Milk tea collaboration, no reproductive isolation.

There are many new ways to collaborate with milk tea brands. Let’s take a look at what new ways these milk tea brands collaborate with each other this summer!

In the hot summer, you are ready to order a cup of milk tea to cool down.

I opened my phone and found something even hotter than this summer - milk tea collaboration.

On the day I wrote this article, HEYTEA collaborated with Light and Night, CHAFEST TRADE collaborated with Fox Spirit Matchmaker, and LELETEA was even more exaggerated, with BM in the left hand and Anpanman in the right hand.

It is not a coincidence that everyone is collaborating on new products. Rather, collaborating on new products has become the norm for new tea beverage brands. Not only is it widespread, but the speed of "updates and replacements" is extremely fast.

Xiao La Jiao took a brief look at Cha Baidao's recent joint activities. In the past three months, it has not missed a single month, with "Honkai Impact 3rd" in April, with "Tun Tun Zai" in May, and with "Fox Spirit Matchmaker" at the end of June.

My goodness, if one day you walk into a milk tea shop and find that it doesn’t have any co-branded IP, that might mean that the brand is about to be out of business, right?

Everyone should be familiar with the concept of co-branding.

Going back a long way, in 1979, McDonald's stuffed toys from the collaboration with Star Trek into Happy Meals, which was probably the first collaboration. More recently, a few years ago, Uniqlo was busy launching co-branded T-shirts with major anime IPs.

The cross-border linkage between the catering industry and games and animation is a basic operation. The friendly exchanges between major beverage categories, such as Luckin Coffee joining hands with Moutai and Nayuki joining hands with Tsingtao Beer, are not news.

But these days, milk tea collaborations have crossed boundaries to a degree you can’t even imagine. Everything can be linked, as long as you are famous, come on!

Reproductive isolation? Not true.

The first thing that struck me was that Lelecha and Liushen Floral Water could be connected? ? ?

Milk tea and cosmetics are mixed together...

Manner X Helena

There are also co-branded luxury goods, which allow you to achieve high-end luxury freedom with just 20 yuan.

It’s not just the brand, The shy also...

If you search more carefully, you will find that these tea drinks have been co-branded with various brands you can and cannot think of. Although we don’t know when the Metaverse will be realized, the Linked Universe has already been realized first.

Could it be that imagination is the only thing that can restrict tea beverage joint brands?

If you think about it carefully, this matter is a bit strange.

There are countless consumer products and many options for co-branding. Why is it that tea drinks have become so popular for co-branding, and even created a new market trend?

But, after some analysis, I found that this guy is born to do this job. He has only become so popular in recent years because his talent points were activated too late. . .

How do you mean?

First of all, tea drinks are particularly suitable for the characteristics of tea shops.

Take Heytea as an example. The number of Heytea stores worldwide has exceeded 4,000. In the first half of last year, 800 new stores were opened, of which 60% are in first- and second-tier cities, 40% are in third-tier cities and below, and there are even stores overseas. Heytea is not that big. Luckin Coffee and Mixue Ice City have exceeded 10,000 stores a long time ago.

Tea shops are usually located in places with convenient transportation and dense crowds.

There are 4 stores within 3 kilometers of our village.

In short, with its large number, convenient location, wide distribution, and multi-level penetration, it is comparable to Lanzhou Ramen and Shaxian Snacks.

When you still regard tea shops as a must-have hut for summer heat relief, brands have already regarded them as the "rear window of a taxi" in the new era. . .

Moreover, in the case of tea drink X brand, at first glance, tea drink is the main consumption of consumers, and peripherals are given as gifts. But in fact, from the perspective of consumer psychology, peripherals are the main consumption, and what to drink is not important .

Well, there are many people who drink milk tea frequently for the sake of collaboration and even break down their defenses.

The core of the collaboration is still "fan economy"

Because these leading milk tea brands have a series of characteristics: suitable for all ages, cheap, high frequency of demand, and extremely low purchasing decision costs.

The taste is unlikely to disappoint you; the prices are basically reduced to the lowest, only about ten yuan a cup, so you won’t feel too bad if you drink one cup every day. If you really can’t afford it, you can invite friends or like-minded people to drink together, gather around, or even give drinks to friends you have a good relationship with.

Therefore, the properties of tea itself are perfectly suitable for linkage. . .

Secondly, in the past, co-branded items were commodities themselves. Uniqlo’s co-branded items were clothes, and Nike’s co-branded items were shoes. When designing them, one had to consider market acceptance and the difficulty of producing the products, as well as many other constraints. Therefore, many brands would be very cautious when choosing co-branded IPs.

If it works well, it will become a historical classic like Nike's Back to the Future series. But what if it fails? Not only will the sales of the product line plummet, but it will also lower the brand's tone and directly nail it to the pillar of shame in history.

There are many people who like EVA, but there are probably not many who are willing to go out wearing a T-shirt with Shinji Ikari's portrait printed on it.

However, for joint ventures in the catering industry, catering is the main consumer, and the joint venture serves as a "free gift" with no taboos.

For beginners, you can just put the key brand image on milk tea, cups, and bags. If you want to be more advanced, you can make some customized stickers, customized fans and other small gifts.

Have you discovered that these few tricks can be applied to almost all brands...

This has also created a unique ecosystem of collaboration between tea drinks and brands: there is no reproductive isolation, and everything can be co-branded.

Not to mention brands, this one sticker trick can conquer the world, even celebrities can participate without pressure.

The joint branding market response is not good? No problem, we will find another IP next month, change the packaging materials and roll-up banners, and we are done!

Therefore, under this trend where all tea beverage brands have to connect with each other, tea beverage linkage has also entered an era of great internal competition.

At first, we made cups, paper bags, cup covers and stickers. Later, we started to design and customize small peripheral products: hair combs, bibs, balloons, woven shoulder straps, fans, shoulder bags, flash cards, and now we have entered into deep customization.

Jian Wang 3 X Meituan Waimai X DQ, offline and online activities together, in addition to the offline game all the sects joint flash cards and other peripherals, there are also unique rewards set up in the game.

A colleague who is crazy about The shy told me that when Cha Baidao collaborated with The shy, there were several offline theme stores in Hangzhou. In addition to flash cards, there were also limited edition dolls.

Cha Baidao even held a fan meeting at the end of the year. In addition to meeting him in person, there was also a chance to win a bottle of milk tea made by him.

In the industrial and commercial society, time is precious. Why can brands and tea shops hit it off and make tea-drinking brand linkage an industry trend?

For brands, linkage is an attempt to “achieve great results with small efforts”.

A person in charge of the linkage with Jian Wang 3 told me, "Online delivery depends on the traffic pool. It depends on how much money you have to invest. One dollar brings one dollar effect. There is no way to achieve the effect of ten dollars with one dollar. Jian Wang 3 itself has a good player ecology offline, and offline activities have more possibilities for user fission and word-of-mouth communication."

There are two main reasons for choosing the tea beverage linkage: "One is that it is a national chain that can cover all regions of the country, and the other is the ability to control the brand."

As linkage becomes normalized, tea beverage brands have formed a relatively standardized process for linkage.

The last time Jian Wang 3 cooperated with Cha Baidao, the overall process cycle was about 2-3 months, covering more than 7,000 stores across the country. "Basically, we just need to follow their process line. There will be minor bumps in the details, but the overall process is very easy."

As for the results, the last time Jian Wang 3 X Cha Baidao sold nearly one million cups on the first day, an increase of nearly 100% month-on-month. In terms of publicity effect, it was on the hot search many times, and the total exposure reached hundreds of millions. After that, they will continue to communicate with different brands to pursue more diverse linkage possibilities.

Today's tea brands are facing a highly competitive and highly homogenized market. At a time when it is difficult to differentiate products, Nayuki's Tea and Heytea, as high-end tea brands, have repeatedly lowered the prices of their products in recent years, lowered their profile, and pursued a broader market.

Collaboration was once a weapon for them to differentiate themselves in competition. It not only allowed them to gain higher levels of discussion, but also gave them the opportunity to become advertisers and create new revenue streams.

But unfortunately, in a market with serious internal competition, once a method works, other brands will quickly follow suit.

The originally differentiated marketing is inevitably heading towards aesthetic fatigue again.

Perhaps what will be left for the world in the future is only a legend that there is no reproductive isolation and everything can be co-branded, as well as a pile of dusty wrapping paper from various brands under the consumers' cabinets.

Author: Dodo Warrior

Source: WeChat public account " Bad Review X.PIN "

This article is authorized by @差评X.PIN to be published on Operation Party. Any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 agreement