---
title: "2020-2021: Without Dreams, Why Brands?"
description: "The article reviews the challenges and opportunities in China's FMCG sector during 2020, highlighting the rise of new consumer brands, the importance of product strength, and strategies for brand building in 2021."
author: "Keny伟"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2021-01-06"
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# 2020-2021: Without Dreams, Why Brands?

> The article reviews the challenges and opportunities in China's FMCG sector during 2020, highlighting the rise of new consumer brands, the importance of product strength, and strategies for brand building in 2021.

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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 are unclear. 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 attempted diversified brand development paths. This year's Double 11 saw 360 new brands achieve the No.1 position in their subcategories, the most ever. Last year, only 11 new brands dominated on Tmall Double 11, and this year's Tmall 618 had only 26. Among founders, there are profit-seekers riding the trend and long-termists adhering 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 have higher demands**
The upgrade of consumption demand and the rise of the post-90s and post-95s have brought more opportunities for consumer goods startups, but they have not made 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 has led more founders to contact capital, hoping to take advantage of this trend to quickly run out during the window period and widen the gap with competitors. Thus, finding money and monitoring products become their daily routine.
**Only with money can they dare to continuously invest in acquiring new customers, seize user mindshare first, and run out faster; otherwise, when advertising stops, sales stop.**
**Channels are increasingly picky**
Streamers and channels are like big shots; they are increasingly picky about products. They also hope for good products that can generate high sales and bring generous commission returns. Some带货streamers and influencers only cooperate if the brand has money, but they squeeze prices very low, just for shipping goods, which does not help build brand power.
**Recruitment**
There are too many startups, and talent cannot keep up. Many copywriters understand writing but lack commercial copywriting skills; many media personnel lack data analysis and content capabilities; many bosses want to hire good brand managers but cannot find them. How formidable a startup team can be is not determined by how strong the boss is, but by finding suitable employees who each do their part 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 rates, and squeeze their profit margins, relying on possible channel advantages to survive. They are neither top nor bottom, let alone building brand barriers, and a large number die off 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. Within the first hour of November 11, the transaction volume of 313 small home appliance brands increased by over 1000% year-on-year. Among them, Yun Jing, which entered Tmall only one year ago, became a member of the "billion club," with a year-on-year growth of 2000%. At the same time, new brands such as Tianke floor washing machine, Huoji disinfection knife holder, and Youli floor heating pad became the No.1 in their respective 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 cooking surged. Instant food categories represented by Kong Kong Italian pasta, Haohuanluo, and Li Ziqi snail noodles were sought after by foodies. Kong Kong 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 promotions, achieved good results within less than a year of listing.
**First, audience segmentation**
The trend of younger main consumer groups in China is obvious. The post-95 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 target 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, it became the No.1 in Tmall figurine box storage within less than a month of listing.
KPL competition phone iQOO, a personalized product line developed by vivo for young consumers, targets users who like playing mobile games. With a curved screen with cinematic color performance and a full-speed processor, it aims to bring users a professional e-sports experience. The iQOO Z1x was the No.3 single product in the 1.5k-2k price range on Tmall Double 11 this year.
**Second, product** **Good products save marketing costs.**
When studying, students with poor grades can afford school selection fees and attend good schools if their families are wealthy, while those with good grades save money. The same applies to brands selling goods: if the product is not good, unless the family has a mine, 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 products for themselves or as gifts.** In addition to the brands mentioned earlier like Yun Jing, Tianke, and Shark steam mops, there is another interesting brand: townew sensor trash can, the No.1 in Tmall sensor trash can category during Double 11. It is unprecedented in the trash can industry, with sensor 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 promotion, 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 has no hope of winning. Huoji tested the waters with the new category of kitchen knife holders. The disinfection knife holder was launched on Tmall in August last year, with lukewarm sales. However, 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%.
From the product development stage, it already considered how to conduct online promotion later. The ritual of unboxing, the design of the package, the type of package card, the number of gifts, the differentiated selling points of the product, and the brand story are all seamlessly integrated.
**3. Ingredient differentiation:** Ximuyuan, as the first domestic brand to develop and produce a full range of skincare products with industrial hemp, officially launched its products in January. It completed 5 rounds of financing in one year, with two core series: camellia and hemp leaf CBD, at mid-to-high price points. Although its "camellia" series cannot compare with AOEO's rise speed, its CBD series has formed barriers in licensing and ingredients in the current skincare field. In China, companies that plant and extract industrial hemp need to obtain licenses issued by the state, and as a brand company, they can only cooperate with such companies.
New infant and child care brand Dicos, 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 high acceptance of its moisturizing and soothing functions, requiring little market education. By strongly differentiating through ingredients, Dicos quickly cooperated with a large number of maternal and infant and professional KOLs/KOCs on platforms like Douyin, including Dad'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 in Tmall Double 11 body soap. Its facial cleanser features camellia as the main ingredient. Although it somewhat imitates Chanel's camellia series, the big brand has educated the market with this ingredient and shaped the tone, positioning itself as a dupe for Chanel.
**-04- Awareness**
**For any brand, the basis for consumers' purchase behavior is to build consumer attention and awareness of the brand and product.** After the Spring Festival, the first marketing case to go viral was "老乡鸡" from Anhui. The slightly rustic press conference brought this regional catering brand into everyone's view. There must be many people who have never eaten at "老乡鸡" so far, but that does not prevent them from knowing the brand, and even knowing that it specializes in Anhui old hen. Through this wave of online marketing, it built brand awareness and also gained a lot of goodwill.
Brand awareness refers to the degree to which consumers know 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 information flow advertising. By diverting traffic from outside the platform to e-commerce platforms, all brands basically know these tactics, but different executions bring vastly different results.
The transparency of tactics also places higher demands on marketers' content operation capabilities. Influencer cooperation is no longer solely based on follower count. Summarizing 2020, the overall changes in marketing tactics are:
**1. Hit product thinking**
Startup brands have limited financial and human resources, so they should concentrate their forces, select one product for saturation attack in stages, establish a trust anchor through a high-energy category product, and then expand product categories based on function and scenario.
Shark Fit, the No.1 in Tmall Double 11 chicken breast category. Initially, it 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, the No.1 in Double 11 milk powder/rice cereal card, initially entered the infant food market with walnut oil, won brand awareness through the concept of three-country organic certification and pecans, and then expanded to other categories.
Old packaging
Baby snack No.1 Baobao Chanle, initially built brand awareness with its dried shrimp skin, filling a market gap through differentiated single products, quickly gaining cooperation from WeChat official accounts and maternal and infant bloggers, and then accumulating 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, focus on one platform, especially Xiaohongshu, for influencer seeding cooperation. However, if there are effective bloggers on other platforms, scattered cooperation can also be done for the purpose of selling goods.
Secondly, in 2020, more brands began to build their own content matrix. Through short videos, graphics, and live streaming, they created their own accounts to control traffic. Many personal IPs on Douyin even built consumer trust through short videos + live streaming to sell products. On Douyin, Liu Nan, CEO of Miai Baby, opened her own account "刘楠talia" for short video fan attraction + live streaming sales. Seafood from Lianyungang swept the Douyin platform last year, and this year, Lianyungang people are not satisfied with seafood and have started selling beef.
Internet foodies really do not let any cow go. Previously, major bloggers sold steak, and 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 a cumulative viewership of over 48 million people. His arrival changed the world where streamers' fans were mainly female; 80% of Lao Luo's fans are male. Popularity is inevitably accompanied by chaos. Artists who could not get bookings 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.
In addition to selling goods, live streaming rooms have two core functions:
**Brand promotion:**
**A live streaming room is not just a place to sell goods, but also a new space for brand-consumer communication. Brands can launch new products, promote the brand, and convert sales through live streaming.**
On December 4, Andy Lau's live streaming debut on Taobao streamer Viya's room to promote the movie "Shock Wave 2" caused fans to flood in, freezing 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 various apparel brands: Bosideng, Peacebird, GXG, Semir, and HLA; food brands: Huangshanghuang, Mengniu, Three Squirrels, and Gujing Gongjiu; beauty and personal care brands: Unilever and Bloomage Biotechnology 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 is not that with a fan base, the live stream will definitely have viewers, nor that with few fans, the viewership will be poor. In Douyin live streaming, 90% of enterprises are still testing methods, and there are still opportunities to enter now. However, many old e-commerce practitioners look down on live streaming, thinking it is low-class. They do not understand off-platform seeding and are too lazy to learn. Prices are getting lower and lower, but they still hope their brands can break through.
**4. Increasingly refined content 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 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, and it is evident that brands are putting effort into basic product strength in terms of taste and appearance. Basically, current fruit wine brands have particularly attractive 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 best.
Meijian, a green plum wine under Jiangxiaobai, won both sales volume and revenue championships during the Double 11 opening period this year.
In overall marketing, "Meijian" starts with the product, showcasing better plum wine from the perspectives of raw materials (Puning green plums) and process (sugar pickling process slowly extracting juice over 90 days), allowing consumers to trust the quality of Meijian.
Initially, Meijian's content focused on the scenario of home mixing, including how to use Meijian wine and other drinks to create summer beverages.
But when summer really arrived, Meijian did not push the mixed drink scenario but began to focus on the dining scenario. Meijian appears in scenes with lobster, hot pot, and barbecue. Through scenario-based marketing, it gives consumers a reason to buy.
I boldly guess here that maybe 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 very obvious. For example, Zhixun, Huatian Xiangzi, Shizi Gege, and Jiushi Lang all focus on highlighting appearance. Shizi Gege's fruit wine focuses on female tipsiness. The ROI tipsy series launched with this point, but this kind of content marketing just videoizes the selling point without combining consumer usage scenarios. Currently, most fruit wine brands make this mistake, and the investment efficiency is not high.
**5. Binding with celebrities/bloggers/streamers**
From the deep cooperation between Huaxizi and Li Jiaqi, everyone saw the important role of top streamers in brand growth. It not only directly reaches the target group for brand exposure but also directly achieves sales growth. More and more brands choose to cooperate with top bloggers and influencers for brand endorsement while deeply penetrating influencer fan groups. Taking live streaming as an example:
Ffit8 meal replacement protein bar was first launched on Xiaomi Crowdfunding in March this year, selling nearly 190,000 boxes in 14 days, but the brand did not break out of its circle. The turning point came from cooperation with Luo Yonghao in May, and it has since become a regular in Lao Luo's live room.
Men's comprehensive personal care brand "Liran," founded one year ago with 4 rounds of financing, currently has over 20 SKUs on Tmall, basically covering men's usage scenarios from skincare to bathing and makeup. In live streaming sales, Liran chose Luo Yonghao because, compared with 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 for Douyin information flow advertising to reach users.
Other brands, such as Shanghai Jahwa's Yuze, a functional skincare product like Winona, bound with Li Jiaqi; Bloomage Biotechnology's Runbaiyan bound with Viya; and new contact lens brand Cofancy often appeared in Zhang Mofan's live room in the early stage, cooperating with An Qi from "Youth With You 2," directly selling out the same style. Its competitor Moody chose to cooperate with Yu Shuxin.
**6. Cross-border co-branding, explosive marketing**
In 2020, the e-commerce circle saw many wonderful cross-border co-branding cases, such as 999 Ganmaoling x Laxin Shuo, Heytea x Wonderlab, and Heytea x Sexy Tea. Liran's co-branding with OATLY and Okamoto, and many consumer brands have shown us through practical actions that co-branding is still an effective means to shape a youthful, personalized brand 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 does not prevent brands from using it as one of the important marketing means for explosive content marketing and cross-circle communication. Co-branding requires both parties to have similar brand values and tone, leveraging each other's commonalities to further enhance the brand image. Secondly, the creativity and products of co-branding should be based on the real needs of users and value the consumer experience. Examples include 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, and 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 to start from 0 to 1, but the challenge is breaking out from 1 to 10. In 2021, for those brands with dreams, remember:
**1. Traffic is not the core; product strength is**
In 2021, there will only be more brands, and traffic hunger will become more severe. Many brands put too much energy into marketing for saturation attacks but do not settle down to make good products, resulting in many brands whose strengths are not yet good enough but whose 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 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 a stage of refined user operation, centering on users, meeting consumer needs, and forming interactions. The core competitiveness 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. **Is the product trustworthy enough for consumers?**
**Is the operation and use clear enough for consumers?**
**Is the purchase experience good enough?**
**Does the effect match the promise?**
Private domain traffic is no longer a place for monetization and harvesting. How to operate consumers well and provide services based on private domain traffic is something brands need to think about. It is 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 user 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, and spokesperson. Emotion is consumer sentiment. Many girls see a beautiful product and their attention is drawn away, so to make a female user like and impulsively buy, you need to make her feel a sense of falling at that moment.
**4. Douyin self-broadcasting**
Since Douyin established its e-commerce department, its determination in e-commerce can be seen. From "content to grab users" to "e-commerce to monetize users," Douyin now needs conversion rates to support platform monetization. Brand Taobao live streaming self-broadcasting is basically a standard store configuration, but self-broadcasting on Douyin is still not attempted by many brands. From May to November last year, the number of Douyin blue V (enterprise certification) accounts with monthly GMV exceeding 10 million yuan surged from 25 to 110, and the number of top players and GMV continued 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 Wang Xiaolu 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 consumers, infinitely improving the convenience of consumer purchases, and combining online and 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, and the Forbidden City co-branded products have exhausted the Forbidden City's tone. However, as explosive content marketing, cross-border co-branding is still encouraged for brands to try. If the target audiences of brands overlap significantly, brands can cooperate on content points, leverage each other, and achieve win-win results. In addition, brand linkage should consider brand positioning and internal core values; otherwise, it will only bring consumer fatigue.
**-06- Summary**
Creating a real brand is very hard and requires time to settle. The road is long and cannot be achieved overnight. Like leveling up and fighting monsters, founders cannot relax for a moment. Beautiful dreams are always inspiring, but whether reality develops as expected has many uncertainties. Instead of grasping uncertain resources like influencers, channels, and traffic, it is better to grasp certain resources: product, founder and team capability improvement, and user experience. I have met many brand founders, and most excellent people share a common trait: continuous learning and reverence for consumers. I hope brands persist in their dreams and maintain reverence!
**Important Conference Announcement!**
**January 19-20, Wuxi, Jiangsu**
New Distribution will join hands with 500+ FMCG distributors from five provinces in East China to gather in Wuxi, Jiangsu, to provide a meeting for brand owners and distributors aimed at product selection, cooperation, and exchange. Make arrangements before the New Year, and start working after the New Year! Don't wait until after the Spring Festival to plan!
Interested brand owners or distributors are welcome to contact us. Please scan the WeChat QR code below to register for attendance or exhibition.
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