China’s New Consumer Brand Development Trend Report 2022
【Posted on: 2022 January】
According to the “2022 China’s New Consumer Brand Development Trend Report” jointly produced by Weiboyi, MMA and Mojing Market Intelligence analyzed the new market environment insights, brand development characteristics, marketing strategies. China is becoming one of the world’s largest consumer markets in terms of economy, and technological advancements such as 5G, big data, and artificial intelligence can improve product production efficiency and transportation efficiency. In addition, the growth rate of brands in the Guochao (“national trend”) market can also be seen that more and more consumers are willing to consume according to Chinese traditional culture. Moreover, the diversification of Chinese consumer demand has given the new market a lot of room for growth. Finally, coupled with the endorsement of favourable national policies, it has vigorously promoted economic development and accelerated the formation of a strong domestic market.
Common characteristics of typical new consumer brands
New consumer brands are emerging in mature categories and cutting-edge categories mainly through differentiation, segmentation and regionalization strategies. Combined with sales channels, starting from product design and development, to marketing channels and terminal contact methods, they are all centred on consumption. They not only improve consumers’ loyalty and dependence on brands but also make brand production and marketing more efficient, more accurate, and closer to consumers.
New consumer brands can accurately capture the needs of markets and target groups with low concentration, low brand effect, fast growth, and survivability, quickly fill market vacancies and category gaps, and gradually achieve scale breakthroughs through upgrades in various directions to gain capital favour. Food and beverage, clothing, beauty, mother and baby, pets and other industries are gathering industries for new consumer brands.
The marketing methods of new consumer brands are more aggressive and bold, investing a lot of online KOL word-of-mouth construction, using new social channels as an important conversion outlet, and using the volume scale to force sales conversion growth. New consumer brands make better use of digital tools to build a comprehensive intelligent growth path, and achieve a comprehensive digital reconstruction of the “people and goods market”.
KOL marketing strategy and effect analysis
Daily planting of grass is the biggest appeal of KOL marketing for new consumer brands. The average monthly investment amount is 1.6 million yuan, with an average monthly posting of 120 articles. The competition for KOL placement is becoming more and more intense, which is relative to difficult for new brands. The report shows that KOL investment costs account for an average of 3.7% of key e-commerce channel revenue, and the largest is 15% for mother and baby brands.
From a strategic point of view, first of all, new consumer brands generally put more articles on Xiaohongshu and more money on Bilibili; and in terms of account type strategy, in different marketing scenarios, KOLs emphasis is also varied. The stronger the conversion demand is in the marketing scenario, the more vertical the type of KOL is, and the more the tier level is concentrated at the waist (mid-tier KOL); the new consumer brands as a whole use sharing, good things, recommendation, and evaluation as general popular keywords for grass-growing and publishing, and then cooperate with them. The characteristics of each platform, such as Xiaohongshu, focus on collection gameplay, Bilibili emphasizes domestic products, and Douyin highlights life scenes.
From the perspective of the e-commerce effect, KOL marketing investment has an obvious effect on promoting e-commerce. The new consumer brand KOL’s launch intensity and sales basically show the same frequency in the same month. At the same time, at least 3 platforms have increased the number of posts, and the probability of incremental sales has increased. Xiaohongshu has the greatest effect on conversion promotion. From the perspective of interactive effects, Douyin has a good overall interactive effect. The main interactive effect of the film and television UP main station of Bilibili is the best, the photography KOL of Weibo is good, the Douyin is the best KOL, and the Xiaohongshu life record KOL is the platform’s TOP1 .
Case Study of KOL Marketing of Typical New Consumer Brands in China
WONDERLAB case – a large number of tests are mainly carried out in the vertical seed circle layer, and then the products are implanted by the momentum department/star, using the large V of the circle layer, and the waist vertical KOL to deeply plant grass with the same style, good things recommendation, etc., and then use the whole field KOL content detonated the focus of the public. Finally, with the help of festival nodes and e-commerce live broadcasts, the anchors with goods can promote conversion. Long-term operation is achieved by the brand social and e-commerce platform KOC posting orders to achieve long-term keyword search and retention.
Michelle Bingcheng Case – The official release of the theme song on major platforms starts the prelude to the creation of memes, and then uses the Z generation to reprocess the topic in Bilibili by playing memes, and playing the theme song interestingly to bury the point for subsequent dissemination. Douyin and Kuaishou platforms realize offline shop exploration and create a trend of low-threshold events that everyone can participate in as a stalk. Weibo undertakes topics (clock on) and evolves from richer entertainment to gameplay to reach a wide range of people. Finally, the WeChat public account is used to dismantle the topic in a multi-dimensional and in-depth manner, and the media account and marketing account are used to continue the topic’s popularity.
Marketing trends
The new generation, the new elderly, the young people in the new town, and the new middle class will be the four major new user groups, while the intelligent taste new, the first to please yourself, the rejection of anxiety, the multi-lazy house, the health picture book, the Yuanre extension (metaverse craze), and the trendy sports, empathy experience, national style and national trend, and companionship of cute things will be the top ten consumption trends in 2022.
In terms of the changing trend of products, based on the external environment of social development and technological progress, superimposed on the user base of diverse audiences and iterative needs, the four keywords for the development of new consumer brands in China in 2022 will be intelligence, scene-based, ecological and international change.
From the perspective of changes in the marketing field, the KOL marketing market is expected to reach 525.3 billion yuan in 2022, and KOL promotion and short video marketing are still the focus of new consumer brands. At the same time, Zhihu, Bilibili, and video have high development potential and may become new favourites. In addition, the acceleration of the integrated construction of public and private domains will bring long-term operational ROI brought by the seamless undertaking of all links, which will reduce costs and increase efficiency for brands. Based on accurate insights into demand pain points based on changes in people, goods, and field environments, smart marketing decisions based on data + AI will become the dominant model in the future.
Finally, the report also takes stock of the KOLs that are most favoured by new consumer brands in 2021. The list is based on three major selection criteria, focusing on beauty, food and beverage, daily chemicals, small appliances, mother and baby and clothing, and selected 180 high-quality KOLs, providing a reference for brand marketing in 2022.
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