Who popularized the so-called consumer substitution?

This article mainly tells the rise of the "consumption substitution" phenomenon and the growth story of a group of content creators as the beneficiaries of this phenomenon.

At present, a new concept of spending money is popular in the whole society - new rational consumption. For example, young people who have the strongest consumption demand and willingness are more concerned about the practicality, experience and even freshness of the goods.

In short, what we call the trend of "equal replacement" has taken root in people's hearts.

The direct beneficiaries of this concept are, of course, the traditional OEM factories. However, these so-called white-label and factory-label products have stepped out from behind the scenes and have been accepted by the public. There is a group in the middle that plays the role of bridge, translation and even promotion.

The Wang Qi couple we met were the earliest initiators and participants of the concept of substitutes. Their factory-source store visits are still influencing a wide range of consumer groups; Xiao Qi's sharing of good things has experienced a leap from "the most expensive is the best" to high quality and low price; Captain Guoguo has benefited from the promotion of many factories and sensed this wave of consumption earlier.

They are content creators who master the rules of platform traffic distribution and are well versed in the preferences of young people. Some of them have also unlocked the code to make money when connecting factories and consumers, becoming individual atomized businessmen.

Whether creating or starting a business, they are a group of surfing-style players. From entrepreneurial motivation to monetization model, they have different styles, even eccentric, and each shows different survival wisdom.

They have caught up with this wave of substitutions, how can they ensure they don’t miss the next one?

1. A Tibetan girl quit her job and became a factory blogger

Zana Rangguo wanted to resign because her boss did not fulfill the initial promise. However, when she thought about whether she could find a job with a monthly salary of 10,000 yuan in Chengdu, she suddenly felt like a deflated ball and all her courage disappeared.

That day, she took the subway to work as usual. The more than one-hour journey felt like a long journey of life. Suddenly, she saw her blurry reflection in the window of the subway car coming from the opposite direction. The train started, and the two of them walked towards each other and just slid away. "Looking at the other self walking away, for the first time in my life, I felt an epiphany. I shouldn't be on my way to work. This shouldn't be me."

Zana Rangguo, a Tibetan girl, was originally the content director of an MCN agency, responsible for discovering potential influencers, selecting tracks, and planning content. She once accompanied three or four accounts, starting from scratch and accumulating millions of fans in just a few months. In addition to the minor conflict with her boss, there was another important reason for her resignation: "Since I can help others become famous, why can't I do it myself?"

Just like that, in 2019, Zana Rangguo transformed herself into a fashion blogger "Captain Guoguo" on Xiaohongshu and Bilibili. In just two or three years, she has accumulated millions of fans across the entire network.

At first, she was working in the pet-related field, "but later she felt it was not profitable," so she switched to clothing.

Zana Rangguo started her business as a content blogger from scratch. When she talked about the most difficult thing she had ever experienced, she blurted out "lack of money". She called her family to borrow money, but her mother on the other end of the phone thought it was unreasonable to hear that her daughter quit her job to start a business. Zana Rangguo shouted at the top of her lungs, "I promise to pay you back in half a year."

She made no secret of her passion for making money. She started three businesses during her four years at university. The first time she started a WeChat business selling crystal jewelry, she was scammed. The second time she opened a grid shop with her college roommate, she suffered a huge loss. The third time, she warned herself not to get involved in any project with rent or agency fees, otherwise it would be too dangerous. Finally, she thought of the most simple and clever way, which was to set up a street stall to sell socks. However, she found that the socks could not withstand the wind and sun, so she gave all the socks to her roommate.

With 10,000 yuan from her mother, she started her own business again. This time, it was different from the past. "Captain Guoguo" was something she liked and was good at, and she had accumulated experience in content. She was a fashion blogger and had her own ideas and opinions.

Before joining the MCN agency, Zana Rangguo worked at a fashion magazine in Beijing. She accidentally discovered that a fashion editor with a monthly salary of 8,000 yuan used luxury goods, which shocked her. Then another incident happened, which also had a profound impact on her. When she was wearing a 200 yuan dress bought online, her colleague reached out to flip the washing label. "He said, don't get me wrong, I just want to see what brand you are wearing." It turns out that their brand awareness has penetrated into their bones and implanted into every corner of life.

This makes her always think about who really pays attention to me and what they really need when she is selecting content. Maybe many people are like her when she first arrived in Beijing. They may have limited spending power, and people around them are pursuing higher-end consumption. "I told myself that what I recommend to them may not be the cheapest, but it must be very cost-effective and worth the money."

For example, when the weather gets hot, she recommends some clothes suitable for hot and muggy weather. For another example, she does some 1688 big secrets themes, such as how to buy better things at 1688. There are also low-price themes, but she has to put a "water" label on them, that is, the appearance of the clothes after being washed is trustworthy.

With such accumulated output, Captain Guoguo received his first business order on Xiaohongshu within half a year. Although it was only 200 yuan, "I was so happy at that time. I felt like I was the richest person in the world when I got 200 yuan."

In October 2019, "Captain Guoguo" had its first hit content, and then the number of promotional orders gradually increased.

In 2022, because of the output of the same source content on 1688, an underwear factory in Gu Rao, Shantou, Guangdong, approached her to actively seek cooperation. They searched for the business cooperation background of Xiaohongshu, and the first one that popped up was "Captain Guoguo".

At first, Zana was hesitant. In her memory, the service provided by merchants on 1688 was not very friendly. At that time, there was no free return policy or seven-day unconditional return or exchange policy, let alone free shipping on returns.

The merchant told her that they were a contract manufacturer for a certain underwear brand, a brand that almost all girls knew.

After the cooperation between the two parties, the transaction results of the group on WeChat official account were also very good, and many buyers were college students. The factory also recommended "Captain Guoguo" to other factories in the Gurao production area.

This collaboration made Zana Rangguo realize the huge consumer demand behind brand substitutes. She began to actively plan some content for brand substitute consumption, and the data was also good.

One of the two pieces of content pinned by "Captain Guoguo" on Xiaohongshu is a recommendation for yoga pants produced by the 1688 source factory, which has received more than 5,000 likes, nearly 4,000 collections, and more than 150 comments.

Throughout 2022, Captain Guoguo received more than a dozen advertisements from source manufacturers, which contributed one-third of her annual income that year.

Like most bloggers, Zana Ranguo creates content and monetizes it. He bought a house and a car in Chengdu. Not only does he live a stable life, but because of his freedom, he has even entered the lifestyle of an elderly person ahead of time.

When asked if she would continue to be a content blogger, Zana Ranguo did not hesitate, "Of course, until I die."

She was worried that we thought it was a joke, so she added that she was not joking and that she would do it as long as she could until the day she couldn't do it anymore.

2. From selling big brands to selling substitutes

Xiao Qi was originally a cartoonist, but she became a blogger by accident. She also unknowingly entered the two fields of beauty and skin care that are closest to money.

At that time, consumerism was still prevalent. The price of skin care products was often four figures. Various concepts were popular and people were immersed in the frenzy of consumption. Compared with the cost performance that young people talk about now, the creed of everyone buying things at that time was, "the most expensive is the best."

In order to get closer to users and resonate with each other, Xiao Qi has to test the rules every time she releases content to share good things. Before influencing others, she must immerse herself in consumption. She herself does not have such a strong demand for consumption, but "I will keep brainwashing myself, you must buy, if you don't buy, how can others follow you to buy?"

For example, when concepts like taking C in the morning and A in the evening or peptides were proposed, or when a pair of shoes from a certain brand priced at 6,000 or 7,000 yuan became popular that month, she had to ignore the price of the product and place an order directly to keep up with the trend. At one point, her monthly consumption amounted to 30,000 or 40,000 yuan.

Once, in order to attend a brand launch, she had to spend 30,000 to 40,000 yuan to buy a Chanel Wanderer. "You will feel that kind of pressure, because it is popular and everyone will carry it. You should also buy it." In the end, she transferred the bag to another blogger.

This is a game that you can’t stop. In Xiao Qi’s words, it’s a vicious circle: you have to keep up with popular trends, keep buying, and maintain output, so that users will feel that it is right to follow your lead and the brand will continue to invest.

Although she didn't like this kind of life, it didn't seem to be wrong. Until one day, it all came to an abrupt end.

In the second half of 2021, Xiao Qi suddenly discovered that the consumption craze was fading, and the income of picture and text bloggers was sharply declining. Many people switched to Douyin and Xiaohongshu, including herself, and stopped updating her WeChat public account.

One of the important factors for the change is that "the most expensive is the best", which was once regarded as a golden rule, is no longer effective. She found that when blogger friends around her share good things, they will bring up the white-label products from the source.

In fact, Xiao Qi once invested in a friend's clothing business, which specialized in yoga pants and bought the goods from 1688. A short-sleeved shirt, a logo change, a sticker, and you can sell it. This was incredible to her. And it was the first time she felt shocked by the price, "It turns out that the cost of a piece of clothing can be so low."

The yoga pants business was not successful, but this experience almost reshaped Xiao Qi's perception of commodities and she also retained the habit of using 1688. She would order seven or eight pieces of clothing at a time, wear a T-shirt every time she appeared on camera, and buy a lot of jewelry. The average order value was basically less than 100 yuan. Now she would buy some small furniture that was consumable. In this way, Xiao Qi contributed hundreds of yuan a month and tens of thousands of yuan a year.

For a while, several blogger friends I know love to buy makeup brushes. When they share with each other, they don’t send each other a link, but the name of a certain factory, and then everyone goes directly to the platform to search. This is completely different from the habit of sharing links when buying things on Taobao and JD.

She also has friends who are so exaggerated that they regard 1688 as a "price board" for everything from food, clothing, housing and transportation. They may not necessarily buy shampoo, disposable underwear, small tables and stools here, but they will definitely check the prices there.

Buying cheap things and becoming a money-saving blogger was very unpopular and even resisted a year ago.

In the past, bloggers around me, including Xiao Qi, still carried the burden of being bloggers and were ashamed to share that their products actually came from a factory-goods platform like 1688. "Everyone still circulated them in a small circle, and would not really share good products. At that time, the business did not allow people to post such things."

Now, the first thing to do in sharing good things is not to raise the price. In the past, those who shared high-end luxury goods even saw a decline. Young people have become more pragmatic and more sensitive to prices. The mentality of not buying expensive things has spread like a virus. Bloggers have also unloaded their burdens, and the tide of content has reversed for a while.

If you open Xiao Qi's Xiaohongshu account "Fried Cicada Monkey" today, you will think that she is a cultural blogger. She defines herself as "cultural travel, reading, and women are everything." Consumption content is almost eliminated, and reading, movies, travel, and emotional topics almost occupy the entire content of the homepage.

To her surprise, it turned out that this would not affect the content creation and commercial realization ability at all. Recently, she released an advertisement for a new Motorola mobile phone. Instead of doing a simple product review like in the past, she put it into life scenes and implanted it into the original content from the perspective of changing times and nostalgia.

This is actually a more vital transformation. Xiao Qi realized that "after all, we can't just make content by shopping. Daily life is not built by consumption."

Xiao Qi is clearly disenchanted with brands, and her state of mind has changed greatly. She admits that the blogger industry is in a false prosperity with a lot of flowers and flowers, and sometimes in order to make others like their output and arouse their yearning, bloggers have to fall into the consumption trap under secondary pressure and repeat a vicious cycle.

Now, she likes the current situation very much, knowing what is good and what price is real. After both the content and life return to simplicity, everything becomes more natural for her who doesn't like consumption in nature.

At least when buying things, the purpose is not to influence others, but to see whether you like it or need it.

3. The Origin of the Concept of Substitution

If we trace the origins of the now popular concept of "substitute", Wang Qi and Yang Dandan must be among the early contributors.

After graduation, they went to work in Internet companies. Yang Dandan liked to buy some daily necessities for little girls online. Around 2014, she found that it was cheaper to buy things on 1688. She bought pantyhose almost by the dozen, and then showed off to her colleagues that they were very cheap. The other party's surprised expression was a kind of sense of achievement for her.

By shopping day after day and year after year, Yang Dandan had unknowingly grasped the general outline of China's industry: the main production area of ​​foreign trade jewelry is Qingdao, Pingdu is a major producer of false eyelashes, the best place to buy wigs is Xuchang, and high-end women's clothing is basically produced in Shenzhen.

One day, Yang Dandan manually created a table based on her years of purchasing experience, where a certain type of factory is concentrated, and even the corresponding boutiques and factory stores, and sorted them by different themes. Then she sent it to a Douban group.

There was no motivation, no business idea, she was still working in a big company, she just wanted to share, but she didn’t expect many girls to like and discuss it. But at that time they hadn’t thought about the consumption trend behind it, let alone the business opportunities behind it.

It was not until 2019 that Yang Dandan and Wang Qi had their own child. In order to balance work and life, they decided to start an e-commerce studio. One of the directions is to operate accounts and share content.

Initially, they chose to publish a content about 1688 on "What's Worth Buying", with the theme of things being cheaper. Soon, there was a small traffic explosion, with about a thousand people collecting it. Although there are not many operations now, their account on What's Worth Buying eventually reached more than 100,000 followers, which ranked very high on the platform.

After that, the article was slightly modified and published on other platforms, which also received a good response. This was also the opportunity for them to set up the "1688 Source Factory Excavator Group" on Douban, which now has 50,000 members.

At the same time, they also planned another theme content on Xiaohongshu, "MUJI's Substitutes". Although this article was eventually restricted due to various factors, it received more than 30,000 likes and collections, which was a great encouragement for them.

Wang Qi is keenly aware of the power of the word "substitute", and feels that he has hit upon the sentiments of most consumers. "For whatever reason, people are returning to the essence of consumption and starting to pay attention to the product itself."

The two quickly continued to produce more content around "parity": according to categories such as storage, clothing, and home furniture, they explored and sorted out products that "did not have too much premium and were close to the value itself." At that time, there was no so-called industry map, and they manually collected, screened, and sorted out information.

Every post received a response, which was Yang Dandan's greatest sense of accomplishment in the early days. Users would even keep urging them to update, asking them to release a certain category or series in the comment section. They would post three or four articles a week on topics related to 1688. Even if a post was deleted, they would interpret it as a kind of influence.

It was also during that period that they basically understood the characteristics and tone of the mainstream users of different content platforms, and the content would be differentiated in a targeted manner. For example, Bilibili has a high proportion of students, so it is more suitable for recommending clothing content; Xiaohongshu has users from mature families with certain spending power, so the feedback on home decoration content is better.

At that time, they had not considered commercialization. Wang Qi said that they were more motivated by the idea of ​​operating the account and in a sense acted as an opinion leader in a niche field. However, when they established a certain trust relationship with users and the traffic naturally accumulated to a certain level, they began to think about other possibilities.

Initially, after accumulating thousands of fans on the official account through content, it gradually formed a private domain, and some people began to tentatively ask in the group, "Can you help with shipping?"

Because 1688 had a special feature at that time, there were requirements for the minimum order quantity, and it was more about wholesale. Some young people would not stock up in large quantities for the purpose of trying new things. The channel for placing orders and collecting payments also changed from group relay to fast group. Although the frequency of opening groups every month was uncertain and the categories were limited, they accumulated a group of loyal users for many years.

The reason for this close relationship is that Yang Dandan chose basic clothing categories. "Underwear, socks and the like are fast-moving consumer goods, and people have a large demand for them and consume them frequently. In addition, e-commerce has an insurmountable obstacle, which is returns. We make basic clothing because we don't want to make impulse purchases and then have a large number of returns. Our manpower and material resources are not enough to support such a model."

Compared with the initial manual sorting of origin information, the platform now has an industry map with various labels based on different dimensions. Compared with the previous black box status of the factory, the information is now more transparent, which to some extent lowers the threshold for their product selection.

However, as more young people have become aware of the value of 1688 as a "substitute", it has attracted more manufacturers to move in. However, it is becoming more difficult to find truly cost-effective source factories.

They are a typical family workshop. They send their children to kindergarten during the day and handle their own affairs. Compared with the 996 working hours in a large company, which was full of internal friction and made them feel powerless and unwilling to do anything when they got home, they are still busy now, with greater pressure, and entrepreneurship requires more comprehensive personal skills, but they have no complaints and are "busy and enthusiastic."

In the end , Captain Guoguo, Xiaoqi and Wang Qi and his wife are just a small sample of countless small Bs. They have accurately grasped the subtle changes in the content ecology in the past few years and have become the earliest capturers and beneficiaries of the trend of alternative consumption.

They are no longer obsessed with selling one product all over the world, but instead serve their target circles well and establish longer-term connections and stickiness.

In fact, bloggers like Captain Guoguo have replaced the traditional commercial distributor group to a certain extent. Compared with the latter who are just engaged in pure distribution of goods, they have broken away from channel anxiety and instead understand the user's consumption mentality better. Using content as a fulcrum, they can more easily attract massive consumers.

These ant-like individuals and the live-streaming e-commerce sales experts are the most important groups that cannot be ignored. They indirectly reshape new supply and new demand, and even promote micro-innovation of business models to a certain extent.

Written by: Zhai Wenting and Li Huan

Source: New-Daybreak (ID: new-daybreak)