Sold 100 million in 30 days. The older the brand, the more popular it is.

Some old brands that once faded from people's sight are now revitalized with new images and strategies through emerging social media platforms. This article will explore how these old brands use new media platforms to achieve resurgence and analyze the key factors for their success.

"I lost it 20 years ago, and now I want to buy it back with my own hands."

There are many similar comments in the live broadcast room of @背背佳 official flagship store on Douyin. This brand, once "hated" by many people born in the 80s and 90s, is returning to the public's attention with a brand new attitude.

Recently, the hashtag #背背佳90日售了100万年 has been trending on the Internet, bringing back many people's childhood memories. Public reports show that the Beibeijia brand was founded in 1998. In the early years, under the operation of "China's Marketing Godfather" Du Guoying, it achieved an annual sales volume of 450 million yuan. In 2005, with the addition of celebrity spokespersons and a precise grasp of parents' anxiety about their children's physical condition, the already popular Beibeijia was pushed to a new peak and became a fashion item that almost every teenager has.

However, in 2006, many consumers complained and reported that Beibeijia had engaged in false advertising, misleading consumers, and its product efficacy was questioned by experts, which triggered widespread condemnation of the brand in society. Beibeijia gradually disappeared from the public eye until recently when it became popular on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, and its live broadcast rooms were sold out.

In fact, it is not just Beibeijia. Kas has observed that in the past two years, many old brands have "recovered" again with the help of new traffic platforms, and even achieved unprecedented results in the live broadcast room. From "forgotten" to "sought after", what did these old brands do right? Do other old brands still have a chance?

1. Old brands take center stage on Douyin

If we were asked to recall a few old domestic brands that have become popular on the Internet in the past two years, I believe everyone can think of quite a few.

Some of these old brands unexpectedly became popular due to certain social events. For example, last September, a group of high-cost-effective old domestic brands including Fenghua, Yunkang, Lianhua MSG, Huoli 28, Qiqiang, Jingjing, Metersbonwe, etc., became popular collectively due to Li Jiaqi's gaffe and Huaxizi's failure. Not only did they receive a lot of attention at the time, but many brands still have good sales today.

Take the old brand of hair care products, Vitality 28, for example. At that time, tens of thousands of netizens poured into the live broadcast room, but the brand was unprepared and could only temporarily recruit three relatively "free" "uncles" from the factory to perform. They did not know how to live broadcast or use Douyin, and even introduced the products haltingly. However, they impressed netizens with their simplicity and sincerity. All the products in the live broadcast room were sold out that day, and the account gained more than one million followers. This brand that was about to "disappear" was thus "revived".

Screenshot of Vitality 28 elderly anchor

As of now, @活力28服装洗衣旗舰店 has 9.31 million fans on Douyin, and it is ranked in the top 10 of Douyin's "Daily Use" brand rankings almost every month, showing a strong recovery momentum. In an interview with other media, Hu Wenzhong, deputy general manager of Chengdu Yizhong Detergents Co., Ltd., revealed that after the unexpected popularity, the daily GMV of the live broadcast room exceeded 20 million yuan, and now it maintains an average daily sales of more than 100,000, ensuring the long-term operation of the brand.

Some have actively chosen to embrace live streaming e-commerce, and after entering the live streaming room, they have actively improved their own people, goods and places, which not only left a deep impression on netizens, but also ushered in a breakthrough in their own business.

For example, in the summer of 2021, the down jacket brand YaYa targeted the market demand for off-season clothing and moved the live broadcast room to a snow-capped mountain at an altitude of more than 5,000 meters. This scene innovation, which is greatly different from traditional live broadcast rooms, not only caught the eyes of many people in the industry, but also triggered discussions and attention from netizens.

Screenshot of YaYa Snow Mountain live broadcast

After regaining the popularity, YaYa did not stop there, but built a brand-owned live broadcast matrix and launched high-frequency live broadcasts to further seize the minds of users. In addition, in order to keep up with the recommendation mechanism of Douyin e-commerce and the public aesthetic trend, YaYa has also made many improvements in product selection and creating hot products.

For example, in order to increase the certainty of "explosive items", YaYa will test new items on the platform promotion nodes before the peak sales season arrives, and select about 10 "potential explosive items" based on data such as clicks, favorites, add-to-cart, and conversions. After finalizing the potential items, YaYa will conduct marketing promotion around them, such as finding celebrity spokespersons to try them on, finding influencers to recommend them, etc., using the IP effect to accumulate higher traffic and popularity for the products. When entering the big promotion node, various tools will be used to further promote conversions.

It is with such multi-dimensional improvement of people, goods and places that YaYa has successfully achieved the transformation from loss to tens of billions of revenue, and made the brand popular in the streets again.

Others are because the "second generation" took over the management and led the brand's rejuvenation reform, making the old brand known to more young consumers and giving it new vitality.

For example, the brand Jieliya, which Kasgang wrote about some time ago, achieved a simultaneous increase in both its popularity and sales through the short play "Towel Empire". According to the Operation Research Society, in the past three months, the number of consumers who searched for the brand word "Jieliya" and entered the Tmall flagship store increased by about 30%-50%, and the store's daily sales increased by 100% year-on-year. During the 618 period, it even ranked first in the Tmall home textile industry.

@Towel Master Tik Tok screenshot

There are many similar cases. Overall, one obvious feeling is that compared with the public's pursuit of new brands in previous years, more and more people have "rekindled their passion" for old brands in the past two years.

2. What did the old brand do right to become popular again?

Due to the difference in "personalized recommendations", each person has a different perception of which brand is "more popular". From a data perspective, Kas specifically checked the brand rankings of Douyin e-commerce in recent times and found that many old domestic brands have successfully entered the top positions on the platform. Among them, the performance of the three tracks of clothing and underwear, daily necessities, and beauty and skin care is particularly significant.

In the apparel and underwear market, brands such as YaYa, Bosideng, Woodpecker, Romon, and Camel have made their debuts and are firmly at the top of the brand sales charts; in the daily necessities market, brands such as Fenghua, Liby, and Vitality 28 have shown strong market competitiveness and often rank in the top ten of the sales charts; and in the beauty and skin care market, the two domestic giants Hansu and Proya are evenly matched, each with many loyal fans. In addition, the food brand White Elephant has also shown strong fan attraction and sales power, achieving very good results.

According to Kass’s observation, although different brands have different focuses and strategies, there are many similarities in actual operations, which are worth learning from by more brands:

First, accurately target consumer groups and create core product categories.

As we all know, compared with the traditional shelf e-commerce mechanism of "people looking for goods", brands need to increase the width of the pallets. Douyin, which is positioned as an interest-based e-commerce, actually follows the logic of "goods looking for people". If you want to increase sales in the early stage, the importance of "core explosive products" is self-evident.

Take the outdoor brand Camel as an example. The brand was founded in 1930 and originally started out with leather shoes. It began to enter the outdoor field around 2000. Against the backdrop of the outdoor craze in the past two years, it has led the "mountain wear" trend with the hot sales of its "three-in-one jackets", which has become an outdoor item that almost every young person has.

In Kas's opinion, the explosive sales of the "three-in-one jacket" are inevitable. On the one hand, it has the practical functions of outdoor products such as windproof, waterproof, and breathable, but the price is quite "affordable"; on the other hand, fashion elements are incorporated into the design, making the jacket not only suitable for outdoor scenes, but also suitable for daily wear, broadening the usage scenarios and meeting the actual needs of more consumers.

With its product quality being excellent enough, in order to better promote its "three-in-one jacket", Camel made full use of social media such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu for marketing, such as inviting influencers to collaborate and actively publishing content about outdoor life and outdoor wear, maintaining the popularity of related topics, attracting the attention of a large number of young consumers, and establishing the mindset of an "outdoor brand", successfully bringing popularity to the entire brand through this single product.

@Camel TikTok screenshot

Secondly, actively cooperate with celebrities or top talents to amplify the voice and find opportunities to re-enter the public eye.

Take the Beibeijia mentioned above as an example. It was first discussed on various platforms because of a video of the female star Bai Lu wearing a Beibeijia posture correction belt on the set. In the video, Bai Lu, with an exquisite ancient hairstyle, walked out of the building amid the cheers of fans. The black Beibeijia in a gray cardigan and her upright posture when walking were indeed quite eye-catching.

The voiceover of the video also synchronized words such as "No wonder celebrities have such good figures", "Wearing this improves the whole person's demeanor and adds to their temperament", "I was really shocked by Bai Lu's body change. The sisters are all excited", etc., which made many girls who pursue beauty crazy.

After attracting a certain amount of attention through celebrities, Beibeijia entered the live broadcast rooms of top anchors such as @与辉同行, @李金铭, @齐儿, and @胡楚靓, further enhancing the brand's voice and sales. It also made Beibeijia, a youth orthopedic health equipment that had been eliminated by the times, transformed into a must-have posture correction device for beauties.

At the same time, although Dabo has considerable sales, many domestic brands have not given up on setting up their own live broadcast rooms and attach great importance to the construction of the live broadcast matrix.

In June, a month with the important 618 promotion, the top three brands on Douyin's clothing brand list are Woodpecker, Heilan Home, and Romon. Among the sales of Woodpecker and Romon, the proportion of brand self-operated accounts and merchant self-operated accounts reached more than 60%, while the proportion of Heilan Home self-operated accounts was close to 80%.

In fact, the importance of brands building their own broadcast matrix is ​​actually a commonplace topic, so I won’t go into details here. However, according to my observation, the number of brands’ matrix accounts has been increasing recently, and the positioning has become more and more segmented. On the one hand, this may be related to the fact that brands often cooperate with multiple parties, and different entities need to make their own differences; on the other hand, because the traffic that each account and each live broadcast room can obtain is limited, a larger number of accounts can indeed obtain more traffic exposure for the brand.

Some matrix accounts of Heilan Home

It is worth noting that since the beginning of this year, the contribution of product cards to the GMV of various brands has increased significantly. In many cases, it has even surpassed short videos and become the second largest sales channel for brands on Douyin.

Taking Vitality 28 as an example, the total sales in the past 30 days were 100-250 million, of which live broadcast accounted for 72.84%, product cards accounted for 15.71%, and finally videos accounted for 11.45%.

From the perspective of carriers, live streaming is still the core source of brand GMV, but as a new growth point, the potential of merchandise cards cannot be underestimated.

The reasons for this can be analyzed. On the one hand, the platform's strong support for the "shelves" has allowed brands to pay enough attention to this new traffic entrance and actively build its linkage with the content field, effectively improving the exposure of product cards and the convenience of purchase; on the other hand, such products are just-in-time products that meet the actual needs of users. Therefore, when brand awareness is high enough and the price is reasonable, users often do not need too much market guidance. After purchasing once, it is easy to place another order by searching the purchased order page.

3. In the era of algorithmic media, the older the brand, the more popular it is?

The rise of online e-commerce and live streaming was once seen as a challenge to many old brands. Many people believe that as consumption shifts online, the number of products available to consumers increases significantly, and new brands emerge like mushrooms after rain. The appeal and competitiveness of old brands will gradually decrease. After all, they are always tied to images such as "outdated" and "conservative" in stereotypes.

However, the actual situation in the past two years has been quite different from this expectation. Many old brands have not only not become "outdated", but have shown an even stronger momentum. Why are brands more popular as they get older?

In Kas's opinion, on the one hand, with the rise of new media and self-media, the influence of traditional media is not as strong as before, and although new individuals have a certain voice, it is difficult to form a scale effect of full coverage. In short, there is no channel that can enable a brand to build a global brand power.

If we think carefully about the various emerging brands that have emerged in recent years, some of them have indeed achieved a leap in sales in a short period of time, achieving sales of hundreds of millions or even billions, but their influence mostly remains on a single platform. After leaving this channel, the brand’s competitiveness on other platforms is not strong.

On the other hand, these old brands have established their own brand image and brand recognition through the influence of TV advertising and print media in the traditional media era, covering a wide enough consumer group and having a "national popularity" that is difficult for current brands to establish. This makes them have higher brand potential when they turn to the online field. Therefore, although they may not be as responsive to new platforms as new brands at the beginning of the transformation, they will eventually have the strength to regain the market with their brand heritage and market foundation. There is no insurmountable gap between them.

On the other hand, with the change of people's consumption concept and the rise of the sinking market, practical things such as "cost-effectiveness" and "quality" are the main factors affecting people's consumption, which has also become a new growth point for a number of old brands. Because they have a mature supply chain system, the production cost is generally lower than that of new brands. In addition, old brands have already had a good image and quality assurance in the minds of consumers in the past, so there is no need to invest more marketing expenses in this regard, and there is no need to increase the product price.

Therefore, Kas believes that new traffic platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Video Account, Kuaishou, etc. may be the traffic pools suitable for old brands to achieve counter-cyclical growth. If brands can strengthen their learning and operations of online e-commerce and various platforms, they will have a good chance of reaching the next peak.

References

5. A new MVP emerges in the 40 billion short drama market

4. 2024, the history of the collapse of the traffic network celebrity

3. 150,000 fans and monthly GMV of over 10 million: We found the secret of the manager’s high sales

2. For merchants with a large number of physical stores, Video Account may be your last chance to transform online

1. The big earthquake of alcohol live broadcast