Scene Brand 0-1: Hubang Hot Sauce kidnaps the poor’s takeaway

In the fierce competition in the hot sauce market, Hubang Hot Sauce stood out with its unique scenario brand strategy, achieving an amazing annual revenue of 200 million in just four years. Next, let's take a deep look at how Hubang Hot Sauce achieved great success in the takeaway scenario and explore its future expansion path in more scenarios.

In the next few issues, I will talk about more cases of scenario brands.

Hubang Hot Sauce is a representative of scene brands. It was founded in 2015 and had an annual income of 200 million four years later.

The most common scene where people see Hubang hot sauce is takeaway. It has developed more than 100,000 catering terminals through takeaway scenarios, with an average annual growth rate of 200%.

The cultural review media "Highway Store" once mentioned that "the takeaway of the poor has been kidnapped by Hubang hot sauce... No matter whether the takeaway I ordered at noon is braised chicken, pickled fish or scrambled eggs, this lunch will lead to the same destination - Hubang hot sauce bibimbap."

Why is Hubang Hot Sauce successful in the takeaway scene?

01

When entering any industry, you must study the current competitive situation in the industry.

The most obvious pattern in the hot sauce industry is one super company and many weak companies. Lao Gan Ma has established a difficult-to-cross moat by fixing its price range and monopolizing supermarkets. In response to these two characteristics, the entry point for new entrants in the industry is very obvious.

The first entry point is to extend the price range, either cheaper than Lao Gan Ma or more expensive. This is actually very difficult. Facing the 8-15 yuan price range of Lao Gan Ma, if you sell it cheaply, you won’t make money, and if you sell it expensively, no one will buy it. The second entry point is to change the scene. When people go shopping in supermarkets and buy hot sauce, they will think of Lao Gan Ma. What about other scenes?

02

Therefore, Hubang Hot Sauce has tried many scenarios and even set up 20,000 offline terminals in half a year, but without exception, all have had little effect.

At this time, an employee of Hubang Jinan Office tried to sell the hot sauce in take-out restaurants. Unexpectedly, the product was sold out in a few days.

In fact, there were four scene characteristics of takeout at that time:

First of all, there is a lot of room for growth in the target scenarios.

According to Zhiyan Consulting, the market size of China's online food delivery industry was 125.03 billion yuan in 2015, and exceeded 660 billion yuan in 2020.

Secondly, there are few competing products in the target scenario.

As an emerging industry, takeout was regarded as a "pseudo-demand" by many experts and scholars at that time, and the only hot sauce brand that really entered the market was Hubang Hot Sauce.

Another thing is that the entry threshold into the target scenario is low.

Adding hot sauce to take-out meals to enhance the flavor is a real demand from the user side, which can in turn encourage merchants to accept the entry of Hubang hot sauce.

Finally, the target scenario can bring incremental users rather than competing for the existing users of the giants.

Most of the consumers in the takeaway industry are young people who are willing to try new products and are less sensitive to prices. Although there is some overlap with the users covered by Lao Gan Ma in traditional supermarkets, there are significant differences.

03

When actually entering the target scenario, what the brand needs to do is to create a product that suits this scenario.

For example, Lao Gan Ma is usually packaged in half-pound bottles and is made of glass bottles, which is obviously not suitable for takeout scenarios.

Therefore, Hubang Hot Sauce reduced its product specifications to 15g, which can be consumed in one serving, and avoided easily breakable glass packaging, instead using the ketchup packaging method of Western fast food.

Of course, for the young group in the takeaway scene, the packaging design of Hubang hot sauce is more trendy and fashionable. All these are serving the scene and the user experience in scene consumption.

04

A scenario brand is one that makes users think of you first in a specific scenario.

In order to penetrate the takeaway scene, Hubang Hot Sauce first affected key groups of takeaway customers, such as students and white-collar workers. It began to become familiar to this group of people through brand alliances with Pepsi, Zhaopin, BOSS Direct, and NetEase game implants. Later, it cooperated with well-known fast food brands such as Country Style, Xiao Yang Shengjian, and Lao Niangjiu to form a unique brand impression in the takeaway scene.

Basically, when Hubang hot sauce entered the food delivery market, there was no other hot sauce in this field. When it arrived in the hands of users along with bags of food delivery, it had already taken the first step to penetrate the scene.

First-mover advantage begins to become a competitive barrier.

05

Now, Hubang Hot Sauce is trying to advance from 1-10.

You may have heard of "brand spillover". When you form a brand effect in a certain group, the people around them will also learn about your brand.

Scene overflow is similar to this. When you form a brand effect in a certain scene, your users will also bring you to other scenes.

For example, young people discovered that Hubang hot sauce is not only for takeout, but can also be used in scenarios such as business trips and eating alone at home - thus, an overflow effect occurred in various scenarios.

In order to adapt to these scenarios, Hubang Hot Sauce only needs to make some small changes to the product to meet the needs of the scenario. For example, Hubang Hot Sauce pioneered the design of 30g yogurt cup. This small can design is more concise and fashionable, and is closer to the consumption scenario of young people eating alone.

Of course, before this, Hubang hot sauce was only available online, in cooperation with Xiangcunji and Lao Niangjiu. In the future, will Hubang hot sauce become a standard for Chinese fast food and enter offline physical stores?

Just like Coca-Cola and Pepsi in KFC and McDonald's stores, Hubang Hot Sauce began to explore more scenarios.

Author: Huang Xiaojun

WeChat public account: Jingyan Brand Lab (ID: JingyanLab)