Bawang Tea Princess: A consumer product that takes Internet thinking to its extreme

In mid-August, Bawang Chaji announced the "calorie" of its products. Milk tea now has its own "identity card". From 2017 to now, Bawang Chaji has expanded wildly and has become a top milk tea consumer brand. What marketing strategies are behind it that are worth learning from? This article analyzes this and hopes to inspire you.

In mid-August, Bawang Chaji publicly disclosed the calories of its products, and milk tea now has an "identity card"! Information such as product calories and nutritional ingredients is delivered to consumers through the official service account.

The calories are open, the ingredients are transparent, and the flavor is clear. Bawang Tea Princess has triggered a hot search on the consumer voucher in an open and honest manner. The consumption demands of Generation Z are not just a cup of milk tea with complicated ingredients, but the pleasant experience behind that cup of milk tea.

The self-satisfaction of not gaining weight after drinking, the impulse of holding it with style and being able to show off one's personality. The milk tea ID card is just like a buckle, buckling in the hearts of young people.

Bawang Cha Ji opened its first store on Wuyi Road in Yunnan Province on November 17, 2017. After six years of dormancy, it has become a leading brand in the new consumption of milk tea. What business strategies behind it are worth learning for marketers?

The simplest way is the best. Let’s take stock of the brutal expansion of Bawang Cha Ji from the perspective of 4P marketing theory.

01 Product positioning: Scale up and focus on big single products

In 2021, 1,388 new tea drinks were launched, including 1,568 fruit elements; in the new product report for the first half of 2022, tea drinks with fruit elements accounted for more than 60%. The common features of brand products at this stage are fruit tea and milk cap.

Bawang Chaji gave up these two directions and differentiated itself. It gave up the Red Sea fruit tea track with many brands and opened up a new track, the original leaf "original leaf fresh milk tea". The probability of standing out among more than 1,000 fruit tea brands is very small.

Through the new Chinese style tea drinks, we have become the leader in the new track of "original leaf fresh milk tea" that we have opened up. This is a blue ocean product positioning strategy, which enters the vacuum market through a combination of differentiation strategies.

The logic of big single products, doing a good job of basic models, and continuously deepening brand value. In the "Original Leaf Fresh Milk Tea" series of Bawang Cha Ji, there are 3 popular single products that continue to maintain a sales share of about 70%, among which the signature product "Bo Ya Jue Xian" accounts for more than 30% of the sales, and the fastest cup can be made in ten seconds.

With the improvement of production capacity, the average sales volume of each store has reached 1,500 cups per day. In the new store opened in Nanjing, Bawang Cha Ji can achieve a daily sales volume of 4,000 cups with half the number of employees, under the premise that customers only have to wait for an average of 5-10 minutes.

Why did Boya break his string?

Compared with other products such as fruit tea, standardization is simpler. It is simply composed of tea and milk, and the production time is as fast as 10 seconds. Replicable standardization is the prerequisite for large-scale and large single products.

The brand strategy of holding high the Gundam brand quickly captured people's minds. The brand name comes from the Chinese epic story, Farewell My Concubine, which reflects the persistence and pride in the Chinese people.

The brand slogan, "Meet friends from all over the world with oriental tea", uses labels such as national style, fruit tea, Chinese style, and oriental to make people think of Chinese brands. In terms of competitive product comparison, people will invisibly compare Starbucks' position in the West, and analogy thinking about competitive products has already given the product an invisible premium.

The brand vision, the red and white dopamine colors, matched with a simple large logo, the combination of Buddha's aura and geometric aesthetics, is exactly the same as Starbucks' visual style.

Brand packaging, many of which "conflict" with the visual design of luxury goods. The new packaging inspired by the Ancient Tea Horse Road is very similar in style to Dior prints; the new Sakura Oolong product is based on Valentino and Chanel because of its similar color scheme and camellia pattern; the Gardenia design is similar to the color scheme and pattern of LV's spring and summer menswear launched in 2023, based on blue and white tie-dye, with brand logos and floral patterns.

The product names are divided into four series: Original Leaf·Fresh Milk Tea, Qingyun·Xueding Collection, Yuanshan·Fresh Brew, Four Seasons·Fresh Fruit Ode. Each name has Chinese culture overflowing the screen. In the Original Leaf Fresh Milk Tea series, Boya Juexian, Gui Fulanxiang, and Huatian Oolong are full of Chinese style.

There is no need to cultivate a sense of luxury, only to awaken analogies. Many brands such as Starbucks, DIOR, Chanel, and LV have been verified by the market, and analogies awaken users and convey brand tone. Rather than plagiarism, it is better to say that this is reorganization and innovation.

02 Pricing strategy: choose the blue ocean and cut the price vacuum zone

Freshly brewed tea drinks continue to grow year by year, with the market size increasing from 70 billion yuan in 2017 to more than 130 billion yuan.

As a brand, the barriers to TO B are replicable standardization and efficiency, while the barriers to TO C are taste and brand quality.

For franchisees, ensuring sufficient profit margins and allowing partners to make money is the foundation of the brand, and behind the money is the ultimate supply chain and standardized labor efficiency; for consumers, good taste is the foundation, and behind it is identity recognition. The brand tone represents what type of person the user himself belongs to.

According to the survey, there is no relatively national leading brand in the price range of 15-20 yuan; there is Mixue Bingcheng at the low end and Nayuki, Heytea, etc. at the high end. Instead of confronting each other head-on, it is better to avoid the red ocean and adopt a differentiated pricing strategy.

This is true not only for price but also for product expansion. From its establishment in Yunnan in 2017 to its first store in Chunxi Road, Chengdu in 2021, it has been dormant for 4 years. Not blindly expanding, but exercising appropriate restraint is also a form of offense. The strategy of cultivating niche markets and surrounding cities from the countryside has been proven to be effective.

The strategy of staggered pricing quickly seized the market share of the mid-to-high-end market. Bawang Chaji's original leaf fresh milk tea is "tea + milk", and its underlying logic is similar to latte's "coffee + milk".

At the same price point, there are mature brands like Cha Yan Yue Se, but Cha Yan Yue Se is obviously regional, concentrated in Hunan, and not fully spread across the country. With a large enough market volume, Bawang Cha Ji can be said to have hit the price vacuum zone of this category.

03 Channel layout: Matrix combination, restraint is also offense

For channel layout, brands have a set of strategic methodologies.

First, use large stores of more than 200 square meters to build brand potential, and second, use mainstream stores of about 60 square meters to replicate on a large scale to get closer to consumers. Use high-quality locations to increase brand potential and create brand tone with a better experience.

The repeated mask incidents and rising costs have caused many brands to flee shopping malls. However, Bawang Chaji did the opposite and opened stores crazily during the epidemic. It opened more than 1,000 stores in 17 provinces and cities across the country, and many stores had monthly turnover of more than 1 million yuan.

In September 2021, the Bawang Cha Ji Chengdu Chunxi Road flagship store opened, located in the Chunxi Road subway station square at the "center of the universe", with IFS and Chunxi Road Pedestrian Street in its left hand and Taikoo Li in its right hand.

Faced with high rents of over one million yuan, entering popular locations is the brand's high-profile strategy in channel layout. Opening a store in Chunxi Road brings three benefits to Bawang Cha Ji.

First, it is not uncommon to queue for 40-50 minutes for a month in a row; second, the brand potential of high-end business districts is enhanced; third, continuous hot searches attract franchisees from all over the country.

Looking at the new media marketing channels, the Xiaohongshu brand and high-quality regional stores form a matrix.

The brand account establishes its image and creates social communication activities, and content with more than 10,000 likes, collections and comments often appears; through the "Dandelion backend data search for the keyword "Ba Wang Cha Ji" on Xiaohongshu, 451 pieces of cooperation content were reported; in addition, there are many real users sharing, and there are more than 150,000 popular notes on Hongshu.

Douyin, a large number of influencers visiting stores, brands’ profit-sharing strategies, 10% discount on the daily traffic of the big single product Boya Juexian, and a large number of store visits and brands’ targeted commission plans for traffic. In terms of store management, everything from site selection to public domain traffic and private domain membership system management is in order.

Products are updated in a rhythmic manner. From attracting new users to retaining users to fission, every link is carefully considered. For example, in the backend applet mall, the "Invite and Get Gifts" setting is set up to invite one person to receive coupons. The 18-yuan coupon is split into 4 coupons of different denominations to ensure the distribution of gross profit.

Compared with the brands that mindlessly and crazily distribute coupons, this is a more business-oriented approach. Luckin Coffee 1.0, Miss Fresh and other brands directly offer free drinks to new users, which is completely contrary to the fission of business logic and is just a short-term product of capital that drinks poison to quench thirst.

The points mall is designed to make old users more sticky, the cup collection app is designed to satisfy the "blind box mentality" of collectors, and the tea friends community is based on user operations of LBS stores.

When it comes to opening up channels for franchising, Bawang Cha Ji has her own unique methodology.

Whenever we arrive in a new city, we must choose a core CBD location. After hyping up the brand, we will use the tea lovers’ community to accumulate the brand’s own private consumer traffic, and then undertake the subsequent fission strategies and conversion operation design.

04 Promotion and marketing: holistic thinking and business focus

The creation of public domain social topics is not like a consumer product at all. There is a professional operation and marketing team behind every step.

Let’s review some of the event marketing that has exploded in the past six years.

On June 20, 2018, Bawang Tea Princess launched the Douyin "tearing the cup" trend, which was played hundreds of millions of times. The popular blind box, tearing the cup "elegantly" after drinking milk tea, Dior lipstick, RMB, milk tea weekly card, and other fancy marketing made the popularity explode.

On March 14, 2019, Bawang Cha Ji launched its first hit fruit tea, 1000ml Colorful Flowers. This super large size that cannot be fully held in one hand contains six kinds of fruits. The visual impact quickly makes customers have an impulse to buy.

On August 10, 2019, Bawang Chaji's first store in Malaysia, Petaling Jaya, officially opened. Going overseas first and then returning to China is still a high-potential brand strategy. Internationalization and orientalization are also strategies to avoid the hot domestic market first, which is similar to the differentiated operation of product selection and positioning.

In September 2021, the first store in Chengdu Chunxi Road opened, known as the "center of the universe", which is also a heavyweight for opening up the southwest market. Just like Apple's offline experience stores, which are always located in the most prosperous locations in the city, they will open stores even if they lose money.

In August 2023, Bawang Cha Ji's new function, "Product ID Card", was officially launched, and the calories of the first six drinks were announced, making nutritional information transparent. Just like Yuanqi Forest's 0 sugar and 0 calories concept, it has been tried and tested by the punk health-conscious Generation Z, leaving users without worries. Through the interaction of "calorie visualization" and "ingredient parameterization", the fixed perception that drinking milk tea will make you fat is invisibly broken.

Apart from the marketing events in the public domain, the store-based communities are also done very carefully. We operate the communities based on stores, and try to maintain 200 to 300 people in each group.

Each store community is equipped with at least two staff members, the store manager and the operations specialist from the headquarters. The daily operation strategy is clearly visible, such as: give out coupons on Monday; popularize traditional Chinese knowledge and tea culture on Tuesday; hold member day on Wednesday; member day activities on Thursday; promote fun games on Friday to attract attention, etc. There are different motivations behind each strategy, and the ultimate goal is to get consumers to place orders.

Marketing and promotion, various resources are tilted to the big single product "Bo Ya Jue Xian" with an annual sales volume of 80 million cups. For example: the designated objects of the cup tearing activity, who buy a large cup of Boya Jue Xian, can upgrade to a cup tearing gift. It is the beginning of the school season, and the official annual hot-selling slogan of the event is still "Bo Ya Jue Xian". The active guidance of the shopping guide in the C position of the store is all directed to this super single product.

Final Words

If the Bawang Cha Ji brand wants to represent China to the world, it must find a unique Chinese expression. The brand positioning combines oriental culture with tea heritage and innovation to create a new oriental tea shop.

The tone at the beginning was an international brand, inheriting the spirit of the ancient Tea Horse Road, starting from Yunnan, using oriental tea to meet friends around the world. The collision with luxury goods and the various plagiarism storms questioning the packaging design can also be understood as innovative reorganization. Just like the air-level product WeChat, it was once praised as plagiarizing foreign social products in the early stage of the product.

Through the underlying thinking of 4P marketing, the popularity of the Bawang Cha Ji brand is no accident. From products to prices, channels to operations, every link has a unique understanding and strong execution. From a systematic perspective, this is a consumer product that has taken Internet products to the extreme.

In addition to 4P marketing thinking, analogy thinking and migration capabilities are also worthy of product people's consideration and practice.

For example, the calorie "product ID card" has been around for many years in the beauty industry, and it has become a new hot search when it is transferred to the milk tea industry; the logo avatar collides with Starbucks, and the packaging style collides with DIOR, Chanel, etc., which are all potential energy transfers. Product positioning, the original leaf fresh milk tea "tea + milk" is an analogy transfer of latte "coffee + milk".

Behind every migration is countless times of in-depth thinking by the brand management team.

There is still a long way to go for Chinese milk tea. If one day Bawang Cha Ji can represent Chinese tea and become as popular around the world as Starbucks, it will be a pride for domestic brands.

Author: zhrayan, WeChat public account: 炏's Black Box