Scan the QR code in the image to register In the red ocean track, many people have this confusion: their own products feel similar to competitors, making it hard to compete. Everyone likes differentiation, but the reality is cruel: the more intense the category, the more convergent it becomes. What to do about homogenization? Many people are obsessed with finding traffic and calculating ROI, looking at cases, learning from big brands, following competitor bloggers, and seeing others' billion-level sales, creating an illusion: as long as they have the right traffic support, breaking a billion is easy. However, these are ultimately at the "tactical" level. For a brand operator, especially a founder, planning must be done at the "strategic" level. Founders need to understand advertising, but they must not turn themselves into mere media buyers, only looking at traffic ROI. Do not use the diligence of advertising and traffic seeking to compensate for the laziness in product and marketing strategy formulation. Since last year, I have been paying attention to the Tmall fruit wine industry and found that homogenization in this industry is becoming increasingly severe. Today, using it as an example, I will share my personal thoughts on how to break the deadlock in a homogenized industry. Background: Baijiu, beer, and wine occupy nearly 90% of the alcohol market share, and fruit wine has always been a "category without brands." However, the consumption needs of the new generation have changed significantly. In the past two years, the growth rate of fruit wine consumption amount has been 50%. Currently, there are 5,000 fruit wine brands on Tmall alone. There are too many fruit wine brands, and the slightly tipsy girls are almost not enough. Emerging brands are well-versed in the startup routine: high appearance + product positioning + live streaming/seeding promotion. As a result, fruit wine brands look like this: One can't help but sigh, each one is beautiful! In many categories, high-appearance packaging can quickly establish differentiation for emerging brands. In the fruit wine category, new brands come prepared, putting great effort into appearance, making it hard to distinguish winners. The same is true in many industries like flower tea. Looking at their Xiaohongshu advertising, many emphasize "wine suitable for women": The homogenization of many brands also means the homogenization of product positioning and selling points. So how to break through from the "strategic" level? -01- Category Opportunities When consumers see a brand and take the action to place an order, their psychological activities mainly go through these 3 steps: First: What does this brand sell? Second: Why should I buy it? Third: What value can it provide me? The first impression of a brand, "what it sells," is the brand's category. Category opportunities include creating new categories and focusing on categories. In the fruit wine category, many brands tell consumers: I sell fruit wine. But this is too broad. With many brands, consumers easily forget you, and overtaking on the curve is a dream. The ultimate battlefield of business is the mind. Category is the key marketing force hidden behind the brand. Whether it's a brand or a product, the first thing to solve is consumer awareness of you. 1. Category Focus Many bosses have a misconception: only with more SKUs can they have the opportunity to increase GMV. The opportunity for emerging brands is not to be big and comprehensive, but to clearly understand their manpower, financial resources, and material resources, and enter from a segmented category to find a breakthrough. Currently, the fruit wine industry has segmented categories such as plum wine, lychee wine, grapefruit wine, yogurt wine, tea fruit wine, peach blossom wine, osmanthus wine, etc. A hundred flowers bloom, and the lack of representative brands in segmented categories means there is enough space for emerging brands. In 2011, Great Wall Motors' sedan business accounted for more than one-third of its sales, exceeding SUV sales by 40,000 units. Although the momentum was good, it did not have enough advantage compared to other competitors. With the increase of independent and joint venture brands, competition in the sedan field became increasingly fierce. Great Wall Motors had relatively limited financial strength and resources. So that year, Great Wall Motors adjusted its strategy, decisively giving up the immediate "sweetness," "narrowing" its products, and pouring resources into the SUV field, which at the time accounted for less than 5% of the Chinese auto market. Thanks to that focus, Great Wall Motors has developed over the past 10 years from annual sales of less than 10 billion to over 100 billion now. There are many such examples on Tmall. Ulike's hair removal device, SKG's neck massager, and "Meijian" last year reached TOP1 in the Tmall fruit wine category, with only plum wine. When the company has money and a team, expanding is a later story. 2. Creating New Categories: Creating a new category is essentially finding differentiation from the root, establishing unique value, and reducing competition. Fruit wine is a large category, and it can be increasingly segmented based on raw materials, processes, user groups, and concepts. "Luoyin" tea fruit wine is positioned as "tea + fruit + wine," forming a unique product advantage. Products include "Dianhong Rose," "Dianhong Green Plum," "Da Hong Pao Grapefruit," etc. It launched on Tmall in October last year and achieved millions of yuan in revenue in the first month. Sales have grown quickly in recent months. The bottle label features ancient Chinese female portraits, full of oriental charm. Banu Hotpot initially competed with Haidilao on service, but Haidilao = good service is deeply rooted in people's minds. As a latecomer, using the opponent's advantage to compete with the opponent is completely impossible to win. Later, Banu Hotpot focused on tripe, renamed itself "Banu Tripe Hotpot," broke through with the single product tripe, and created the "tripe hotpot" category. In the fruit wine field, new raw materials and new technical processes can bring new category opportunities. In fact, technological innovation is a barrier and the most direct way to establish a new category. Notes on category selection: The category you create must conform to consumer cognition and not be self-indulgent. Previously, an entrepreneur excitedly told me that he found a blue ocean in the fruit wine category: "collagen fruit wine." Women can get slightly tipsy while supplementing collagen and becoming beautiful, and the taste is not bad, but the price is a bit higher. At first glance, this really opens up a new category, and logically, "collagen" also meets women's beauty needs. But which woman drinking alcohol does it for whitening? Instead, she would have to spend more money on this ingredient, so she might as well buy nutritional supplements or cosmetics for whitening. Recently, I saw a health fruit wine brand that focuses on 18 amino acids + longan, ginger, red dates, and other health flavors, claiming to drink for health and good complexion. This category positioning is a bit self-indulgent like "collagen fruit wine." Changing the category is basically accompanied by product transformation, which is closely related to supply chain, team R&D, and time cycles, and is not easy. If you cannot change the product category, how do you break through? -02- Brand Selling Points Selling points are the consumer's reason to buy. Whether in red ocean or blue ocean products, they must have selling points for target users. The awkward point for red ocean brands is that the selling points they can think of are not unique or exclusive, and when advertising, they are similar to competitors, resulting in low advertising efficiency, and then the brand falls into anxiety. Everything that can be said has been said, what to do? 1. Be One Step Ahead Marketers like to find differentiated unique selling points when extracting selling points, but the reality is that there are not so many unique points. Yuanqi Forest focuses on: 0 sugar, 0 fat, 0 calories. But except for coffee and milk, most beverages do not contain fat. It's just that Yuanqi Forest said this point out loud. Which herbal tea does not reduce heat? Wanglaoji said it first. 2. Focus Categories can be focused, and selling points can also be focused. Many personal care emerging brands particularly like to enter from silicone-free volumizing shampoo, after all, young people have hair anxiety, and thick hair easily triggers impulse purchases. Is there a big difference in these silicone-free volumizing shampoos? Does that mean if others do it, I shouldn't? Of course not. The market size is large enough. I focus on user pain points, vigorously strengthen this selling point, and when people see my brand and product, they strongly associate it with silicone-free volumizing, and that's success. Many brands actually do not focus. They have the same selling points as others, and they say everything in a long list, like the current fruit wine industry. 3. Dig Out Ignored Facts Brands often ignore many details. What professionals take for granted is a world outside consumer cognition. Previously, I chatted with a fruit wine brand. With homogenized appearance and selling points, they were lost in extracting selling points. After communication, they began to dig out selling points from ignored facts. There is a classic marketing case: The teacher of Ogilvy founder Ogilvy extracted a selling point for a beer brand "Schlitz": every bottle of Schlitz beer is blown with high-temperature pure oxygen before canning to ensure a crisp taste. But at the time, the brewery owner was disdainful: This is a standard process in beer production. All beers have to be blown like this. If it's not blown, it will go bad! But this selling point helped Schlitz beer sell massively. When consumers see such an advertisement, isn't it easy to want to taste it and see how crisp it is? Consumers are guided this way. So, Nongfu Spring is a bit sweet. -03- Differentiation Positioning Differentiation: Huazhixiao makeup, although some people complain about their products being average, in the highly competitive makeup track, they broke a billion in a year. It has to be said that their positioning of "girly makeup" is right. The product style is two-dimensional, and the packaging is dreamy. The product packaging almost puts all girly elements: a thinking angel on a Roman column, a three-dimensional teddy bear on a chocolate eyeshadow palette, and puffy magical clouds on a rice powder box. The high recognition makes a deep impression after seeing it. Scene Differentiation: Plum wine brands all emphasize raw materials and process. "Meijian Plum Wine" seeds outside the platform, entering from differentiated dining scenes like "hotpot" and "barbecue," unlike other fruit wine brands' "women drinking alone," allowing consumers to associate the brand in specific scenes. Dining scenes are also easier for group self-propagation of the brand. Personal care brand PWU Pure Beauty, with its fragrance shampoo, is in a super competitive field like silicone-free volumizing. But its outside-platform seeding combines the use scene of fragrance shampoo with the daily scenes of couples, creating resonance. Packaging Differentiation: Zheyijia, a traditional enterprise in Huzhou, Zhejiang, developed a fruit wine series two years ago as shown below. The overall bottle design is conventional, very much in line with their previous offline channel style. Looking at Zheyijia's current Tmall store style, it also follows the ancient style route, but unlike Luoyin, Zheyijia reflects the national style through the bottle shape, with high recognition, achieving greater differentiation from other brands. Packaging should also consider the acceptance of target users. Jianghu Guaiguai uses the packaging innovation of "bagged wine" to enter the market. Although the overall packaging is innovative, the style is a bit young, especially like children's jelly. Moreover, many people in the Tmall store comment area think it's expensive. Currently, monthly sales are dismal. -04- Value and Emotional Identification A brand must establish connections with users, whether it's user mind, brand association, or user experience, all should be established simultaneously. Fruit wine is a repurchase product, and the main users are women. Therefore, in addition to marketing around the product itself, member operation and user emotional operation are important. Historical articles will involve ideas, so I won't write specific solutions here. -05- Summary Entrepreneurs look at trends, and trends look at national planning. I noticed this year's National Two Sessions government work plan: adhere to expanding domestic demand and use government spending to drive consumption. Therefore, in the future, more consumer brands will definitely appear, and a large amount of homogenization is inevitable. If brands want to survive or overturn the predecessors, relying on increasingly expensive traffic will only end up complaining that "e-commerce is getting harder to do." Diligence in "tactics" can only move yourself, but in-depth research and diligence in "strategy" should be what operators and helmsmen pay attention to. There are countless brands with high GMV. Don't always envy others. Experience is for learning and practice. It's important to find a path suitable for your own brand development. There are thousands of beautiful women in the world, but only one is suitable for you. Marketing Old Wang (WeChat ID: wltx-2015)