Recently, the first "Funeral Tea" tea shop in China opened in Shanghai. Like "online celebrity Restaurant" such as "Happy Tea" and "Master Bao", the customers of "Funeral Tea" kept coming in an endless stream, which even led to the phenomenon that scalpers bought "online celebrity Food" at a higher price. At the same time, many well-known "online celebrity restaurants" have closed down one after another, and even some veteran stores have become "chicken feathers in one place". "online celebrity catering" is a world of ice and fire. What is the reason behind this?
Queue for 7 hours just for a cup of tea
"Food is the most important thing for the people". In the Internet age, when Internet celebrities are highly sought after, "online celebrity Catering" has also set off an iterative and updated "queuing economy". It is reported that the queuing time for buying "Hi Tea", "Master Bao" and "Cheese of Light", which are known as the "Three Giants of People’s Square" in Shanghai, can reach 7 hours, which leads to scalpers’ purchasing and queuing for payment, which makes the premium of "Hi Tea" for a cup of 20 to 30 yuan as high as 100 yuan, and merchants even introduce the regulation of real-name purchase of ID cards, causing widespread controversy.
Not only Shanghai, but also Hongkong’s "Jenny cookies" are sold daily in limited quantities, and Beijing’s "Taoyuan Village" is called "Hermes" in the field of soybean milk fritters, and the explosive market of "online celebrity Catering" can be seen.
Take "Xicha" as an example. In May 2012, the first store opened in Jiuzhong Street, Jiangmen City, Guangdong Province. At present, there are about 50 branches in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Foshan. Only stores in Guangzhou and Shenzhen have an average monthly turnover of more than 1 million yuan, among which the most popular coastal city store in Shenzhen has an area of about 90 square meters and a monthly turnover of more than 1.5 million yuan.
With the subtle influence of Internet development on the market, the catering industry in online celebrity has also experienced different stages of change. During the period of 1.0, the cognition of the traditional catering industry was subverted from the consumer level. People found that apart from "eating", there were different experiences such as personalized service and style environment.
In the period of 2.0, which focused on the combination of marketing and products, topical packaging gave food unprecedented communication power and greatly shortened the brand’s cognitive cycle; In the period of 3.0, personalized labels such as "fashion brand", "luxury" and "ingenuity" attached importance to the overall creation of "online celebrity catering", but it was followed by increasingly severe customer loyalty.
The consumption power of "light food" has increased by 14% annually.
In 2016, the national catering revenue was 3,577.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.8%, while the GDP increased by 6.7%.
According to international data experience, the overall growth rate of the catering industry can maintain steady and rapid development when the per capita disposable income of the country is between 5,000 and 10,000 US dollars. According to the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the per capita disposable income of urban residents in China in 2016 was 33,616 yuan, which is in good agreement with this data interval.
Under the background of the booming industry, "online celebrity Restaurant" is unique in its store location, style design and service details. A simple cup of milk tea can be selected with different flavors. When it is sold, the temperature and method suitable for drinking will be indicated on the teacup, and even the image of the store attendant is required as "online celebrity".
At the same time, "online celebrity Catering" has grasped the consumption characteristics of young people’s purchasing power in pursuit of fashion hotspots, covering people between the ages of 14 and 35. The consumption power of this kind of "light food" main consumer group is increasing at an average annual rate of 14%. The younger generation subconsciously hopes to seek a sense of collective identity and reach a certain consensus by queuing or eating the same bowl of noodles.
In addition, emotional rendering, star effect and other highlights prompted consumers to spontaneously share recommendations on social networks. According to the analysis of people in the catering industry, compared with traditional restaurants, their marketing methods are more changeable, not only through word-of-mouth communication by diners, but also through cross-border cooperation with many brands to jointly create topics, which is worth thinking about by catering people.
From superficial efforts to core values
However, "parallel" restaurants, which once set a record of 52 stores in eight months, have been closed in Beijing, Fuzhou, Ningbo and other places. The pancake fruit shop "Huang Taiji", with the highest valuation of 1.2 billion yuan, has also admitted that it has closed half of its doors, and the performance of the creative dish "Carved sirloin" has dropped by nearly 80% compared with the peak period.
The "online celebrity Restaurant" has gone wave after wave in a short-lived vortex. According to the data, in 2016, the monthly closing rate of the catering industry in China was as high as 10%, and the annual compound closing rate exceeded 100%.
Low consumer loyalty is one of the potential risks of "online celebrity catering". Under the fast pace of life, consumer groups with distinctive personalities have the characteristics of pursuing fresh enthusiasm and easy to lose. The disconnection between marketing and products makes merchants ignore the essence of catering industry. "Fun" is only the added value of food and cannot be the core of restaurants.
Some enterprises win the attention through gimmick marketing and charge the joining fee, which is prone to problems. The unified distribution of ingredients, the unified management of chefs, and the inspection and supervision of storefronts are all very important, and the difficulty lies in management. Some enterprises join quickly, but the depth and intensity of management and control of franchise stores are not enough.
Experts said that "online celebrity Catering" will inevitably get lost in the noisy market in the later period, and only rely on the big waves of the market to urge some catering enterprises to awaken themselves and turn from superficial efforts to building brand core values.
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