How to develop Hunan cuisine brands

Due to its highly aggressive taste, Hunan cuisine has been sweeping the country at a speed rarely seen in history in recent years.

Most Hunan cuisine bosses in Hunan are courageous, love to learn, have foresight, dare to deny themselves, dare to push back, and dare to actively innovate.

The following is a case in which we serve a Hunan cuisine brand. Now I will share the strategy and logic behind the entire case with you, hoping to inspire you.

The founder of the project, Mr. Jiang, is a chef and started from scratch. He runs a Hunan restaurant called Private Kitchen in Xiangtan, Hunan.

Earlier, with his excellent cooking skills, he personally managed the restaurant and managed it successfully for more than ten years, and then gradually entered into a chain development.

However, because the trademark "private kitchen cuisine" could not be registered, a new brand called XXXX was established.

However, after investing millions, this new brand took several years to come into being. It has always been tepid.

So we invested millions of dollars in upgrades and re-planned and launched a flagship store.

However, after the new store was launched, not only did the business not meet expectations, but the performance of the two original stores was also It is also gradually declining. So he came to us for cooperation.

We then began to investigate the entire project.

Why is the business of the first store booming, the performance of the second store tepid, and the third new store even more unsatisfactory? What is the problem?

We After research and analysis, the following conclusions are drawn.

First, the new brand has low awareness.

The original private kitchen brand name is easy to recognize and spread, and can be remembered once you say it.

And this new brand name, XXXX, not only has no value orientation and positive associations. On the contrary, it is too connotative, resulting in high recognition costs, high memory costs, and high communication costs for this new brand name. Secondly, a designer who doesn’t understand brand marketing, in order to pursue the elegance and beauty of design, designed this new brand XXXX without even basic recognition, including the brand’s logo, which is also poorly designed. This design not only fails to reduce consumers’ cognitive load, but instead creates information asymmetry. The final result is that not only does the high-cost storefront have no customer acquisition advantages,

Secondly, the brand has no unique value and no clear reason to buy.

We communicated with consumers and distributed 2,000 questionnaires and came to the conclusion:

XXXX is an extensive cognition in the minds of consumers.

Swamped in the homogeneity of several Hunan restaurants, the overall dining experience has no distinct value memory point. There is no differentiated purchase reason for consumers to travel three to five kilometers to eat. The existing customer base is almost all random customers from the surrounding area one kilometer away for convenience.

In the past, private kitchens also had information asymmetry problems such as unclear value propositions and unclear purchase reasons. But the reason why it has been popular for so many years is, first of all, because the competition in that era was not so fierce, and secondly, through years of word-of-mouth accumulation, it has accumulated a large number of repeat purchases from loyal customers. If a new brand has no unique differentiated value and no clear reason to buy, it will naturally have no advantage in creating new customers.

Third, the product taste has no advantage.

The original private kitchen has been able to continue to be popular for so many years. The core reason is that the founder personally purchases the ingredients, strictly controls the ingredients, and personally cooks the dishes. In terms of product taste, he insists on the taste of Hunan local cuisine all year round. However, once we embark on the road of chain operation, the entire product production system must weaken its reliance on chef skills and adopt standardized, industrialized, and packaged operating procedures. The product taste is also forced to upgrade from the original Xiangtan flavor. It is a compound seasoning flavor. The dishes with compound seasonings are completely incomparable to the original local dishes and native dishes.

It’s okay to open one or two stores, but once you want to grow bigger, you have to go chef-oriented and take the road of standardization, which will inevitably lead to sacrificing the advantage in taste. Once the taste advantage is sacrificed, the core competitiveness is lost. We can only make efforts in the aspects of environment, model, brand, marketing, efficiency, price, etc.

This is why you see many Hunan cuisine chain brands with overwhelming advertisements, various business model innovations, various high-end and fresh decoration environments, and various promotional specials. Wait,

But when you finally pay the bill, you will find that the average price per person is only forty or fifty yuan, and many are even as low as thirty yuan, while the unit price per customer of many fly restaurants can be seventy or eighty yuan. reason.

Because the disadvantages of chain Hunan cuisine brands are exactly the advantages of these fly restaurants. Therefore, it is impossible to harvest these fly houses.

Secondly, the supply of the entire Hunan cuisine back-end industrial chain system is incomplete, the distribution system is immature, there is a lack of large-scale high-quality raw material planting and supply bases, and there is also a lack of large-scale stable and mature suppliers of specialty accessories, seasonings, equipment, etc.

In other words, if you want to build a Hunan cuisine brand with a unit price of 100 yuan to 100 directly-operated stores in Hunan, there are no mature suppliers, and many of them have to rebuild a standardized supply chain system on their own. .

Fourth, the model is too heavy and the environment is old.

XXXX’s model and decoration style tend to be fast fashion. Fast fashion style itself is a short-term trend and cannot withstand the precipitation of time. Moreover, the depreciation rate of the decoration space is very high, so there is no advantage in the overall environmental experience if it is only opened for two or three years.

At the same time, the main customer base of the fast fashion model is young people who are not sociable, and they are basically four-person stations. It is suitable for selling through the Pinmao channel and relies on the turnover rate to win.

The channel is street shops. The main customer groups and consumption scenarios of street shops are family dinners, friend gatherings, favor banquets, light business, and small banquets. In other words, community streets In side shops, there is a greater demand for round tables and private rooms.

If you open an 800-square-meter fast fashion restaurant in a street shop community, the result is that the four-person table in the lobby is not full, and the round table in the private room is not enough. The utilization rate of the overall space area is not reasonable, so that the square meter efficiency and human efficiency are low.

Including the product structure and pricing system are wrong. Because, opening an 800-square-meter fast-fashion Hunan cuisine model in the communities and streets of Xiangtan is not done right.

In summary. The core reasons for performance growth bottlenecks are the following four points.

First, low brand recognition and low awareness lead to low natural customer acquisition power of the store.

Second, the brand has no unique value. As a result, there is no reason for consumers to come from three to five kilometers away to eat. They can only pick up the business of some surrounding residents.

Thirdly, the product taste has no advantage, resulting in low repurchase rate.

Fourthly, the 800-square-meter fast fashion model is opened in the community, resulting in the model being too heavy, and the human efficiency and square footage efficiency are low.

The above is only a single-dimensional analysis conclusion from outside to inside.

If we enlarge the spatial perspective and analyze the macro competitive landscape, the actual situation is even less optimistic.

In the entire Xiangtan, there are only a few restaurants, and supply exceeds demand. Hunan cuisine brands are extremely homogeneous. Most of them rely on heavy investment, heavy operations, and high cost performance to build barriers. Basically, single store investment The models all pay for themselves in about 3 years.

The number of Hunan cuisine brands that can recover investment within one year does not exceed 5% of the entire Xiangtan (stores with a single store investment of more than 1.5 million yuan). This is still a street shop. The situation at Pinmao is even worse.

Finally, after many discussions and evaluations, we decided to readjust the strategic positioning of the company.

First, a single breakthrough, focusing on Xiangtan boiled live fish.

Why?

Because the core of management is balance, and the core of strategy is breakthrough. The core of breakthrough is to first identify and judge strategic opportunities, and secondly to solve internal problems.

This is called opportunity greater than value, value greater than problem.

Then why focus on Xiangtan boiled live fish?

The reasons are as follows.

1. Have cultural power.

The dish of Xiangtan boiled live fish was created during Zeng Guofan's victory in the Qing Dynasty. It has experienced hundreds of years of precipitation and inheritance, and has extremely tenacious vitality and cultural force.

2. There is regional potential energy.

The secret of cooking live fish in Xiangtan lies in the word "Xiangtan". It is the only local dish in Hunan cuisine named after the city of Xiangtan. It is similar to Tianjin Goubuli steamed buns, Nanjing duck blood vermicelli soup, and Beijing roast duck. It occupies a regional potential energy and is a public culture with a clear mind and consciousness. assets.

It has the genes to become a local delicacy business card and a local characteristic signboard.

3. It has the forward-looking potential of the times.

The Xiangtan Municipal Government and the Xiangtan Industry Association are vigorously promoting the food culture strategy of "one side of the landscape, one side of the people, Xiangtan celebrities and Xiangtan flavor". Catering people from all walks of life are encouraged to explore historical and cultural origins. Vigorously innovate and promote.

At the same time, the government will invest in comprehensively integrating financial resources to promote the image of Xiangtan's food culture and tourism, and comprehensively build Xiangtan's food, beautiful scenery, celebrities, folk customs and other cultural tourism industries.

The biggest core key of strategy is to follow the trend, and the biggest potential energy is the opportunity of the times.

4. Have mental consciousness.

We distributed 1,000 consumer mind surveys and found that 85% of consumers know and have eaten Xiangtan boiled live fish. When asked about the delicious specialties in Xiangtan, 29.7% of consumers recommended the Xiangtan boiled live fish to us.

At the same time, after research, it was found that Xiangtan boiled live fish has extremely high value recognition in cities other than Xiangtan, such as Changsha, Zhuzhou, and even Shenzhen. And it has the foundation to go nationwide.

5. Not occupied.

The Xiangtan boiled live fish, a public cultural asset, has not been discovered, recognized and occupied by other brands in the market. It can be said to be a huge strategic blank opportunity.

6. High sense of value.

Xiangtan boiled live fish takes advantage of the unique Xiangjiang water source in the Xiangtan basin. It has a high sense of value and is a good seed.

7. Demand high frequency and wide spread.

Suitable for all ages, with a broad customer base. And there is no feast without fish, and it has the attributes of a hit in banquet scenes.

8. The supply chain is stable.

The risk coefficients of categories such as chickens and ducks are lower compared with the same period last year, and the price coefficients of categories such as cattle and sheep are more stable compared with the same period last year. And the breeding and supply chain system is more stable. It has the basic support to become bigger and stronger and open hundreds of stores. To sum up, Xiangtan boiled live fish has the advantages of cultural strength, regional potential, sense of value, and stable supply chain.

We finally decided to focus on Xiangtan boiled live fish and use this product to take on the task of breaking the entire strategy.

However, the dish of Xiangtan boiled live fish only has cognitive To truly undertake the task of strategic customer acquisition, in addition to giving it a cultural story, more importantly, it must also give this product a unique differentiated value. Therefore, we recommend retaining the genetic basis of this product and innovating.

2. Give products unique value through product innovation.

1. Another major feature of Xiangtan, lotus seeds and bamboo fungus, is added to this dish. At the same time, some innovations have been made in product technology research and development;

2. Select the most tender fish of about 2.5 kilograms, and build a third-level breeding base to purify the meat quality and taste of the fish;

3. Cooking in a small pot with an open block; cooking in a single pot,

4. Develop and design a tableware with the shape of a gold ingot;

5. Design an advanced Taste the soup, then eat the fish, then make the rice to experience the cooking rituals and serving skills, etc.

Focusing on the signature dish of Xiangtan boiled live fish is just the breaking point of the strategy, giving consumers a clear reason to buy and giving the brand an advantage in acquiring customers. However, to achieve truly sustained and stable growth, the core key lies in the allocation of resources along the entire value chain.

Third, focus on the "banquet" scene, promote the "delicious" strategy, and reconstruct the value chain.

Why?

Because unmet consumer demand is the focus of corporate strategy and the starting point for resource allocation in the entire value chain. The Hunan vegetable market in Xiangtan can be roughly divided into the following four types of businesses.

1. Commercial and supermarket brands

Main customer groups: mainly working-class families and young white-collar workers. Consumption scenario: Mainly family gatherings, eating, drinking and having fun, leisure and light socializing.

The advantage of the brand is channel protection and high brand exposure. The disadvantages are weak product capabilities, high rental properties, and limited customer flow, resulting in more monks and less food.

2. Fly Restaurant

In fact, the customer groups with real spending power in third- and fourth-tier cities rarely go to shopping malls for consumption. They like to run fly restaurants, because many fly restaurant owners are chefs themselves. At the same time, I purchase it myself, cook it myself, and order the food as I see it. The ingredients are fresh and the taste is indeed better.

However, most of the fly restaurants have simple environments, poor experience, unsafe food and hygiene, and cannot meet the needs of social banquets. If you want delicious food but also want to treat guests with dignity, then go to a high-end club.

3. Similar to large hotels and private clubs

The main customer base of this type of restaurant is mainly high-spending businessmen and politicians in Xiangtan. The consumption scene is purely business banquets and government receptions. Lord. The advantage is that the ingredients are fresh, the chefs are skilled, the service is good, and the environment is good; the disadvantage is that the price per customer is too high, basically upwards of 200, and the price/performance ratio is low, so the customer base is also small.

4. Community street shop brands

Brands such as XXXX. Main customer group: mainly families from surrounding communities. The consumption scenarios are mainly family dinners, friend gatherings, favor banquets, light business and small banquets.

The advantages are good environment, good service, high cost performance and face. The disadvantages are weak product strength, complex taste, seasoning taste, and packaged ingredients.