---
title: "2020-2021: Without Dreams, Why Brands?"
description: "This article reviews the challenges and opportunities for new consumer brands in 2020, highlighting the importance of product strength, consumer insight, and strategic marketing. It offers predictions for 2021, emphasizing the need for brands to focus on product quality, user assets, emotional engagement, and emerging channels like Douyin live streaming."
author: "Keny伟"
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published: "2021-02-25"
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# 2020-2021: Without Dreams, Why Brands?

> This article reviews the challenges and opportunities for new consumer brands in 2020, highlighting the importance of product strength, consumer insight, and strategic marketing. It offers predictions for 2021, emphasizing the need for brands to focus on product quality, user assets, emotional engagement, and emerging channels like Douyin live streaming.

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If Wang Feng were to ask: Tell me, what is your dream?
Many entrepreneurs would answer: **Build a brand!**
But what is a brand? Many people can't explain it clearly. However, their thoughts are practical: they hope their brand products sell well, make more money, and have a longer lifespan.
In the past 2020, despite the black swan of the pandemic, more entrepreneurs flooded into the new consumer goods startup track. This year, more brands rose through online channels, and more online brands tried diversified brand development paths. **This Double 11, 360 new brands took the No.1 spot in their subcategories, the most ever; last year Tmall Double 11 had only 11 new brands leading, and this year's Tmall 618 had only 26.**
Among founders, there are profit-seekers riding the trend and long-termists sticking to their original aspirations. Various people make trade-offs between quick money and long-term, selling goods and brand tone, interests and users. For those dreaming of building their own brands, the journey is long.
Without dreams, why brands?
Today, let's review 2020 and look forward to 2021.
**-01-**
**Difficulties**
**Consumers demand more**
The upgrade of consumer demand and the rise of the post-90s and post-95s generations bring more opportunities for consumer goods startups, but they don't make brands "easier to do." On the contrary, consumers have higher requirements for brands in terms of product strength, appearance, ingredients, service, effect, price, and even packaging and service. **Brands must not only think about how to satisfy consumers with product strength but also consider how to bring consumers different emotional value spiritually.**
**Brands have more places to spend money**
Intensified competition makes more founders come into contact with capital. They hope to take advantage of this trend and quickly run out during the window period, as well as distance themselves from competitors. So, finding money and monitoring products become their daily routine. Only with money can they dare to continuously invest in customer acquisition, seize user mindshare first, and run out faster; otherwise, if investment stops, sales stop.
**Channels are increasingly picky**
Streamers are bosses, channels are bosses. They are increasingly picky about products. They also hope for good products with high sales and generous commission returns. Some带货streamers and influencers won't let a brand on their show just because it has money.
Some bloggers cooperate for the sake of money, but the price is pressed very low, just for selling goods, which does no help in building brand power.
**Recruitment**
There are too many startups, and talent can't keep up.
Many copywriters understand writing, but commercial copywriting is their short board; many media personnel lack data analysis and content capabilities; good brand managers are hard to recruit, and many bosses want to hire but can't.
How formidable a startup team can be is not determined by how strong the boss is, but by finding suitable employees who do their jobs and quickly join the battle.
**Brands are harder to build**
**Clarifying brand value/user experience has become an important watershed distinguishing "brand" from "LOGO."**
Many bosses harbor brand dreams, but rather than building a brand, they just have a LOGO and start selling goods. Those with average product strength have high customer acquisition costs, poor repurchase, squeeze their profit margins, and survive on possible channel advantages. They are neither top nor bottom, let alone building brand barriers, and a large number die directly.
No matter how bad the environment or how many difficulties, some companies always stand out.
**-02-**
**Following the Trend**
**Rising with the trend**
In 2020, affected by the pandemic, some industries grew rapidly, especially small home appliances, household cleaning, instant food, disinfection and sterilization, and health and wellness.
In the first hour of November 11, the transaction volume of 313 small home appliance brands increased by over 1000% year-on-year. Among them, **Yunjing** joined the "billion club" just one year after entering Tmall, with a year-on-year growth of 2000%. At the same time, new brands like **Tineco** floor washers, **Huoju** disinfection knife racks, and **Youli** floor heating pads became the No.1 in their industries.
Consumers pay more attention to the home environment, and studying and working at home have become new needs. During Tmall Double 11, latex mattress pieces increased by 5600% year-on-year, smart door locks and designer furniture pieces increased by 900%; children's study desks increased by 900%, and computer chairs increased by 750%.
The pandemic led to the rise of home consumption, and the demand for home-cooked food surged. **Kongke** pasta and **Haohuanluo** and **Li Ziqi** luosifen (snail noodles) as representatives of instant food categories were sought after by foodies.
Kongke created a new category of "convenient pasta." After entering Tmall in September last year, it took less than 10 months to achieve cumulative transaction volume exceeding 100 million yuan.
**-03-**
**Rise**
The rapid growth during the special period is not replicable for most brands. At the same time, many brands, by entering extremely segmented markets, product differentiation, or explosive marketing, achieved good results within less than a year of launch.
**First, audience segmentation:**
The main consumer group in China is clearly getting younger. The post-95s population is about 260 million, with spending reaching 4 trillion yuan.
For new brands, it is very difficult to gain the mass market. In the early stage, they must determine the most precise users for their products and find the group with the highest user concentration to reach.
Many brands target the post-95s in their audience segmentation, especially in beauty and food. Compared with brands making mass-market products, they have already achieved audience segmentation, but within this group, further segmentation is possible to find their target audience.
Buying sneakers and figurines is very common among the post-95s, so the "GOTO figurine storage box" was born. In this extremely segmented industry, in April 2020, less than a month after launch, it became the No.1 in Tmall's figurine box storage category.
KPL competition phone iQOO, vivo's personalized route product developed for young consumers, targets users who like mobile games. With a curved screen with movie-level color performance and all-racing processors, it hopes to bring users a professional e-sports experience. The iQOO Z1x was the No.3 single product in the 1.5k-2k price segment on Tmall Double 11 this year.
**Second, product:**
**Good products save marketing costs**
When studying, students with poor grades can get into good schools if their families can afford the school selection fee, while those with good grades save money. The same applies to brands selling goods: if the product is not good, unless you have a mine at home and the acquisition speed exceeds the churn rate, otherwise, start with the product. Good products save marketing costs. Over-focusing on traffic and marketing skills is putting the cart before the horse.
**How to judge your product strength?**
**The team is the customer: see if your own employees are willing to buy your product for themselves or as gifts.**
In addition to the brands mentioned above like **Yunjing, Tineco, and Shark** steam mops, there is another interesting brand:
**townew** induction trash can, Tmall Double 11 induction trash can No.1, unprecedented in the trash can world. It has induction lid opening and automatic garbage bag tying! Many people buy it for the bathroom.
Of course, for many brands, technological R&D is a barrier that cannot be replicated.
Product is the foundation of every brand. Before marketing, you must clarify your brand positioning, differentiation, and product content points. If visuals and packaging can add value, even better.
**1. Product differentiation:**
New brands are most likely to build or retain their brand by entering from an innovative field. Simply copying giant products gives no hope of winning.
Huoju tested the waters with the new category of kitchen knife racks. The disinfection knife rack launched on Tmall in August last year with lukewarm sales. In the first half of 2020, affected by the pandemic and the gradual effect of category education, sales surged, with year-on-year growth of over 1000%.
Before Ffit8, the mainstream domestic meal replacement brands were Super Zero, Beast Life, WonderLab, Dongchi, Smeal, etc. Ffit8's rise, though greatly related to Luo Yonghao, did achieve product differentiation from the above brands.
Ffit8 made a snack-style design, breaking the original protein bar that just stuck protein powder together. It concentrated high-quality protein, high dietary fiber, and high-quality fat into one protein bar, breaking the fitness consumption scenario and expanding to different scenarios like breakfast, work, travel, meetings, and driving.
However, my concern for Ffit8 also comes from its product. There are many negative reviews on its flagship store, focusing on the taste like soap, sweetness, and not filling. If product feedback from consumers is not used for timely product iteration, Ffit8 can only rely on continuous customer acquisition to make up for the low repurchase rate.
**2. Positioning differentiation:**
**3. Ingredient differentiation:**
Ximuyuan, as the first domestic brand to develop and produce a full range of industrial hemp skincare products, officially launched its products in January. With 5 rounds of financing in one year, its two core series, Camellia and CBD hemp leaf, have medium-to-high unit prices. Although its "Camellia" series cannot compare with AOEO's rise speed, its CBD series forms a barrier advantage in terms of license and ingredients in the current skincare field. In China, companies that plant and extract industrial hemp need to obtain national licenses, and as a brand company, you can only cooperate with such companies.
New infant and child care brand Deke Si, with 3 rounds of financing this year, has the core product line of Calendula series, containing calendula extract and other ingredients, covering calendula cream, body lotion, and body oil. The calendula ingredient has been educated by Kiehl's, and female consumers have a very high acceptance of its moisturizing and soothing functions, requiring little market education. By strongly differentiating through ingredients, Deke Si quickly cooperated with a large number of maternal and professional KOLs/KOCs on platforms like Douyin, including Father's Evaluation and Dingxiang Doctor. At the same time, it built private domain traffic to establish relationships with users.
AOEO, launched in April this year, was the No.1 body soap on Tmall Double 11. Its facial cleanser's main ingredient is camellia, which somewhat imitates Chanel's camellia series, but the big brand has educated the market with this ingredient and shaped the tone, positioning itself as a Chanel alternative.
**-04-**
**Awareness**
For any brand, the basis for consumers' purchase behavior is building consumer attention and awareness of the brand and product.
After the Spring Festival, the first marketing case that flooded everyone's screens was "Laoxiangji" from Anhui. The slightly rustic press conference brought this regional catering brand into everyone's view.
There must be many people who haven't eaten at Laoxiangji so far, but that doesn't stop them from knowing the brand, even knowing that it specializes in Anhui old hen chicken. With this wave of online marketing, it built brand awareness and also gained many people's praise.
Brand awareness refers to consumers' familiarity with the brand. The initial stage of awareness is attention: seeing you but not knowing your purpose. From attention to a clear understanding of product features, functions, and value is brand cognition. At this stage, content marketing, advertising, PR, and market activities are needed to communicate with consumers.
Now, one important way to build brand awareness is content marketing, including graphic and short video seeding, live streaming, and feed placement. By driving traffic from outside the platform to e-commerce platforms, these tactics are known to almost all brands, but different execution brings vastly different results. The transparency of tactics also raises the bar for marketers' content operation capabilities. Influencer cooperation is no longer just about follower count. Summarizing 2020, the overall changes in marketing tactics are:
**1. Explosive product thinking**
Startup brands have limited financial and human resources, so they should concentrate their forces, choose one product for saturation attack at a stage, establish a trust anchor through a high-potential category product, and then expand product categories based on function and scenario.
Shark Fit, Tmall Double 11 chicken breast category No.1. It initially chose chicken breast as the main product because among the earliest health foods, chicken breast is a product with extremely high awareness and rigid demand. By establishing consumer awareness and trust through chicken breast, it then launched konjac noodles, buckwheat noodles, brown rice, and ready-to-eat beef, greatly reducing the cost of market education.
Qiutian Manman, Double 11 milk powder/complementary food card No.1, initially entered the infant food market with walnut oil. Through three-country organic certification and the concept of mountain walnuts, it won brand awareness and then expanded to other categories.
Old packaging
Baby snack No.1 Baobao Chanle, initially built brand awareness with its light-dried shrimp skin. Through differentiated single products, it filled a market gap and quickly gained cooperation with WeChat official accounts and maternal bloggers, then accumulated private domain traffic. Later, when Baobao Chanle positioned itself as complementary food and launched complementary food products, old users directly drove new product sales.
**2. The efficiency of off-platform seeding determines the speed of starting**
Few brands that have risen in the past two years have not used off-platform seeding to drive traffic.
First, when the brand budget is limited, go all-in on one platform, especially Xiaohongshu, for influencer seeding cooperation. But if there are effective bloggers on other platforms, scattered cooperation is also possible for the purpose of selling goods.
Second, in 2020, more brands began to build their own content matrix. Through short videos, graphics, and live streaming, they create their own accounts to control traffic. Even many personal IPs on Douyin build consumer trust through short videos + live streaming to sell products.
On Douyin, Liu Nan, CEO of Miya Baby, opened her own account "刘楠talia" for short video fan attraction + live streaming sales. Lianyungang seafood swept the Douyin platform last year, and this year, Lianyungang people are not satisfied with seafood and have started on yellow beef. Internet foodies really don't let any cow go. Previously, major bloggers sold steak, now they sell beef.
**3. The rapid rise of live streaming**
The popularity of live streaming this year was probably not anticipated by industry practitioners themselves. On April 1, Luo Yonghao's live streaming debut on Douyin had a total payment transaction volume of over 110 million yuan and cumulative views of over 48 million. His arrival changed the world where streamers' fans were mainly female; Lao Luo's fans are 80% male.
Popularity is definitely accompanied by chaos. Artists who couldn't get gigs during the pandemic flooded into live streaming rooms, stirring up the hormones of brands and streamers. Live streaming bases were built everywhere, and various has-been artists' debuts made many people fantasize that as long as you have fans, you can sell goods, and as long as you have a phone, you can be a streamer.
Besides selling goods, live streaming rooms have two core functions:
**Brand promotion:**
The live streaming room is not just a place to sell goods, but also a new space for brand-consumer communication. Brands release new products, promote the brand, and convert sales through the live streaming room. On December 4, **Andy Lau's live streaming debut** on Taobao streamer Viya's room to promote the movie "Shock Wave 2" caused a flood of fans that froze Viya's live room into a PPT.
**Self-broadcasting:**
Store self-broadcasting is spreading across multiple platforms. No matter how deeply influencers are bound, they are still under someone else's roof. More and more stores are starting self-broadcasting. With the rise of Douyin e-commerce, brands are no longer satisfied with Taobao self-broadcasting and have started official live streaming on Douyin, especially clothing brands: **Bosideng, Peacebird, GXG Semir, HLA** and other clothing brands, food brands: **Huangshanghuang, Mengniu, Three Squirrels, Gujing Gongjiu**, beauty and personal care brands: **Unilever, Bloomage Biotech** have reached a state of non-stop broadcasting.
(Bosideng Douyin live streaming duration)
(Bosideng Douyin live streaming duration)
Data source: Douchacha
Especially for Douyin live streaming, it's not that with a fan base, the live stream will definitely have views, nor that with few fans, the views will be poor. In Douyin live streaming, 90% of companies are still testing methods, so there is still an opportunity to enter now.
But many old e-commerce people look down on live streaming, thinking it's low-class. They don't understand off-platform seeding and are too lazy to learn. Prices are getting lower and lower, but they still hope their brand can break out.
**4. Content is increasingly refined management**
With limited budgets, deep cultivation of content is much more important than spending money on volume.
The competition for influencers across traffic platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili has become the norm for off-platform seeding. Influencers often charge thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. For many new brands with limited monthly budgets, refined content management is very, very important. They should more carefully select influencers, optimize content, embed scenarios, and review data.
The fruit wine category has always had categories but no brands. Now, more and more new brands are emerging. In terms of taste and appearance, it's clear that brands are putting effort into basic product strength. Basically, current fruit wine brands have particularly good-looking bottles, packaging, and overall design. "Looks are justice" is somewhat failing in the new fruit wine brands. However, in terms of off-platform marketing efficiency, "Meijian" is still the one.
Meijian, Jiangxiaobai's plum wine, was the double champion in sales volume and sales revenue during the Double 11 opening red this year.
In overall marketing, "Meijian" starts with the product, from raw materials (Puning green plums) and process (sugar pickling process slowly extracting juice over 90 days) to present a better plum wine, building consumer trust in Meijian's quality.
Initially, Meijian's content focused on the home mixing scenario, including how to mix Meijian wine with other drinks to make summer beverages.
But when summer really came, Meijian stopped the mixed drink scenario and began to focus on the dinner gathering scenario.
Meijian appears in scenes with lobster, hot pot, and barbecue. Through scenario-based content, it gives consumers a reason to buy.
I boldly guess that in summer, some competitors' scenarios are also mixing with other drinks, so the scenarios are similar, and differentiation is needed.
In content marketing, the differentiation between brands is still obvious. For example, Zhixun, Huatian Xiangzi, Shizi Gege, Jiushilang all focus on highlighting appearance.
Shizi Gege's fruit wine focuses on female tipsiness. The ROI tipsy series launched with this point. This kind of content marketing just videoizes the selling point without combining consumer usage scenarios. Most fruit wine brands currently make this mistake, and the investment efficiency is not high.
**5. Binding artists/bloggers/streamers**
From the deep cooperation between Huaxizi and Li Jiaqi, everyone saw the important role of top streamers in brand growth. They can not only directly reach target groups for brand exposure but also directly achieve sales growth. More and more brands choose to cooperate with top bloggers and influencers for brand endorsement and deep penetration into influencer fan groups. Taking live streaming as an example:
Ffit8 meal replacement protein bars launched on Xiaomi Crowdfunding in March this year, selling nearly 190,000 boxes in 14 days, but the brand didn't break out of its circle. The turning point came from cooperation with Luo Yonghao in May, and it became a regular in Lao Luo's live room.
Men's comprehensive personal care brand "Liran," founded 1 year ago with 4 rounds of financing, currently has over 20 SKUs on Tmall, basically covering men's scenarios from skincare to bathing and makeup. In live streaming sales, Liran chose Luo Yonghao because compared to Li Jiaqi, Luo Yonghao has more male fans, accounting for 80%+, and can better influence male consumers' purchase decisions.
After the live stream, Liran used Lao Luo's live stream clips as endorsement and invested in Douyin feed placement to reach users.
Other brands, such as Shanghai Jahwa's Yuze, a functional skincare brand like Winona, bound Li Jiaqi; Bloomage Biotech's Runbaiyan bound Viya; the new contact lens brand Cofancy often appeared in Zhang Mofan's live room in the early stage and cooperated with Anqi from "Youth With You 2," directly selling out the same style, while its competitor Moody chose Yu Shuxin for cooperation.
**6. Cross-border co-branding, explosive marketing**
In 2020, the e-commerce circle saw many wonderful cross-border co-branding: 999 Ganmaoling x Lamian Shuo, Heytea x Wonderlab, Heytea x Chayanyuese. Liran's co-branding with OATLY and Okamoto, many consumer brands have told us with practical actions that co-branding is still an effective means to shape a brand's youthful, personalized image and get closer to young people's ideal persona.
Cross-border co-branding with the Forbidden City and Dunhuang Museum has become commonplace. Although co-branding is now common, it doesn't stop brands from using it as one of the important marketing means for explosive content marketing and circle-breaking communication.
Co-branding requires both parties to have similar brand values and tone, leveraging each other's commonalities to further enhance brand image; secondly, the creativity and product of the co-branding should be based on users' real needs and value consumers' usage experience.
Shu Uemura x One Piece, Judydoll x Disney, Holiland x Oreo, Perfect Diary x Oreo, Kushi x White Cat dishwashing liquid, Li-Ning x Ballantine's, Bosideng x Jean Paul Gaultier.
**-05-**
**Trend Judgment**
The current changes in platform logic, traffic structure, and new sales methods are very suitable for brands' 0-1 startup, but the challenge is 1-10 circle-breaking. In 2021, for those brands with dreams, remember:
**1. Traffic is not the core; product strength is**
In 2021, brands will only increase, and traffic hunger will become more severe. Many brands put too much energy into marketing for saturation attacks but don't settle down to make good products, resulting in many brands whose strengths are not good enough, but weaknesses are already obvious.
More important than traffic is whether the brand solves customer pain points and whether there are enough reasons for consumers to buy. Care about what value your product brings to consumers, pay attention to consumer details, and have continuous extreme requirements for the product. Otherwise, there will be no repurchase, and brands without repurchase are destined to become foam in the new consumer goods wave.
**2. User assets**
Consumer changes are very fast now, and consumer loyalty is getting weaker. In the future, the industry will enter the stage of refined user operation, centering on users, meeting consumer needs, and forming interaction. The core competitive point of brands will shift to user retention, conversion, and per capita consumption. Whoever understands users better and is closer to customers has a better chance.
**Product: is it enough to make consumers trust it?**
**Operation and use: is it clear enough for consumers?**
**Purchase experience: is it good enough?**
**Effect: does it really match the promised effect?**
Private domain traffic is no longer a place for harvesting and cashing in. How to operate consumers well and provide services based on private domain traffic is something brands should think about carefully. It's definitely not just posting a post every day, saying good morning and good night, which is called consumer operation.
**3. Mobilizing consumer emotions**
Most consumer goods now have shifted from "necessities" to "non-necessities." In the future, there will only be more homogeneous categories competing for users' budgets.
Consumers are still willing to spend on "non-necessities" not only because it evokes the usage scenario of the product, but also because it touches consumers on an emotional level, including the product's appearance, story, spokesperson, etc. And emotion is consumer sentiment.
Many girls see a good-looking product and their attention is drawn away. So to make a female user like and impulsively buy, you need to make her feel captivated at that moment.
**4. Douyin self-broadcasting**
Since Douyin established its e-commerce department, it's clear that Douyin is determined in e-commerce. From "content to grab users" to "e-commerce to monetize users," Douyin now needs conversion rates to support platform monetization.
Brands' Taobao live self-broadcasting is basically standard for stores, but self-broadcasting on Douyin is still tried by few brands.
From May to November last year, the number of Douyin Blue V (enterprise verified accounts) with monthly GMV exceeding 10 million yuan surged from 25 to 110. The number of top players and GMV continue to rise, indicating that "Douyin live streaming" will become a mainstream trend.
**5. Online traffic saturation, brands continue to return offline:**
In 2020, Red Elephant, Colorkey, Babycare, BOBORE, and Wangxiaolu entered offline convenience stores and new channels, gradually accumulating their users.
In 2021, more brands will open their own stores or enter offline channels:
1) Only by reaching more terminals and more consumers, infinitely improving the convenience of consumer purchases, online plus offline, is the necessary path for brand growth.
2) In offline scenarios, products will bring consumers more direct experiential marketing.
**6. Cross-border co-branding:**
Now cross-border co-branding is everywhere, with Forbidden City co-branded products everywhere, exhausting the Forbidden City's tone.
However, as explosive content marketing, cross-border co-branding is still encouraged for brands to try. The target audiences of brands have a large overlap, and brands can cooperate on content points, leveraging each other to achieve win-win.
In addition, brand linkage should consider brand positioning and internal core value, otherwise it will only bring consumer fatigue.
**-06-**
**Summary**
Creating a real brand is very hard and cannot be separated from the accumulation of time. The road is long, not achieved overnight. Like leveling up and fighting monsters, founders dare not relax at any moment.
Beautiful dreams are always inspiring, but whether reality develops as expected has many uncertainties. Rather than grasping uncertain resources like influencers, channels, and traffic, it's better to grasp certain resources: product, improvement of founder and team capabilities, user experience, etc.
I've seen many brand founders, and most excellent people share a common trait: continuous learning and reverence for consumers.
Hope brands hold on to their dreams and hold on to reverence!
Text source: Marketing Lao Wang (ID: wltx-2015)


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