Young people who can’t make money love to spend money on a sense of ceremony

"Getting free stuff" and "spending money to buy a sense of ritual" seem to contradict each other, but they are fully demonstrated among contemporary young people. A sense of ritual is an indispensable thing in a tiring life. Merchants also gain business opportunities because of consumers' sense of ritual. How to integrate a sense of ritual into a brand? Let's read it together!

"What is restrained is the extra demands, not the pursuit of beauty."

For Duoduo, the gears of consumer preferences began to turn in September 2022.

At the beginning of 2022, a discount store for expiring snacks, Haotemai, opened downstairs from the company. It was located on the first floor of the business district near the street, and people were coming and going. When I passed by after get off work in the evening and wanted to buy some potato chips, drinks and self-heating rice, Duoduo was afraid of meeting acquaintances, so he would look around first, and then walk in in two steps at a time.

It was not until September of the same year that Duoduo went to a downtown mall for a meal and discovered that there was not only a Haotemai store, but also a Hi-Tego store. "Before, when people went shopping in the mall, the most common bags were from H&M, Uniqlo or Miniso, but now there is one more - Haotemai bags."

Duoduo also talked about another major discovery of his: there are more and more discount groups. Search for "薅羊毛" and a collection of discount information will pop up on Xiaohongshu. Lululemon stores held an event to give away a pair of pants, and some consumers lined up at the store door the night before. Looking back, in the past, this "crazy" situation only appeared the night before the release of a new Apple phone.

All of the above make it particularly obvious that moderate consumption has become the current mainstream.

But at the same time, New Retail Business Review noted that one type of consumer behavior has increased rather than decreased: paying for a sense of ritual. Contemporary young people, aware of the difficulty of making money, are trying to save money while spending money to buy a sense of meaning.

1. For happiness

San San and Li Meng are good friends who grew up together. They have different personalities and temperaments and work in different cities, but they have one thing in common: they both have their own unshakable habits.

On Saturday afternoon, San San went from Shanghai to Suzhou for a two-day short vacation. She didn't need to bring a suitcase or a selfie stick, but she had to bring a booklet. She showed it to Retail Jun with great interest, and opened the notebook, which contained a lot of stamp patterns.

"These were stamped at the Gansu Provincial Museum last week. I waited for more than half an hour with other people around the small stage for stamping."

Photo provided by the interviewee

During her trip to Suzhou to relax, she included going to the Suzhou Museum to get a new color stamp. A pattern is divided into different stamps according to color and shape, and a complete pattern can be obtained by stamping several times. According to local media reports in Suzhou, tourists lined up before the stamping place opened. When the flow of people was the largest, it took about 2 hours to queue up.

"There are six layers in total, and each layer will bring new changes. Just thinking about it makes me excited." San San smiled. One of her biggest wishes this year is to travel to Beijing and get a few stamps at the Palace Museum.

There are many people who love stamp collecting like San San. With the booming tourism industry, there is a stamp collecting craze in China. There are more and more museums and scenic spots across the country where stamps can be collected. Even in some industry exhibitions and ordinary markets, new ways of collecting stamps and checking in have been introduced.

Li Meng, who works in Nanjing, calls herself a backpacker who travels all over the world and is keen on collecting postcards from all over the world: "Every time I go to a scenic spot, I will check to see if there are any postcards I like, and I must affix local stamps before sending them to my good friends."

She recalled that in 2019, when Shanghai's Tianzifang was still bustling, she would go into a sundry shop in a small street to pick out postcards. She wanted one with a Shanghai scene printed on it, one with a portrait of a woman from the Republic of China, and one with plant specimens embedded in it for dozens of yuan. She had to take any beautiful and distinctive ones. At that time, most shops had a mailbox, so she could write and put a stamp on it and send it out.

Nowadays, writing and mailing postcards on Taobao has become a business. In places like Kashgar Old Town, Lhasa, Lijiang, and West Lake in Hangzhou, you can get a handwritten postcard from a stranger for less than 10 yuan.

Image source: Taobao

During the storytelling, San San and Li Meng mentioned at the same time that they felt a sense of satisfaction in the process of collecting stamps and handwriting postcards, just like ticking off an important item in life on a to-do list.

2. Create business opportunities

Driven by the demand for "sense of ritual", many new business opportunities have emerged.

Liu Xue's condolence picture

If you like the picture above and are interested in cooking, then I have reason to believe that there is a small kitchen appliance (maybe more than one) "lying" in your kitchen or in your shopping cart.

From bread machines, air fryers, to small household ovens, etc., the "sense of ritual" runs through the videos of cooking bloggers , and has gradually evolved into various strange small appliances, such as bean sprout machines, waffle machines, fruit and vegetable purifiers...

Some ritual products are more novel. For example, the wedding advertisement that has become popular recently was originally a sudden idea of ​​a couple born in 1995 in Chengdu, but it unexpectedly set off a trend of imitation. "To inform relatives and friends, and also to keep a souvenir" is the meaning of young people's newspaper announcements.

Posts on Xiaohongshu sharing their feelings about newspaper placements are full of "surprises" and "touched". This has triggered a wave of "what a sense of ceremony" in the comments section below, followed by a wave of consumers following suit and checking in. The newspaper placement craze has spread rapidly, and newspapers around the country have also smelled new business opportunities. It used to cost only a few dozen yuan to publish information, but now most of them cost more than 100 yuan.

City-level newspapers like Shenzhen Evening News offer multiple options for advertising. The "Forever" edition, which is "text-based, 4×4 cm, inside pages," costs 199 yuan, while the "high-end customized" cover costs 199,999 yuan. Advertising in a newspaper may cost one-fifth of the money you would spend on a house, but on the day Shenzhen Evening News opened for reservations, reservations were already booked until next year.

Image source: Shenzhen Evening News Xiaohongshu official account

Marriage is a major event in life. Many new rituals have evolved, from the original wedding ceremony and bride-receiving video to the current marriage certificate acquisition and even divorce video.

Take the divorce follow-up video , for example. It caused a small controversy as soon as it appeared. One netizen asked: "I don't understand, divorce is followed by video, is divorce a glorious thing?" Not long after, someone responded: "It can be done for marriage, why can't it be done for divorce."

Many online filming teams have started to accept orders for filming divorces, with promotional text such as "filming divorces, recording an equally important day in life." While joking that they risked being beaten, the filming teams showed their prices - 300 yuan per hour, 1,200 yuan for a full day of filming.

However, currently, divorce shooting is still relatively rare. In an interview with New Weekly, photographer Xiao Xiong, who has participated in divorce shooting, believes that divorce shooting touches the vulnerable side of the public's heart, requiring photographers to be more professional and cautious, and it will be difficult to implement in reality.

The above two types are based on the ritual sense of marriage record. The same business of recording is also the rental of concert camera phones . In order to obtain high-definition and high-quality photos, the "star-chasing artifact" ranking list came into being. The Samsung S23 Ultra, which is loved by star-chasing girls, has also become a popular rental phone.

Image source: Xiaohongshu, Aizuji, Xianyu

When Retail Jun interviewed Qianqian, a star-chasing girl, her eyes lit up: "I had the urge to rent a Samsung S23 this year, because I didn't take a satisfactory photo at the concert before. Every time I go to a concert, there are girls who bring their own cameras and take very clear photos. I envy them so much. Although there are various high-definition photos on the Internet, they are still different from those taken by myself. I don't have that sense of participation."

Because of this, categories for renting concert-specific phones can be searched on mobile phone rental apps including Renrenzu and Aizuji, as well as on channels such as Xianyu, Xiaohongshu, and Taobao.

3. A soft marketing

Some brands have also learned to integrate the "sense of ritual" into their business segments, thereby differentiating themselves and establishing brand competitive advantages.

For example, for birthdays, the normal process is to have a meal, give gifts, and then have a cake. The key is to celebrate. Correspondingly, the flower shops, restaurants, and cake shops used to focus on the taste of the cakes, the physical appearance, and the service attitude. But now it is different. In order to enrich the sense of ritual of celebration, brands have come up with various tricks to reshape products and service processes.

The saying "If you hate someone, take him to Haidilao for his birthday" is true, because Haidilao is a place where social phobias collapse. There are not only fruit platters, cakes, and birthday crowns, but also employees singing for the "birthday boy", "say goodbye to all the troubles, and say hi to all the happiness". In addition, there are Sichuan opera face-changing and interactive rock-paper-scissors with sad frogs to ensure that there will be no dull moments.

As early as 2017, the cake brand "Panda Never Walks Away" realized the business opportunities behind the sense of ritual and launched the "online ordering + creative delivery" operation model. After the cakes were delivered, employees wearing panda costumes would perform dances and magic shows on the spot and send blessings. The market also verified the demand for "sense of ritual". Data shows that it took only 4 months for Panda Never Walks Away to become the first in the regional industry and the first in repurchase rate.

Image source: Haidilao and Panda Buzou official Weibo

Keep and McDonald's also use the same principle. Keep successfully captured the hearts of girls through various beautiful and interesting medals. You can get exquisite medals by running, which has led to an increase in the use of the platform. It is reported that Keep has earned more than 500 million yuan by selling medals.

McDonald's launched a limited toy package, and every time it was released, it was snapped up. Using gifts to extend happiness is actually selling a sense of ritual and scarcity. According to official data, McDonald's sells 1.5 billion toys every year, and 20% of its annual revenue comes from Happy Meals. There is also a team inside McDonald's that specializes in toy production and development.

In the opinion of brand marketing expert Ding Shian, the most important significance of ritual in brand marketing is to build a more trusting and dependent relationship between consumers and products and brands, and enhance the cohesion between them. The shaping and extension of brand personality has become the key to influencing consumers' emotions and choices.

Although the sense of ritual is important, it can also be used incorrectly. For example, The Beast, which started out as a flower seller, put up a slogan "Buy flowers with stories", trying to deeply bind the public's emotional value through consumers' stories and instill in consumers the idea that buying flowers is buying quality of life, buying something precious and caring.

However, there are many comments online about the Beast flowers not being what they claim to be and their poor quality: "The marketing is indeed good, but it is really unacceptable that a few ordinary roses of average quality can be sold for 1,314 yuan." Netizens judged the so-called "sense of ritual" to be a profit-making method for the brand to increase prices, which damages the brand image.

Facts have proved that if you want consumers to pay for the sense of ritual, it won’t work if either the product or the experience has shortcomings.

IV. Conclusion

Why do we still need a sense of ritual in a life where the desire for consumption is declining? One netizen gave the answer by borrowing a passage from The Little Prince:

It makes a certain day different from other days, a certain moment different from other moments, and people discover the differences in life at every moment and thus discover the splendor of life. People with a sense of ritual take life seriously.

Faced with the changes in the past three years of the epidemic, the unpredictable future and dangers, the involuted workplace and the often anxious life, the sense of ritual is not formalism, but a piece of candy in life, and the demand for it will only increase.

Author: Wu Shaoge

Source: WeChat public account "New Retail Business Review (ID: xinlingshou1001)"