How does the "Luckin Coffee" that is so fast that people can't understand it work?

Luckin Coffee, which has continued to lose money, completed its listing 18 months after its establishment. It soared 50% at the opening, and its stock price once reached US$6 billion after its listing. It is indeed amazing that Luckin Coffee can achieve such results in such a general environment, and its incomprehensible fast style of play has made many people confused, and they even think that Luckin Coffee is a typical money-making style. . But if we carefully analyze Luckin Coffee’s business model, we will think that the success of Little Blue Cup is not accidental, but inevitable.

I split the entire strategy of Little Blue Cup into three steps. The first step is to conduct sufficient market research to understand the market opportunities and confirm whether you can enter the game; the second step is to accurately position the brand. And implement high-dimensional attacks to seize users' minds; the third step is to use traffic pool thinking for fission marketing.

According to third-party data, China’s coffee consumption is growing at an annual rate of more than 15%, which has huge potential compared to 2% of the global market; the global coffee market is worth 12 trillion yuan, of which the United States alone accounts for 30,000 yuan. billion, while China only has 70 billion, which means there is relatively huge room for development. It is worth noting that the structure of coffee drinking is also very different between the Chinese market and the global market. Globally, freshly ground coffee accounts for 87%, and instant coffee accounts for less than 13%. The Chinese market is exactly the opposite, with instant coffee accounting for 84% and freshly ground coffee accounting for only 16%. It can be seen that high-quality coffee experience is seriously lacking in China. With the deepening of the concept of consumption upgrade, the demand for freshly ground coffee in the Chinese market will increase significantly in the future.

Obviously, Qian Zhiya, the founder of Luckin Coffee, saw the opportunities in the industry and quickly assembled a team with capabilities that matched the opportunities. He used Internet thinking and a steady stream of funds to fully educate the market and challenge user perceptions. Moreover, unlike the development logic of traditional enterprises, Luckin Coffee is not afraid of huge losses and mainly uses the user growth model as its development logic. This style of play has indeed caused a lot of doubts in the industry, believing that such a money-burning model will lead to the same ending as bicycle sharing. However, I personally think there is an essential difference. Luckin Coffee’s combination of online App and offline stores implies an important trend in new retail. With strong operations and rapid development, it can achieve completely different results.

Behind every successful brand is the support of corporate strategy, and Luckin Coffee is no exception. In the early days of its establishment, Luckin Coffee used two combinations of oppositional positioning and high-dimensional strikes to continuously enhance the brand image of Luckin Coffee and achieve the number one position on the user side.

Oppositional positioning

The core of the concept of oppositional positioning is strong competition orientation, forming a differentiated positioning with competitors. This method is very suitable for latecomer brands. For example, the opposite positioning of Guazi used cars is that there are no middlemen to make the difference, which is in opposition to the irregularity of the entire industry. The opposite positioning of Shenzhou Car Rental is "safer special cars", which puts competing products on the opposite side, allowing users to form a kind of The perception that other private cars are unsafe.

Luckin Coffee adopts a counter-positioning approach, using Starbucks, the big brother in the coffee industry, as a competing product to continuously attack Starbucks’ weaknesses while strengthening its own brand image. For example, Starbucks focuses on the coffee shop experience in the offline third space, while Luckin Coffee seizes the limitations of the third space and uses unlimited scenarios to subvert Starbucks' advantages, reposition its competitors' brands, and force its competitors to to a disadvantageous position.

In addition, as a new coffee brand, Luckin Coffee also conducted porcelain marketing on May 15, 2018, and sent an open letter to Starbucks, pointing out that Starbucks supplies small blue cups. The pressure on business owners instantly increased the popularity of Luckin Coffee. There are various signs that Luckin Coffee has been eyeing Starbucks from the day it was founded. Everything is done to give users a perception that Luckin Coffee dares to challenge industry giants and even has the ability to overthrow Starbucks.

Not only that, the Little Blue Cup team also spent a lot of time creating visual symbols and auditory symbols to enhance this user perception. The design of the deer antler LOGO gives people a sense of daring to break the rules and seek breakthroughs. The setting of the small blue cup forms a sharp contrast with Starbucks' green LOGO, making the two brands strongly associated. Whenever users see Starbucks, they will think of Luckin Coffee, reducing users' memory costs.

In terms of auditory symbols, the slogan "Who doesn't love this cup?" has a meaning of challenging the user's mind. Through a rhetorical question, the user has 1 second to think and answer, thereby enhancing the retention of the little blue cup in the user's mind. time.

High-dimensional attack

Luckin Coffee has successfully established a strong connection between itself and Starbucks, but this is not enough to become a hard-core means to attack Starbucks. Luckin Coffee, which is well aware of this truth, quickly launched a high-dimensional attack, seizing the limitations of Starbucks' traditional offline cafes, strengthening its Internet attributes, seizing the minds of users with the first brand of new retail coffee, and achieving precise cards. Bit. That is to say, relying on differentiated positioning, Luckin Coffee has successfully positioned itself first in the new category industry. Let Luckin Coffee be promoted from a challenger to an industry leader, which will greatly enhance users’ brand awareness of Luckin Coffee.

Starbucks’ subsequent actions further deepened Luckin Coffee’s leadership position. In August 2018, Starbucks, under pressure, announced that it would cooperate with Alibaba’s Ele.me. Starbucks would choose to sell its products in 31 locations across the country. 2,000 offline stores in key cities provide takeaway delivery. The emergence of this news made many people believe that "Starbucks was forced to compromise by Luckin Coffee", thereby establishing Luckin Coffee's industry status.

Luckin Coffee’s marketing routine is worth learning. It uses existing stock to find incremental growth, and its high-band and high-frequency approach takes traffic pool thinking to the extreme. To prevent anyone from confusing traffic pool thinking and traffic thinking, we first distinguish the two concepts. Traffic thinking is simply to obtain traffic to form a conversion, while traffic pool thinking is to obtain traffic and obtain more traffic through storage, operation and exploration. There is a problem that needs attention here. From a technical point of view, traffic pool thinking requires the construction of a data model, and Ruixing Coffee’s choice of self-built App’s online transaction method solves this problem very well, and conducts data analysis based on user purchasing behavior. , and ultimately form user portraits and create a traffic pool for user fission.

Luckin Coffee’s marketing routine is simple and practical. Roughly speaking, it can be divided into three steps: first cup reward, new acquisition reward, and coffee treat.

In the early days, Luckin Coffee used advertising and product trials to find seed users. For example, white-collar workers in an office building may see Luckin Coffee’s free first order advertisement when riding in the elevator, and scan the QR code to register. Can become a seed user. (The larger the seed user base, the better the effect of later fission). The second step is to attract new users, because the essence of fission is to attract new users to old users, and a certain temptation needs to be given to both parties. Therefore, Luckin Coffee deliberately spends part of its advertising costs on new subsidies to catalyze users' social desires through welfare induction and highly creative sharing methods, thereby obtaining social traffic at a lower cost to form fission marketing. The third step is to set up a coffee treat. Compared with the simple and crude WeChat red envelope, this method expresses the user's feelings for friends. The way I treat you to coffee is closer to the social etiquette in people's real life.

Look for market opportunities, accurately position your brand, and make good use of fission thinking. Simple moves and fast execution are the keys to Luckin Coffee’s success, even so fast that people can’t understand them. Because they played too resolutely, without hesitation in making decisions, without mercy on losses, and without procrastination. It seems that Luckin Coffee is just trying to deceive investors. In fact, Luckin has a very mature operation team and a clear development plan. In any case, Luckin Coffee, which has reached this stage, has a strong sense of fantasy, with firm investors, rapid user growth, objective revenue, and successfully completed its listing. People like to question unreasonable phenomena, but I prefer to find reasonable parts in seemingly unreasonable situations. The growth path of Little Blue Cup may not be replicated, but the style of play and attitude are worth learning from.

Technology Silver Fox

Well-known technology self-media: recommended author, Baidu dynamic celebrity.

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