POSITIVE HOTEL's sales on Douyin e-commerce over the past year

Instant coffee can't fetch a high price But health supplements can

Before analyzing why POSITIVE HOTEL sells well, we need to understand a question: Why is instant coffee no longer selling well? Who still drinks instant coffee? Previously, we proposed a three-quadrant model for consumer goods: price, convenience, and experience. In all three dimensions, instant coffee brands cannot compete with offline brands like Luckin Coffee. Nestlé, once a leading instant coffee brand, now counts taxi drivers as its most mainstream consumers. This group doesn't care much about coffee taste; whether their thermos holds strong tea, coffee, or goji berry water is irrelevant. What matters is alertness and convenience, emphasizing a functional orientation. This approach translates to POSITIVE HOTEL by swapping cups for bags, removing non-dairy creamer, and focusing on health functionality. This is extremely friendly to office workers—it surpasses other instant coffee brands in convenience, offering both alertness and style, plus health benefits! We've analyzed many times that to get experienced consumers to pay a premium, playing the efficacy card is one of the best methods. Taste? Aroma? Origin? No, no, no—wielding the twin blades of "fat reduction" and "health care" is the key to slicing off a generous market share. Whether by coincidence or not, if you have the habit of drinking traditional Chinese medicine, you'll notice the bag's design is quite similar to the packaging of decoctions from pharmacies, subtly aligning with the "health preservation" trend. It's like having health in hand with one bag. Rather than selling coffee, it's selling coffee-flavored health supplements. Since it's positioned as a health supplement, whether it tastes good as coffee is irrelevant, and material costs can be kept quite low. Essentially, it's still the 9.9-yuan coffee business, but the premium in the price covers marketing expenses.

Half of the entertainment industry is helping promote it Generating traffic and buzz

Accurately positioning the category is just finding a market angle that few (or very few) care about; convincing consumers to believe you and spend real money requires effective marketing strategies. POSITIVE HOTEL has spent big on celebrity endorsements—hiring Lin Gengxin as spokesperson, shooting a series of promotional materials, and sparking a small wave in the celebrity circle. Many celebrities were photographed on set holding bagged coffee, which indeed attracted significant traffic for the brand. Douyin advertising is also heavily invested. According to Chanmofang data, in Q1 2024 alone, brand exposure reached 104 million, a quarter-over-quarter increase of 828%; the number of promoted Douyin accounts was 2,779, a quarter-over-quarter increase of 2,825%. In comparison, for the whole of 2023, brand exposure was only 33.67 million, with 294 promoted accounts—not even in the same league. Remember the premium issue we mentioned earlier? That's where the money goes. Of course, spending on traffic is one thing, but content is key. POSITIVE HOTEL constantly emphasizes its connection to health and fat reduction: A flood of bloggers and accounts continuously share dietary rules like the "Mediterranean diet," and share success stories of themselves or others losing weight, playing the "no dieting, no exercise, no abstinence" card openly. Can drinking coffee help you lose weight? It doesn't matter; what matters is that consumers believe it: Look, I drank a cup of coffee, zero calories! Luckin still costs 9.9 yuan, but this cup (bag) costs less than 7 yuan, and you can enjoy the same as the celebrity. After all, it's just instant coffee; can the fat you've gained through hard work claim emotional damages?

Celebrity-endorsed coffee. Source: Xiaohongshu

Great visual appeal Is always the first law of communication

Good methods are not afraid of being overused; they're afraid of not being used to death. In today's "phone eats/drinks first" era, anything intended for camera-based dissemination and expression must first be very internet-famous and visually appealing. Let's recall the coffee category: how many cases of product design have been extremely viral, photogenic, and triggered massive self-propagation? I can't think of any, because there really aren't many notable cases. Now look at POSITIVE HOTEL's packaging. POSITIVE HOTEL's packaging. Source: Xiaohongshu. Is this bag viral and attractive? Not to mention the quite "classy" envelope design; the vibe of an internet-famous hit is overflowing. Incidentally, these series have their own names, like "Yellow Envelope" and "Black Envelope" based on packaging colors, reminiscent of "Little White Bottle" or "Little Bright Bottle," easy to remember and pronounce, and also distinctive. As mentioned earlier, premium instant coffee loses to offline brands like Luckin due to deficiencies in price, convenience, and experience, but POSITIVE HOTEL, with its packaging ingenuity, successfully gains advantages in convenience and experience. This is the direct reason why, despite its not-cheap price, it can still command a high premium. Imagine, as a hard-working office worker, at the start of a busy day, you urgently need some "fuel" to refresh yourself. Now, immediately, as long as you have hands and water, you can get a zero-calorie, healthful drink. Moreover, the packaging is quite attractive, so you can't help but take a selfie and post it on your Moments: "Another day of health preservation!" Is it really healthy? Who cares; the office worker has survived another day.

Products in different colored packaging. Source: Internet

Through this case, we repeatedly discover one of the traits of the food and beverage track: the actual efficacy of the food is necessary but secondary. You need a strong sense of conviction, from category positioning to marketing strategy to product design, all telling consumers, "Apart from me, you have no better choice." No late night is healthy, just as no piece of fat grows randomly; consumers know this all too well. Awareness brings anxiety, anxiety triggers desire, desire stimulates purchase, and purchase calms anxiety—it's a closed loop.

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