Click to read the original article for details Source:全天候科技 (ID:iawtmt) For a long time, the entrepreneurial circle has harbored a culture of circles. For example, based on the educational background or work experience of founding teams, there are Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei circles, and so on. These founders, due to similar life experiences, are more likely to trust each other, close the distance, and then help each other, seeking opportunities for cooperation. In the recently booming new consumer track, a group of people with a common label has frequently emerged. With their keen sense and innate advantages in the FMCG industry, they can not only capture entrepreneurial opportunities under the new consumption trend but also stand out more easily—these are the "former P&G people." Since entering China in 1988, P&G has been known for its systematic training management and outstanding marketing capabilities. Not only is it known as the "Whampoa Military Academy" of marketing for frequently planning household advertisements such as Head & Shoulders' "anti-dandruff strength" and Rejoice's "just so confident," but it has also cultivated countless outstanding talents for China's consumer goods industry, including excellent entrepreneurs. Huang Jinfeng, founder of beauty brand Perfect Diary; Lü Bo, founder of skincare brand HFP; Chen Jianqun, founder of oral care brand usmile; Wang Ying, founder of e-cigarette brand RELX; Tang Liang, founder of daily chemical brand植观; and Xiao Guoxun of restaurant brand好色派沙拉 have all worked at P&G. The management model and brand marketing tactics of this "Whampoa Military Academy" have left a deep imprint on these founders, so much so that in the rise of these new consumer brands, the shadow of P&G can always be seen. Li Lun, partner at Panda Capital, believes that among the new wave of entrepreneurs, elites represented by the P&G faction who have received systematic training and possess internet capabilities are the best entrepreneurs. "Former P&G People" Leave to Start Businesses When mentioning P&G, most people can name several of its brands. For example, Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Rejoice, Vidal Sassoon, Safeguard, Tide, Crest... These well-known washing and care brands all come from P&G. About ten years ago, their advertisements could occupy prime time on major satellite TV channels, and their spokespersons were hot first-line stars, with even the slogans deeply rooted in people's hearts. Head & Shoulders advertisement (Image source: Internet) Back then, it was a very proud thing for college graduates to enter P&G, and Lü Bo was one of them. In 2006, Lü Bo, who had just graduated with a master's degree from the University of Alberta in Canada, joined P&G. Some say that after returning to China, he entered a P&G R&D-related department; other reports say he worked in P&G's marketing department for eight years. It is currently impossible to verify the authenticity of the two claims, but it is certain that Lü Bo was deeply influenced by P&G culture, which was fully reflected in his subsequent entrepreneurial process. The year after Lü Bo joined P&G (2007), Huang Jinfeng graduated from Sun Yat-sen University's Lingnan College with a degree in International Economics and Trade and entered P&G's most mysterious Market Research Department (Consumer and Market Knowledge, or CMK). Starting from the most basic intern position, analyzing, monitoring, and predicting consumer behavior and market changes, Huang Jinfeng worked there for three years. During his time at P&G, he fully learned the entire process of how a world FMCG giant helped complete the production and sales of daily chemical products in China, mastered market research methods and brand marketing logic, and wrote the widely circulated "P&G CMK in My Eyes." From the perspective of a sharer, Huang Jinfeng revealed the abilities of a "CMK person"— "CMK requires strong analytical skills and keen business acumen, strong communication skills to help the team solve problems, and also strong leadership, but this leadership tends to be influence, that is, how to start from objective data, propose credible business logic, and influence the entire business process." Even though this text does not mention him personally, as a "person who has been there," it is obvious that Huang Jinfeng believed he possessed the abilities that a "CMK person" should have. This also provided confidence and foundation for his later founding of Perfect Diary. Unfortunately, P&G's myth did not last long. With the rapid development of mobile internet, TV advertising gradually weakened, consumer attention shifted, and the influence of this giant began to decline. Coupled with frequent changes in leadership, budget cuts, layoffs, and other negative news, P&G's performance also declined. According to financial reports, 2004-2008 was a period of rapid rise for P&G, with revenue growth of nearly 60%; in the following six years (2008-2014), P&G was in a relatively flat, slightly fluctuating state, with annual revenue basically around $80 billion. By 2015, revenue declined significantly and began to go downhill; in 2016, performance had regressed to the level of ten years earlier—2006. Chart:全天候科技 Similarly, after P&G's development trajectory deviated from the rapid rise period, many P&G people chose to leave one after another. In 2010, Huang Jinfeng left P&G and went to another domestic cosmetics company; four years later (2014), Lü Bo also resigned to start a business. After a brief trial and error, he established Guangzhou Eggshell Network Technology Co., Ltd. (the parent company of cosmetics brand HomeFacialPro, or HFP), serving as founder and CEO. Joining this wave of resignation and entrepreneurship were also Chen Jianqun, the later founder of usmile. In 2015, coinciding with the consumption upgrade trend of oral care products, Chen Jianqun noticed the crazy growth of electric toothbrush market data and also experienced the characteristic of electric toothbrushes that "after use, you can't go back to manual toothbrushes," so the entrepreneurial seed buried in his heart finally could not help but grow wildly. "I asked myself, 'If I don't succeed, can I happily work for another five years to pay off the tuition for entrepreneurial trial and error?' The answer was: no problem, I will move forward without hesitation." Chen Jianqun said that it was with this spirit of "the fearless are ignorant" that he resolutely resigned from P&G and embarked on his entrepreneurial journey. During his days at P&G, Chen Jianqun met many precious friends and partners. According to him, P&G alumni also provided a lot of valuable help and advice in his later entrepreneurial process. Not just the three of them, but looking at the experiences of some new consumer brand founders, it can be found that they have a common name—"former P&G people," including RELX founder Wang Ying,植观 founder Tang Liang, and好色派沙拉's Xiao Guoxun. According to data from Panda Capital, as of 2018, among the more than 3,000 people who graduated from P&G, 20% chose to start businesses or join entrepreneurial companies as partners. Also, according to First Financial reports, in the 30 years since P&G entered China, it has cumulatively sent more than 6,000 high-level talents to the domestic consumer goods and related industries. Familiar Business Tactics Defining a group of people by circle or faction is mostly because these people share common personality traits, or similar ways of thinking and acting. Reflected in P&G people, it is their keen business thinking, data analysis capabilities, and outstanding marketing power. Chen Jianfeng, who left P&G, followed consumer change data in choosing his entrepreneurial direction, entering the strongly growing electric toothbrush market. To understand consumers' specific preferences, Chen Jianfeng and the founding team spent 6 months conducting in-depth research. They found 20 consumers and tracked and recorded from dimensions such as living habits, usage scenarios, and consumption needs, in order to understand the real needs of the target audience as much as possible. The situation of finding entrepreneurial direction from survey data also happened to Perfect Diary founder Huang Jinfeng. In the early days of entrepreneurship, Huang Jinfeng and his two partners ran around the world, inspecting various offline stores, trying to find new opportunities in the consumer field. After researching and analyzing 7-8 consumer tracks, Huang Jinfeng's team found that the beauty consumer market develops very well in various countries, with the ratio of skincare to makeup in mature foreign markets being 1:1, while in China it is 9:1; but compared to skincare, makeup is also easier to attract young users. Considering both market potential and product attributes, Perfect Diary finally chose to enter the market from the makeup category. This way of finding opportunities from market research data is precisely due to the founders' work experience at P&G. Christy, vice president of marketing at Perfect Diary, once said that P&G is a company that attaches great importance to consumer research, almost to the point of obsession with consumer insights and research. This experience made Perfect Diary very good at studying consumers and data analysis from its inception. A former P&G person revealed that P&G does not have a dedicated data analysis department, but no matter which department you work in, you must have data analysis capabilities. "Data-based decision-making" often becomes the starting point for former P&G people's entrepreneurship. In addition to this data-driven business thinking, another prominent advantage of P&G people is marketing capability. Judging from the performance of the past two years, whether it is Perfect Diary, HFP, or usmile, these "P&G faction" new consumer brands are all good at content marketing. It can be said that without the assistance of marketing, relying solely on the founder's data analysis and decision-making ability, it would be difficult for the brand to stand out. In the process of brand marketing, they also have two common points: creating concept marketing and continuous advertising offensives. Taking usmile as an example, not only does it promote the brand concept of "caring for the mouth like skincare" in publicity, but related oral care products also have different marketing concepts following consumer preferences. For example, the toothpaste product, having insight into female consumers' love for sweets but worry about health and weight, launched the slogan "anti-sugar small square bottle"; the mouthwash, using the concept of refined skincare, launched "essence mouthwash." Image source: usmile official Weibo With marketing gimmicks, the next step is to create momentum. In the era when traditional media dominated advertising channels, P&G occupied consumer minds through short-term, continuous, and intensive advertising. In today's era of multimedia integration, these new consumer brands still adhere to this tactic in marketing, but the specific steps are divided into two steps— First, through public domain platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin, KOLs intensively publish grass-planting content; then, import public domain traffic into private domains such as Tmall stores and WeChat official accounts to achieve transaction conversion. The same strategy is used by HFP and Perfect Diary when the brand is first launched or when new products are released. These brands can always accurately target target users, find accurate ways to reach users through various channels, and supplemented by consumer-favored spokespersons and consumer-preferred product styles, they eventually successfully run out from many brands. P&G Is Not a "Get Out of Jail Free Card" Brand development is a process from 0-1, 1-10, 10-100, and different stages test founders differently. The "genes" of P&G people cannot help these new consumer brands achieve the full path from 0 to 100. Panda Capital once pointed out in an article that the thinking and experience of large company scale management make P&G people better at going from 10 to 100. In other words, the test for P&G faction founders is actually more in the early stage of the company. In the view of Liu Zhe, former founder of the brand仙屋专研, although the founders of HFP, Perfect Diary, and other brands are from the P&G faction, they actually have a strong non-P&G logo because they have all experienced setbacks and failures. If Lü Bo had not tasted the bitterness of entrepreneurial failure, and Huang Jinfeng had not had the entrepreneurial experience at御泥坊, it would have been difficult for them to achieve the leap from 0 to 1 in the entrepreneurial process. There are countless P&G faction entrepreneurs, but the proportion that can truly run out is very small. Even the now well-known brands still face considerable challenges. Perfect Diary is a dark horse that ran out in the domestic beauty field in recent years, even surpassing international first-line brands in the early stage, ranking first in multiple beauty sales rankings. But since 2020, Perfect Diary has shown a trend of weak growth, even being overtaken by competitors. According to data from Huachuang Securities' commercial group, in May 2020, Perfect Diary's online GMV was 202 million yuan, 3 million yuan less than another domestic beauty brand Florasis; in June of the same year, Perfect Diary's online GMV was 198 million yuan, 37 million yuan behind Florasis, and the gap between the two gradually widened. From financial report data, from 2018 to 2020, Perfect Diary's parent company's sales and marketing expenses accounted for 48.7%, 41.3%, and 65.2% of total revenue, respectively. In the first quarter of 2021, this expenditure reached 1.04 billion yuan, accounting for 72.1% of revenue. Even with a significant increase in sales and marketing expenses, Perfect Diary still fell into a user growth bottleneck, and its position as the "first domestic beauty brand" is precarious. Similarly, HFP, after experiencing high growth in previous years, also saw a significant decline in GMV and GMV year-on-year growth rate. Data from Huachuang Securities' commercial group shows that from January to July 2021, HFP's GMV was 437 million yuan, a sharp year-on-year decrease of 50.9% compared to 890 million yuan in the same period last year. Only usmile, which reported news of going public in January this year, seems to still be on the rise. After the star product Y1 Roman column electric toothbrush's GMV exceeded 1 billion yuan in 3 years, during the 2020 Double 11, usmile became the first Chinese electric toothbrush brand to break 100 million yuan, ranking first in the sales list of new oral care brands. But how long this glory can last is currently unknown. In the eyes of investors, even though there are some drawbacks of growing up in a large company system, the P&G background is still an advantage for some founders. In 2018, Panda Capital partner Li Lun discovered that the portrait of the best founder at the moment might be: when young, the first job was at a company like P&G for five years, was systematically trained, and knew that wild growth is particularly good. If the industry he later did matches his previous experience, he also has a wave of original P&G brothers and friends who can help, with a lot of resources available. Perfect Diary founder Huang Jinfeng also once evaluated his work experience at P&G: P&G taught me some methodologies for doing things in the daily chemical field, such as how to build a brand, how to fight channels, how to pull the market, these specific execution-level tasks. But they also know well that P&G will not be a "get out of jail free card" for entrepreneurship. How to apply the experience "stolen" from P&G to the brands they founded, and "take from blue and be bluer than blue," has become a new topic for these new consumer founders. Are you "watching" me?