“Don’t gain weight during the Spring Festival”, whose wallet will be emptied?

As the saying goes, "Every festival makes you gain three pounds." After the Spring Festival, major platforms have begun to promote "Don't gain weight during the Spring Festival" or "Scientific weight loss after the festival." There are endless consumer products about these. How to do this business well? You might as well take a look at this article.

The Spring Festival is almost over with relatives asking "Have you gained weight?"

In the past three years, the epidemic has caused people to stay at home for a long time and offline fitness has been hindered. Users' demand for fat loss has completely exploded in the early spring of 2023, which is originally the peak season for fitness, so that teaching people "not to gain weight during the Spring Festival" has become one of the hottest businesses at the beginning of the year.

Advertisements for "big meal savior" can be seen everywhere in subways, airports and e-commerce platforms; the coaches in fitness apps are naturally "open during the Spring Festival" and continue to release follow-up training videos; on major social platforms, content about "post-holiday weight loss tips" frequently appears on hot searches.

In this wave of traffic, video bloggers have made their presence felt. Weight loss bloggers, or more precisely, bloggers who teach people how to avoid gaining weight, are the main force. In order not to waste the peak period of increasing followers, they, who combine product recommendations, content output and fan interaction, recommend fat-reducing products and share their experience of "not gaining weight" more frequently around the Spring Festival, increasing followers quickly while also accelerating monetization.

However, compared with those weight loss bloggers in the past who claimed to “lose 10 pounds in 7 days”, these “no fat gaining” bloggers are more down-to-earth and popular.

From the perspective of the crowd, previous weight loss bloggers were mostly professional fitness bloggers, or directly sold "weight loss" products, showing a polarized situation, but there was a huge information gap between them and the users; the current "no fat gain" bloggers include nutritionists, successful weight loss people, full-time mothers, etc., each with their own target audience in their respective vertical fields.

Judging from the content shared, the bloggers who were promoting "Lose 10 pounds in 7 days" and "Remove fat and clean intestines" a few years ago are now promoting "Anti-sugar and carbon reduction" and "Scientific fat reduction". Whether it is a fat reduction recipe or an exercise video, they are more inclined to explain the principles and practical experience.

Behind this is the change in the aesthetics of the times, the user's cognition, and the improvement of health knowledge. After the impact of the epidemic in the past three years, the user's mentality has changed from "just wanting to lose weight" to "maintaining a good condition and not gaining weight." The business of "not gaining weight" is much larger than the "weight loss" business, but it is also difficult. If you want to make money from this business, you have to change your approach.

1. Young people are surrounded by the slogan “Don’t gain weight during the Spring Festival”

Around the Spring Festival this year, Wu Chen found himself surrounded by messages about "not gaining weight during the Spring Festival".

Before returning home for the Spring Festival, she took several extra aerobics classes to control her weight and maintain her condition, but after staying up late, eating big meals, and snacking all day, she still gained a lot of weight. Although she originally wanted to lose weight, what made her anxious was that no matter which app she opened or what occasion she went to, it seemed to remind her not to gain weight during the Spring Festival.

In the subway station, she first saw the slogan of a probiotic brand, "No need to be sick of a big meal." Thinking of the need to attend various dinner parties and meet relatives and friends during the Spring Festival, she hurriedly placed an order for herself and her family.

The slogan "A big meal won't make you sick of it" in the subway station / Photo provided by the interviewee

When she opened the e-commerce app at night, the "Guess What You Like" feature hit her pain points again: products with slogans such as "Don't Get Fat During the Spring Festival", "Enjoy a Big Dinner", and "The Savior of Spring Festival Dinner Parties" were constantly recommended to her. She noticed that most of the products had monthly sales of over a thousand.

Most of these are blockers, enzymes and other products, priced between 100 yuan and 200 yuan. The consumption threshold is not high, but they are full of gimmicks. They mainly regulate the gastrointestinal tract, resist sugar and absorb oil, etc., directly hitting the pain point of young people who "lose weight by lying down during the Spring Festival".

I closed the shopping app and wanted to book a few classes on Keep and Super Monkey after the Spring Festival, but I didn’t expect to be “hit” again.

In the app, many fitness enthusiasts posted their training photos under the topic of "Continuous training during the Spring Festival", and some KOLs also gave their training videos eye-catching titles such as "No weight gain from Spring Festival meals" and "One hundred ways to lose weight after the New Year". On social platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, she also saw her coach live broadcast on his account at 10 a.m. every day, with the title "Spring Festival training check-in", and many students left messages saying, "Wait for me to come back for class."

Before going to bed, she took a look at Weibo and found that the topic "How to deal with holiday weight gain" was also on the hot search list.

"How to deal with holiday fat" became a hot search on Weibo

It has to be admitted that "not gaining weight during the Spring Festival" is a hot topic during the Spring Festival. Behind these topics, two pieces of information are reflected.

First, users attach great importance to health. The epidemic in recent years has strengthened people's demand for physical exercise and improving immunity. People have begun to achieve a "no-fat" state through moderate exercise and healthy diet.

Second, the recovery of consumer demand. Fat loss and fitness will always have a market , so brands and gyms naturally cannot miss this wave of traffic and business. In the publicity during the Spring Festival, there are many descriptions that can hit the public's emotional points: "At the Spring Festival gathering, there is always an old classmate who accidentally 'outshines the crowd'. Is that person you?" "After the Spring Festival, restart earlier than your peers, starting with diet", etc., trying to make people empathize and increase new needs and scenarios.

After the Spring Festival, the "no weight gain" business will continue to surround consumers as the seasons change and user needs change.

2. Who is promoting the idea of ​​“Don’t gain weight during the Spring Festival”?

Weight loss and fitness have always been one of the popular tracks on long and short video platforms. Therefore, there are many participants in the "not gaining weight" business. In addition to sports and fitness bloggers with more than 10,000 fans on social platforms such as Bilibili, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, there are also a large number of new entrants from other tracks and even amateurs.

In summary, the content of these bloggers is nothing more than "control your mouth and move your legs", and the update during the Spring Festival is also to increase followers. In detail, due to the differences in personality and content, they can be mainly divided into three major schools.

One of the major schools of thought is the " plan-making and check-in school ". In this school, one type of account is mainly focused on making "fat-reducing recipes", one type is mainly focused on "daily live broadcast and follow-up exercises", and another type records daily weight changes. The account profile is mostly "Height and weight XX, I want to lose X pounds in XXX days", which has a strong sense of purpose.

The check-in bloggers in this school can quickly gain popularity by relying on fixed copy and themes, and on the other hand, they can alleviate users’ impression of the pain and mystery of weight loss and fat reduction through daily records , attract fans to participate in supervision and check-ins , and achieve fan acquisition and interaction.

The style of check-in bloggers is fixed and the threshold is low

The second largest school is the " self-test school ". This type of blogger often records their real fat loss experience and marks "original weight XXX, current weight XXX" in the introduction. As the saying goes, "long-term illness makes a doctor", they summarize a set of methodologies based on their own successful experience.

Blogger "Fei Fei's Fat Loss Diary" recorded her experience of losing weight from more than 140 pounds to 104 pounds in her account, sharing her changes after eating healthy. She believes that this type of blogger is more likely to build trust with users because of their real personalities. At the same time, because the bloggers are originally mothers, wives, and professionals, they not only teach some fat loss principles, but also create content that can empathize with users with user thinking, which is easier to attract fans.

The user base of this type of blogger is wider than the weight loss crowd in the past. Feifei concluded that the pain points of fans are not only the lack of confidence caused by body shape, but also the health problems and intimate relationship problems caused by obesity. They have the value needs of pursuing mental health and making the whole family eat healthier. These needs and pain points are also not covered by the weight loss bloggers in the previous stage.

There is another more confusing category, belonging to the " auxiliary tool faction ". During the hot period of the Spring Festival, these bloggers recommended various types of carbohydrate blocking tablets, claiming to "prevent weight gain" through supplement assistance. Although they are also recommending products, these bloggers mainly recommend functional products instead of the more controversial "weight loss" products such as "scraping oil tea" and "intestinal cleansing tablets". The purpose has also become "not gaining weight" instead of "pure weight loss".

Judging from the interaction data (likes, favorites and comments), users are very interested in such accounts, which continues to attract a large number of new bloggers, exacerbating the phenomenon of internal competition in the track - the threshold is getting lower and lower, and the content is becoming more and more homogenized.

In order to create differentiated content and seize time periods other than the Spring Festival, some accounts began to extend their content to other scenarios. "Losing weight is just a result. How to live, grow, and improve after losing weight is also a good track." Feifei began to add topics such as women's personal development in addition to fat loss knowledge.

3. From "pure weight loss" to "no weight gain", this business has changed

In general, the bloggers of the above three schools are the main promoters of the "Don't Gain Weight During the Spring Festival" business. This reflects the improvement of health knowledge and changes in user perception.

First, during the epidemic, the demand for home fitness brought Liu Genghong, Pamela and other top fitness bloggers, as well as the live broadcast and follow-up exercise format, to the fore. Then, the user's demand for physical health brought the "lifestyle fat loss" model to the fore, that is, all exercise consumption is broken down into life. For example, if there is no time to exercise today, take the stairs. After forming a habit, it can also form a stable calorie consumption. Nowadays, many "no fat gain" bloggers will create under the framework of "lifestyle fat loss".

The changes and popularity of these "non-fat" bloggers are not surprising. As for how long they will be popular and how they will make money, it is still difficult to judge . How to extend the account life cycle and improve the commercial closed loop is a common problem for these bloggers.

For the top fitness bloggers, they are more inclined to use their star effect to monetize through advertising, endorsements, etc. However, for the mid-to-lower fitness and fat loss accounts, these accounts are still in the stage of increasing followers, and the monetization path is relatively simple, mainly window display and advertising, and occasionally live broadcast to earn rewards, but they have not entered the field of professional live broadcast sales.

Compared with top bloggers, small and medium-sized bloggers turn their attention to private domains. "Bloggers' daily content sharing is to build trust with fans and accumulate water in the early stage. Because there is information asymmetry in the fitness and weight loss industry, users have strong needs and are more likely to accumulate private domain traffic and make referrals." said fitness coach Joey.

Feifei, who holds certificates as a nutritionist and yoga instructor, has nearly 50,000 fans online. In the early stages, she teaches others how to develop correct eating habits, change their previous diet structure, and understand food. In the later stages, she introduces fans into her private domain, where she can maintain the community and carry out 1V1 paid consulting, fat-reduction camps, and product promotion services.

Live streaming is indeed a big challenge for many bloggers of the same type. On the one hand, live streaming is "dependent on luck", with one group of goods, two purchases of traffic, and three supply chain issues. Solo bloggers are relatively limited in the early stage. On the other hand, live streaming is different from editable short videos and pictures. It is more professional and the anchor is easily affected by the live streaming data.

The bigger challenge lies in whether these bloggers can promptly perceive and grasp the next round of changes in users' aesthetics and cognition and make timely adjustments.

Users who have purchased irregular weight loss products from WeChat merchants have been hurt once. Their thinking is slowly evolving from the quick-acting "lose 10 pounds in 7 days" and "diet to lose weight" to focusing on balanced nutrition and getting out of sub-health conditions.

Wu Chen gave an example, saying that "how to lose fat when metabolism is damaged" is now becoming popular. It is aimed at people who have suffered metabolic damage and rebounded due to dieting in previous years. Some celebrities' extreme weight loss recipes are also gradually being "abandoned."

In the final analysis, there is no lazy way to avoid gaining weight. The seemingly efficient weight loss methods claimed by weight loss bloggers in the past are actually due to a lack of respect for food and a lack of understanding of the principles of exercise. "More and more users should realize that not gaining weight is actually a healthy and scientific lifestyle ," Joey said.

Therefore, the number of bloggers who output the underlying logic is gradually increasing . "In this way, users can not only eat according to the recipes and follow the videos, but also understand the principles, improve their cognitive ability, and judge for themselves which are IQ taxes and which are really useful. It is better to teach people how to fish than to give them fish. The demand for 'not gaining weight' will always exist, but science can make long-term money." Wu Chen said.

At the request of the interviewees, Wu Chen and Joey are pseudonyms in this article.

Author: Su Qi; Editor: Jin Yufan

Source public account: Kaiboluo Finance (ID: kaiboluocaijing), focusing on live streaming e-commerce, new consumption, and focusing on in-depth content.