6000-word analysis | What is the secret behind the "five female doctors" that became popular amid controversy?

In the future, oral beauty will become the third largest category after skin care products and cosmetics. For a long time, Chinese people have believed in "you are what you eat", and in the early years, there was also a saying that "eating pig's trotters can supplement collagen". In the field of health and anti-aging in recent years, ingredient parties have realized the absorption problem of large molecule collagen, and after searching for a while, they gradually transitioned from collagen to collagen peptides. The author of the following article introduces the growth and explosion of five female doctors, let's take a look.

"In the future, oral beauty will become the third largest category after skin care products and cosmetics." Shiseido China CEO said at the Shiseido 150th Anniversary China Press Conference in November 2022.

The concept of "oral beauty" is not new. For a long time, Chinese people have believed in "you are what you eat", and in the early years, there was also a saying that "eating pig's trotters can supplement collagen". In the field of health and anti-aging in recent years, ingredient parties have realized the absorption problem of large molecule collagen, and after searching for a while, they gradually transitioned from collagen to collagen peptides (which can be simply understood as small molecule collagen).

Although there are some industry organizations and research endorsements, there have been constant doubts in the market about "collagen peptides being a waste of money", and the reasons are mostly the same as those used to criticize collagen in the first place.

Looking at the domestic market, the market segments have not yet taken shape, but players have already occupied their positions. Mature brands such as By-Health, Beijing Tong Ren Tang, Swisse under the H&H Group, and emerging brands such as WonderLab and "Five Female Doctors" have all launched hot-selling collagen peptide products.

When I was studying the nutritional category on Douyin e-commerce, I noticed that "Five Female Doctors" had achieved amazing growth in the past two years, and the brand has received two rounds of financing totaling more than 10 million yuan from 13 Capital, Dexun Investment, Shuiyang Shares (parent company of Yu Nifang) and Huaying Capital. In terms of brand sales, "Five Female Doctors" has achieved the following results:

• "Five Female Doctors" was founded in 2019 and launched its first product, collagen peptide vitamin C drink, in July of that year. It achieved sales of one million in just two months. The following year, it was listed on the Douyin 618 nourishing diet category new star brand list, and later won the TOP3 of the 2021 Tmall Double 11 nourishing category dark horse list
• During the Douyin 618 event in 2022, the brand ranked TOP2 in sales of the nourishing category and TOP1 in sales of self-broadcasting by merchants. Its popular products include collagen peptide vitamin C drink, daily Kangtang™ plant drink, collagen peptide EGCG drink, VC skin rejuvenation essence, etc.
• In December 2022, Magic Mirror market intelligence data showed that the market share of "Five Female Doctors" in the collagen category of Taobao Tmall platform-general dietary nutrition food was 2.07%

As the concept of "collagen peptide" has attracted more and more attention from investors and supply and demand sides, the "five female doctors" who have hit the cusp of the trend are destined to be caught up in the two forces of supporters and controversy.

In today’s article, let us return to the 4Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place) of this brand and see how the “Five Female Doctors” grew and exploded, and how to further build the brand.

1. Starting: Relying on ingredients and cost-effectiveness to break through, and upgrading the factory after the public opinion storm

In an interview in the middle of last year, brand founder Jiang Jun told the Knife Skills Research Institute (ID: DigipontClub) that long before she founded "Five Female Doctors", she herself was a "loyal user of collagen peptides", but most of the brands on the market at that time were overseas brands, which were either not so palatable or very expensive.

Therefore, like many emerging brands at the beginning, the founding team of "Five Female Doctors" hopes to bring "easy-to-use and affordable" collagen peptide products to users.

In terms of product ingredients , according to Magic Mirror market intelligence, each bottle of "Five Female Doctors" collagen peptide vitamin C drink contains 5000mg of fish collagen peptide, 100mg of elastin peptide, 100mg of GABA, 100mg of vitamin C and passion fruit concentrate juice and other ingredients, emphasizing "non-conceptual addition" .

Among them, the new food ingredient GABA helps users sleep, while passion fruit concentrate juice can neutralize the taste of the product and improve consumers' eating experience.

In terms of pricing , the Tmall official flagship store of "Five Female Doctors" shows that the collagen peptide vitamin C drink is priced at 311 yuan, buy one box and get one box free (excluding discount coupons). During the recent e-commerce New Year's Festival promotion, its classic products can be seen as low as 8+ yuan per bottle .

DaoFa has sorted out several common collagen peptide products on the market. They are available in powder, tablets, and oral beverage forms like "Five Female Doctors". Most of the brands have a retail price of more than 200 yuan per product. Relatively speaking, "Five Female Doctors" has differentiated itself in terms of cost performance.

Judging from the product review section and user feedback on social media, consumers do recognize the taste and cost-effectiveness of the "Five Female Doctors" products.

As for why it is possible to maintain the cost-effectiveness of the product while "adding multiple ingredients", DaoFa has consulted the brand about this issue, but has not received a response as of press time. In a short video posted on the official Douyin account of "Five Female Doctors", the brand has announced that prices may increase in the future.

In order to further understand the product production and pricing mechanism of the "Five Female Doctors", Daofa checked the brand's supply chain information and learned that the cooperative factories of its collagen peptide vitamin C drinks, Daily Kangtang™ plant drinks and other product lines include Jiangsu Junyao Health Technology Co., Ltd.

In June 2022, the Phoenix E-Commerce Research Institute published an article titled "Eye of the Storm | Behind the "Five Female Doctors"' Borderline Propaganda, the OEM Factory Once Supplies to the "MLM Giant"" pointing out that Jiangsu Junyao once produced Quanjian's "Natural Health Concept" products, and Quanjian was reported to be "suspected of MLM", and the "Five Female Doctors" were therefore once caught up in the suspicion of being a "problematic OEM factory".

At present, the official store announcement of "Five Female Doctors" shows that the product lines such as collagen peptide vitamin C drinks "will cooperate with two factories, Xianle Health Technology Co., Ltd. and Newsbo Guangsai (Guangdong) Biotechnology Co., Ltd." Among them, Xianle Health is one of the OEM factories for some product lines of brands such as Swisse and Lishen. Judging from the factory qualifications, it can be inferred that the "Five Female Doctors" who have experienced the storm have upgraded the upstream supply chain.

Product details, cr. Five Female Doctors Official Flagship Store

In addition to the retail method, "Five Female Doctors" also provides online subscription services. The SKUs include single-month, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual cards, with a price range of 569-10,499 yuan. After the user purchases, the store will deliver the products by express according to the frequency of use. This is equivalent to locking in a part of highly sticky "old customers" in advance, and also helps to cultivate users' habit of long-term use of the product.

In addition, as a food that promotes its efficacy, the brand does not actually use specific control group figures (such as the percentage of wrinkle improvement after use) to answer the question of product efficacy. Instead, it emphasizes that it varies from person to person and that "long-term supplementation is recommended." This is one of the reasons why such tonic products have long been criticized as "IQ tax."

2. Seize the group of sophisticated mothers and invest heavily in private domains and Douyin e-commerce

Today, there is no external data to record the channels through which the "five female doctors" made their first pot of gold, but what can be observed is that the brand's popularity is inseparable from three points: core user operations, Douyin e-commerce explosion, and other social media seeding, which in turn cover brand private domain, Douyin e-commerce, Weibo Xiaohongshu and other channels.

1. Brand private domain: operate carefully to increase stickiness and repeat purchases

According to brand founder Jiang Jun, "Five Female Doctors" already had a community of old customers in the early days of its establishment (classified by the standards of the eight major groups of Douyin e-commerce later, mainly sophisticated mothers and senior middle-class people), and the brand would interact with consumers and answer questions in the community. When "Five Female Doctors" entered Douyin e-commerce in 2020, they also received short videos of amateur Amway from these old users. Some old users even took the initiative to spend money on "Douyin+" for the short videos released by the brand to help the brand with publicity and promotion.

However, when the knife skills analyst contacted the "health consultant" through the "Five Female Doctors" WeChat public account and consulted through the brand's Tmall official flagship store, many staff members said that "there is no group."

In the WeChat ecosystem, "Health Consultants" are one-on-one services and are not professional medical personnel. They mainly undertake the functions of "pre-sales/after-sales consultation + serving old customers to repurchase". "Health Consultants" promise that if users place orders directly through WeChat, the corresponding product prices will be more "cost-effective" than other channels.

Daofa observed that currently in the "Five Female Doctors" Taobao/JD.com/TikTok official stores, users can become brand members through "one-click membership" and enjoy the "1 yuan for 1 point" policy when placing an order. When the points reach a certain threshold, they can participate in the redemption of corresponding rights and interests. Among them, most stores have also set up member groups, and the threshold for joining the group is the cumulative consumption amount. For example, JD.com store members can join the group with a total consumption of 999 yuan (as shown in the picture).

Brand private domain details, cr. Brand corporate WeChat, Tmall/JD.com/Douyin official flagship store, etc.

From one-on-one corporate WeChat private consultants to strict control of group entry qualifications, we can see that the "Five Female Doctors" have a tiered operating model for brand consumers. The shallow standard of this model is the consumer's order amount, and the deep standard is the consumer's recognition of the brand.

When consumers enter the upgrade chain of exclusive benefits for old customers of the brand, they have the opportunity to further develop into "super users" and bring more new users and cash flow to the brand by placing orders themselves or recommending them to friends and family.

2. Douyin e-commerce: Collaborate with vertical categories and top influencers, and emphasize scientific research background

Looking at the major e-commerce platforms, "Five Female Doctors" entered Tmall in November 2020, and was selected as one of the top 3 on Tmall's Double 11 dark horse list a year later. Its JD flagship store opened on March 18, 2022, indicating that the brand's layout in the traditional shelf e-commerce business is not early.

On the contrary, the "five female doctors" invested earlier and more heavily in Douyin e-commerce.

Wang Shengguang, head of the brand's e-commerce business, once told DaoFa that the development of the "five female doctors" in Douyin e-commerce can be roughly divided into three stages:

Phase 1: From 2020 to June 2021, the founding team will personally broadcast the show. During this period, the brand basically did not invest in traffic or cooperate with influencers, and the monthly sales volume was as high as about one million.

The second stage: Starting from June 2021, the "Five Female Doctors" began to do Dabo, and reversely searched for target KOLs around user groups such as sophisticated mothers and senior middle-class people, and selected Douyin influencers who had cooperated in vertical tracks such as body shape and etiquette. The average monthly sales of these influencers can reach 4-6 million, and the brand's overall monthly sales on Douyin have exceeded 10 million.

Phase 3: Starting from November 2021, the "Five Female Doctors" have been promoted more vigorously and appeared in the live broadcast rooms of top Douyin influencers such as Zhu Zixiao and the Big Wolf Dog Couple. The brand also set up a store self-broadcast matrix and matched differentiated goods to cultivate content and goods. At the same time, the brand has successively cooperated with the "Douyin Life Style" and Douyin e-commerce nourishing category theme activities, achieving sales explosion in multiple e-commerce nodes.

From the perspective of "people-goods-place", the development logic of "Five Female Doctors" in Douyin e-commerce is relatively clear:

• People: From a single large account, we have achieved matrix account distribution and continued to harvest differentiated groups of people
• Products: The brand is constantly upgrading its products, from basic products to upgraded products to collagen peptide peripheral products, including Kangtang, essence and other single products
• Field: From the merchant's own broadcast to the arrival broadcast, from short videos to shopping malls, the brand has made arrangements, and more scenes have been jointly exerted, and it has also caught up with the platform's 618, Double 11 and other big promotions as well as the brand's own Big Day explosion

Given that Douyin e-commerce is a platform that relies heavily on content-driven, let’s take a look at the content marketing storyline of the “Five Female Doctors” in this channel. In fact, whether it was the trial of merchant self-broadcasting in 2020 or the multiple participation in platform activities in 2022, its Douyin marketing always answered these questions to users: What is collagen peptide? What can our products bring to you?

Compared with the initial emphasis on "the founder's PhD background from Peking University", the brand now puts the focus back on the product, and the sales pitch is no longer limited to "promotion", but will give more consideration to popularizing some practical content for users.

Taking the Douyin 618 node marketing in 2022 as an example, the official account of "Five Female Doctors" released a series of short videos of founder Jiang Jun talking to "senior brother" Zhang Zhaofeng, talking about the efficacy of products such as "Kangtang". Zhang Zhaofeng is a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Hygiene at the School of Public Health of Peking University. He later participated in the "Collagen Peptide and Skin Nutrition High-level Forum" held in Beijing in January 2023 and released a lecture report "Collagen Peptide and Skin Nutrition" - the brand is endorsed by relevant professionals, which deepens the impression of "scientific research personality" to users from different perspectives.

3. Xiaohongshu Weibo: mid-level bloggers/amateur marketing + group buying benefits

In addition to private domains and Douyin e-commerce, brands promote products on other social media mainly to maintain their reputation and supplement traffic.

DaoFa found that the "Five Female Doctors" continued the same idea of ​​promoting products on Douyin on Xiaohongshu/Weibo, starting with middle-level bloggers such as nutritionists, body experts, and health experts. There are also some amateurs promoting products, and the latter are mainly concentrated in the group of mothers. In addition, the brand will also cooperate with some coupon bloggers on Weibo to promote group purchase benefits.

After reading this, if you think that this is a channel brand that "has a wild way of micro-business and focuses on reaping the benefits of Douyin", then I have to say that this idea is still a bit hasty.

In August 2022, "Five Female Doctors" moved from online to offline, and the first physical store was officially opened in Chaoyang District, Beijing.

Historical experience tells us that when a new brand opens a store in a shopping mall and directly contacts and serves customers with a more three-dimensional portrait, it means that the brand building process has taken an important step forward.

In other words, the "five female doctors" are accelerating the creation of a "brand".

3. Brand content is more diverse, and “borderline marketing” becomes history?

If you enter the brand keyword "five female doctors" in the search box, you will find that this brand has been very good at gaining corresponding rhetoric space for brand marketing since its inception. There are also many public reports that call the above behavior "borderline marketing" or "gimmicks."

One of the common "edge" words comes from the product name.

Taking the "Daily Whitening™ Sports Recovery Drink" (now off the shelves) as an example, the aforementioned Phoenix.com report said, "Qingyan Boshi's application for related trademarks does include the "Daily Whitening" trademark, and the trademark classification applied for is Class 32, beer and beverages, and is currently in the substantive examination stage... Although there is a high probability that the trademark will not be applied for, it can still be added with the ™ mark for a period of time, which not only allows users to perceive the product's whitening effect, but also avoids the risk of "false propaganda", and the cost is not high. "

Product image, cr. Phoenix E-commerce Research Institute

In terms of promotional language, it is certain that the "five female doctors" who are currently focusing on the nutritious diet track need to convey the "product efficacy" to users, but they must also be careful not to use medical-related professional terms, otherwise they will touch the regulatory red line.

The Tianyancha system shows that the "Five Female Doctors" affiliated company "Beijing Jiuling Qingtu E-Commerce Co., Ltd." was punished in August 2022 for using disease treatment terms such as "anti-inflammatory" when promoting on the Douyin platform.

Another type of "borderline" rhetoric has a much longer history.

Since its establishment, "Five Female Doctors" has always endorsed its products with the identity of Peking University PhDs and used the research results of Peking University professors in the field of collagen peptides to introduce its products. However, the Peking University School of Medicine website issued a statement as early as 2020, stating that the relevant brand entity has "nothing to do" with the Peking University School of Medicine.

cr. Peking University Health Science Center (Industry Management Office) official website

Interestingly, Daofa has noticed that there are many recent press releases showing that on November 1, 2022, Peking University Health Science Center and Beijing Qingyan Boshi Health Management Co., Ltd. officially reached a cooperation agreement to jointly establish the "Peking University Medicine-Qingyan Boshi Skin Nutrition and Anti-Aging Joint Laboratory". Does this mean that there will be new changes in the brand marketing caliber of the "five female doctors" and Peking University Health Science Center in the future? Perhaps it will take time to prove it.

And all of this seemed to have gradually iterated in December 2022.

During that month, the "Five Female Doctors" brand took frequent actions: first, it cooperated with well-known actress Li Ruotong as the brand ambassador, using the image of a professional actor to express the attitude of "shaping beauty with professionalism"; then it linked up with Harper's Bazaar, well-known actress Li Ruotong, host/actor Guan Ling, parent-child blogger @开心幽默妈, brand loyal user Wanwan and brand No. 1 employee Jingwen, to jointly interpret the theme of upgraded products to help women in different fields bloom beautifully; at the end of the year, the brand released its first TVC "What the Mirror Sees", discussing growth issues and conveying the concept of "May every woman be more confident, firm and shining in love and companionship."

Undoubtedly, the next step for the "Five Female Doctors" is to interpret women's power in a more multi-dimensional and three-dimensional way.

So far, from the initial focus on "scientific research personality", to the opening of offline physical stores, to the sudden intensive marketing activities on women's issues, the branding actions of "Five Female Doctors" have increasingly given people a sense of urgency. At the same time, the brand content has also become richer and more diverse.

But regardless of the controversy that the "collagen peptide" category carries in the market, or the brand's historical marketing methods, it is foreseeable that it will take some time for the "five female doctors" to tear off past labels and break specific filters.

ref:

2022.12: Financial Market Weekly "Five female doctors join hands with Peking University Health Science Center to establish a joint laboratory"

2022.12: Magic Mirror Market Intelligence "Are the post-00s starting to take oral beauty products? How much more can be gained from this 23 billion market?"

2022.10: Ministry of Commerce International Trade and Economic Cooperation Research Institute "White Paper on the Development of Domestic High-quality Collagen Industry"

2022.10: iResearch Business "The grand opening of the "Five Female Doctors" physical store makes beauty "within reach""

2022.6: Phoenix E-commerce Research Institute "Eye of the Storm | Behind the "Five Female Doctors" publicity, the OEM factory once supplied goods to the "MLM giant"

Author: Chu Qing

Source: WeChat public account "Knife Skills Research Institute (ID: DigipontClub)"