This year, several notable shifts have occurred: fewer companies are willing to lose money for the sake of 618 or Double 11 sales reports; media no longer pedestalizes emerging industries or brands, using cautious and evasive language about new species; investors may call you not to invest, but to submit their resumes... I think such bleak circumstances cannot be entirely blamed on the external environment; it's also because we have always prioritized growth over profit. Now in Q4, almost all physical enterprises have realized one thing: growth without profit is nothing but hooliganism. How to create "profit-driven growth"? This should be the key topic for Q4 and even 2024. I'd like to share my insights from four aspects. Market Increment Learn to discover new consumption scenarios from market gaps For all highly competitive industries, profit has a time window. Simply put, as the market becomes saturated and competitors start to involution, profits are continuously eroded. But at the same time, I've noticed an interesting phenomenon: many big brands that survive competition possess a rare ability. They can always find unknown gaps in seemingly saturated markets, thereby creating new profit points, such as Coca-Cola. I think there is no beverage market in the world as saturated as cola. The cola category has a long history; all channels that should be entered have been entered, and all regions that should be penetrated are covered. Yet Coca-Cola can achieve profit-driven growth every year, which is worth pondering for every new consumer brand. A few years ago, Coca-Cola, with slowing growth, proposed a new strategy called "coke with meal," planning to break through the "meal accompaniment" scenario. Why "meal accompaniment"? Because when consumers stand before supermarket shelves, they easily compare the price of cola with surrounding beverages, and compare prices between stores. Therefore, beverage sales in front of offline shelves struggle to balance profit and growth. But when we dine in restaurants, without shelf comparison, people default to accepting higher prices for drinks, allowing cola to achieve higher profits. This year, Coca-Cola co-created a food variety show with Tencent Video called "Friends, Please Eat," which aligns with the current "food buddy" culture among young people. Beyond regular product placement, Coca-Cola also had the production team connect to set up partner stores in six cities including Beijing, Chengdu, and Wuhan. You may not know that by Q2 this year, China had 8.636 million catering outlets! Coca-Cola relies on these restaurants penetrating the capillaries of cities to gain higher product premiums and continue growing in hidden corners. As early as 2016, Coca-Cola partnered with 1,700 catering outlets for a "buy meal, get cola" activity; in 2019, it collaborated with McDonald's and Burger King to offer interactive coupons and delivery promotions, promoting the "cola + fast food" CP; that summer, it also partnered with over 2,000 outlets for a "cola + crayfish" CP. Like Coca-Cola, JING has also focused on the meal accompaniment scenario in recent years. Last year, JING produced a documentary called "Delicious Rivers and Mountains." In it, JING frequently appeared alongside conch from Xiangshan Port in Ningbo, swimming crabs from eastern Zhejiang, and stewed lamb from Dabie Mountain. While baijiu brands compete for cultural and social scenarios, JING carved out a new "nourishment" scenario for autumn and winter. Because JING contains herbal ingredients that invigorate blood and warm the stomach, it naturally pairs with warming foods and counteracts the harm of cold-natured foods. Thus, JING proposed slogans in this Tencent Video program: "Lamb with JING, warm body, heart, and stomach" and "Seafood with JING, warm and cool complement each other." Often, when we complain about "market saturation and profit erosion by competitors," it's because we've lost commercial imagination. When we only compete for market share by product category, we can't see where increments and profits are. Only by breaking our narrow definitions of the market, like Coca-Cola and JING, and seeing gaps competitors overlook, can we continue to create profit-driven growth. Let me give a few more examples to illustrate. Recently, Haidilao found a new consumption scenario: the "After party" after fan concerts. When concerts end, Haidilao sends buses to pick up fans to eat hotpot, making it a pilgrimage site for fan girls. Wong Lo Kat cleverly found the scenario of auspicious culture and blessing-seeking, launching customized blessing cans during Spring Festival and college entrance exams. Heineken took the opposite approach, launching non-alcoholic beer placed in parking lots, emphasizing it's drinkable for drivers. If you still can't find new market gaps, a simple idea is to reverse-engineer your business from media vertical content. Such content naturally targets specific interest groups and often contains numerous segmented consumption scenarios. For example, recently my family and I watched "Heart Signal 7," and social media is full of notes analyzing the outfits of male and female guests on dates. Brands like clothing, accessories, perfume, and cosmetics can market around the "date" scenario. Similarly, "Thirteen Talks 8" and "Once Upon a Bite 5" represent high-net-worth individuals, "Sword Coming" and "Douluo Continent" gather young people, and FIBA, NBA, etc., target passionate straight men. We can dig out hidden small scenarios from these diverse contents. New Product Explosion Selected IP + Product Discounts + Channel Linkage These days, Luckin Coffee's co-branded coffee with Moutai, "Sauce Aroma Latte," is flooding social media. Luckin's buzz is partly due to "attaching" to Moutai, which has absolute scarcity. But more important than buzz is that this single product's sales have exceeded 100 million, breaking Luckin's single-product sales record. Luckin's co-branding success is not a coincidence; it's due to its consistent product launch strategy. This year, Luckin also co-branded with Tencent Video's popular anime "Blade of the Immortal," launching "Kunlun Boiled Snow Latte." Luckin invited users to create derivative works using the IP's imagery for cups, cup sleeves, and bags, and many anime fans participated in this peripheral co-creation. Besides boosting buzz, it also brought considerable sales. Luckin's blockbuster sales make many consumer goods companies envious. The biggest difference between current consumer entrepreneurship and the past is that everyone no longer believes in the big single-product strategy but operates multiple SKUs or even cross-category, like Genki Forest and babycare. But for most brands, they launch new products quickly, yet few become blockbusters. Luckin's model for hitting new products can be summarized as "Selected IP + Product Discounts + Channel Linkage." The "Kunlun Boiled Snow Latte" co-branded with "Blade of the Immortal" sells for only 9.9 yuan on Luckin's official account. Even with Moutai's endorsement, "Sauce Aroma Latte" sells for only 19 yuan. While the IP raises product value, Luckin still keeps prices low, letting consumers feel the cost-effectiveness. On launch day, Luckin provides exclusive entry points for co-branded products on Tencent's official accounts, mini-programs, and communities. The signage and POP of over 10,000 stores nationwide are replaced with co-branded promotional materials. The core of "Selected IP + Product Discounts + Channel Linkage" is actually the IP, not discounts or channels. When IP and product marry, consumers buy not just the product but the added value attached to it. People posting "Sauce Aroma Latte" on social media are self-deprecating that they can drink Moutai for 19 yuan; we rush to buy "Kunlun Boiled Snow Latte" to feel the heroic spirit of "Blade of the Immortal" in our minds. Like Luckin, Heytea has done similar things. When "A Dream of Splendor" was airing on Tencent Video, Heytea highly restored the same tea drinks from the show, launching Perilla Peach Drink and Menghua Tea Joy·Diancha. They turned Zhao Pan'er's tea-making method into video content for product promotion. In official account articles, they invited Zhao Pan'er for a tea battle, using storytelling to reveal new product launches. Heytea also decorated some stores in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen as themed tea houses, highly restoring scenes from the show. Within a week of launch, these two drinks sold 1.404 million cups, and due to high traffic, Heytea's mini-program even crashed. Don't just see this as co-branding; co-branding is only the surface. Ordinary cross-industry co-branding brings basic attention, but the models of Luckin and Heytea bring actual sales. The traditional new product promotion model is: use heavy hard advertising to build recall, use extensive seeding to build awareness, and finally harvest during big promotions via live streams and terminal promotions. The problem with this model is that it essentially competes on budget size and operational efficiency, making it hard to fundamentally widen the gap with competitors. But the "Selected IP + Product Discounts + Channel Linkage" model is different. First, IP itself is differentiation; when IP and product co-brand, they avoid the quagmire of product homogenization. Moreover, the effectiveness of content utilization varies greatly among brands. A top IP in the hands of a mediocre brand is just a name, but in the hands of a master, it can summon wind and rain. IP first gives products a premium, then generates topics for promotion, and finally brings traffic to sales shelves. IP can align brand, effect, and sales, allowing new products to gain both fame and profit in a very short time. The key to this new product promotion model is not just finding an IP to co-brand with, but leveraging the platform's ecosystem resources around the IP—such as official accounts, mini-programs, WeChat Channels, and communities—and fully penetrating the IP's momentum into offline terminals and stores. Only then can you push new products to explode. Node Explosion Find consumption motives beyond cheapness The popularity of live streaming has made low prices the norm in e-commerce, so big promotion nodes like 618 and Double 11 are losing their former glory. When consumers find cheap deals every day, there's no need to wait for Double 11... The awkward part is that although promotion nodes have lost their charm, marketers still bear the pressure to hit high performance during these nodes. The key to solving this problem is to find consumption motives beyond low prices. Last Double 12, KUKA Home offered some different ideas. During the KUKA Good Things Festival, they created an unconventional live stream. They invited comedian Yang Di and his mother to promote products, and the live room had no flashy discount posters or shouting hosts; it looked more like a variety show set. KUKA built three different home scenarios—youth, family, and couple—and Yang Di and his mother played games like "Home Knowledge YES or NO" and "Pitfall Challenge," completing product seeding amidst casual jokes. Consumers could pay deposits and pre-order products in the live room, then check offline. After one live stream, KUKA sold 17,700 pre-sale cards. Moreover, when customers came to offline stores to redeem pre-sale cards, store salespeople could persuade them to buy more home products, boosting store sales. This "variety show-style live streaming" is fundamentally different from the past "hawking-style live streaming" in terms of business conversion logic. "Variety show-style live streaming" uses entertaining content and immersive sets to attract viewers to stay longer, allowing consumers to naturally learn product selling points while enjoying the show, generating purchase desire, and breaking past consumption logic from a sensory perspective. In "hawking-style live streaming," viewers wait for low-price moments. In "variety show-style live streaming," viewers watch not just to consume but to enjoy the show. KUKA's "variety show-style live streaming" was actually a project co-customized with Tencent. KUKA not only needed to connect the business loop of Moments—Channels—live room—mini-program but also leverage Tencent Video's industry resources in variety shows to help negotiate celebrities, arrange set design, and design scripts and processes. When we seek node sales explosions in an era where e-commerce low prices are as common as cabbage, we must learn to tap into and mobilize the platform's deeper industry-level resources, not just standard resources, and view project cooperation with a co-creation mindset. All marketers sharpening their knives for big promotions should seriously consider: besides lowering prices, what other reasons do customers have to stay in the live room? What other motives to add to cart? User Activation We don't lack private domain user scale; we lack the ability to mobilize private domain users The cost of getting an old customer to spend is one-fifth of acquiring a new customer. Learning to mobilize old customers is the only way to ensure profit alongside growth. Private domain traffic has become standard for enterprises, but what I observe is: enterprises no longer lack the ability to acquire new users in private domains, but lack the ability to retain and activate them. They often have tens of millions of followers, but besides lowering prices, they have no good way to convert them. This is a major pain point in current user management. In traditional private domain operations, the three classic methods to activate old customers are: First, based on past data tags, understand customer needs and recommend matching products. Second, regularly follow up with old customers, maintaining new product recommendations and communication. Third, offer old customers greater discounts and more attentive service to stimulate repeat purchases. But these three methods essentially solve old customer conversion through refined user operations. You can refer to Chunzhen's approach and think differently about activating private domain users. This year, Chunzhen partnered with the hit drama "Lost You Forever," securing Tencent Video's early access product and delivering it to private domain users. The allocation of early access rights was not simply based on who spent more. To watch early access, users had to participate in a game of co-planting a相思树 (love tree) in the mini-program community, earning "fruit sense points" by browsing products or adding导购 (shopping guide) WeChat, to qualify for early access. While giving benefits, Chunzhen turned benefit delivery into an interactive game, subtly shifting user behavior motives. Gamification, though still asking users to watch ads and add WeChat, quietly reduces users' defensiveness toward commercial information, naturally increasing private domain activity. McDonald's operates similarly to Chunzhen. When partnering with "Clash of Clans," both private domain fans could use exclusive passwords to claim co-branded meal coupons. Giving discount passwords instead of discounts is a clever move. Directly giving coupons is the brand actively lowering prices, and fans face the brand with a "wool-picking" mentality. Exclusive passwords feel more like playing a game with users; essentially it's still lowering prices, but fans' action motives differ. Moreover, users' membership points from buying McDonald's burgers can be exchanged for virtual game coins in "Clash of Clans." The virtual game world and real world interact wonderfully, greatly mobilizing private domain users' enthusiasm. Many methods introduced in this article leverage content IP to create profit-driven growth. I want to remind you of two operational points: First, brands must not only learn to select IP and create content but also learn to use the platform's ecosystem resources to connect your business chain, so IP drives business, not just topics. Second, IP marketing is often hard to attribute; we should skillfully use tools for analysis. For example, Tencent Video launched the "Smart Strategy Engine" product, which accumulates content performance of over 90% of top IPs across the site and over 3,000 brand marketing data points. We can predict an IP's marketing value from three dimensions: content impact, resource performance, and brand benefits. Final Words Find hidden incremental scenarios, try content-based new product promotion models, add consumption motives beyond low prices during nodes, and explore gamified ways to activate old customers. These are the four hurdles I believe we must cross to achieve profit-driven growth. Growth is not important; profitable growth is important.