From good products to good brands, 3 guidelines for accelerating brand creation in 2024

Looking back at 2023, product consumption was sluggish. How to break out of the siege in 2024? Let’s see below~

"Difficult" is the unified evaluation given by the consumer industry to 2023. On the consumer side, the population is changing, consumption is becoming more rational, and Nielsen's consumer desire index has reached its lowest level since statistics were available; on the capital side, the enthusiasm has decreased and expectations have declined. It can be said that the logic of today's consumer market is completely different. With the passing of the era of crazy expansion and exchanging profits for scale, the players at the table have also experienced a round of changes.

During this year's Double Eleven, the overall e-commerce market fell by 33%, but there are still a number of new brands emerging. Take Tmall's Double Eleven list as an example. Among the brands that were founded on Tmall within 3 years, 1,606 brands won the trend new category championship. Most of these brands stand on the new trend category, and their products have R&D barriers and replication windows. Among them, the first high-end gaming chair TOP1 TGIF's first gaming chair product was released in 2022, and the cycle from R&D to listing was 2 years.

Fangzai Photo Studio, the world's first studio that customizes building block figures through full-body photos, established a Tmall store in April 2023, and achieved a GMV of 9 million in December alone; but it took two years of research and development from the establishment of the project to the launch of the product. Kongduoka, a leading brand of healthy cold meals, was established in 2021. Its products are updated and iterated every 3-4 months, and each product is required to have an 8-month leading window period.

However, a good product is only the first step. There is still a long way to go from a product to a brand. Why can these brands quickly become the leaders of these trending categories?

After communicating with the three brands, Kongduoka, TGIF, and Fangzai Photo Studio, Daofa found that in addition to satisfying the "1" of "strong products", they all have close ties with Tmall; they efficiently borrow the power of the platform, use Tmall as a base for brand self-operation, give full play to the advantages of D2C, and achieve rapid growth in brand sales and operations.

In August 2023, Tmall launched the "Thousand Star Plan" for growing emerging brands to help them create brands on Tmall. The three brands, Kongduoka, TGIF, and Fangzai Photo Studio, all participated in it and received practical support and pain point resolution. In the growth experience of these three brands, we have seen three "shortcuts" to create brands on Tmall.

1. Maintain the brand position and capture Tmall's high-quality customer base;
2. Step out of your own perspective and explore a diverse product portfolio;
3. Dig deep into data trends and develop precise platform operation strategies.

1. Maintain brand position and seize Tmall's high-quality customer base

The trend track represents both innovation and "immaturity". Along with opportunities, there is also uncertainty about user capacity. For founders, finding the first batch of target users is the biggest challenge. Especially for brands with high R&D costs and higher than the industry average customer orders, it is even more difficult to find high-quality users.

Fangzai Photo Studio took a lot of detours in "finding users". Xu Hao, the founder of Fangzai Photo Studio, told us that before entering Tmall, the team tried to find the first batch of seed users in WeChat Moments in 2022 to do price testing. At that time, three rounds of price adjustments were made: 299 yuan, 199 yuan, and 99 yuan, but no one bought them.

After the setbacks in the private domain, they tried to enter Taobao at the end of 2022. As a result, they sold 3,000-4,000 sets of products in the first month at a price of 299 yuan. After the Tmall store opened in April 2023, it generated nearly 4 million monthly sales in the first month. So it is not a problem of product pricing, but a lack of target consumers in the private domain.

Left: Fangzai Photo Studio, the champion project of DeeCamp 2020, was once noticed by Kai-Fu Lee

Right: Fangzai Photo Studio Tmall store

Founders of new brands, especially technical founders, are often obsessed with their own products and have information barriers to the overall industry situation. Their own circles are also limited, making it difficult for them to reach the target consumer group. However, platforms that "put traffic first" naturally have user advantages, which happens to complement them.

Tmall's greater value lies not only in sales, but also in creating new products and building brands. The founding team of Kong Duo Ka, which came out of Bestore, had a clear plan for the brand position since the birth of the brand based on their own experience in the industry, thus avoiding many detours.

The main product of Kong Duo Ka, which focuses on healthy weight loss, is a 21-day Kong Duo Ka cold meal priced at 2,799 yuan. Such a high customer unit price and consumption cycle will undoubtedly generate a higher trust cost.

In order to improve conversion efficiency, Kong Duoka has divided its business path into three parts: "content diversion - Tmall conversion and repurchase - private domain to increase customer orders". Among them, Tmall is the main brand position, which not only bears the responsibility of displaying the brand image, but also is the main platform for sales.

As for why this arrangement was chosen, Kongduoka founder Duan Wen told us that, firstly, most users are still accustomed to searching and purchasing on Tmall; secondly, Tmall's users are more comprehensive and can cover high-quality users with high spending power. A good brand image can improve conversion rate.

As for building a good brand image on Tmall, Kong Duoka’s experience is to focus on maintaining the evaluation, comments, and sales of the brand’s official store; while keeping prices stable, make full use of the energy of major nodes and major marketing IPs such as Tmall 618 and Double 11 to make concentrated blasting.

As a trending category, it is difficult to do business on the shoulders of predecessors. However, Tmall’s inherent “brand mind” endorsement is just right for the first batch of people who try it. Therefore, using the platform to capture high-quality users is the first shortcut.

2. Jump out of your own perspective and explore a diverse product portfolio

In addition to users, for new brands in trending categories, there are often no mature brands in the existing industry to benchmark against, making it difficult to grasp the ceiling of the industry.

Lian Xun, the founder of TGIF, told us that, based on historical industry data, before TGIF entered the market, the 2,000 yuan price range was the ceiling for gaming chair pricing, and sales were limited. In addition, the overall consumption trend this year is not particularly optimistic, so the team was very restrained when positioning and pricing the product.

However, Tmall’s Xiaoer will often communicate with them about the consumption trends of the entire track and give them suggestions on service upgrades and new product iterations. The reason is that there is a considerable capacity of high-end consumers who love e-sports on Tmall.

After many exchanges, TGIF first tried to upgrade the service of gaming chairs, launching a packaged direct delivery service with a 10% increase in the price of a single chair in October 2023. To their surprise, 40% of consumers chose this version.

For members of the "Thousand Star Plan", Tmall will provide 1v1 Xiaoer to provide professional advice for brand growth and Tmall operations. Xiaoer, who is more familiar with Tmall users' consumption behavior, can often provide more perspectives for start-up brands to help them create products that better meet user expectations.

Kong Duoka is also one of the beneficiary brands. The earliest Kong Duoka spicy strips product was 39.9 yuan for 5 large bags and 30 small packages. Although the absolute price is not high, as a new product, it also lacks competitiveness in the spicy strips category. After Tmall Xiaoer noticed it, he suggested that Kong Duoka try to launch a 19.9 yuan version, because the platform users are now very receptive to the 19.9 yuan price range. So in the first two months of the new product launch, Kong Duoka added a trial version of 20 small packages for 19.9 yuan.

In addition to the sales growth, what surprised Kong Duoka even more was that more than 30% of the users attracted by the trial had repeat purchases with higher average order values, which improved the overall sales performance.

Brand founders often have a clear understanding of their own products, but lack first-hand perception of users, especially the consumption habits of platform users. However, the "waiters" who shuttle between various brands in the industry every day often know this clearly. Therefore, jumping out of the self-perspective and focusing more on the strategy of authentic products is the second shortcut.

3. Dig deep into data trends and develop precise platform operation strategies

After finding users and developing good products, there is still the "operation" hurdle. For many brand founders, especially those with a technical background, e-commerce operation is a major difficulty.

Firstly, some founders are building a brand for the first time and have no knowledge of e-commerce, such as the team of top students at Fangzai Photo Studio. Secondly, most founders were born in high positions and have rarely fought in the front line. They have no time to take care of the operational details and have little experience.

At the same time, hiring a senior full-time operator is too expensive for a startup. At this time, the best solution is to form an alliance with the platform and find a "strategist" who is familiar with the rules of the game to help.

Lian Xun, the founder of TGIF, mentioned that all members of the TGIF team are senior e-sports enthusiasts. They are well aware of user experience and product requirements, but have little contact with e-commerce and lack operational experience. However, since joining the "Thousand Stars Plan", Tmall's Xiaoer will come to give 1v1 activity strategy suggestions at major platform nodes.

What impressed Lian Xun the most was that when TGIF participated in the first Tmall event, apart from the price concession, it did not plan to do anything else. After the waiter found out, he immediately found them and gave them the advice of "doing pre-sales and rushing to the list". After listening to the advice and taking action, TGIF's sales were effectively improved during that big event.

In addition to exclusive "military advisors", Tmall also provides more tools and more detailed data to brands participating in the "Thousand Star Plan" to help brands see their business situation more clearly, thereby improving the efficiency and accuracy of each step.

Take Fangzai Photo Studio for example. As a general gift and trendy toy brand, they position their customer base as first-tier urban white-collar workers, college students, and sophisticated mothers aged 18 to 28, mainly women.

But after seeing a clearer user behavior portrait, they found that male e-sports players also accounted for a large part of their customer base. So in the later traffic delivery, Fangzai Photo Studio adjusted the crowd labels, which brought about an increase in conversion rate and absolute sales.

Another similar company is Kongduoka. Kongduoka analyzed the user preferences of the entire path of "content storage - collection and purchase - pre-sale payment" through data analysis, and adjusted the content dissemination and product combination strategies based on the preferences.

As a result, the seven-day meal product, with a customer unit price of 700 yuan , achieved a 20-fold increase in conversion rate. Knowing yourself and your enemy will ensure victory in every battle. For brands, being familiar with the business environment and understanding user preferences are compulsory courses. But with the help of the platform, you can get credits for this course faster. Digging deep into data and making good use of military advisors is the third shortcut.

4. Analyst Comments

For start-up brands, the difficulty is not the lack of good products, but how to find customers who appreciate them, how to grasp product and market expectations, and how to make good use of platform resources.

In the recently popular TV series "Fang Hua", all the bosses want their products to be sold in department stores. This is because everyone subconsciously knows that "department stores only do brand business". In this era, Tmall is like the department store in "Fang Hua", which not only has cost-effective products, but also provides a place for high-quality brand innovation.

However, department stores are also full of competition, and it is not easy to go from a new player to a leader, especially for start-up brands that are still in the growth stage. The "Thousand Stars Plan" is like an acceleration track. Through 1v1 brand creation training, digital business tools, brand creation manager salons and other measures, brand creation managers can quickly achieve the transformation from product "specialists" to business "all-rounders".

In the current era of speed, it is difficult to build a brand, and it is even more difficult to build a new and cutting-edge brand with a long-term vision. Only when the value is seen and recognized can we have the motivation and confidence to persist. This may be the greatest value of the "Thousand Stars Plan".

Author: Li Zi

WeChat public account: Knife Skills Research Institute (ID: DigipontClub)