Click to read the original article for details In April 2020, even during the pandemic, the innovative consumer brand Wangbaobao completed a Series B financing of nearly 100 million yuan against the odds, led by Black Ant Capital, with original investors Source Code Capital, Vertex Ventures, and Dexun Investment continuing to follow. Just last December, Wangbaobao had completed a Series A financing of tens of millions of yuan. Prior to that, Wangbaobao had also received a tens of millions yuan angel round from Kaitai Capital and Dexun Investment. A food startup, it launched its Taobao store in May 2018, with sales exceeding 2 million yuan in the first month; within less than a year, by May 2019, its single store achieved the top position in the Tmall cereal category; in 2019, participating in 11.11, it defeated established cereal brands such as Quaker and Calbee, securing the top spot for Tmall oatmeal, with annual sales growth exceeding 20 times. As the 'fastest' growing food startup, Wangbaobao's growth rate is astonishing. In the non-traditional cereal field, how did Wangbaobao manage to rise abruptly?
-01- Market Segmentation and Product Positioning In the current era, consumer demands have been fully met by various enterprises. For a company to stand out, it must shift from 'meeting demands' to 'creating demands'. The reason for choosing the cereal category to enter the food field is that during the operation of self-media accounts, Yao Jing discovered that young female consumers often discuss weight loss and high aesthetics when talking about food. Furthermore, after research, it was found that the cereal category has strong plasticity, and there is no absolute brand that remains in consumers' minds; consumer awareness of cereal brands is relatively vague. Based on this background, Yao Jing combined these two advantages to develop low-temperature baked oatmeal that is both delicious and healthy, addressing the pain point of young consumers who 'love to eat but fear gaining weight'. By leveraging the original followers from operating food accounts, they continuously collected user needs to determine flavors. Then, they conducted internal testing and screening, recruited users for taste tests, gathered feedback, made further adjustments and iterations to the product, and finally launched it to the market. In less than two years, the designated purchase rate reached 95%, making it the 'synonym' for the cereal category.
-02- Communication: Selling Goods or Endorsement? According to Yao Jing, from a media perspective, third-party information platforms such as Weibo, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili are identified through data analysis as places where target users appear, and they are Wangbaobao's main communication channels. After determining the traffic channels, Wangbaobao selects top-tier and a large number of mid-tier KOLs for diffusion, appearing frequently in these media within a certain period to achieve high coverage and brand promotion. Moreover, Wangbaobao has a dedicated new media team responsible for KOL cooperation and placement. Nowadays, the dividend of television has disappeared. In the era of fragmentation, most new consumer brands use well-known 'people' as a method, supplemented by multiple new media, using KOLs and celebrities as communication tactics to quickly ignite consumer interest and enhance consumer memory, thereby radiating to more consumers and achieving a wide-reaching effect.
-03- Offline is Just a Sales Battlefield Having been established for less than 2 years, there should still be significant room for growth online. Why rush to go offline? Regarding this, Yao Jing explained that in the past nearly 2 years, we have never thought that Wangbaobao was doing 'sales'; we have always insisted on building the Wangbaobao brand. Whether online or offline, it has never been separated. Market and sales may be separated; for example, online Tmall is a carrier for sales. Similarly, offline stores, supermarkets, convenience stores, etc., are also sales carriers for Wangbaobao. By doing marketing and branding online, going offline is just to get closer to consumers. As a food product, cereal is relatively immediate, and Wangbaobao hopes users can more easily buy Wangbaobao. Nowadays, online and offline are increasingly converging, and the separation is not severe. At the same time, new media like Focus Media and digital new retail platforms like Hema Fresh can also achieve precise targeting of target consumers.