Recently, the circle of friends was swiped by a blue coffee essence! And in the elevator, on the TV, and in the office, little blue cups are occupied everywhere.
The blue cup is highly recognizable, and it is a new product at first glance. But why is this new product so explosive?
After careful research, Liaison Yi found out that it only took 5 months for the "Little Blue Cup" to explode from 0 to 0. It was like a sneak peek at the secrets of the explosive cultivation!
It only took 5 months to develop a new retail brand!
That's right, this is lucky coffee.
As a company just founded in November last year, lucky coffee has quickly established more than 300 coffee shops in 13 cities in China.
This number of store openings is almost the same as that of COSTA, the second largest coffee chain in China after Starbucks, which entered China in 2006.
The store opening plan in May is aggressively set at 500 stores nationwide.
The actor Zhang Zhen and the goddess of literature and art Tang Wei held the advertisements of "Little Blue Cup" overwhelmingly, which made the discussion of "art and coffee" quickly ferment!
Compared with the speed of opening the store, their sales are more brutal!
According to a friend in Beijing, the Galaxy SOHO store on the edge of the East Second Ring Road in Beijing has such good sales during peak weekdays that the owner of the small noodle store in Chongqing next to it "can't understand where the order came from."
Luckin coffee's overwhelming advertising campaign, coupled with the cashless app ordering approach, what kind of digital genes are behind it?
How did the operators behind it think about this combination of punches and measure its effect? Let's do it one by one.
Luckin Coffee's Top Secret Weapon
In order to practice this weapon, Luckin Coffee did two things, directly poking at the core of new retail.
First, follow the new retail concept and reduce the four major costs
Luckin Coffee uses the new retail concept, full data operation and management, resulting in low management cost, low customer acquisition cost, fast traffic fission, and basically zero scene cost, while traditional coffee only costs more than 30% of the rent and decoration!
1. No cashier, no cashier. Reduce offline store management costs;
2. Cashless transactions, ordering and payment are completed on the online APP, and then new through fission marketing. Reduced customer acquisition costs;
3. Backstage big data automatically records consumer preferences, and carries out precise marketing to increase the repurchase rate and rapid fission. reduce traffic costs;
4. The coffee is mainly picked up by the store, supplemented by SF Express. The scene cost is basically zero.
Second, put your money where the knife is
What Luckin Coffee does next is to return to the coffee itself through the cost savings, create super cost-effective products, and complete consumption upgrades.
The traditional retail industry pursues large-scale competition through rapid expansion, so "economic principles" and "efficiency principles" are the core content of the retailer's business philosophy. Consumer interests are often the most easily overlooked value factor.
In today's new retail scenario, consumer demand is the biggest starting point for retailers.
1. Luckin coffee price
Since consumers are most sensitive to price factors, Luckin Coffee has made a new positioning of prices.
The price of coffee is about 20-30 yuan, and the price range is stuck below Starbucks and Costa (30-40 yuan), and above KFC, McDonald's and other fast food coffee (10-20 yuan).
2. Use 20% more expensive coffee beans than the market
Luckin Coffee chooses more expensive Arabica beans, which are 20% to 30% more expensive than commercial coffee beans currently on the market. The coffee beans are mainly Arabica beans from four famous producing areas in the world, including Ethiopia and Colombia.
Besides the coffee beans, the ingredients are also world-class.
Caramel is the caramel of FABBRI (Fabri), the most famous and oldest coffee syrup manufacturer in Italy.
Matcha is a flavor-free, color-free, and preservative-free Uji Matcha under the umbrella of Japan's Uji Matcha Co., Ltd. It is known for its unique biological functions and "green" nature.
3. Use a Swiss top coffee machine
The coffee machine uses SCHAERER (Shelley), the current No. 1 selling Swiss automatic coffee machine manufacturer.
The application of automatic coffee machines greatly improves the stability of extraction pressure and water temperature, and avoids the influence of human factors that may affect the quality of coffee.
4. World-class barista recipes
Founder and CEO Qian Zhiya invited three WBC (World Barista Competition) champions from Italy, Japan and China to be responsible for formulating recipes and designing products.
Looking at it all the way, we can find that what Luckin Coffee has done is a major feature of the blue ocean strategy: stealing the boat.
Cut down the links that customers do not pay much attention to, or reduce them as much as possible. The cost savings will be smashed in the link where the target customers can feel the most "value".
For example, ZARA, a classic case of the blue ocean strategy, is to invest heavily in high-end store locations and improve the diversity of clothing styles by cutting image endorsements, reducing advertising, and reducing the production of single products.
This approach can be described as very clever.
After reading the strategic layout, let's look at the specific trading method of lucky coffee, pure dry goods!
The logic of pre-testing and ad serving
Most people can only sigh "really rich" when they see the overwhelming advertisements of Luckin Coffee. However, what we need to analyze is the investment logic behind this. After all, if you have money, you must spend it in the right place to get results.
And without hesitation, it is precisely because they have done a good job of pre-testing and let the data speak.
Luckin Coffee initially opened 3 stores in the lobby of the company headquarters, Block C of Galaxy SOHO and Wangjing SOHO for preliminary testing.
In these places, they test 3 styles of play:
Test 1: Corporate headquarters lobby
Test purpose: To observe employees' consumption frequency, repurchase rate, price sensitivity, etc.
Practice: Use internal purchase links and WeChat to place orders, and constantly test the impact of various price combinations and promotion policies on this basis.
Test 2: Galaxy SOHO Block C (good location, crowded, no shortage of new customers)
Test purpose: Wangjing SOHO covers 30,000 people to see how long it will take to reach the maximum production capacity of a single store.
Approach: Look at the number of fission, pull new speed, test App-based fission marketing.
Test 3: Wangjing SOHO (Location is partial, no traffic flow)
Test purpose: Mainly test the effect of scheduled advertisements in WeChat LBS stores.
Approach: Cooperate with the advertisement to see the new speed of fission after customer acquisition.
After three test methods, Luckin Coffee found the most suitable style for them:
1. Quickly inform surrounding people through LBS advertisements
2. Get the first batch of download users for free with the first order
3. Use interesting and powerful fission to pull new (pull one get one free) to attract stock to find increments to obtain virus growth
According to these three play methods, you can achieve the effect they want:
On average, it only takes about two months to achieve the number of store orders to become the coffee shop with the best business in the surrounding area.
So, we see that lucky coffee is grabbing the market, even if they spend a lot of money to advertise, but they have no hesitation from top to bottom.
The input-output ratio is strictly calculated, and the effect is within the expected range. Here, the preparation in the early stage is the biggest focus, and the result is only obtained by nature.
Not only that, Luckin Coffee has also tested different divisions of labor in the online and offline promotion of Luckin Coffee. Let's talk about it in detail.
Online effect, offline brand
How is the online and offline delivery of Luckin Coffee laid out? This is a point we are going to dissect.
After analysis, it is found that they put a lot of advertisements, but they are not blind, but have different choices according to different channels.
Do it online:
1. Online advertisements are mainly targeted by WeChat LBS.
Luckin Coffee is the first of its kind to use LBS for marketing so much in China. They basically invest as soon as they open the store, and repeat the suction around the store. This launch is the integration of brand effects, but mainly considers CPS (transaction cost).
2. Brand contract advertisements in WeChat Moments.
When the number of stores opened in a city basically covers the main urban area, they will consider using the brand contract advertisement of WeChat Moments to enhance their image.
This fee is relatively expensive, and it is basically a brand display, mainly considering exposure and interaction effects (user likes, comments, and coupons).
Offline branding:
The offline delivery of luckin coffee is mainly focused on advertising.
It can be said that focus advertising is recognized as the most efficient traditional media form for branding, because it is compulsive and repeatedly watched.
For launch, they choose office buildings and communities in major urban areas, and do not consider the delivery area. First, they consider the speed of opening stores and can be preheated in advance. Second, consumers have a relatively diverse consumption radius, and brand launch is given priority to covering a wide range of people.
After seeing so many routines of lucky coffee, we have to say that their success is not based on luck. Behind its rapid popularity, there are these unknown efforts.
The inspiration of luckin coffee to us
Although many e-commerce merchants do not do coffee, nor do they do offline, but lucky coffee still gives us great inspiration.
First, how to cut a bloody path in a category that everyone finds it difficult to rebrand. You must know that when it comes to coffee, you will definitely talk about Starbucks. Some people even think that there is only one brand of Starbucks in China.
Luckin Coffee uses the blue ocean strategy.
The second is how to quickly use both online and offline channels to blow up a brand. Many people think that it is better to play online, and some think that it is better to play a brand offline.
But in fact, they do not know how to make good use of the characteristics of both online and offline channels, so they can only be on one side.
The third is speed. To seize the national market, you need to use the fastest speed. The source of the speed is a large number of preliminary tests, using data and effects to speak, rather than using so-called experience.
After all, any old experience pales in the face of new things.
Of course, Luckin Coffee exploded quickly, but it was not without challenges, such as site selection, store operations, and employee training. I hope it can overcome difficulties in the future and bring more inspiration to our entrepreneurs.
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