Have Yili and Mengniu lost their voice in the Spring Festival marketing war?

Many brands have begun to market their products during this Spring Festival, but the voice of dairy companies has become quite small, almost "disappeared". What is the reason for their silence in the Spring Festival marketing war? This article puts forward several thoughts.

A very interesting phenomenon emerged in this year's Spring Festival marketing: the voice of dairy companies has become quite small, almost to the point of disappearing.

The first ten minutes of the Spring Festival Gala have always been regarded as a barometer of the national economy. In previous years, the limelight has been occupied by health care product companies, real estate companies, and Internet companies. Among these advertisements, dairy companies have always occupied a large share. Although they are not in the lead, they can be described as rock solid.

By this year, almost all of the above industries have withdrawn from the market. The screen has become dominated by liquor, and dairy product advertisements have almost disappeared. The only one that appears is Jinlingguan, but its momentum is much smaller than in previous years.

Half a month before the Spring Festival Gala began, it was rumored that Yili had taken over the title sponsorship with a sponsorship fee of up to nine figures. Later, everyone discovered that the exclusive title sponsor of the 2023 CCTV Spring Festival Gala simply "failed to sell" and no one raised a bid.

In addition, it is rare to see dairy companies spending money on local satellite TV’s Spring Festival Gala, and among the key Spring Festival movies, the only obvious thing is that Feihe is deeply tied to "The Wandering Earth 2".

Weibo screenshot

Is it because he has no money? Obviously not.

According to FoodTalks' 2022 Top 30 Chinese Dairy Companies list, Yili and Mengniu ranked the top two with dairy product revenues of 108.28 billion yuan and 88.141 billion yuan respectively, with profits both around the tens of billions. At the same time, a total of six dairy companies had revenues of tens of billions, namely Yili, Mengniu, Bright, Feihe, Junlebao and Want Want China.

In the World Cup that just ended not long ago, Mengniu and Yili took the first and third place respectively in the final list of the Digital Brand List 2022 World Cup Brand Marketing List. Mengniu spent a lot of money to become the global official sponsor of the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

According to GlobalData, Mengniu invested $60 million in event sponsorship alone. In addition, it "bet" on its spokespeople Mbappé and Messi, both of whom made it to the finals, so it was a win-win for both sides.

Digital Brand List

Although the budget is not insufficient, the dairy companies' indifference towards this year's Spring Festival "big marketing item" also shows, to a certain extent, that the strategic focus of dairy companies' investment has changed - perhaps the Spring Festival is no longer the time period they pay the most attention to.

1. Consumer mentality and marketing attitude

During the Spring Festival, the public's consumption mentality changes significantly compared to other time periods, and the most obvious manifestation of this is in the film market.

In terms of the quality of the film, it is hard to say that "Man Jiang Hong" is very good. Like the "Chinatown Detective" series in previous years, it is difficult to classify it into a specific type. It is more like a party skit brought to the big screen. But looking at the data, whether it is single-day box office, number of screenings or total box office forecast, it has surpassed its biggest rival in the same period, "The Wandering Earth 2".

During the entire Spring Festival, people consume as a family unit. Although young people aged 20-30 are the main force in the movie-watching market, they still have to accommodate the aesthetics and understanding of the elderly and children at home. With the whole family, after watching many movies, "Man Jiang Hong" is more suitable from the perspective of promotional materials. It has some comedy elements, can teach and entertain, and highlight national justice. Although the film is a bit bloody, there was no sign of it in the early publicity.

The same is true for shopping. During the Spring Festival, consumers often consider the needs of the entire family rather than their own.

In the advertisements in the first ten minutes of the Spring Festival Gala this year, the most frequently appearing product was liquor, with a total of seven brands appearing eight times (Gujing Gongjiu appeared twice in a row).

Although various media have expressed the view that "young people don't like to drink liquor", liquor is still the king of socializing during the Spring Festival, a festival where family and elders play the leading roles.

Because white wine has a high unit price, exquisite packaging, and an almost unlimited shelf life, it is not only suitable for gatherings, but can also be kept if not finished. After the Spring Festival, the recipient can give it to others on any other holiday... With the blessing of multiple factors, white wine has become a recognized hard currency for gifts.

But dairy products have countless embarrassing aspects as gifts compared to liquor.

• First, the unit price is not high. The unit price of a whole box is unlikely to exceed 200 yuan, which does not show its preciousness and sincerity.
• Secondly, it is too heavy. When you are visiting relatives and friends, you can hardly carry anything else with you.
• In addition, the most embarrassing thing is that the quality of dairy products is linked to freshness - the higher the price, the better the quality, the lower the shelf life, and the more difficult it is to store.

Infant formula originally met all of the above characteristics: high unit price, good value, and easy to store. However, one unavoidable reality is that the drastic drop in birth rates in the past two years has severely restricted its market size and sales.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics' "China Statistical Yearbook 2022", the number of first marriages in my country in 2021 was 11.578 million, a decrease of 708,000 from last year. This is the first time in many years that the number of first marriages has fallen below 12 million, setting a new low since 1985.

On January 17, not long ago, the National Bureau of Statistics announced the operation of the national economy in 2022. The data showed that at the end of 2022, my country's population decreased by 850,000 compared with the end of the previous year, which was the first negative population growth in my country in nearly 61 years; and the number of births in 2022 was 9.56 million, the birth rate was 6.77%, and the natural growth rate was -0.60‰, which was the first time in many years that the number of births in my country fell below 10 million.

Due to various unfavorable factors, the marketing investment in these major events during the Spring Festival was naturally reduced.

Of course, it is customary to do something during the Spring Festival, but the budget cannot be too high. The strategies of various brands are basically for long-term planning, rather than expecting a concentrated burst of short-term trading volume.

In addition to short and fast online interactions and customized short films as the main gameplay, dairy companies have covered the popular dramas and variety shows scheduled by long videos during the Spring Festival, and customized New Year's scripts to closely bond the brand with New Year elements.

For example, the leading online variety show "The Great Detective 8" started broadcasting "concerts" and "advanced gatherings" before the Spring Festival. The first feature film was also officially launched during the Spring Festival. The title sponsor Amul also shouted out the slogan "Good luck Amul, together every year" in the program, thus improving the brand's coverage of Spring Festival marketing.

In short, none of the above operations have created much buzz for the brand on their own. Compared with the concentrated firepower of dairy companies during the Winter Olympics and the World Cup, it is more like using conventional actions to slightly borrow the momentum of traditional festivals to increase their presence, and that’s enough.

2. Marketing Dilemma

In fact, in recent years, dairy companies have been in a creative dilemma in marketing.

"Dairy products" is a big word, which includes countless sub-products, including traditional liquid milk and yogurt, dairy drinks such as Real Fruit Grains and You Yogurt, milk powder for all age groups, and cheese, which has always been regarded as a casual snack.

As mentioned earlier, the sales volume of infant formula has been affected by the declining fertility rate and the number of first-time marriages, and the market capacity has shrunk massively; and adult/middle-aged and elderly formula overlaps with the health care product market, and the competition in this area is so fierce that it has become a red ocean many years ago.

Because cheese does not conform to the Chinese people's eating habits, the market is too small and almost negligible. Although large companies have product lines, they do not allocate too much weight to marketing. The only domestic market share has been occupied by foreign brands such as Anchor and Bel. In the past two years, the domestic brand Meiji Landou has come from behind and cut a large piece of the market share, but the overall market capacity has not expanded much.

The competitors of milk beverages are all other beverages including juice and cola, and the competition is as fierce as that in the health care product market. In recent years, under the trend of "new consumption", new brands such as Yuanqi Forest have emerged one after another, which has also brought pressure to the traditional milk beverage product line.

When it comes to dairy beverage marketing, a difficult hurdle to bypass is the "milk dumping incident" in 2021. Before that year, dairy beverages were tied to online variety show voting, driving astonishing sales growth.

The advantages of this method are that the monetization chain is extremely short, the speed is extremely fast, and it is similar to live streaming. The disadvantage is that it cannot shape the brand image from a long-term perspective. Fans consume for traffic stars, not for products. But considering the gambling and competitive attributes, user stickiness and conversion rate are several times stronger than ordinary live streaming. However, after the "milk dumping incident", it caused huge public controversy, and this chain was cut off.

After going around in circles, the traditional battlefield - liquid milk and yogurt - is still the largest.

In this main battlefield, the marketing ideas of dairy companies have become more or less homogenized in the past two years, and the logic is almost always to link drinking milk with strengthening the body and supplementing nutrition.

Under the guiding ideology of Mengniu’s product advertisements, “a cup of milk a day makes Chinese people strong”, sports marketing has naturally become a battlefield for head-on confrontation between the giants.

Sports marketing has always been Mengniu's tradition. Its series of layouts, from the World Cup to the Olympics, from the Chinese Youth Football League to the NBA, from rewarding women's football to cooperating with Gu Ailing, all conform to the spiritual core of "every bit of the nutrition world must be strong".

Yili’s approach is similar, and its current main strategy is to focus on top sports IPs.

According to relevant information, Yili not only fully supported the two local Olympic Games, but also has been escorting the Chinese Olympic team. Over the past 14 years, Yili has provided nutritional support for more than 30 training bases, more than 600 training venues, and tens of thousands of athletes across the country.

Whenever there is a big sporting event, the two giants always compete with each other. Under the bombardment of super-high budgets, other smaller companies, such as Guangming and Junlebao, can't squeeze in at all, so they have to focus on secondary fields such as e-sports, sailing, and marathons.

When it comes to the battle for sports marketing, the core is still the young groups who focus on the events. In order to further consolidate the attention of young people, dairy companies are not only vying for the lead in sports events, but also have the biggest sponsors of popular variety shows and dramas in their hands.

Yili, the official dairy partner of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, takes Yili's high-end brand Jindian as an example. In 2022 alone, it won the title sponsorship of four S+-level variety shows on the platform, including "Riding the Wind and Waves 3", "Breaking the Thorns 2", "Fifty Kilometers of Taohuawu 2" and "Talk Show Conference 5", and its fancy reputation has been played to the sky. If it is said that the biggest savior of the variety show industry in 2022 is the dairy brand, there will be no objection in the industry.

However, can the comprehensive selection of sports and entertainment content really alleviate the mental deficiency of young people in the new consumption era faced by traditional dairy companies?

3. “Mental resources” still need to be developed

In recent years, all walks of life, especially fast-moving consumer goods companies, have been seeking transformation and often talk about "new consumption". However, in actual operation, it is not that simple.

What is "new consumption"? The definition is actually quite vague. Its essence lies in the word "reconstruction". These two words involve all aspects of the industry: reconstructing communication channels, reconstructing supply chains, reconstructing companies with product thinking, and reconstructing circulation methods using big data and artificial intelligence technologies...

In the new consumer era where everything is being reshaped, how should dairy companies position themselves?

The key to new consumption is still the word "new". Dairy giants are all old companies. The most difficult thing in the world is to seek change and innovation.

Small businesses that were previously not well known to the public and have little historical baggage can completely choose a niche track and quickly occupy the minds of users. For example, Huaxizi, Perfect Diary, Yuanqi Forest, Meiji Landou, Kongke Intentional Noodles, etc. These new corporate brands have gathered a lot of capital in a certain period of time, and carried out concentrated saturation bombardment on channels such as Weibo, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Focus Media, forcibly opening up usage scenarios and occupying the minds of users. At the same time, the rapid expansion of offline sales channels can lead to a significant sales boost in the short term and achieve a breakthrough from 0 to 1.

This tactic is obviously not applicable to large enterprises, especially super-large enterprises such as Mengniu and Yili. It is difficult to turn around when the ship is too big, and all marketing actions must conform to the tone set in the past years. This enhances the sense of historical weight, but at the same time limits the creativity.

In terms of creativity, the space left for dairy companies to innovate in marketing is actually quite narrow.

From the above analysis, we can see that whether it is this Spring Festival or many major sports events in the past, dairy companies mostly release content in the name of the entire group company, aiming to build a brand rather than focusing on a certain product line. Compared with increasing sales of a certain category in the short term, dairy companies are more inclined to shape themselves into an indispensable infrastructure in life, just like tobacco and oil companies.

Mengniu becomes the official global sponsor of the 2018 World Cup. In the book "Positioning", Jack Trout proposed the positioning theory based on the concept of "selecting the place of decisive battle" in the military. Its original intention is to "drive the army to the place of decisive battle". In the marketing field, it means to let the company's products or services represent a certain category or certain characteristics, occupy the most advantageous position in the minds of consumers, and obtain the user's priority choice.

In Trout's view, as the external environment changes, consumers have more and more power, and companies can no longer operate only from the perspective of profit. Only by fully developing and utilizing the "mental resources" of customers can they take the initiative in competition and gain long-term competitive advantages.

In the era of fierce competition, only products that are accurately positioned can stand out from the competition. Enterprises must either survive by differentiation or gradually die out without differentiation.

So, what is the position of dairy products? In the final analysis, its biggest role is to supplement nutrition besides daily food.

However, the marginal utility of advertising bombardment based solely on this point is limited - dairy products always follow the law that the shorter the distance, the fresher they are.

Dairy companies are increasing their investment in fresh milk, which is also the fundamental reason why small-scale local companies other than giants such as Yili and Mengniu have room to survive.

If you have new ideas and want to adopt a new consumption strategy, you may only be able to learn from the ideas of large multinational groups such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever and establish sub-brands that do not affect each other.

How should these sub-brands be positioned and their concept output strengthened? Can the strategies of Yili for Amul and Jindian, and Mengniu for Chunzhen and Telunsu in ambient yogurt and high-end organic milk be further subdivided by the new consumption logic? And how can they eventually regain the lost market share of cheese and milk beverages? These are probably the next questions for the giants.

Author: Shi Ruoxiao

Source: Yiyuguancha (ID: yiyuguancha), the telescope and sonar of the pan-entertainment industry.