Recently, when many tea companies talk about brand marketing, they have come to realize that the tea industry needs more personalized, humanized IP marketing, and some tea companies are also consciously paying attention to how to embark on the path of building their own brand IP.
So, in terms of IP building, what other approaches can branded tea companies use to raise brand awareness and social influence?
1. IP Marketing Becomes a New Trend in Tea Brand Marketing
With the development of the internet and the ever-amplifying value of new communication media, online content has begun to explode, yet fragmented content is also scattering consumers’ attention and struggling to leave a deep impression. This is an enormous challenge facing tea companies in brand marketing.
At present, the most intuitive phenomenon in the tea industry is this: although every tea company is sparing no effort to innovate, objectively speaking, there are not many blockbuster products on the market, and copycat behavior among peers is obvious. Seeking a brand marketing breakthrough purely from the product side will clearly come under greater pressure.
Therefore, in brand building, IP marketing has become a widely recognized marketing approach in the current market environment. Creating a successful brand IP is clearly another way for tea companies to break through in brand marketing.
2. Several Main Modes of IP Marketing
Looking at IP marketing cases across the consumer goods industry, the forms are diverse, but the core still lies in the company completing a process of brand personification. Generally speaking, it mainly includes the following modes:
Some companies build the brand itself as the core IP, concentrating on highlighting the brand’s uniqueness in the brand name, logo design and product development, and conveying the brand’s core values to consumers. New-style tea drink brands such as Heytea and Mixue Bingcheng all favor this path.
In addition, Xingcha Jun has also observed that some relatively mature tea companies without a well-known figure, when they want to do IP marketing, will choose to leverage existing well-known IPs for crossover marketing. The purpose of doing so is often that the brand wants to enrich its vitality in the market and add new “labels” to the brand in consumers’ minds. For example, in recent years, some tea companies have been actively trying to collaborate with liquor companies, restaurant brands and cultural-creative brands to form combined market momentum and increase brand exposure.
There is another approach, also familiar to everyone: building the company founder or a representative figure as the brand IP. For instance, when we talk about Apple, we cannot fail to mention its soul figure \u2014 Steve Jobs; likewise, Musk’s personal charisma has become Tesla’s unique halo.
Such cases are quite common across industries \u2014 Yu Minhong of New Oriental, Jack Ma of Alibaba, Lei Jun of Xiaomi, Dong Mingzhu of Gree. For their companies, they are all extremely successful personal IPs, even equivalent to brand image spokespersons; they have already carved a strong “brand-and-person” association in consumers’ minds.
Therefore, when tea companies plan their brand IP marketing, they should pay special attention to building the IP of a brand representative. This mode is also very suitable for companies in the tea industry: through personal IP building, a brand can raise its awareness and topicality among mass consumers, because a personal IP is also an important component of brand equity.
3. Is Personal IP Building More Suitable for the Tea Industry?
In recent years, tea companies have attached ever greater importance to brand marketing. Whether it is building a core figure’s IP or IP co-branding, tea companies can gain substantial exposure and bring new growth to brand momentum.
In today’s commercial society, personal IP building amounts to a business card crafted by the brand; in other words, its role is already similar to that of a brand spokesperson.
In IP marketing \u2014 especially personal IP building \u2014 there is uniqueness that competitors can hardly “replicate.”
This is also why more and more branded tea companies emphasize personal IP building, particularly the founder’s IP marketing: once it succeeds, it is very difficult for rivals to copy. In this brand marketing model, its “personality competitiveness” is the one thing that cannot be replicated, because the person is unique. In other words, in today’s era where influence reigns supreme, consumers may first be drawn to you as a person, and only then become customers who buy your tea products.
In short, everyone feels that the tea industry today is severely “involuted,” and believes the reason is mainly that the tea market has gradually bid farewell to its past high-growth trajectory. But we believe the most essential reason behind it is that the tea industry’s brand marketing path still needs to “accelerate.” Perhaps personal IP building is the centerpiece of tea companies’ brand marketing going forward.
Selected Hot Topics from Xingcha
New Forces in Tea Consumption \u2016 Dissecting Strategic Single Products \u2016 Stay Away from “Financial Tea”
Pu-erh Tea Video Interviews \u2016 China Tea Storage Industry Development Conference \u2016 Industry Shake-up
Persistence in Brand Building \u2016 New-Style Tea Drink Brand Playbooks \u2016 Ways for Tea Companies to Break Out
Breaking Tea Homogenization \u2016 Fake Pu-erh Case Involving RMB 1.8 Billion \u2016 Sky-High-Priced Tea
Xinhui Chenpi Goes Viral \u2016 Tea Companies’ Layout in the Post-Pandemic Era \u2016 2022 Spring Tea Season<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
Author: Lam Sam (LamSam), the Old Tea Head
ZENTEA MANOR
Alliance Supply Chain Services Limited
Unit 902-3, 9\/F, Mini Cube, 10 Sam Chuk Street, San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
www.zentea-shop.com Email:info@zentea-shop.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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