Another good example using this methodology. On Double Eleven in 2018, we launched an “Ecuadorian Pink Diamond” ice cream.
Because it uses the world ’s only natural pink cocoa, this raw material is particularly scarce, so the cost is also very high. Nearly 40 yuan a piece, we have no choice but to sell it for 66, it is double eleven An eyeball product.
At that time, 20,000 pieces were sold in less than ten hours, and the sales were good. Later, when we re-examined, we thought, why can this be done?
The first is a product breakthrough, using scarce raw materials, and this raw material makes it appear pink that girls like very much. Pink natural ice cream is almost a blank spot in the market, and then there is pink cocoa, and pink chocolate is also a blank spot in the market.
In addition to flavor, we have added a very expensive type of grapefruit in Japan. So this product started from the beginning, from raw materials, flavor to beautyThere are many topics of this kind that come with it. When we promote, there are more words to talk about, which aroused a lot of user curiosity.
So it is a typical case of a product breakthrough leading to a content breakthrough. The product itself needs to have a lot of stories to tell, rather than we boringly saying that this product is delicious, or how.
Third is the external momentum. At the same time, we started the trial of many KOLs on Xiaohongshu and Taobao, so that they brought a larger spread. It is a very standardized method of operation, and it really triggered the double eleven.
2, do three aesthetic upgrades, any consumer goods have the opportunity
The following question I want to communicate with you is a friend’s question. He asked me about consumption insight and product literacy. Which is more important?
This made me think for a long time. I used to think that consumer insights were the most important, meaning whether you can find opportunities. But today I think product literacy is the most important, because your brand is always guided by products.
Everyone is talking about this upgrade, that upgrade, but there is another core point, is that with the growth of new consumer groups, have we considered the issue of aesthetic upgrade?
Product literacy is essentially talking about your aesthetics of the product. No matter what kind of product you want to make, its appearance, taste, and even every sentence you communicate with consumers after making it, are essentially aesthetic issues.
But the scary point is that everyone feels that their aesthetics are good, but when we look at the products that are hung up on the market, most of them die of aesthetics.
When a product is presented, what it looks like is visual taste, what taste is taste aesthetics, and what it is to communicate is communication aesthetics. A product can achieve these several aesthetics, no matter what category there are opportunities.
Taking Zhong Xue as an example, we know that the traditional ice cream is the Red Sea and the competition is very fierce, but we don’t feel that we have done anything different.
When all ice cream is round, square or sandwich, we first make it into a tile type, give it a bright visual symbol, and it is simple, clean and memorable. . This is a visual difference from the original ice cream.
Second, we make this product zero added, make the ingredients a little bit better, present a better flavor, and crush the traditional ice cream on the taste aesthetics.
Third, we have always used Zhong Xuegao’s own methods in communication. For example, if we do n’t expand one thing, we say that this is a very delicious ice cream, healthy and safe. It requires you to slowly take the product, we did not say that this product is to please everyone.
In this way of communication, it is very different from traditional ice cream.
Zhong Xuegao can do it today, essentially because the aesthetics of a large group of people is improving, including vision, taste, and communication.Item aesthetics. We find that after improving these three aesthetics, we can really stand out from other ice creams at once.
There is an opportunity to apply this logic to any consumer category. For example, when you make milk, when you improve the aesthetics of vision, taste, and communication, it is different from all milk itself.
But trying to achieve this aesthetic improvement is actually more difficult, and it is also a long-term problem for us. In the past, all consumer goods companies had R & D as R & D, and brands as brands. They were two independent departments.
But today we have been working on how to open up these two departments, and then cultivate a product manager. Previously, we saw that R & D is technology, and it is not very good at market, consumer insights, including aesthetics. Brands are to communicate.
I think the future of consumer product production should be a comprehensive system. It requires a product manager instead of an independent department. We are particularly scarce of such product managers. I can only cultivate myself slowly.
A product manager like this often comes from whether he has gone a long way, has read a lot of books, has tasted a lot of taste, and then has 10,000 times of thinking and chatting, which is very difficult.
3. Thinking of big products: eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body
One more thing, I think when making a product, everyone must have a big product thinking. Many people say that I sell a bottle of water. This bottle of water is my product. I sell an ice cream. This ice cream is my product.
This is not the case today. The so-called big product thinking is that when you build this product, you must think about what consumers see it, what they hear, how they smell it, consumption. I tasted it and so on.
It also includes what perceptions consumers have in the process of obtaining it, and what impressions they ultimately leave in the minds of consumers. This kind of big product thinking is different from the traditional, narrow single product thinking. We internally summarized the six words of the Buddhist family, which are: eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body.
If you have colleagues in the field of consumer goods, you can try to set up your own new products in this way. Each of the six “eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind” meets one of the six items. Will be bigger.
Third, how to go from traffic to brand? Quality, innovation, restraint
The last point is our own thinking, which is what we have been doing all the time. How to go from traffic to brand? When we first started, we all hoped that there would be more traffic, and we all hoped that we could burst, but it would be easy for the burst to go for a long time.
So how to go from traffic to brand? Our own definition is to do three things well: quality, innovation and restraint.
In short, quality is used to retain regular users. We have always believed that if a userConstantly going to a restaurant to eat, it must not be because this restaurant is pushing new dishes every day, but because of the balanced quality, because their home-made fish and shredded pork is as delicious as ever.
Innovation is used to attract new customers. There are a large number of users who do not come to spend while you maintain the quality of the old product, which means that the old product is not enough to touch him, then you must continue to attract new customers with innovative things, and then precipitate.
The last point is called restraint. Today ’s consumer era is different from the previous era. In the last consumer era, you made 1 to be packed into 10, and enlarged to 100 through traditional media to tell consumers that the consumption information at that time was Asymmetric.
But today, as consumer information and channels become more and more symmetrical, in addition to seeing your good, your bad will be magnified.
A brand who wants to go longer today must be moderately restrained. Maybe you made 10, but you only need to say 4 or 5 to the outside, and keep some for consumers to dig, interact, and play with you. It is very important that you do not take away his fun.
Restraint is more difficult to achieve, but I think it is the most important point. From traffic to brand, we are pursuing three things: quality, innovation and restraint.
Q & A session
Q: Under such a difficult situation, how should brands communicate better with consumers?
A: Still what I just said: Rather than do it, don’t go to hot spots. I think it smells like human blood buns.
If we do n’t have any substantial help for the epidemic situation, or the purpose is to sell ourselves, we may not be right, so we can do our job well at this time.
And communication is not necessarily face-to-face. For example, when we can start billing, we require an action: the production staff and billing staff of each shift of the factory should take a temperature measurement and record the temperature Come down.
Then we made the health status of all the production and billing personnel on this order into a small card and sent it with the parcel. I’m not trying to brag about anything, I just want to send a message to the users: we have worked hard to protect ourselves, so that users can rest assured, this is our duty.
Q: Do you think that the 5g era will change the existing marketing structure?
A: I think it definitely has an impact. This impact is not necessarily right from my perspective, but I think there are two aspects to pay special attention to:
First, the soft implantation and soft dissemination of content by 5G will bring greater convenience. This is a particularly particularly important direction.
Second, at the level of intelligence, in the 5G era, some intelligent applications, including AR or VR scenarios, will have new opportunities.
In terms of marketing, I do n’t think it ’s that heavy.Yes. The consumer’s concern is always based on what he wants to obtain, and the consumer’s needs have not changed significantly.
External people think that Zhong Xuegao has done a good job in marketing, but we rarely talk about it internally. We think that doing what is essential is fundamental, so I don’t recommend paying too much attention to marketing. Of course, it is a help to do marketing well when you have the power, but if the product is not ready to talk about marketing, you may lose points.
Q: Tmall traffic is very expensive. How did Zhong Xuecake get inside and outside the station and how to choose KoL for cooperation?
A: In 2018, when Zhong Xuegao was in his first year, we mainly started Xiaohongshu. At that time, Xiaohongshu had a considerable bonus, so we focused our efforts on putting it in Break through.
A large number of KOLs at the waist and bottom were found and tried, interacted and spread. I did a lot of grass planting work from Xiaohongshu, and then a lot of users ran to Tmall to pluck grass. After plucking the grass, I felt good about the product. I went back to Xiaohongshu to continue planting. Every year, we will discuss where the dividend platform for the next year is.
Tmall ’s traffic is also complementary. When you have more sounds outside the station, Tmall itself will also support and tilt the traffic. The more you make yourself, the more you can stand out from the crowd. The better this snowball effect.
Q: Is Zhong Xuegao doing private domain traffic operation? Do you have any suggestions on what is appropriate for the brand under what circumstances?
A: We are slowly doing this. Private domain traffic is indeed a huge treasure trove, but it is very important that it may not be suitable for all products or brands.
Private domain traffic is essentially suitable for some business formats with long decision chains and high decision complexity. For consumer products, especially consumer products such as ice cream, the contact time with consumers is very short, and the time for consumers to decide whether to buy or not is up to two seconds.
In this case, we communicate with consumers more to disturb consumers than to promote consumers, so we are very cautious about private domain traffic.
Q: How do companies invest in short video operations?
A: This is also a problem that different companies have different models.
How do you judge a brand for short videos? I think we can think in this way. Without short videos, wouldn’t you be able to better communicate with users? If not, it may not be your best option.
Secondly, I think short videos will definitely develop in the direction of medium videos. From the beginning of the eyeball effect to the back, it will definitely develop towards content stickiness. If Zhong Xuegao makes short videos, we will stick to this idea, not for short-term eyeballs and traffic.