Heytea and Bawang Tea Ji, who appeared at wedding banquets, used scenes to break through the internal competition

In this article, we will explore how new tea brands can break through the monopoly of the traditional alcoholic beverage market and achieve brand growth in special occasions such as wedding banquets through innovative scene marketing strategies. The article details how Heytea and Bawang Chaji successfully entered the wedding banquet market by leveraging their brand and product advantages, and how they attract young consumers through customized services and social media marketing.

Every generation has replaced wine with "tea", and now "tea" has become milk tea.

Young people’s rejection of drinking culture starts with wedding banquets. Who would have thought that it was new tea drinks that would compete with alcoholic beverages for business? Recently, Bawang Tea Princess released a set of data: from January to September 2024, Bawang Tea Princess has provided about 1.5 million cups of modern tea for group scenes such as weddings, social gatherings, and workplace celebrations. The number of group orders during the National Day holiday increased by nearly 300% year-on-year. The person in charge of the relevant business of Bawang Tea Princess revealed, "Recently, we have received invitations for long-term cooperation from many wedding companies, and we are seriously considering it internally."

Morketing searched for the keyword "milk tea wedding toast" on Xiaohongshu and found more than 20,000 notes, and the number of notes for "wedding milk tea" was close to 10,000, of which the vast majority mentioned Bawang Cha Ji and Heytea.

In the public's impression, the mainstream consumption scenarios of new tea drinks are concentrated in shopping, afternoon tea, and parties. Almost all new tea drink brands are squeezed into these scenarios. However, as these scenarios tend to be saturated, if brands want to find new growth, they must expand into new scenarios or more subdivided scenarios. For example, wedding banquets are actually subcategories of dining scenes, but they have an additional cultural attribute compared to simple dining scenes.

1. Young people don’t like to get married, but brands are targeting wedding banquets

What's the purpose? In the short term, the brand's focus on wedding banquets is essentially to increase the group catering business. According to relevant notes compiled by Morketing, the order volume for a wedding is basically 100-500 cups, which can even cover half of a single store's daily sales (Bawang Cha Ji's official data shows that the average monthly sales of a single store in 2023 is 24,000 cups, and the average daily sales of a single store is close to 800 cups).

In order to attract group meal orders, Heytea and Bawangchaji have also set up group meal discounts. Group meals can only be ordered through the mini program, eliminating the commission of the food delivery platform.

Group meals are not only a quick and considerable source of income for stores, but also a direction for brand layout adjustment. According to the "2023 China Group Meal Industry Development Report" released by the Group Meal Professional Committee of the China Hotel Association, the scale of group meals will increase from 1.19 trillion yuan in 2017 to 1.84 trillion yuan in 2022, with an annual growth rate higher than the average level of the catering industry.

The group catering industry in the report refers more to B to B, such as providing products and services to schools, governments, enterprises and other groups. The large amount of milk tea ordered for wedding banquets we are discussing today can be understood as small group catering that is biased towards social catering. But in essence, they have the same commonality - small profits but quick turnover (of course, the profit is only smaller than that of a single consumption). Small profits but quick turnover is also a more pragmatic choice for new tea drinks after entering the low-price era.

In addition, from a longer-term perspective, it is also an effective way to accumulate brand assets. As mentioned above, unlike ordinary gatherings and team building, wedding banquets have more cultural attributes and are important moments in life.

This approach may be more familiar to another brand, Wanglaoji. Wanglaoji changes consumers' mindsets when buying beverages by binding them to scenes with a sense of ritual, such as weddings, school entrance exams, birthdays, etc., turning the product into a symbol and integrating it into the cultural atmosphere. As Ye Jizeng, deputy general manager of Guangzhou Wanglaoji Health Industry Co., Ltd., said: "Important moments in life need a sense of ritual, they need to be blessed, remembered, and recalled. We want to make these rituals more atmospheric, so that buying beverages, an unimportant thing, becomes an important thing."

Extensive exposure of the brand in wedding scenes will undoubtedly enhance the brand loyalty of the wedding protagonists, and even cultivate the habit of purchasing this brand to enhance the sense of ceremony at important moments.

For the audience of this wedding, it can also quickly improve their awareness of the brand. Young people of the same generation may think, "I can also switch to milk tea when I get married", which is an immersive way to promote the brand; young and old people will think, "This thing tastes good", which is an efficient way to expand customer base. In addition to wedding banquets, it is indeed difficult to find a scene like a wedding banquet that can gather such a wide age range.

Moreover, in segmented scenarios, the head effect of catering brands is often more obvious. For example, when mentioning birthday scenes, people will think of Haidilao, and a group of people holding light signs and singing "Say Goodbye to All Your Troubles..." will appear in front of their eyes; when mentioning informal business negotiations, Starbucks' third space is inevitable; when taking children out shopping, Xibei will become the first choice for many parents.

What catering brands do you think of when you think of weddings? There may not be a unified mindset at present. Therefore, Heytea and Bawangchaji are trying out the blue ocean scene of weddings in order to occupy the mind in advance.

2. Perfect integration into the wedding banquet scene

Above we talked about "why", now let's talk about "why can", from a brand perspective, why are Bawang Cha Ji and Heytea able to occupy a place on the market.

First, the product symbol is consistent with the scene. We have all heard Laura Ries's words that positioning is to find a vacant space in the consumer's mind and then plant a "nail". Symbolize the product, use visual hammers and language hammers to hammer the nail continuously, and finally make it deeply rooted in people's hearts.

It is not difficult to find that consumers choose Heytea and Bawangchaji as wedding teas mainly because of their names and packaging, and they think that the meaning is good and fits the atmosphere well. As mentioned above, weddings have strong cultural attributes, just like CNY marketing, which emphasizes festivity and auspiciousness.

The concept of Heytea already exists in traditional Chinese wedding customs, and the new tea brand Heytea was born to make a living from this. Heytea has a linguistic hammer in its hands, and its brand name and slogan "Happiness on top of happiness" make it very smooth to enter the market. Other products with meaningful meanings, such as "Lots of Happy Persimmons" and "Youxi Persimmon Coconuts", are also very popular.

Therefore, Heytea is also one of the first brands among new tea drinks to explore wedding scenes. As early as 2022, Heytea launched related activities, giving away free tea when getting a marriage certificate on May 20; launching a short story film with a wedding theme; giving away Heytea on Chinese Valentine's Day and vigorously launching wedding group meals...

Bawang Cha Ji wins in terms of visual appeal. It uses cups with dark red background and gold-stamped patterns as display tables. The most popular comment on social media is that it is a good photo. When a product has social attributes based on its appearance, the added benefit it brings is not only offline reach, but can also stimulate online discussion and fermentation. Moreover, in the past two years, Bawang Cha Ji's packaging has been constantly upgraded and has taken the overall Chinese tea route, which is very consistent with the new Chinese-style wedding that is gaining momentum.

Secondly, customization. Since it is a specific occasion and a specific scene, it still needs to be different from ordinary products.

Heytea has launched wedding-themed customized cup sleeves, packaging bags, and refrigerator magnets. Morketing consulted a Heytea store, and the store said that if there is a large-scale wedding event, they can contact the store manager to use specific packaging for drinks.

Personalized marketing is still a powerful tool to enhance consumer experience and increase conversion rate. Two years ago, Wanglaoji launched surname-customized cans, which topped the beverage sales charts on e-commerce platforms for many consecutive days during the Spring Festival of that year. Data shows that the main buyers are young people under 30 years old in first- and second-tier cities, with an average purchase of about 1.95 boxes per person.

Choosing to use milk tea as a display is itself a relatively personal expression. If the brand can provide more customized services, it will inevitably bring the brand and consumers closer. At this time, it is not a question of whether to choose or not, but whether to choose A or B.

3. Find growth scenarios in user feedback

"The core task of marketing is still insight, and cognitive innovation is the first step of all innovation. Only by finding innovative cognition can we find a way to achieve sustainable growth." Ye Jizeng said at iBrandi Festivla, "In the process of continuous innovation, we have also been inspired to start from emotional scenes, find potential needs, and provide our product experience, so that we can obtain a certain amount of opportunistic growth, and then transform this opportunistic growth into our strategic growth."

So, how to find the consumer's emotions? Brands need to pay attention to what consumers say. When conducting consumer research, brands often focus on natural data such as the user's age, identity, and region, but ignore their consumption scenarios and usage scenario data. But often these data can bring the most direct growth, and will tell you the direction of marketing activities and even feed back to the product.

Where does this data come from? From social media, from private conversations, and from e-commerce comment areas. For example, before Heytea launched wedding-related activities, many netizens posted that they chose Heytea's "One Week Tea" gift box as a souvenir because of the brand name. This is effective information worth grasping for the brand. After hearing the voice of consumers, we must also talk to them, establish long-term and effective communication, and constantly understand emotions and discover scenarios.

In the comment section of the milk tea wedding post, there is a comment that really reflects the value of the scene: "Although I don't know when I'm getting married, I've already thought about what kind of milk tea I'll use." Scene marketing is not about telling you what you need, but about inspiring what you want.

Text | Tiana
This article is written by the author [Morketing] of Operation Party, WeChat public account: [Morketing]. It is originally created/authorized to be published on Operation Party. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.