2023 Internet celebrity new tea drinks: pay tribute to big brands, and then go viral

While new tea giants are busy entering the sinking market, Bawang Tea Princess has begun to break through in the opposite direction. This article details the current situation, development mode and thinking behind the tea market, and I hope it will be helpful to you.

The new tea beverage market has always been good at attracting the attention of young consumers. From carefully selecting fruit ingredients that are not common in the market, such as coconuts, oranges, and kumquats, to creating popular products, to cooperating with well-known IPs and luxury brands to launch limited-time joint activities, new tea beverage brands such as Heytea and Nayuki Tea always find ways to attract long queues at offline stores.

However, when the new tea giants were busy entering the sinking market, Bawang Tea, which originated in Yunnan, began to break through in the opposite direction of "surrounding the city from the countryside". The product innovation and joint activities that Heytea and others have worked so hard to achieve are now being easily cracked by new players.

1. The Mystery of the Popularity of New Tea Drinks

In the article "Cha Baidao's IPO, the new tea drinks' trump card can no longer be hidden" , Jingzhe Research Institute mentioned that the rise of new tea drinks relies on the industry background that the younger generation has become the main consumer group, which has led to "consumption upgrade". The first to meet the demand for consumption upgrade was the innovative product "milk cap tea" made with freshly brewed tea soup and fresh milk. With more and more players in the new tea drink track, product innovation has become one of the important ways for new brands to create differentiation.

The most typical example is the new tea drink summer trend that Heytea and Nayuki successfully set off with yellow peel and oil orange in 2021. According to media reports, after Nayuki launched the "Baqi Yu Yougan" at the end of May of that year, in less than three months, the product accounted for more than 20% of Nayuki's tea's total product sales, and some stores even exceeded 25%. The hot sales of the terminal market also led to an increase in the price of upstream raw materials. In previous years, the purchase price of oil oranges was no more than 2 yuan per catty, but it suddenly rose to more than ten yuan in 2021, and even as high as 40 yuan per catty.

The role of hit products in helping to increase overall revenue is also obvious. Also in 2021, Luckin Coffee, which was originally embroiled in a financial fraud scandal, launched the "Raw Coconut Latte", which became an instant hit. It not only set off a popular trend of "Raw Coconut Latte" in the ready-made beverage industry, but also directly achieved counter-cyclical growth with this hit product. According to data released by Luckin Coffee in April 2022, 100 million cups of Raw Coconut Latte were sold within one year of its launch. If we roughly estimate it based on the unit price of 17 yuan after the coupon, Luckin Coffee has achieved at least 1.7 billion yuan in revenue by selling Raw Coconut Latte in one year.

However, a hit product is something that can only be achieved by chance. In the summer of 2022, new tea drinks collectively encountered a shortage of "hit products", and the difficulty of product innovation was inevitably put on the table.

Different from the technology-centric product innovation path of the digital industry, the product innovation of new tea brands depends to a certain extent on the supply of raw materials. Some niche fruits with strong regional characteristics have limited production, so it is difficult to achieve full supply. Last year, brands such as Cha Baidao and Mixue Bingcheng began to collectively launch mulberry series products, but only in the case of collective procurement by individual brands, some new tea raw material suppliers have stated that there is a supply shortage of mulberry production capacity.

Putting aside the back-end issues such as the supply of raw materials, the birth of a hit product still depends on the scale effect of the brand. For example, the reason why the Yougan series was popularized by Heytea and Nayuki’s Tea is that these two leading brands have a considerable number of stores across the country. When new products are launched, they are easily chosen and tried by a certain scale of users, and then form a hit effect through secondary dissemination.

Sometimes, the creation of a hit product also requires a little bit of luck. In the first quarter of last year, Heytea, Nayuki's Tea, and Lelecha began to focus on launching new guava series products. Judging from the final product alone, the "girly pink" of guava juice has its own "beauty" and is rich in vitamins. It is the same as the oil citrus in terms of both visual and health concepts, and has many elements of a hit product. Even the launch time is also chosen in February and March, just like the oil citrus.

As a result, the popularity of guava lasted only for more than two months before it began to decline. Four months after the launch of new products, Heytea's "Full Bottle of Guava Grape" and "Full Bottle of Guava Yakult" were both offline. After seeing that guava had no chance of becoming a hit, other brands also stopped launching related new products in a timely manner. At this point, brands are fully aware that creating a hit is like opening a blind box, and when the "blind box" fails, brands still need reliable means to attract consumer attention and grab market share.

2. It’s better to co-brand a hit product

Compared with the chance of creating a hit product, IP co-branding gives new tea brands more confidence in terms of fault tolerance and controllability, so almost all new tea brands now organize co-branding activities. According to the Jingzhe Research Institute, as of August this year, brands including Heytea, Nayuki's Tea, Mixue Ice City, Chabaidao, COCO, and Luckin Coffee have all launched co-branding activities, and the number of co-branding activities has increased significantly compared to last year.

Among them, Heytea has launched 19 joint activities this year, with an average of one joint activity less than half a month, while there were only 14 in the whole of last year; Nayuki's Tea had less than 10 joint activities last year, but this year it has officially announced more than 20 joint activities; Mixue Bingcheng is not far behind, with the number of joint activities soaring from only 1 last year to 12 so far, showing a momentum of catching up; and the number of joint activities of Cha Baidao has also reached double digits, one more than the whole of last year.

It is worth mentioning that the co-branded partners of New Tea Drinks are no longer limited to well-known animation, games, and film and television dramas, but also include fashion designers, luxury brands, and even China Post and People's Literature Publishing House.

For example, the co-branded postal theme store launched by Mixue Ice City and China Post Shaanxi Branch was supervised by netizens before it officially opened, and the event received a lot of attention before it was launched. When Heytea teamed up with luxury brand FENDI to launch the "FENDI Joy Yellow" co-branded product in May, not only did the offline stores explode with orders, but even Heytea's official mini program "Heytea GO" crashed due to too many simultaneous visitors. The copywriting of "Get your first luxury brand in life for 19 yuan" and "Get your first FENDI in life with full payment" coupled with the "Joy Yellow" coaster and random badge pictures was even more popular in the circle of friends.

The collaboration between HEYTEA and FENDI shows people that young people’s love for luxury brands can be efficiently transferred to retail brands, driving product sales. However, not every brand can cooperate with international brands, so some brands take risks and choose more tricky ways to achieve their goals.

Not long ago, Bawang Cha Ji, a new Chinese-style tea brand, released a new series of Wild Gardenia products. Because its visual design is quite similar to a piece of clothing launched by luxury brand LV in the summer of 2021, netizens joked that it was a "free collaboration with LV."

Regarding the design of the wild gardenia pattern, the designer said that it was inspired by the pattern of the Tang Dynasty red sandalwood painted groove pipa, combined with the brand's "C" pattern, six-petal gardenia pattern, and red sandalwood pipa pattern. The ink painting visual style, similar to LV clothing, traces back to traditional Chinese colors, combines the pure white of gardenias with the vast indigo, and finally introduces the grass and wood tie-dyeing of the southwestern ethnic groups as a design element to create a sense of wilderness and nature.

Based on the above statement, the Jingzhe Research Institute found that the "Tang Dynasty red sandalwood painted groove pipa pattern" mentioned by Bawang Chaji was previously said to be the inspiration for LV's classic "monopoly", and the "Watercolor Giant Monogram" mentioned in LV's description of the clothing design refers to watercolor rather than ink. Therefore, Bawang Chaji's design description is self-consistent.

However, the Jingzhe Research Institute also found that this is not the first time that Bawang Cha Ji has "paid tribute" to big brands in product design. The design plans or elements of luxury brands including DIOR, GUCCI, CHANEL and Valentino can be found in Bawang Cha Ji's products. This behavior of "touching" big-brand designs has, to a certain extent, achieved the marketing effect of co-branding with luxury brands.

3. Is a collaboration worse than a “tribute”?

There was a heated discussion on the Internet about Bawang Cha Ji's "touching porcelain" behavior, which is also the biggest problem of Bawang Cha Ji since its debut. However, just like Shanye Gardenia's "tribute" to LV, Bawang Cha Ji can always justify its design plan, so the brand has not suffered any real losses in the terminal market due to "touching porcelain". On the contrary, because it has always maintained a large differentiation advantage in packaging design, Bawang Cha Ji's influence is gradually growing.

At the end of last year, Bawang Chaji announced its performance in the past five years. Data shows that in 2022, Bawang Chaji sold more than 57 million cups of drinks in total, and the sales of the Boya Juexian product designed by DIOR exceeded 10 million cups. Some stores in Chengdu, Hangzhou and other places sold more than 50,000 cups per month. In Sichuan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and other places, a number of stores with monthly turnover of millions have also appeared.

On social media, some netizens copied the packaging of Bawang Cha Ji from DIOR and made it into a tote bag, attracting other netizens to leave comments saying "I want the same one". Xiao Zhou, a post-98 white-collar worker working in a second-tier city, told Jingzhe Research Institute that he did not notice that the packaging of Bawang Cha Ji was very similar to that of big brands at first. "Maybe it's because I don't pay much attention to luxury goods. I just thought the packaging of this brand of milk tea was beautiful, so I bought it to try. Whether it is a collaboration with luxury goods or not actually has a big impact on whether I buy their products or not."

It is reported that the number of Bawang Chaji stores increased from 425 to 1,100 in 2022. In an interview, founder Zhang Junjie also said that Bawang Chaji entered 9 new provincial markets in 2022, and entered the first-tier cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen from the previous second- to fifth-tier cities. In April this year, Bawang Chaji expanded wildly in many cities across the country, opening more than 320 new stores, with the momentum of "surrounding the city with the countryside".

The counter-cyclical expansion of Bawang Cha Ji is not only the result of a "bumping into porcelain" collaboration, but also reflects that the current new tea beverage market is in a chaotic and fierce competitive landscape.

In previous articles, Jingzhe Research Institute mentioned that the new tea beverage industry has the characteristics of low product barriers and obvious market regionalization, so the new tea beverage giants occupying first-tier cities do not have an absolute market advantage. On the contrary, since the consumption of new tea beverages is related to shopping, leisure and other scenes, and under the trend of rational consumption, consumers' expectations for product prices also tend to be medium-to-low levels.

Therefore, the current competition among new tea brands is often a competition to see who can attract more consumers' attention. From the initial hit products to the later brand collaborations, they are all competing for traffic and boosting sales for brands through frequent new products in a limited market space.

However, creating a hit product is a metaphysics, and joint activities are a road that cannot be turned back once embarked on. Heytea, which tasted the sweetness of joint activities at the beginning of its establishment, has almost engraved joint activities into the brand's DNA. In the four years from 2017 to 2021, Heytea has successively conducted joint activities with 74 IPs. In addition to the 14 joint activities last year and the 19 joint activities so far this year, Heytea has an average of 18 joint activities per year, and an average of 1.5 joint activities per month.

Such frequent collaborations not only fail to reflect the brand's market appeal, but also reflect the fact that new tea drinks have become somewhat "dependent" on collaborations. Behind the frequent collaborations is the cruel reality that daily new product launches can no longer attract repeat purchases. Continuing to use collaborations to drive new product sales will cause consumers to have "aesthetic fatigue."

Compared with the sales gained by Heytea with real money, Bawangchaji's approach of "touching" big brands is more efficient. However, the risks of "touching" cannot be completely ignored, so some brands will choose to "save the country in a roundabout way" and cooperate with designers to achieve the effect of "cooperating with big brands".

Last week, NOWWA Coffee launched a new co-branded product, Damascus Rose Sea Salt Latte, in collaboration with a former GUCCI senior print designer. From the decorative pattern to the color matching, it is hard to tell the difference from GUCCI, and it also achieved the effect of co-branding with luxury brands. However, after the proliferation of co-branding with big brands, how can new tea drinks continue to attract consumers' attention? This question cannot be answered for the time being.

In fact, from the expansion war in the sinking market to the differentiated competition of milk tea "coffeeization", we can see that the current new tea beverage track is involved in a comprehensive and lasting industry competition pattern. The market situation of the "Hundred Tea Wars" also reflects the future potential of the industry.

Therefore, even in the current fierce competition in the industry, new players continue to emerge in an attempt to get a ticket to the final round. What makes the outcome of this industry competition even more suspenseful is that the product differentiation between giants and new brands is getting smaller and smaller, and the comprehensive game decision around taste, brand influence, and market positioning truly determines the final industry landscape.

“Bumping into” big brands can indeed help new tea brands stand out, but dwelling on whether the behavior of “bumping into” big brands is correct will not reduce the competitive pressure on industry giants. New tea brands at the moment should perhaps think more about how to persist until the day when the industry reaches its finale in the face of the full-scale attack from new brands.

Author: Bai Lu

Source public account: Jingzhe Research Institute (ID: jingzheyanjiusuo), exploring and discovering the new economy.