/PRCWT/GUANGZHOU, January 18, 2024 - Loopy, the pink beaver, uses emojis to go out of the loop on social platforms, becoming a vehicle for young people to release their emotions and achieve identity and emotional resonance. Many brands, including Luckin, have also taken advantage of this opportunity to set off a joint trend. Loopy emojis are similar to the previous "dopamine", which essentially captures the young people's desire for emotional value.
Lengthening the field of vision, many consumer events are actually a microcosm of Generation Z's entry into society, bringing new emotional demand consumption fashion. Including the 11th National Congress of the Communist Party of China promoting the decline in popularity and the return of offline fields to the consumer center; Generation Z is willing to spend a lot of money on interest, focusing on "the province should spend flowers"; "crispy college students" have become stalks, and today's young people who do not have a heart for health care... These real choices, like millions of DNA, eventually converge into a unique consumption map driven by the emotional value of young people.
For brands, these clues are all guidelines on "how to properly embrace young people". If a brand is willing to sink down and explore, what kind of youthful answer will it eventually hand over?
From "closer" to "better experience"
To achieve an effective rejuvenation, the first thing is to think about how to operate the relationship with the target consumers in the actual operation of the brand. To achieve this, the brand needs to establish an effective touchpoint setting with the target consumer group first. For young people, easy access and long-term companionship are excellent "weapons" to effectively impress them.
At present, more than 90% of Watson's customers are urban women aged 18-45, including young students, newcomers to the workplace, and many young people who consume at the mid-to-high end. Watsons, which has been in the same frequency as young people for a long time, has naturally captured this, and its first strategy is to "get closer to them" as much as possible. On the one hand,
Under the control of epidemic normalization, the authenticity and experience of offline consumption are more precious, and the offline scene will become the most direct communication touchpoint between Watsons and young consumers; on the other hand, if you want to penetrate the minds of young people, you need brands to carry out long-term communication based on the scene.
After a long-term layout, among the current Watsons stores in the core urban areas of the country, there are about 830 stores with universities about 3 kilometers away. These stores are also called "campus stores" internally, and most of them are gathered in the vicinity of young groups to achieve effective "companion value". "Campus stores" cover more than 15 million college students, each of which may be the potential traffic of Watsons' new retail experience scene.
What's more, Watsons also provides very popular "value-added" products from the perspective of young people, such as combinations based on sets, virtual cross-category creation, and a number of styling services such as manicures and wigs. Like creating exclusive "Easter eggs" for young people, it further breaks the communication restrictions between each other.
"Getting closer" is just the first step. Based on this, it is more important to let young people "experience better". Looking back on the years when you stepped into the university campus, will you encounter the situation of pursuing a healthy and upward life, but lack of action, and need a senior to lead in the front; and the novice skin care is not the essence, and you are still a novice in the workplace makeup near graduation, and you long for a senior to guide you.
Watsons seizes the natural curiosity of young people for diverse and novel experiences, and starts from their actual life and learning scenarios to provide college students with accurate scene-based communication such as workplace makeup and skin care guides, healthy and beautiful interactive games, and sustainable lifestyle advocacy.
Last year, Watsons has successfully held more than 530 campus events, covering more than 90 cities and 460 colleges and universities, and exploring healthy and energetic lifestyle trends with more than 9 million college students. Looking back at the whole process, it can be seen that Watsons has completed a "brand adding personal touch" ceremony with the help of this event.
The core of the so-called "brand adding personal touch" is to make the brand without human characteristics warm and concrete. Under the dual infiltration of scenes and activities, for many college students, Watsons is more like a caring senior sister, or a warm and soulful friend, with long-term companionship, and timely guidance when needed. In this way, Watsons has narrowed the psychological distance with the young consumer group, and completed a precise touch in a new, personalized and warm way.
Today, the essence of experience as a retail industry has fully returned, and the industry also hopes to evoke consumers' perception. Watsons has long recognized this trend and proposed to focus on store product display and product selection strategy iteration, and added retail scenes such as fragrance stations, trendy makeup areas, and BA InspireCloud experience. It is committed to creating a youthful and energetic atmosphere, bringing users deep "emotional value" such as relaxing themselves and pleasing themselves.
This is actually a great example of transforming "brand language" into "user language" through product and service upgrades, so that young consumers can more intuitively feel the strength and determination of the brand's comprehensive renewal.
Understand what young people love and play with them
If the experience upgrade brought by products and services is like laying a solid foundation for youth, interesting and rich marketing activities can stimulate young people's interest and set the "finishing touch" for youth. Brands often take this as the core and have a deep "long talk" with young people based on interests, emotions, needs, etc.
Young consumers especially hope to achieve diverse interactions with brands in diverse scenarios. Only by occupying the most focused scenes of young people's minds can brands plant anchors for young consumers and build a common discourse system between the two parties, thereby precipitating consumers' continued awareness of the brand and achieving sustainable growth.
In order to create an accurate communication scene that is more suitable for the Generation Z crowd, the brand continues to gain insight into the preferences of Generation Z consumer groups, actively establish contact with them, continue to occupy the social position of young people, and integrate into the communication context of Generation Z, so as to strengthen the consensus of youth. Combined with Watson's recent O + O marketing activities and dismantling them, two hidden specific directions can be found.
One is the insight into young people's life concepts and lifestyles. The fitness method pursued by Generation Z can be City Walk or the popular "Baduanjin". They are setting off a new trend of health and wellness. In their concept, "beauty and health" are important. The new personalized lifestyle that regards health as fashion and pursues health value has become a real desire of many young people.
As early as the rise of healthy consumption, Watsons used the image of "healthy and beautiful" to occupy the user's mind. After gaining insight into the new trend of healthy consumption among young people, Watsons proposed "new aesthetics of health", advocating that beauty can be achieved through internal adjustment and external nourishment. For Watsons, the next proposition that needs to be solved is how to make young people "listen to persuasion" and let them have a two-way journey with "healthy beauty".
Watsons chose to connect healthy beauty with youthful vitality, combine Eastern aesthetics with Western health elements, and jointly advocate a healthy and optimistic attitude towards life with young people, further broadening young people's perception of the brand.
Based on this idea, Watsons and the world-famous health and fashion lifestyle blogger Pamela joined hands to create a traditional martial arts movement, "Pat Eight Xu", "Tai Chi Push Palm" and other conventional Western training movements, to create an "Oriental Aesthetic Health Exercise" suitable for Chinese young people. When training, trainers can first use the simple internal tone of "Pat Eight Xu", and then cooperate with the dynamic rhythm to meet the needs of fitness and fat loss. In the current consumer environment, this set of aerobics can also help more young consumers achieve beauty, body and mind at zero cost and low threshold.
At the same time, sports and fitness have become a new social language of Generation Z. Watsons has a precise insight into young people's preferences, joined hands with Pamela to enter the campus, and led more than 1,000 students and sports experts from Shanghai universities to dance this set of "Oriental Aesthetic Health Exercises", dance passionately with their classmates, release their youthful vitality, and immerse themselves in the charm of the new oriental health aesthetics, successfully leveraging more young people to pursue "healthy beauty" together.
The second is to explore young people's love and create social topics from IP. In the multicultural era, young consumer groups are more pursuing consumption based on interests and hobbies, and the consumption guidance and value creativity shown by IP are becoming more and more significant.
Adhering to the concept of embracing the diversity of young people and entering their hearts, Watsons recently joined hands with Kuaikan Comics to launch a comic theme store, incorporating a number of well-known comic IP elements into the image of Watsons stores, and building the store into a "two-dimensional space" around young people. In addition to purchasing the surrounding area of the country, consumers can also unlock the same makeup of the manga idol. Layer by layer, continue to amplify the interest and consumption power of users in the two-dimensional circle, and maintain emotional resonance with the young group.
Nowadays, Watsons is very familiar with the path of forming continuous mental communication with young people. While firmly providing functional value to young consumer groups, it is flexible to maintain high-frequency dialogues with young people through various forms of activities, extensive communication channels, and self-output content and stories.
Looking at the upgrading of retail formats from an industry perspective, rejuvenation is an inevitable trend. But more importantly, how to catch up with the pace of young people, better grasp their own unique value, and continue to amplify their advantages. As a brand, it is necessary to go out boldly, approach the target group, and open up offline and online channels to win the hearts of consumer customers; it is also necessary to simultaneously cater to the preferences of young people in the retail experience and provide them with diverse and rich choices.
It has to be admitted that compared with the "online brand" born out of the young group, traditional brands often have to go through the pain of radical innovation in launching the youth battle, and they must need a deeper brand concept as support. For Watsons, the key to the concept is "people-centered". With this as an anchor, we can rely on the insight of consumer preferences, consumer behavior and intrinsic value tendencies in the ups and downs of the industry to play a steady and impartial role.
Holding the consumer with the left hand and gaining insight into trends; grasping the O + O strategy with the right hand to build a borderless experience scenario for users, Watsons not only realizes the expansion of the road of self-development, but also provides new solutions for the upgrading of the industry.
