Is Jiang Xiaobai’s copywriting ineffective?

Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting was once widely circulated, and many people paid for it because of the copywriting. However, Jiang Xiaobai's sales have declined this year, which makes people wonder: Is Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting ineffective? Let's take a look at the author's analysis of this situation~

Jiang Xiaobai had a widely circulated copywriting before:

I hope I can still pour you wine in ten years. I hope we can still be old friends in ten years.

01

In 2012, the liquor industry was caught up in the plasticizer scandal. At this time, Jiang Xiaobai was quietly born. Relying on its endless stream of touching copywriting, it became a dark horse in the liquor industry. At its peak, its annual turnover once reached 3 billion yuan.

However, ten years later, Jiang Xiaobai was mentioned again, relying on rumors of layoffs.

We can't help but ask, has Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting become ineffective?

To answer this question, we have to start with the liquor industry.

Liquor can be divided into two major categories based on its outer packaging. One is packaged liquor, such as Moutai and Wuliangye, which are suitable for gifts and banquets; the other is bottled liquor, such as Niulanshan and Lao Cun Zhang, which are suitable for dinner parties and food stalls. Jiang Xiaobai is targeting the latter market.

At that time, the bulk liquor market was basically dominated by Niulanshan Erguotou and the Northeast Old Village Chief's duo. The former, with its overwhelming advertisements of "Authentic Erguotou, authentic Beijing flavor", firmly occupied the minds of the authentic Erguotou and even surpassed the Erguotou's ancestor Red Star, while the Old Village Chief also took advantage of "Country Love" and went from the Northeast to the whole country.

The liquor industry is an industry with extremely fierce competition. To understand how fierce it is, the client of a liquor brand I worked on before once said: If you can register any name related to liquor that you can think of, I lose.

But in this seemingly stable market structure, Jiang Xiaobai emerged and in just a few years, became a competitor to Niu Er and the old village chief.

The success of Jiang Xiaobai lies first in its insight into a new market demand. Starting from more than ten years ago, China's dining scene has changed a lot. The scene of people gathering has changed from round tables to square tables, and from hotels to roadside shops. The social scene of liquor is no longer the high-end round table culture and class culture, but has become more relaxed and casual, with more of a small gathering of a few good friends for a drink.

In response to the changes in consumption scenarios, Jiang Xiaobai set its sights on young people and created this youthful wine specifically for them.

Young people are not used to drinking liquor, so I will make a light-flavored sorghum liquor with a 30-odd alcohol content. Young people cannot drink too much at small gatherings, so I will make small bottles of liquor. Young people think traditional liquor is too rustic, so I will make the packaging exquisite and artistic, and add heartfelt copywriting...

It was precisely these exquisite and thoughtful copywriting that made Jiang Xiaobai stand out among a number of liquor brands and made it completely popular with the rise of social networks at that time.

While other liquor brands have Wang Gang and Chen Baoguo raising their glasses and drinking together while shouting “inheriting a century-old classic”, Jiang Xiaobai is a 2D little boy who tells you: “It’s not that I can’t quit drinking, but that I can’t quit friends”, “You don’t understand my silence, so how can you understand my sadness”.

Which young man can resist this?

Many of these texts may seem a bit pretentious today, and have a bit of the flavor of QQ spaces back then, but at that time, they were indeed all the rage on the Internet. The public account tweets of Jiang Xiaobai's texts have received more than 100,000 views.

02

But why does Jiang Xiaobai seem to be a little quiet now?

First of all, in terms of external factors, after the outbreak of the epidemic, people had fewer opportunities to gather offline, which naturally affected Jiang Xiaobai, whose main sales channel is offline catering. This made Jiang Xiaobai's performance highlight remain in 2019, and it stopped announcing sales data to the public from 2020.

The "2020 Young People's Alcohol Consumption Insight Report" shows that Jiang Xiaobai's market share in the small-bottle wine market has fallen from 20% in 2019 to 0.5%.

Even after offline life returned to normal, Jiang Xiaobai has not returned to its peak in terms of sales or brand awareness.

Many people gave the reason in three words: "not good to drink". A post-95s consumer on social media said that the small bottle of Jiang Xiaobai "is too loose and strong, very bad and intoxicating". According to some wine bloggers, Jiang Xiaobai has a Xiaoqu fragrance, but it does not have a very prominent fragrance. It tastes "watery" and lacks the flavor substances in traditional liquor. "I can't smell the aroma of grain, and it's hard to smell anything other than alcohol."

In terms of taste, even Jiang Xiaobai itself is intentionally guiding people to use Jiang Xiaobai to mix with beverages, which to a certain extent also shows that it is indeed not that delicious to drink it alone.

But even if Jiang Xiaobai is really unpalatable, it certainly didn't become unpalatable suddenly. It must have tasted the same when it was popular before. Why was it so popular before?

The reason can only be the copywriting. Copywriting can really bring sales, even if your product is not that good.

When analyzing Jiang Xiaobai's success, many marketers like to talk about one point: Don't always focus on Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting. Jiang Xiaobai's success is not based on copywriting, but on its powerful distribution capabilities. You can buy it at any roadside stall or small restaurant across the country. This is the most amazing thing about Jiang Xiaobai.

In fact, this statement is not rigorous, because you can buy bottled liquor at any roadside stall or small restaurant in the country, and there is more than just Jiang Xiaobai. The shelves are filled with at least a dozen or twenty kinds of liquor. Why do people still like to choose Jiang Xiaobai?

There is no doubt that the answer is because of Jiang Xiaobai’s copywriting.

The most powerful ability of a copywriter in terms of selling products is the ability to create trends.

Use attractive copywriting to create a viral spread, thereby driving the product to become popular for a while. Even if the product is not that good, people are willing to buy it and try it, because everyone loves to follow fashion. What I buy is not the product, but a pursuit of fashion and the satisfaction of my own emotional values.

Is the sauce-flavored latte delicious? I drank a cup while pinching my nose, and felt uncomfortable for the whole afternoon, but this did not affect its popularity after the topic became popular. It was so popular that it was hard to get a cup in 1-2 months. "Good wine and coffee, one cup after another" This is the power of popularity.

This KFC Crazy Thursday joke on February 29 this year went viral on major social media platforms: "If you miss this Crazy Thursday, the next Crazy Thursday on February 29 will be in 2052." Similar texts went viral on major social media platforms. KFC sold 2 million pieces of original flavor chicken on that record-breaking day. It still had the same taste and the same discounts, but it suddenly became a hit. This is also the power of popularity.

Jiang Xiaobai has created a trend of heartfelt copywriting with its packaging copy, and has continued to innovate over the past few years. Some people who buy wine even collect the packaging. Every once in a while, many large self-media accounts will release various selected collections, and various screen-sweeping materials are also circulated on Weibo, official accounts, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin platforms. This has made Jiang Xiaobai's brand a top presence on social media for many years. Under the subtle influence of these copywritings, when you buy wine at a stall, supermarket, or convenience store, looking at a shelf of similar products, there is a high probability that you will choose the brand whose copywriting you often hear or see.

It is often said that copywriting that sells products is not advanced, and advanced copywriting does not sell products. In fact, this is not absolute. Using creativity and copywriting to create trends, and letting trends drive product sales, is actually a possibility of making copywriting that sells products more advanced.

Recently, Qun Yushan created a spring brand film for ubras. The copywriting is very delicate, but beneath the appearance of brand image promotion, there is a very strong product core hidden, which tells people: you should wear lace underwear in spring.

When a tree shadow looks like lace, nature has a sexy flavor. It spreads and grows, but it doesn't necessarily have to go up, left, right, forward, or backward. It stretches and grows freely into its own appearance, which is nature. The sexiest appearance is also lace, the original appearance. Ubras Spring Lace Series When a piece of lace looks like a tree shadow, sexiness has a natural flavor. Subtitle: Wear lace through spring When we fall in love with sexiness, we fall in love with freedom.

※Subtitle: ubras Let the body be free first

Put forward a strong proposition and tell a story for it, so as to create a concept that you should eat/wear/use XXX at XXX time/scene. Through the dissemination of the concept, a new trend is subtly created, which drives the hot sales of products.

03

But why is Jiang Xiaobai’s copywriting ineffective now?

Because copywriting is a consumable, its communication effectiveness will decay over time.

The decline in the effectiveness of copywriting begins a countdown from the moment it is issued. It could be a day or it could be decades, but few people can grasp it accurately and can only judge it through objective feedback.

We often post tweets to promote products. A good tweet can be used repeatedly and can quickly promote products every time. But suddenly one day, this tweet no longer promotes products. At this time, I know that I need to write a new one.

On Xiaohongshu, there are often those notes that go viral and get tens of thousands of likes. At this time, there will often be many accounts that will carry the notes, and they will continue to go viral. Some even have more traffic than the original account. They will be repeatedly posted and repeatedly popular, but after a while the data will be just average when they are posted again. This shows that the effectiveness of this note has been exhausted.

Adidas' global slogan "Impossible is nothing" has been used for 20 years. Recently, Adidas launched a new slogan "You got this". I don't like it for any reason, but I think it may be because the effectiveness of that slogan has been almost exhausted.

In fact, the success of Jiang Xiaobai's copywriting is precisely because it has continuously launched new copywriting over the past few years, continuing to maintain the popularity of "Jiang Xiaobai's heartfelt copywriting", but we have seen that in recent years, there have been very few copywritings that have been able to stand out. The most recent one may be "Jiang Xiaobai's 100 Solemn Statements" in 2021.

The reason may be that Jiang Xiaobai's original copywriting style is not enough to impress today's young people, or perhaps in Jiang Xiaobai's own operational plan, copywriting is no longer the focus of operational communication. In short, the effectiveness of the previous copywriting has been almost exhausted.

For a positive example in this regard, we can look at Luckin Coffee. After its rebirth, Luckin Coffee has almost become the king of whole-life activities. Its content topics come one after another, and it is often on the hot searches. Other brands have one high-level collaboration a year, but Luckin Coffee has one a month.

In a "2023 Luckin Coffee Marketing Department Annual Performance Report.ppt", Luckin Coffee's Marketing Department summarized in detail its various communication cases over the past year, including N dozen hot searches a year, more than a dozen popular joint brands, and sales of competitors' half-year sales in one month, etc. The whole article is linked with "Why Luckin Coffee (our marketing department) understands marketing so well". Of the 27-page PPT, 25 pages summarize the achievements, 1 page summarizes the shortcomings, and 1 page is THANK YOU.

From this we can see that the success of Luckin's marketing can be understood as a topic marketing tactic. It did not stick to the previous successful paths. When Maotai sauce-flavored liquor became popular, it only did joint brands. When poster copywriting became popular, it only wrote copywriting. Instead, it combined the rapid launch of new products and looked for all forms of content that could create topics and spread the word. This is to always keep people's attention on the Luckin brand and make Luckin a popular symbol of the Chinese Internet. Even though some people also criticized that the taste was not as good as competitor A, and there was also a price war with competitor B, when workers felt sleepy in the afternoon and wanted to buy a cup of coffee to refresh themselves and continue working, the first thing they thought of might be this brand that they could see every day.

This is the ability of copywriting to create trends, an ability that Jiang Xiaobai and Durex once possessed and is now being promoted by Luckin Coffee. It is also a scarce ability that many high-end brands are now pursuing.

Author: Kuang Shisan WeChat Official Account: Free shipping