From product inspiration to brand strategy, these 6 cases explain how to play traceability marketing

This article uses 6 brand cases to explain how traceability marketing works and what results it has achieved, and objectively analyzes the impact of traceability marketing on brands. It is recommended for brands that want to increase brand awareness and reach more audiences.

As a symbol, the essence of a brand is built on trust. Daofa observed that since this year, more and more brands have begun to do "tracing marketing".

A simple traceability may be to go directly to the raw material production area, or to open the factory for a visit to see the production process of the product. Safety is the underlying demand for traceability. For example, Nongfu Spring’s popular slogan, “We don’t produce water, we are just nature’s porters”, coupled with the documentary about visiting the water source every year, helps the brand occupy the position of “good water from the source”, which has become a winning blow for Nongfu Spring to stand out from many mineral water brands. Quality is a higher-level consideration in safety.

In 2021, Nongfu Spring launched large barrels of tea water to meet the tea drinking demand, and printed "Wuyi Mountain Spring Water" directly on the packaging, using Wuyi Mountain's tea culture to endorse the water quality. But in fact, the word "traceability" can carry far more than just safety and quality. From the strategic positioning of the brand and the extension of the corporate mission to the inspiration of product development and the maintenance of user stickiness, all can be achieved through traceability.

How big is the imagination space for traceability marketing? How can traceability marketing be innovative? We have summarized six cases from emerging and mature brands. Their entry points and scalability are very worthy of reference. I hope they can bring you inspiration.

1. Kefumei: Tracing the source to lower the threshold of brand communication

"Kefumei" is affiliated to Juzi Bio, the "first stock of recombinant collagen". In 2011, the brand entered the functional skin care product market with "human-like collagen dressing" as its main selling point. On Double 11 in 2022, the brand's core product "Collagen Stick" had omni-channel sales of 16 million units.

For most consumers, "recombinant collagen" is still a relatively new concept. Therefore, through multiple "traceability actions", Kefumei has made the general skin care population recognize the skin care effects of recombinant collagen products. For example, in May 2023, Juzi Bio invited distributors, consumers and industry representatives to conduct an on-site traceability trip, and jointly visited Juzi Bio's product display experience hall and production workshop to witness Juzi Bio's high-level scientific research and innovation capabilities and high-standard quality management system up close, and enhance consumers' trust in the brand. Kefumei's approach represents the most common type of brand demand. When there is a certain threshold for your raw materials and product concepts, "seeing is believing" is the most effective means of communication.

2. Huaxizi: Let traceability become the inspiration for product development

Since its launch on the banks of West Lake in March 2017, Huaxizi has been firmly in the C position of domestic beauty brands by occupying the position of oriental aesthetics and playing with Chinese elements to perfection. Its GMV has quickly exceeded 5 billion yuan in 4 years since its establishment. After the great success of its air loose powder in sales, Huaxizi has also continuously launched SKUs responsible for "brand communication" and used traceability to build its brand and shape the value of cultural content.

In 2020, Huaxizi joined hands with the inheritors of the Miao silver jewelry forging skills, and used the Miao intangible cultural heritage skills of Miao silver, Miao embroidery, and batik as design inspiration to launch the "Miao Impression Haute Couture Series Products". After the series appeared on the city big screens in New York, Shinjuku, and Shibuya, it was shared by a number of popular overseas influencers such as Uncle Gross. At the same time, Huaxizi also joined hands with the People's Daily New Media as an intangible cultural heritage inheritance partner, and jointly launched the documentary "Extraordinary Intangible Cultural Heritage" with Li Jiaqi, bringing the story of Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village in Leishan County, Guizhou Province to the world.

In 2021, Hua Xizi replicated the Miao impression method and once again cooperated with "Bazaar" magazine and Li Jiaqi to enter the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan to create the "Dai Impression" series, incorporating classic Dai flowers - Buddleja mongolica, Dendrobium nobile, Polygonum multiflorum, and lotus - into modern formulas, and collaborated with Zhang Yimou, Li Jiaqi, and Du Juan to shoot the documentary "Spiritual Beauty of the East, Dai Impressions" to delve into Dai culture.

In Huaxizi's case, products are divided into two categories, one responsible for sales and the other responsible for branding. The products responsible for branding can first have source inspiration and then form products so as to efficiently complete brand communication.

3. PMPM: Live streaming based on user emotions

The functional skin care brand "PMPM" was founded by former P&G brand director Shan Shan and Lian Chuang Wen at the end of 2019. The brand's biggest label is its original global formula "X+Y+Z", namely "global natural ingredients + star scientific research ingredients + international cutting-edge technology". Among them, natural ingredients are found by the brand in the Piedmont Forest, Grasse Flower Valley, Brittany Coast, Madagascar, Bulgarian Flower Valley, Iceland and other places around the world. As of 2022, the two series of Piedmont Forest·White Truffle and Grasse·Centacle Rose have become the core series of the brand, contributing more than 500 million in sales. The core competitive point of "global natural ingredients" has also become the biggest bridge for communication between the brand and users. Every anniversary event of PMPM revolves around this point: for the brand's first anniversary in 2021, PMPM launched a live broadcast event called "Take Everyone to See the Sea", which broadcast the scenery of the Brittany coast to users in real time, leading users to immersively experience the origin of the brand's core raw material, sea fennel extract;

In the spring of 2022, PMPM once again launched a remote live broadcast event to explore the Piedmont forest where the exclusive core ingredient, Trudiamond white truffle, was born, and opened a "tree hole" for users, inviting hundreds of thousands of users to share their stories;

In early 2023, PMPM continued to use this method to broadcast live in the Alps, and made a commemorative short film based on the sharing and confessions of users in the live broadcast room.

This form has a feeling of "remaining constant in the face of change": natural scenery flows in fixed lenses and does not require excessive explanation. PMPM simply creates a space for users, which can well cater to the public's imagination of distant places in the post-epidemic era.

Compared with the traceability of many products, emotional communication with users is also a clever way to make friends with users emotionally, co-create with users in publicity, and accumulate brand assets in the interaction between the two parties.

4. Mistine: Overseas tracing opens up the local population

If overseas brands want to tell their brand stories to domestic users in their entirety, they usually need to take users back to the place where the brand was founded.

For example, the Thai national brand "Mistine", on the occasion of its 35th anniversary of its establishment and 8 years in China, carried out a complete overseas traceability marketing around the overall positioning and concept of the brand.

In addition to the routine invitation of top beauty KOLs to visit the brand's headquarters, laboratories and offline stores in Thailand, the highlight of Mistine's marketing this time was the choice to cooperate with Li Jiaqi to create a creative short film "The Encounter with Li Jiaqi".

The short film is divided into three parts: "Ingredients", "Technology" and "Inspiration", and is based on the mysterious mission "Rice Search" that Li Jiaqi and Wangwang received. In the film, Li Jiaqi turned into a user's "mouth substitute" to ask various questions, and the R&D staff gave Jiaqi an exclusive explanation of the raw materials and technology of the products. When the two came to the brand headquarters for the last stop, the brand's "Tropical Research" brand concept was fully released under the narration of the president of BetterWay, the parent company of Mistine.

After the TVC was officially launched, the exposure of related topics on the entire network exceeded 500 million on the first day, and topics such as "Li Jiaqi x MISTINE Thai is funny", "Thailand Lande Qi's Encounter", and "Li Jiaqi Wangwang Thai Acting" were on the hot search on Weibo.

The key to such a big breakout effect is that Mistine has combined the brand's Thai genes with content expression. Thai magic comedy elements can be seen everywhere in the TVC: freeze-frame shots are used many times to fix Jiaqi and Wangwang's exaggerated expressions and body movements, and slow-motion shots are used with opera background music to create comedy effects. The two also continued the style of teasing and bickering with each other in the live broadcast, and the nonsensical plot and daily feeling complement each other.

Mistine's "Lost in Thailand"-style performance is a model of combining brand genes with traceability, and it is also a new idea for overseas brands to tell stories.

5. Yili: Inspiring national pride through cultural tracing

In June this year, the dairy brand "Yili" launched a global quality traceability campaign with the theme of "Global Quality Tracking".

On the one hand, the brand took advantage of the tenth anniversary of the "Belt and Road Initiative" and used the concept of the ancient Silk Road. It used AI technology to resurrect the protagonist of the Silk Road, "Zhang Qian", and used his voice to build a Milk Silk Road for Yili - connecting key locations in Yili's global industrial chain layout, such as the Southeast Asian Green Manufacturing Center, New Zealand Ranch, European Innovation Center, and Modern Smart Health Valley.

On the other hand, in order to make users feel more immersive, Yili cooperated with cultural IP Yi Gongzi. She was on Yili's ranch and started with historical poems and literati stories about milk. She told the story in an easy-to-understand way how milk entered the Central Plains from the grasslands and was eventually integrated into the daily lives of the Chinese people. As a national brand, Yili has been working continuously to improve the quality of its milk.

China has no shortage of good cultural stories, which has become the entry point for many brands when positioning themselves. Many brands have explored the stories behind domestic raw materials to increase the value of their products. However, today's national pride is not only reflected in Made in China and Created in China, but also in making "global good things available to China".

"Deploying a global industrial chain and integrating world resources" is Yili's core competitiveness. Therefore, Yili chose to fully magnify this point, combining the process of global development with well-known historical stories, transforming the abstract "global quality" into a realistic plot, and telling a story of "global tracing".

At the same time, Yili innovatively introduced VR/AR digital technology to create an online "quality traceability metaverse", where users can visit and interact from an employee's perspective, entering production, filling, transportation and other scenes that are not accessible through offline industrial tours, bringing a more interesting traceability experience to young users.

Yili has been on the road of traceability marketing for many years. In this year's activities, Yili took traditional culture as the foundation and explored innovative technologies, successfully breaking the bottleneck of traceability marketing, which is worthy of reference for mature brands.

6. De Beers: Launching ESG projects in the name of traceability

De Beers was founded in 1888 and is famous for its "source mining". It claims to be the only jewelry brand in the world that mines directly from the source. It has built a sophisticated traceability system and even began to use the blockchain diamond traceability system Tracr in 2018, so that every diamond can be traced back to its mining. Of course, for expensive diamonds, traceability is necessary, but among a number of diamond brands, the highlight of De Beers is that it has turned the origin of diamonds into a practice field for practicing brand social responsibility. In the brand's main mining areas in South Africa and Botswana, De Beers has opened up eight nature reserves covering an area of ​​more than 50 acres. In 2002, the brand launched the "Diamond Source Road" project, which mainly protects local biodiversity, and also conducts education and promotion projects with local schools and tourists to support local economic development and raise people's awareness of environmental protection.

For example, the brand has set up positions such as biodiversity directors and ecological managers in the local area. Over the past 20 years, it has transferred thousands of animals from protected areas to other parts of South Africa and supported more than 100 ecological research projects to help rewild animals and restore biodiversity.

At a time when the ESG concept has become a new standard for measuring brand governance structure, sustainable development, and long-term profitability, traceability has greater room for imagination: it can not only show users how the brand carries out production activities at the place of origin, but also go further and show how the brand has a positive impact on the place of origin.

Author: Wutang, WeChat public account: "Knife Skills Research Institute"