How do tea, fresh produce, and traditional nourishing businesses with strong categories and weak brands make a fortune quietly in the live broadcast room?

As a traditional industry that is less affected by brand effects, agricultural and sideline products are rarely noticed by everyone. This article focuses on the three categories of tea, fresh food, and tonic products, and explores the marketing strategies of operators in these industries in the context of video sales.

Since the second half of 2023, we have been paying attention to new energy vehicles, clothing accessories, fashion trends, and beauty and skin care. As the overall market performance tends to be conservative and does not show a significant growth trend, the major mainstream tracks are naturally mixed.

Some time ago, we published an article focusing on user insights: "Where should brands find growth in the face of consumers who are increasingly "difficult to fool"?" It also clearly stated our observations and conclusions - "The good or bad of the macro situation cannot be an excuse for whether or not there is growth. There are always opportunities to make money. It just depends on whether you can find the right path."

As a result, many readers immediately asked questions in the background: So which industries and places will make a fortune in 2023?

In order to answer this question, we reviewed our research ideas over the past two years. During this period, we have experienced a series of trends such as the dominance of international brands, the explosion of new consumption, and the rise of domestic brands. However, it seems that we have always neglected to pay attention to a broad track.

West Lake Longjing tea, Yunnan Pu'er, Ningxia wolfberry, Wuchang rice, Hotan jujube, Korla pear, and even sea cucumbers from the Liaodong Peninsula, beef and mutton from the northwest grasslands, kudzu root from the southern hilly areas, fish maw and isinglass from the southeast coast... These agricultural and sideline products with strong origin identification account for a large proportion of consumers' food consumption, but in the past there have been few innovative management methodologies.

Their biggest feature is that they have categories, markets, and scale, but no brands. It cannot be said that they have no brands at all, but compared with other industries, consumers are less affected by the brand effect when purchasing these categories. At the same time, the brand industry concentration of these categories is lower than that of other industries, and the operators all have a simple image of "doing great things quietly".

In this year's environment where uncertainty and development opportunities coexist, we selected and conducted in-depth research on three major categories: tea, fresh food, and tonic products. We found that everyone has their own unique skills. Some rely on "playing chess" to attract fans, some rely on "big brothers" to bring goods, and some rely on investment to increase sales in a short period of time...

This article will attempt to explore what strategies and tactics operators use to keep up with the trend and how they achieve rapid development.

01 Tea

China's tea market has always been huge, and has grown significantly in recent years. According to Frost & Sullivan, the compound annual growth rate of China's tea market size was 5.2% from 2016 to 2021, and the compound annual growth rate from 2021 to 2026 is expected to be about 4.2%, reaching 408 billion yuan in 2026.

Chinese tea manufacturers usually prefer to cooperate with distributors and use their local connections and resources to enter unfamiliar markets. Growth Black Box believes that the distributor cooperation model will remain the main sales model in the Chinese tea market in the foreseeable future cycle.

Thanks to the rapid development of China's e-commerce platform, tea manufacturers are gradually exploring the transformation of distribution stores to online operations. Compared with other industries, the online rate of the tea market is currently at a relatively low level, but the trend of continued onlineization in the future should not be underestimated.

It is worth noting that the low level of overall onlineization does not mean that online operations are not competitive. Growth Black Box observed that in just 7 years, the sales of tea in traditional e-commerce represented by Tmall experienced a rapid growth and then a significant decline, while the year-on-year increase and decrease of tea sales in Douyin e-commerce, which relies on short video content, was also extremely unstable in the past year, and generally showed a downward trend.

Since merchants have entered the market, they must have experienced the changes. Under the huge competitive pressure, whether they can find the right channels has almost become the primary strategy for whether they can maintain growth. On this basis, how to acquire customers, how to repurchase, and how to operate are all indispensable key strategies.

Case: Yiyao Tea

There are not many tea merchants who have grown big and strong purely by relying on brand awareness, but this does not mean that it is impossible to achieve rapid growth and conquest in this field in the short term. During the research process, we found a case that is very worth analyzing - Yiyao Tea Industry.

If we use one sentence to summarize the history of Yiyao Tea, it is "increasing revenue from 0 to 100 million in one year". We try to look back from the results and find that every step it takes contains a precise grasp of the market situation.

1. Choose a track: What is the most profitable thing to sell?

Before the survey, we mistakenly thought that most online tea merchants were individuals or teams that had many years of experience in offline traditional channels and added online channels to keep up with the needs of consumer development. In fact, merchants who have been deeply involved in offline traditional channels for many years usually find it difficult to understand the logic and gameplay of e-commerce or even bringing goods in a short period of time. Even if they have plans to enter the online market, they will choose to rely on agency operation companies.

However, Yiyao Tea Industry belongs to another model. It starts by selecting a track, understanding the gameplay of online live streaming, and then uses the strategy of "one trick to rule them all" to look for more suitable tracks and categories in order to maximize benefits.

According to the person in charge of online channels at Yiyao Tea, his team has been exploring the field of live streaming for three years, and has formed a mature methodology for both sales and operations. During this period, they have sold purple jade, jadeite, and porcelain, and only started selling tea in November last year.

These products, which seem to be completely different from the outside world, are all sold in the same way in the eyes of Yiyao Tea. There is no need to make major adjustments to the strategy each time the products are changed. The reason why tea was chosen is that it has a wider audience than jewelry and porcelain, and the possibility of repeat purchase is also greater.

Over the past year, the actual operating conditions have indeed confirmed that Yiyao Tea Industry’s judgment was correct. Not only has the revenue reached hundreds of millions, but the net profit margin is also very impressive.

This brings us a revelation: after mastering the core methodology of sales operations, we can try more categories to increase the chances of finding the category with the highest return on investment. When the feedback of a category in the market is not good, we should stop and change direction in time.

2. Choose a platform: Where is the best place to sell?

"When we were selling jewelry two years ago, we mainly relied on Douyin and Kuaishou," said the online channel manager of Yiyao Tea. "We once sold a lot of products, but the profits were not so impressive. On the one hand, it was related to the category, and on the other hand, the return rate was too high, and there were many after-sales disputes. It was a bit too much to bear."

After selling porcelain for six months last year, Yiyao Tea Industry suddenly discovered that the traffic scale of the video account began to grow significantly, so it made a major strategic decision to shift the focus of the channel to the video account and take a gamble.

The reason why we say "taking a gamble" is that from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, the traffic of Video Account will not be large, and the daily activity will not be as good as other similar platforms, but Yiyao Tea Industry's gamble is precisely "enter the game early and occupy the pit early". When other mature platforms already need to buy stable traffic to operate stably, Yiyao Tea Industry has made the tea business one of the top few on Video Account relying only on natural traffic and the platform's support policy for new merchants, and this process only took two or three months.

After a year of rapid growth this year, Yiyao Tea Industry has now transferred the bulk of its platform layout to the Tencent ecosystem, and the video account live broadcast channel has contributed 80% to the overall revenue.

Of course, it is true that the tea business was quickly established, but the process was by no means from 0 to 1, and the accumulation of the crowd before that cannot be ignored. After all, the team has three years of experience in video accounts, and the accumulated old fans are the core resources for the start of new businesses. These people define the scope of product selection for new businesses. In other words, the portraits of old fans directly determine which products are easier to sell.

So, where do these old fans with clear portraits come from?

3. Create content: How to find seed users?

It is not surprising that Yiyao Tea collects seed users by creating content, but we did not expect that the entire process did not rely on a professional content team and did not even spend a penny more.

Half a year before selling tea, the team sold porcelain in Jingdezhen, and the production process of porcelain is a very ready-made and high-quality content material. The live broadcast of throwing pottery starts at 4:30 pm every day. There is no need for explanation or fancy shots. The clay is placed on the pottery cart and made into different shapes of pottery pieces with the pottery wheel. This process itself is beautiful and relaxing, and many live broadcast users will stop for this.

When the popularity of the live broadcast room gradually increases, the camera will be turned to the product promotion scene at 7 pm, when the number of online users can reach 8,000-10,000. Combined with the host's vivid explanation and product recommendations, people who are interested in the product category can be filtered out over time.

Going back further, chess is also a low-cost but highly effective live broadcast material. Live broadcasting chess can simulate the feeling of watching chess on the street 20 years ago. The spectators feel involved in the process of thinking about the next move. Such live broadcast content may seem simple, but it is able to accompany the target users at a slow pace, while also achieving a certain degree of interaction, so it is not boring.

Yiyao Tea completed user insights in this series of explorations, and the crowd portraits obtained were highly consistent with the subsequent user portraits of tea buyers. These people are older, mainly between 50 and 70 years old, like traditional culture, have entered or are about to enter the retirement stage, have plenty of time, need companionship, have strong spending power, and have little survival pressure. Their current goal is to enjoy life.

4. Product control: How to differentiate from the competition?

At the beginning of this year, Yiyao Tea officially started its tea business in the video live broadcast with 30,000 to 40,000 fans accumulated from years of content creation. In just a few months, it "killed" 20 to 30 peers in the competition of survival of the fittest.

The person in charge of the online channel of Yiyao Tea said that the key point of differentiation is the quality of tea. Tea merchants usually get their goods directly from tea farmers, whose supply capacity varies. There is even a phenomenon of swapping during the supply process, which leads to the risk that tea merchants need to bear the uneven quality of the goods they sell, and this risk greatly affects the credibility of merchants in the minds of consumers.

Yiyao Tea encountered this type of problem in the early days of its business, with consumers reporting that the products were different from those shown in the live broadcast room. Therefore, the company quickly decided to invest heavily in setting up a professional testing team to ensure product quality. The team consisted of eight national first-class tea tasters and a special sample testing room, with a total investment of more than 1 million yuan.

The daily work of a taster includes picking tea on the tea mountain, testing for pesticide residues, tasting the aroma, taste, and color of tea leaves, identifying the production process, etc. "Our tasters can taste more than 100 different kinds of tea in one day. The workload is huge. By the end, they have no sense of taste. So it is definitely not enough for us to hire one or two tasters."

These contents will also be used as materials for the video account live broadcast room for users to see intuitively, which not only achieves content differentiation, but also increases the user's purchase probability. "Due to the large investment and professionalism, most live broadcast rooms simply cannot imitate us. Over time, we naturally stand out."

In addition, every cake of tea sold by Yiyao Tea will be individually packaged into tea samples, so that buyers can taste it first after receiving the goods. If they don’t like it or feel it is not good, they can directly return or exchange the original part.

This positive strategy continues to boost consumers’ trust in Yiyao Tea, and now the number of fans on the video account has exceeded 100,000.

5. Focus on operations: How to improve consumer stickiness?

The seed users attracted by pulling embryos and playing chess only lay the foundation for tea sales. To really promote orders, a core promoter is needed - the anchor. The anchor of Yiyao Tea is its brand manager Zhang Wenqi, who is good at popularizing knowledge related to tea and getting closer to users.

When the track, platform, content, and product jointly determine the lower limit of a live broadcast room's sales level, the host's personal charm is the room's most irreplaceable asset and determines the upper limit of a live broadcast room's sales level.

"The customers who place orders with us basically like and trust Mr. Zhang very much. In the first half of the year, he live-streamed every day, and the monthly sales reached 15-20 million yuan. After the live-streaming was suspended for nearly two or three months, the monthly sales fell back to 3-5 million yuan, all thanks to the repurchase of old customers."

According to Yiyao Tea’s internal statistics, it takes an average of 14 days from the first order to receive the goods to turn a new customer into a high-stickiness regular customer. It is precisely because the anchor’s personal IP is irreplaceable that Yiyao Tea has not cultivated new model anchors. Even if it were cultivated, consumers would not buy it. The creation of a strong personal IP involves many personalized factors, which we will not discuss in this article, but we can focus on the overall operating model of Yiyao Tea.

The first stage: volume.

Rely on ultra-low prices to attract traffic, such as 1 yuan, 8.8 yuan, 9.99 yuan... because only by selling unprofitable goods first, will there be a chance to sell high-priced goods after establishing user stickiness.

Phase 2: Increase average order value.

After the fans accumulated through sales gradually developed a sense of trust, they began to put some high-quality, high-priced tea varieties on the shelves, with unit prices ranging from a few hundred yuan to a few thousand yuan, covering people of all consumption abilities from low to high. This process can also screen out high-net-worth users.

For example, at 5,000 yuan per kilogram, there are still big spenders who buy 100 orders at a time. This is not an isolated case. There are many consumers who buy tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of yuan of tea in one order. The highest record is 4 million yuan. Of course, this also includes B2B sales scenarios.

The third stage: increase the repurchase rate.

The person in charge of the online channel of Yiyao Tea revealed that after the video live broadcast room started to grow and stabilized, 80-90% of the monthly sales were contributed by old customers, and the return rate was as low as 3%. Most of these old customers are very knowledgeable about tea, and the high frequency of repurchase is due to their high recognition of the anchor and the product.

The fourth stage: innovation.

If we rely solely on old customers, we will soon reach the ceiling of sales scale, so the need for new customers is always there. Yiyao Tea has two main means of new customers:

One is to invest in traffic on the video account. After the live broadcast room operation matured, Yiyao Tea Industry would invest in traffic almost as soon as it started broadcasting. On average, each live broadcast lasted 5-6 hours, with an investment of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. Generally, ADQ and WeChat Beans would be carried out at the same time, with an investment ratio of 7:3. During festival activities, the highest record was 200,000 yuan invested in one event, and the revenue of that event was 2.6 million yuan. After all, after becoming a mature merchant, the official support of the platform has also decreased. In Yiyao Tea's live broadcasts with 100,000 viewers, the paid traffic can reach 80,000 to 90,000.

The second is to promote old customers to bring in new customers. Through the gifting mechanism, fans are guided to forward to their friends circle and friends to achieve fission. The basic gameplay of the video account is 70% private and 30% public, so Yiyao Tea encourages old customers to bring in new customers, and both parties can get free tea benefits. The cost of sending benefits alone can exceed 1 million yuan per month. According to its internal statistics, the effect of old customers bringing in new customers is very good, with a conversion rate of at least 75%.

6. Focus on service/after-sales: How to provide added value to high net worth customers?

When the average customer price reaches over 10,000 yuan, it is close to luxury goods in nature. So we are very curious whether Yiyao Tea has a similar logic to luxury goods in the entire service process.

During the research process, we found that Yiyao Tea has set up a special after-sales team. However, the after-sales staff are responsible for more than just inquiries and returns of goods. They often receive calls from consumers, especially regular customers, and even chat about some "family matters" like friends.

The person in charge of the online channel of Yiyao Tea explained that although many high-spending customers have good economic conditions, they may be very empty and bored in life and often need companionship, even if it is just a little care or greetings. In the process of service, after-sales staff establish a good trust with customers, and over time they become the objects of their confession.

Moreover, after-sales staff even have personal IP attributes . For example, when dealing with returns and exchanges, some customers must specify after-sales staff they are familiar with to provide services. If the staff happens to be on leave, they would rather wait than replace them. This is similar to the way luxury stores establish long-term and stable relationships with customers.

Everyone knows that the WeChat ecosystem is a good platform for building communities and developing private domains, but if you really want to serve high-net-worth customers well, you also need to use your own way to provide them with the required emotional value and other added value beyond the product.

02 Fresh

Compared with other categories, the online and digitalization of fresh food is relatively late. On the one hand, offline channels are mature and complete, and on the other hand, fresh food has higher requirements for temperature and speed during express delivery. Although the fresh food category has also grown rapidly online with the rapid development of e-commerce, the total sales of fresh food through traditional e-commerce channels has declined in the past three years.

Douyin e-commerce emerged later than traditional e-commerce. We pulled the year-on-year data of fresh food subcategories for the past five quarters and found that the overall growth rate has slowed down significantly, and some categories have also entered a negative growth state.

We have observed that in the field of live streaming, many front-line practitioners in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery have opened up new sales channels with the help of traffic, and have achieved good results by operating them themselves or entrusting them to operate on their behalf. At the same time, large traditional agricultural product companies have also seen the innovation of channels and are on the road of exploration and development.

Case: Tiannong Food

Guangdong Tiannong Food Group, which has a 20-year business history, has an annual revenue of 5-6 billion yuan, most of which comes from the breeding and wholesale of pigs (70%) and chickens (30%). The business model of the entire group is the traditional agricultural product industry model.

In recent years, with the diversification of retail channels in the market, Tiannong Group has gradually begun to explore the retail business with whole chickens, eggs, pre-prepared dishes and other products as the main products. This sector has gradually expanded and currently accounts for 20%. Among them, 600 million sales contributions come from ToB retail, including offline large supermarkets, specialized fresh food stores, e-commerce, and live streaming.

It is difficult for self-broadcasting to become popular, and the sales are all dependent on the "big brother"

After consulting relevant experts, we found that the strategies of traditional food companies in deploying live streaming sales are very different from those of other types of businesses. Except for a few industry giants like COFCO and Golden Dragon Fish, traditional fresh food companies usually find it difficult to achieve ideal revenue through self-broadcasting in stores.

Because the branding of fresh food is naturally weak, self-employed individuals without any brand attributes can also sell well on live streaming channels. Therefore, for large-scale enterprises, direct competition through self-broadcasting is obviously not a good choice.

Tiannong Food has had the experience of "failure": in the past one or two years, it not only built its own live broadcast team and started broadcasting on various video platforms, but also commissioned an agent to set up a matrix account, while broadcasting on behalf of others and training its own team. It can be said that it was aiming for the top configuration from the beginning. However, the overall effect was far from expectations.

As a result, Tiannong Group made drastic changes to its strategy, abandoning its own broadcasting and turning to large-scale cooperation with KOLs.

At first, Tiannong Group tried to enter the live broadcast rooms of top influencers such as Lao Luo and Dongfang Zhenxuan, and promoted its own brand "Feng Zhonghuang Qingyuan Chicken", which achieved a high sales volume.

But later, Tiannong Group gradually realized that cooperating with top anchors also has disadvantages that cannot be ignored: on the one hand, the style of top anchors is difficult to change according to the characteristics of the products, and they cannot clearly introduce the product characteristics in a short time of stocking, which may even have a counterproductive effect; on the other hand, the top anchors have limited slots and high fees, and sometimes they may not make a positive profit even if the goods are sold.

However, soon, Tiannong Group found a better way, which was to find a "leader" to promote products on the video account.

"Big Brother" is not an official title, and the group portrait is more flexible. They usually have the following common features:

• Be relatively active in a certain field and have a certain popularity and status.
• You have your own professional community and have strong influence and appeal in the community.
• We don’t take selling products as our main business, we are careful about our reputation and are strict in selecting products.
• The way of selling goods is more subtle, without shouting or creating a tense atmosphere of "321 link".

After many attempts, Tiannong Group discovered that in a mixed public and private traffic platform such as Video Account, relying on the interpersonal circle established by the "leader" to spread products has efficiency and return rate far exceeding simply purchasing the sales slots of top anchors.

At the same time, people live by food, so no matter what the "leaders" originally specialize in, it would not be out of place to promote fresh food products. On the contrary, sharing food can bring people closer together and further enhance the activity of their communities. In this way, brands and influencers achieve a win-win situation.

It is worth mentioning that the relationship between Tiannong Group and the "big brothers" is equivalent to expert distribution. It is not easy for brands to compete with experts for customer resources, so the private domain operation and asset sedimentation are in the hands of experts, and brands do not participate.

The person in charge of the relevant business of Tiannong Group told us that from last year to this year, the sales scale of e-commerce channels has increased from 20 million yuan to 50 million yuan, of which the video account has increased from 1 million yuan to 7 million yuan. "In the process of promoting business, we feel that the focus and style of different platforms are very different. The video account is overall more steady and the progress is relatively slow, but some platforms may take the path of barbaric expansion, and the approach will be more rough and direct."

In general, for traditional large-scale fresh food companies, if they want to have a disruptive breakthrough in the field of live streaming, they must first solve the problem of laying out cold storage warehouses and cold chains. Otherwise, the express delivery costs of e-commerce retail will be too high, and the profit margin will never be able to surpass that of offline channels.

03 Nourishing

Traditional tonic refers to products that use herbs or animal extracts as the main raw materials to supplement the substances needed by the human body. They usually have the advantages of being natural, non-toxic, and having few side effects. For example, sea cucumbers, fish maws, bird's nests, ginseng, etc.

According to Euromonitor data, the market size of traditional tonic products in China increased from 95.15 billion yuan to 114.4 billion yuan (estimated value) from 2017 to 2022. Although the market size has been growing for five years, the growth rate experienced a cliff-like decline in 2019 and 2020, and after 2021, the growth has accelerated. It can be said that the market for traditional tonic products has been renewed from almost stagnant growth.

The huge change in these five years is that the sales channels of traditional tonics have also shown a significant online trend, with the e-commerce penetration rate increasing by more than 50% cumulatively. By 2022, the e-commerce penetration rate has increased to 33.4%, and online channels have become one of the mainstream channels.

Despite the overall growth of online channels, the performance of each platform is different. After 2021, the sales of nutritional products in traditional e-commerce have declined. In the past year, sales on Douyin e-commerce have also shifted from ultra-high growth to a slowdown in growth.

However, through observation, we found that many merchants of nutritional supplements chose to quickly increase their sales on video accounts and achieved considerable sales results.

Case: Xinni Seafood

In the two cases we talked about in the previous article, Yiyao Tea Industry has a crowd accumulation, and Tiannong Food has "big brother" resources. So, for a white-label company that only has products and no other foundation, is it difficult to start from scratch in the live broadcast room?

In fact, this is not the case. Xinni Seafood, which mainly produces sea cucumbers, is a typical example. It faces a small population and a simple structure, and is easily impacted by offline sales bottlenecks. It has many peers, little differentiation, and fierce competition.

However, since March this year, Xinni Seafood has entered the Tencent ecosystem. Through methods such as ADQ traffic investment, the GMV of a single live broadcast in the video account can reach up to 500,000, with an average ROI of up to 9, ranking first in the same category of the video account.

We believe that this success provides a template and reference for other white-label merchants with similar backgrounds.

1. How does the live broadcast room get traffic?

Since we are starting from scratch, the first issue is to get the first batch of traffic for the live broadcast room.

Unlike most businesses that use WeChat beans, Xinni Seafood chooses to use ADQ to directly invest in the live broadcast room. Because ADQ uses short videos to gain exposure, the short video content itself plays a screening role before the traffic enters the live broadcast room. This can not only improve the accuracy of traffic and lay the foundation for high conversion rates, but also increase advertising channels.

The content of short videos and live broadcasts is one of the key points of the strategy, which includes product selling points, product audiences, and the language used in the live broadcast room. The sea cucumbers that Xinni Seafood mainly sells have two selling points: one is eating, and the other is nourishing. Therefore, in terms of content, it is necessary not only to reflect the deliciousness of sea cucumbers, but also to emphasize the efficacy points that are well known and accepted by the public.

In addition, Xinni Seafood has also designed some welfare mechanisms. After all, the average customer price of sea cucumbers is relatively high, and it is very difficult for a new account to sell them. However, changing to a 58-yuan gift box can better retain users and promote intensive transactions by consumers. When transactions increase, the platform will also have more natural traffic, thus forming a positive cycle.

2. How to improve the conversion rate of the live broadcast room?

First, Xinni Seafood will match its own live broadcast room with the industry's top live broadcast rooms to find the gaps in characters and scenes, and then improve the capabilities of its own anchors, using real scenes to showcase products so that users can understand more intuitively and clearly, and the conversion rate will naturally be improved.

Second, constantly adjust the rhythm of the live broadcast room, extend the live broadcast time, and occasionally use some micro-orders to increase the conversion rate. In this way, ADQ gets more time, and the traffic and conversion brought by advertising will also be more accordingly.

Third, constantly improve the logic and words of product shaping. Xinni Seafood uses a method called FABE, where F stands for feature, A stands for advantage, B stands for benefit, and E stands for evidence. In simple terms, it is to use lens language and actual language to show these five aspects of the product, so that the conversion rate will be higher.

3. How do the live broadcast room and advertising flow cooperate?

On the one hand, ensure the consistency of video content and live broadcast content.

With more ads, there will naturally be a situation where the amount of material explodes. Xinni Seafood will monitor it at all times and synchronize the main selling points of the explosive material to the anchor in time. Because when a user actively enters the live broadcast room through video material, it means that he has a certain understanding and demand for the pre-positioned selling points of the video, which requires the anchor to explain the same selling points, so that the user will not jump out quickly.

On the other hand, ensure the consistency between advertising placement and the host’s rhythm.

Every anchor has an exciting period and a dull period during live broadcast, and the ability models of different anchors are also different. In order to pursue higher advertising revenue, Xinni Seafood needs to give the highest budget to the best anchor when launching, so as to maximize ROI.

Conclusion

Currently, the data indicators and consumption indicators of the video account are performing well, and the growth rate is also very strong. Therefore, Growth Black Box believes that before the business indicators are fully achieved, it is an excellent window for merchants who want to enter the market.

This article investigates and analyzes three industries that "focus on categories but not brands". The three cases analyzed all achieved strong new channel growth in 2023, which also represents three different business strategies:

• Yiyao Tea Industry - tap into natural traffic, complete the original accumulation of seed users, and achieve high stickiness and high repurchase.
• Tiannong Food - a distribution platform integrating public and private domains, which allows users to obtain high returns without spending a lot of money on self-broadcasting.
• Xinni Seafood - Make good use of advertising flow to start from scratch and grasp the track accurately and quickly.

Of course, behind a single case is reflected the trend of an entire industry and channel. We also found from the data that since the second half of 2023, industries that "focus on categories but not brands" are accelerating their layout on the video platform, especially fresh food and nourishing foods, showing a very positive growth trend, with monthly sales of tens of millions of yuan.

I believe that in 2024, more industries and businesses will join the video account track to find new population growth or a second growth curve for their business.

There is a very vivid description on the Internet that when online platforms are increasingly becoming the main channel for consumption, some platforms have chosen to "use great strength to create miracles", while others have decided to "slow-roast the whole lamb".

In any case, the key to winning the battle is how to continuously meet the needs of consumers and improve their shopping experience. This is not only a question for the platform to think about, but also requires the joint efforts of merchants and platforms.

Finally, I would like to thank all the merchants who participated in this interview, and also thank Xinshi for providing data support for this survey.

Author: Zou Xiaokun; WeChat public account: Growthbox