The Tea of it all
All about tea while you sip one
LIPTON
CONTENTS
The evolution of Lipton.
Facing covid-19,, how should Lipton develop and what changes they did?
Lipton's market strategies to enter Chinese market.
Why people choose Lipton?
My experience at Lipton pop-up store.(Offline analysis)
Lipton's external competitive environment in China.() Digimind
The evolution of Lipton
Lipton is the world's largest tea brand. Lipton is all about light, energy and natural beauty. Thomas Lipton is the founder of this brand. In 1890, he officially launched Lipton black tea in The UK with the slogan "Direct from tea Garden to the Tea Pot".
Lipton tea brand. It represents both an expert in tea and an international, fashionable and urban life. For more than 100 years, Lipton has always maintained the excellent quality and aroma of generations of delicious.
Thomas Lipton, who was born into a poor family in Glasgow, Scotland in 1850, was the founder of the brand. Once, go out to travel Lipton came to the famous black tea production Ceylon. Ceylon black tea is a favorite drink of the British, but only the upper class can enjoy it because of its high price. Lipton was sensitive to the fact that black tea could become a good business if it could be introduced into the daily life of the masses.
In 1890, he officially introduced Lipton black tea in England. His slogan is "Direct from tea garden to the tea pot".
In 1892, Lipton began a global movement, opening factories in the United States and then branches in India and entering the Far East. In 1898, Lipton was knighted by the Queen of The United Kingdom, get the "world king of black tea" reputation.
In 1972, 80 years after the elder Lipton began expanding the Lipton brand globally, the turnaround in Lipton's history came when Unilever, the world's most famous consumer goods group, bought the entire brand. From then on, Lipton took unilever this global giant ship, began a more powerful expansion road.
Combining the marketing experience of Lipton and Unilever, Lipton tea products are now sold in 110 countries and regions around the world. Lipton is the world's largest tea brand in terms of popularity and sales, at least double the sales of the next largest. Lipton is now the third most consumed non-alcoholic beverage in the world, behind Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
Lipton entered China in 1992. Just five years later, Lipton ranked first in sales and market share of tea bags in a series of surveys of 100 shopping malls in China.
In addition to the popularity of black tea bags, Lipton is also introducing new tea bags such as green tea bags and jasmine tea bags to cater to The tastes of Chinese consumers. In 2004, it launched a series of instant teas including milk tea and lemon tea. In 2005, it launched a series of herbal tea bags.
Facing covid-19,, how should Lipton develop and what changes they did?
Due to the global economic downturn caused by COVID-19, coupled with some political factors, the sales and development of Unilever's brands are uncertain.
However, as a traditional FMCG giant, Unilever has not been hindered in its transformation and development due to the heavy structure of large enterprises. Instead, it has gone ahead in the industry. From social play, young consumers to use data mining further marketing opportunities, and meet the digital channels the internal architecture of the reform, start-up companies and open mind to embrace the spirit of innovation, implement comprehensive digital transformation, early let Unilever can adapt to the new environment, under the traditional brand assets combined with new carriage passed a timeless experience for consumers.
The epidemic has brought challenges to Lipton on both the demand and supply sides, but Unilever has been laying out and optimizing the intelligent supply chain, which ultimately benefits consumers.
Unilever has a global team dedicated to digital supply chain. At the same time, Unilever is also a pioneer in using AI technology for intelligent demand forecasting to replace traditional artificial forecasting, including partnering with a number of start-ups in this area. This will greatly help us to serve consumers more accurately and quickly in a complex market environment. We believe that all digital transformation is to better serve consumers, and the digital transformation of supply will greatly improve our response speed to consumers, provide more customized supply solutions, and meet the ultimate convenient consumption experience needs of consumers with the most effective cost.
In terms of channels, digitalization has brought a compensating advantage to Unilever in a special period. Unilever had already laid out its plans before the pandemic. In the past, e-commerce and offline channels were separated. However, with the change of digital channels and the integration of online and offline channels, Unilever first reformed the organizational structure of the sales department and concentrated all sales teams together to form an omni-channel. Therefore, when the epidemic broke out, we were able to quickly adjust and transfer our offline sales plan to online.
These pre-execution efforts brought great benefits to the company during the pandemic, especially in the first quarter of 2020, when our O2O channel grew rapidly and made up for offline losses.
Lipton's market strategies to enter Chinese market
Lipton, a British tea brand, not only sold its brand to China, the country with the highest tea output in the world, but also achieved the highest sales volume and market share of tea bags in this country in just five years. What enables Lipton to develop rapidly in the Chinese market with such a profound tea culture?
To study consumers' tea drinking preferences
The so-called consumer insight is to discover the real consumer demand and consumer preference and apply it to the practice of brand marketing. Consumer insight is not easy, it requires sufficient capital investment, scientific and technological input.
"Lipton spends 0.7 percent of its annual sales researching customer needs," said Mandy Osborne, director of consumer science for Lipton black Tea. The contents of the study include consumers' tea drinking habits, preferences for brewing, matching, and packaging forms of tea, factors influencing consumers' choice of tea and tea drinking trends, etc. Lipton has conducted a detailed and in-depth survey and research on the tea drinking habits of consumers in 41 countries around the world and has established a corresponding database. You can access the preliminary data of this survey and research on Lipton's official website.
In order to better understand consumers' tea preferences, Lipton has set up a special laboratory called sensory Project Room at its Black tea r&d base in the UK, which is mainly used for consumer insight research. Developers will convene a group of no particular preference, stable personality, can accurately express their opinion of consumers as the research object, and let them to objective evaluation of the details of the product characteristics, and then through the computer statistical methods to evaluate the characteristics of various products, science and meet consumer demand for effective development of new products.
Lipton insight into consumers, not only from the demographic perspective to judge, but through the consumer lifestyle survey, consumer value trend, aesthetic ideal, occupation positioning, class attribution and other factors of judgment. In the relationship between the target population and tea, Lipton found the alienation between the traditional tea drinking style and consumers' lifestyle and found their demand for "simple and bright" drinking style, "supplementary vitality" and "pleasure of natural beauty" in tea consumption.
Localization strategy in Chinese market
To gain a foothold in the Chinese market, Lipton must face the fact that China has always been a big tea culture, and consumers have a relatively rich knowledge of tea. How to enter the Chinese market, let consumers accept a foreign brand interpretation of the quintessence of the country, is a big problem.
Lipton to solve the problem of the breakthrough is to find the target consumer positioning. In the early stage of entering the Chinese market, Lipton opposed the idea of "tea is a leisurely life drink for middle-aged and elderly people" in the hearts of Chinese consumers and took successful people as the breakthrough to enter the market. Due to the consumption capacity of this group and the identity of foreign brands, it is easier to accept foreign brands.
With gradually fierce competition of tea beverages at home and abroad, Lipton will pioneer consumer groups gradually extended to the young people ages 18 to 35, specific representative for urban white-collar workers, youth and company they are at the forefront of fashion, youth is also easier to accept new things and fast-food culture, for Lipton tea there won't be too strong to resist. At the same time, using these two groups as opinion leaders can spread Lipton's youthful fashion concept among the young generation in China, and take the opportunity to carry out word-of-mouth marketing, and further expand the consumer base.
Changes in brand positioning also need to be tangible through changes in packaging. In the tea art tea ceremony culture popular in the Chinese tea market, Lipton takes the opposite approach, with fashion, sunshine, healthy image facing young Chinese consumers, bright yellow product packaging to consumers refreshing feeling. The classic tea bag design avoids the trouble and embarrassment brought by the traditional tea making method and provides convenient tea making for office white-collar workers. Tea bags are the first choice for young people and office workers who are not particular about drinking tea and have no habit of drinking tea and are easy to accept the culture of fast food.
Why people choose Lipton?
First of all, there is a standard for tea taste. Weather is very important to the tea industry, so it is very important to ensure that the taste of tea is not "eroded" by time and space, rain and climate. "Take Lipton's best-selling black tea as an example, which is also the tea favored by Consumers in Europe and the United States. The tea bags of Lipton black tea are blended from Sri Lanka, Kenya, China and other countries. Lipton's blending center in the United Kingdom blends tea from different origins to produce a basically fixed taste every year. To ensure consumers around the world get the same taste and quality of Lipton tea in all seasons."
Secondly, the brand of Li Dun is very hard, and this "hard" backside, besides the petty endowment style of foreign style leads countless Chinese people to buckle, there is a very important point, that is the global unification of food safety detection standards.
According to the report, "Lipton has strict control over the implementation of food safety standards, even if the local standards are different from those of other markets due to local conditions. As for green tea, there is a regional preference, and the production and testing standards will be based on the relatively strict standards of the host country. For example, Chinese consumers are sensitive to pesticide residues, and export issues are also taken into account, so the standards will be stricter than China's national standard, and the EU standard will be adopted."
Third, and very important, is that their tea comes from sustainable tea plantations. "All of Lipton's suppliers in China, for example, are currently certified by the Rainforest Alliance, a non-profit international non-governmental environmental protection organization that seeks to protect biodiversity and achieve sustainable livelihoods through changes in land use patterns, business and consumer behavior. For tea plantations, it has a tea traceability system, a time record of pesticide use and a whole set of standards."
Fourth, Lipton advocates a simple and convenient lifestyle, no matter in the office, or in the fast food restaurant, no matter at home or travel, can easily drink a cup of clean tea. His cultural pursuit is to simplify, so that when people drink a cup of black tea, they should not always think of their tea is great, let alone increase the burden of drinking tea.
Fifth, Lipton's omni-channel marketing makes people familiar with and trust the brand. When we go to McDonald's for a quick meal and the waiter asks you if you want a cup of Lipton black tea. We invited some friends to a teahouse near the community to drink tea and chat. The waiter brought four or five bags of Lipton black tea in the teapot. When we go shopping in supermarkets of all sizes, the packaging of Lipton black tea will appear in your eyes; We stayed in a nice hotel with Lipton tea in our room. We went to a conference, Lipton served; When we want to drink a cup of fashionable fruit tea, the best match object or Lipton black tea! Lipton black tea is everywhere and in your sight at all times. That's omnichannel.
Finally, Lipton has a strong price advantage. Lipton himself is very aware of several truths: first, high pricing consumers do not accept. Two, the price is high the entry threshold is low. Third, standardized production and sales control can surpass most competitors. Fourth, what the product should do is not to raise the price, but to reduce the cost of all parties to meet the price stability of the product while raising the price of raw materials, and not to raise the price unless it is absolutely necessary.
My experience at Lipton pop-up store
In the era of attention grabbing, brands have not only solved product problems, but also need to focus on how to get attention, how to create spatial experience, how to establish consumer interaction, how to promote social sharing.
The pop-up STORE model, which is popular in the fashion field, is a very interesting way of brand communication. Lipton in the tea field also does a good job in the design of pop-up stores.
The concept of pop-up STORE originated in the United Kingdom. It refers to the concept of limited time and limited amount with eye-catching vision, which can trigger brand topics in a short time and complete a wave of publicity and promotion.
The biggest characteristic of pop-up shops is short cycle and fast speed, but concentrated firepower, which often brings together the bursting vision and unique creativity, which is a very good marketing method for the brand to convey the brand concept.
Lipton has been doing pop-up STORE in China for many years. The biggest feature of Lipton is its rich graphic vision and strong brand inclusiveness. It has also made cross-boundary joint names with many brands. I had an experience at a Lipton pop-up once before.
The Lipton pop-up store uses Lipton's classic bright yellow as the main visual, skillfully integrated into the Logo of Lipton. Although the space is only 11 square meters, the double-sided transparent glass with bright yellow lines makes passing visitors want to see what interesting things are hidden in the store.
For the pop-up, Lipton teamed up with SOMA, which is best known for its boutique hand drinks, to create three limited-drink drinks that took six months to develop and produce, in an effort to make the drinks exquisite and delicious.
Lipton's pop-up stores also have a make-your-own drink event where customers can choose their own container, black or green tea, fruit, ingredients, and flavors to make their own drinks and create their own creative hand drinks. There can be as many as 2,000 combinations of variations, which is very interesting.
Lipton's external competitive environment in China
Digimind
First of all, we analyze the external environment of Lipton. The opportunities Lipton faces mainly include the following aspects:
1. In terms of politics and law: In recent years, China's legal system was still not sound enough, and it was difficult for enterprises to protect their legitimate interests through legal channels. But in recent years, China has made outstanding achievements in the legal system, the legal system in all fields has been constantly improved, especially in the protection of intellectual property rights. As a result, the threat of market dominance from counterfeits has diminished and Lipton has been able to develop and promote its own brands.
2. In terms of economic environment: tea, as a non-life necessity, is susceptible to the economic situation of a country, and the income level of people in different countries will have a significant impact on the sales of tea. In recent years, China's economy has maintained rapid and steady growth, and the per capita disposable income of residents has increased significantly, so has the purchasing power of tea.
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3. With regard to the social environment, public attitudes towards the quality of life and health have changed considerably in recent years. Tea as a healthy drink is more and more recognized by the majority of consumers. And China itself has a long history of tea, tea drinking a large number of people. These are Lipton to expand the market, improve the visibility of the favorable factors. Therefore, Lipton's development in China has a good opportunity.
