Overlord Tea Princess, step on the accelerator

Bawang Cha Ji, a dark horse in the tea industry, has emerged in the fiercely competitive market with its unique marketing strategy and cultural heritage.

Bawang Cha Ji is definitely one of the hot tea brands in the past two years, and it has been on the hot search list almost every day. Recently, it has repeatedly appeared on the hot search list due to incidents such as "employees' resignation was publicized", "a large number of people in the industry were poached", and "customers were visited after giving bad reviews". The reason is that Bawang Cha Ji has been running too fast in recent years and exposed "management loopholes". However, in the tea beverage track where giants are everywhere and competition is the most fierce, Bawang Cha Ji, as a newcomer that was only established in 2017, has to step on the accelerator.

In 2021, it completed more than 300 million yuan in Series A and Series B financing. In 2023, GMV reached 10.8 billion, ranking fourth in the industry, with an average monthly sales of 24,000 cups per store. By the end of July 2024, the total number of stores will be more than 4,500, and it has been revealed that it will go public in the United States. Bawang Chaji can be said to be an absolute "dark horse" in the tea beverage track. In addition to its rapid expansion strategy, its rise is also inseparable from the crazy increase in marketing. From a marketing perspective, let's talk about Bawang Chaji's "hurricane-style" marketing and what is worth learning.

1. Touch-and-go marketing to quickly expand the volume

In the first few years after Bawang Cha Ji was founded, it was just a little-known regional milk tea brand. It was not until the launch of its new "Dior style" packaging in 2022 that it truly entered the vision of young people.

A huge amount of discussion such as "Drink milk tea for 18 yuan and get the same one from Dior", "Every time I order Bawang Cha Ji, I feel like I'm picking Dior", "All these years of working for Dior have been in vain", etc., has made Bawang Cha Ji a success and accelerated its popularity.

Taking advantage of this wave of "touching porcelain" popularity, Bawang Cha Ji not only successfully turned "Dior" into a brand super symbol, but also directly raised the brand's appearance and tone to a higher level, creating brand differentiation.

For consumers, it's a good idea to indulge in luxury goods for just a dozen bucks.

After tasting the sweetness, Bawang Cha Ji launched new luxury-style packaging such as CHANELGUCCILV, and shouted the slogan "Oriental Starbucks", each time gaining a wave of social media attention.

It is actually very easy to be criticized for "plagiarism" when copying big brands, but the cleverness of Bawang Tea Princess lies in that copying big brands is the topic, but the traditional Chinese style is the foothold.

The design looks like Dior or LV style, but it is actually Yunnan's traditional dyeing and weaving handicraft. It successfully redirected public opinion to Yunnan's local culture and further deepened the brand label of "Oriental Tea".

Image source: Compound Eye SEEMENT

If a new product wants to be recognized by the public, it can either gradually penetrate the minds of the public through long-term and extensive advertising, or directly leverage something that is well known to the public to reduce the cost of user understanding.

The latter is clearly more preferable from both a cost and execution perspective.

Therefore, such "smashing porcelain" incidents are almost a tried and tested shortcut to stand out in the brand industry.

Luo Yonghao made "acquisition of Apple" a difficult topic for Hammer Mobile Phone. Luckin Coffee "torn apart" Starbucks with an open letter. Burger King has been focusing on attacking McDonald's for 60 years... Before launching new products to the market, you might as well think about who you want to be and what kind of brand image you want to create.

2. Social marketing, penetrating the circle of young people

To judge whether a brand is popular enough, we must first look at its UGC volume. Contemporary young people drink milk tea not only to quench their thirst, but also because of social needs.

Playing with memes and creating topics has always been the marketing dominance of Bawang Tea Princess. Every time Bawang Tea Princess launches a new product, there will be a related "insomnia meme" that goes viral.

For example, "Drinking Boya's broken string, enjoying a sleepless night", "Drinking Wanli Mulan, joining the army for my father at three in the morning", "Tea is drunk in the afternoon, people go crazy in the middle of the night"...

Products with inherent memes tend to spread quickly. The more outrageous they are, the more they can arouse the curiosity of netizens. As a result, Bawangchaji's new product activities have gradually evolved into a common "late-night carnival" party in the circle of friends.

Even the regular promotional activities are always played out by Bawang Tea Princess. During the Chongqing Marathon, the store launched the "Go to the store to do aerobics and win a free coupon" campaign.

In Guangdong, the campaign “get free tea if you practice Wing Chun” was launched. In Sichuan, the campaign “get free tea if you do yoga” was launched. This was even more socially deadly than the Starbucks pick-up order, and the topic of “doing e for tea” by Bawang Cha Ji became a hit.

In addition, 100 million "Meeting Friends with Tea" coupons were issued for a limited time during the 6th anniversary celebration, and activities such as sharing a free-of-charge password to get a free takeout order in one minute were launched. The enthusiasm of netizens to participate directly made Bawang Tea Princess occupy the hot search list for three consecutive days.

Overall, Bawang Cha Ji is a complete culmination of all the advantages. By drawing on Heytea’s social topic gameplay and adding Pinduoduo’s fission marketing, it has carved out a path of its own.

3. Peripheral marketing to build long-term marketing lines

Collaborating with popular IPs to produce peripheral products is the eternal traffic code for tea brands.

However, from a business perspective, this approach is actually short-term and difficult to establish long-term brand value. Bawangchaji's solution is to build a long-term marketing line for the brand around the badge.

First, we launched different badges and peripheral products from multiple dimensions, such as special festivals, regional characteristics, charity events, cultural heritage, etc., such as birthday badges, graduation season badges, paper-cut badges, Asian elephant badges, etc., which directly grasped the "stamp collecting" psychology of consumers and kept the brand fresh and topical at all times.

Secondly, use the limitations of the region to shape the "scarcity" of the surrounding areas.

For example, although it is the same birthday badge, the badge patterns may be different in different regions and stores for different birthday months.

In addition, local scenic spot badges were launched in different cities to lead young people to a new way of checking in during travel. This limitation and cultural value blessing made the Bawang Tea Princess badge a new social currency for young people to "show off", triggering a consumption boom of "one badge is hard to get".

The peripheral marketing of Bawang Tea Princess is not limited to the expression of brand culture, but looks at the inheritance of the entire Chinese traditional culture, creating a differentiated advantage.

Using a small badge, consumers can enjoy a low-threshold emotional consumption, while also leveraging the brand influence.

4. Cultural marketing to consolidate brand moat

Heytea pioneered a new and light fruit tea category; Nayuki’s Tea targeted urban white-collar women with its dual-category model of “tea drinks + soft European bread”; and Cha Yan Yue Se set off a craze for Chinese national style… These leading tea brands each occupy a competitive niche.

In comparison, Bawang Cha Ji's moat is actually very shallow. If there is no sufficient financial support in the future, it will inevitably be a flash in the pan.

The brilliance of Bawang Tea Princess lies in that it has established the positioning of "modern oriental tea" since its birth, and gradually consolidated the "national style" cultural label.

From the brand name and brand image to product research and development, they are all closely linked to Chinese traditional culture.

The brand name is directly taken from the Chinese epic story "Farewell My Concubine"; the names of new products are also based on Chinese culture, such as "Boya Jue Xian" comes from the story of Boya and Ziqi, the "Wanli Mulan" series comes from the story of Hua Mulan, the "Shanye Gardenia" series is designed to pay tribute to the Tang Dynasty style, and "Xingshi Chunshan" incorporates the outing custom during the Qingming Festival...

Starting from January 24, Bawang Tea Princess also started a journey to pay tribute to intangible cultural heritage, including Guangdong Jieyang Fireworks Dragon, Guangxi Zhuang Brocade, Guizhou Miao Embroidery...

In terms of communication, it found a breakthrough in the overseas market, making Bawang Cha Ji a Chinese tea business card to the outside world, and taking the lead in seizing the user mindset of "Chinese tea = Bawang Cha Ji". In this advertisement, tea is used as a medium to bring together "CHA" (tea), a common language of more than 100 countries and regions around the world, and compose an oriental story exclusively for Bawang Cha Ji.

During the Paris Olympics, it joined hands with the Health Ambassadors to "go to" Paris with the slogan "Meet friends from all over the world with Oriental tea".

On the one hand, we are strengthening our cultural foundation and building brand value with traditional culture. On the other hand, we are expanding overseas and enhancing the brand's global influence. We have both Chinese depth and global breadth to create a unique brand advantage.

How to discover blue ocean opportunities from the red ocean market, Bawang Cha Ji has actually submitted a high-scoring answer sheet.

On the one hand, it is necessary to make good use of the dislocation strategy. While everyone is delving into healthier fruit teas, it returns to the purest "raw milk + fresh tea" and takes it to the extreme.

When everyone was opening stores in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, it took the most easily overlooked southwest region as its base, quickly expanded stores from west to east, and entered overseas markets.

On the other hand, we need to do a good job in marketing support. In the 0-1 start-up stage, we should learn from the strategies that have been verified by the leading brands and focus on the traffic dividend and channel dividend.

During the rapid growth stage of 1-100, more attention should be paid to the penetration of brand content marketing, and consciously building and maintaining brand power in the long term.

Can the Overlord Tea Princess, who has stepped on the accelerator, fight her way out of this controversial vortex? Let's wait and see what happens next.

Author:Aye

Source public account: Shock Copywriting (ID: 214328)