Luckin Coffee’s way of survival: “speed” is the only way to survive

This article starts from the three aspects of Luckin Coffee: fast product launch, fast change of spokespersons, and fast joint promotion. It explains how Luckin Coffee quickly earned traffic and saved the company from desperate situations. It also provides a good model for the market operation of many brands. It is recommended for friends who are interested in brand operation and Luckin Coffee brand.

It is said that Luckin Coffee has figured out how to use traffic, but underneath the traffic, there is actually another killer trick hidden.

Recently, the topic of Luo Xiang endorsing Luckin Coffee has become the second most searched topic. People sigh that Luckin Coffee is really good at playing. Being on the hot search is like going to the toilet, several times a day. Therefore, many brands have also begun to learn from Luckin Coffee, learning to co-brand and do things like it. But in fact, traffic is just a protective color for Luckin Coffee. Under this coat, Luckin Coffee’s killer move is actually just one word -

That is "fast" .

1. Fast product launch

What people see is that Luckin Coffee has produced hit new products one after another, but the fact is that Luckin Coffee launches a new product every 2-3 days on average.

The previous new product failed verification and had not yet been taken off the shelves, and a new product has been launched again.

Launching new products is a life-or-death struggle for every company. How can we increase the chances of success? Luckin Coffee’s approach is simple and crude: just launch more new products.

The only popular products of Luckin that you can name now are the Soy Sauce Latte, Raw Coconut Latte, Thick Milk Latte, and Velvet Latte. However, Luckin launched 77, 113, and 68 new products in 2020, 2021, and the first half of 2022, respectively. Nearly 99% of the new products are unknown or even failed, but as long as one succeeds, it will be a huge profit.

For example, what helped Luckin Coffee to barely survive the financial fraud scandal was actually a "thick milk latte", and what helped it to go from barely surviving to a strong comeback was just a "raw coconut latte".

Zhou Weiming, the current vice president in charge of Luckin’s product development and supply chain, once said:

“What kind of milk coffee do consumers like? There is no consensus in the market, so we have to keep launching new products to find out what consumers like.”

It is said that Luckin Coffee has a set of product formulas. For example, 1 represents "fragrance", 2 represents "milk", and 3 represents "syrup". Based on market feedback, these elements are continuously arranged and combined, and new products are launched to test the market. Those that fail are passed, and those that succeed are continued to be developed on this basis. For example, after the great success of the Raw Coconut Latte, the company launched Iced Raw Coconut Latte, Slow Fishing Raw Coconut Latte, etc. Recently, Luckin Coffee has registered a trademark for "Sauce-flavored Latte", and stated that it will establish long-term cooperation with Moutai in the future and continuously launch related products.

So there is no such thing as precise research and development that is always successful. What we have is nothing more than repeated product reorganizations after big data analysis.

2. Spokespersons change quickly

There is a famous saying in the industry: Luckin Coffee is permanent, but its suppliers are transient.

The spokesperson's reputation has collapsed. When everyone was about to see how Luckin Coffee would handle its public relations, they found out that Luckin Coffee had already changed its spokesperson last week...

There is no way. Luckin Coffee changes its spokespersons too quickly. Basically, this person becomes popular this week and starts endorsing Luckin Coffee the next week.

When "Longing" was popular, your brother Zhang Wanyi was still attracting fans crazily in the TV series last night, and today he was displaying the Luckin Coffee poster in his hand in the store.

When "Fengshen" was a big hit, you were fascinated by Ji Fa's breasts the day before yesterday, but today he is holding a Luckin Lanyun Tieguanyin.

Liu Genghong was leading everyone in fitness on Douyin yesterday, and today he had a cup of Luckin Coffee American Ice Coffee in each hand.

In the talk show conference, He Guangzhi's "rose with thorns" joke became popular, and fans below @Luckin Coffee asked He Guangzhi to endorse rose latte. So Luckin Coffee launched the "Rose with Thorns Latte" overnight and signed Luckin Coffee's first "forced" product experience center - He Guangzhi.

During the Asian Games, Wang Shun won the championship with a time of 1 minute 54.62 seconds and broke his own Asian record. He had just come out of the swimming pool and had not even had time to put on his clothes when he held the little blue cup in his hands.

Before the Beijing Winter Olympics, Gu Ailing had just started to emerge, but Luckin Coffee couldn't wait to sign her as its spokesperson on her 18th birthday.

Wang Hedi in "Cang Lan Jue", Jiang Qiming in "Long Season", and so on. As long as you dare to show up, Luckin Coffee will sign you immediately.

While everyone is still heatedly discussing whether drinking a sauce-flavored latte counts as drunk driving, Luckin Coffee has invited Luo Xiang, an expert in criminal law examinations, to be its spokesperson and to educate everyone about the law. Luckin Coffee, real punishment!

3. Fast joint promotion

Luckin Coffee has collaborated with Moutai. You may be amazed at how steady, accurate and ruthless Luckin Coffee’s co-branded marketing is, but little do you know that Luckin Coffee engages in countless brand collaborations every year. Most of them are not considered to be out of the circle, but Luckin Coffee still continues to delve deeper into them.

Without looking too far ahead, if we just take a look at Luckin’s co-branded products starting from last year, we will find that Luckin has IP co-branded products almost every month.

2022.4.11Luckin Coffee×Coconut Tree

2022.4.25Luckin Coffee×EDG

2022.6.13Luckin Coffee×Puer Coffee Association

2022.8.2Luckin Coffee×Lonely Frog

2022.9.5Luckin×Gesha

2022.10.10Luckin Coffee × "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Sea"

2023.1.3Luckin Coffee×Han Meilin

2023.2.6Luckin Coffee×Line Dog

2023.4.10 Luckin Coffee × "Doraemon: Big Bear and the Utopia in the Sky"

2023.5.8Luckin Coffee×Wutiaoren

2023.6.19Luckin Coffee×"Dart Man"

2023.7.10Luckin Coffee × Gulangyu Music Festival

2023.8.28Luckin Coffee×Victoria's Secret

2023.9.4Luckin Coffee×Moutai

2023.9.25Luckin Coffee×Chinese Women's Basketball Team

2023.10.9Luckin Coffee×TOM&JERR

As a result, Luckin has created a mature IP joint operation system, which is also one of the important factors for Luckin to successfully reach cooperation with Moutai.

For example, Pan Hu Studio, the packaging design company for the Maotai-flavor latte, is a long-term partner of Luckin Coffee. It has previously created the "Coconut Cloud Latte" product packaging for Luckin Coffee in collaboration with Coco Tree. The stable design level provides enough eye-catching materials for the Maotai-flavor latte to become popular.

Years of IP collaboration have also allowed Luckin to develop a stable taste quality control system, allowing the bizarre idea of ​​adding Moutai to coffee to be successfully implemented as a long-selling product with suitable taste.

IV. Conclusion

Basically to sum it up, Luckin has new products every day, endorsements every week, and joint ventures every month. What outsiders see of Luckin is "your traffic is beyond my imagination", but only Luckin's own marketing department knows that it is my overtime that exceeds your imagination.

To us, Luckin's speed means quick response, but only those who have worked in the marketing department know how powerful and efficient the decision-making system behind it is.

When chatting with people from some advertising companies, many of them believed that it must be a very happy time to advertise for Luckin Coffee. It’s not that Luckin Coffee is so friendly to the other party, but that Luckin Coffee’s marketing department has strong decision-making capabilities and a very high level of acceptance.

In fact, as an advertising practitioner, when I see creative ideas such as "Jiangxiang Latte" and "Li Luxiu's YYDS", I can't help but sneer. During internal brainstorming, I can come up with more than 20 such ideas in one night...

However, these ideas are either rejected by directors or clients who seek stability, or presented to Party A at the proposal stage, and after winning admiration and applause from the entire audience, nothing happens next.

The reason is simple. It is not difficult to come up with such an idea, but it is often troublesome to implement it, especially for the client's marketing department. A brilliant idea from an advertising company may mean that they have to add a lot of extra workload. In the end, the proposal is changed again and again and returns to the old way of an advertisement + a series of flat posters. There is no other reason, it is path dependence.

Sometimes, your proposal is approved on site, but it still needs to be reported to the higher authorities within the client, and after the final modification and decision, it often takes two months.

The fact that Luckin Coffee can achieve “had an idea yesterday, executed it today, and went viral tomorrow” may not only be due to the professionalism and efficiency of the company’s decision-makers, but also because Luckin Coffee is actually a company that has “died” once.

Yes, only when you "die" once, will you know how rare it is to be alive. Things like overtime and internal competition are simply more beautiful words than death.

It all started in 2017. Since Luckin Coffee was founded, it has been struggling to survive in the cracks. Making coffee in China is a gamble, not to mention the industry leader Starbucks standing in the way. However, Luckin Coffee relied on cutting the leeks of capitalism on Wall Street and then turned around to expand violently, distributing coupons to subsidize Chinese users, and thus destroyed its brand awareness.

I originally thought that Luckin Coffee, the "national pride" that cut foreign leeks to subsidize Chinese people, was just a joke, but then news came that Luckin Coffee had financial fraud. Its total revenue was more than 2 billion yuan, and fake revenue accounted for more than 2 billion yuan. It turns out that it really doesn't make money. It works so hard just to let us drink coffee with 28% discount coupons...

After the financial fraud, all of Luckin’s senior management was replaced. In the words of the new chairman Guo Jinyi: Except for retaining the original name, Luckin has become a brand new company.

Then Luckin Coffee shrank its business lines, shutting down milk tea, peripheral products, vending machines, etc., retaining only the coffee business, and then began to quickly launch new products, integrating brand marketing and user operations into one department (brand marketing and user operations integration), allowing marketing to be invested entirely in accordance with the guidance of user operations, and effectively converting the traffic obtained from marketing through user operations.

Then we saw that after Luckin Coffee was delisted from the U.S. stock market and closed hundreds of stores, it restarted its expansion path the following year, and in 2022, the number of stores surpassed Starbucks, and then its revenue also surpassed Starbucks. On the user side, we saw that Luckin Coffee launched hot products and joint ventures every few days, and it was on the hot searches every day.

Just like a Douyin operator once said a point of view: Why do many companies always fail to make Douyin? A very important reason is that they live too well and too comfortably. Only those companies on the verge of death, with the belief of taking a gamble, can often make the company's Douyin account successful.

Perhaps the same is true for Luckin Coffee. The reason why it can create hit products and publicity cases time and time again is because it climbed up from the edge of the cliff, so it just wants to run as far as possible.

This is a road of no return, which means that you cannot stop. Once you stop, you will find that the cliff is right behind you, but it also means that this is an endless road with no limits and no obstacles.

Author: Kuang Shisan, WeChat public account: Free shipping