In 2024, the growth logic of China's growth-oriented brands has completely changed.

Long Slope and Thick Snow, Amidst Dense Fog

"A long slope with thick snow, a deep ravine with lush grass, a mountain with flourishing trees, and clear waters." This is a description in "The Book of Rites · The Great Learning" about a peaceful and beautiful natural environment.

In the modern business world, "long slope and thick snow" has a different connotation. Buffett said: Life is like a snowball. Find the wet snow and the long slope to make the wealth grow larger and larger. "Long slope and thick snow" is used to metaphorize industries with long-term stable growth prospects, just like the "long slope" and "thick snow" needed when making a snowball.

The tracks with "long slope and thick snow" are rare, and the consumer industry is one of them. Once a brand is established, it will not easily die. In recent years, Xiaohongshu, where a number of new brands have emerged, in order to help more small and medium-sized enterprises break through the predicament, has launched the Red Brand Accelerator, providing official 'nutritional supplements' for more growth-oriented brands to help achieve a crucial leap in business from 1 to 10. However, this is by no means an easy task, and Henry (a pseudonym), the founder of a chain tea drink brand, has a deep understanding of this.

2019 can be regarded as the outbreak year of the tea drink industry. In this lively scene, a small team with a concept can open a tea drink store, thus attracting many entrepreneurs to enter the industry, and Henry is one of them. Unfortunately, just when he was ready to go all out, he encountered unexpected situations. The store opened and closed repeatedly, experiencing countless life-and-death moments.

After going through the hardships, new challenges followed one after another. The competition in the tea drink industry is as fierce as fire, and the price war is even more intense. A bigger problem lies before Henry. As a start-up enterprise, how to gain exposure and attract consumers' attention? Otherwise, he might become just like the tens of thousands of peers who have been cancelled and left the market, disappearing into the crowd.

The solution he thought of is co-branding. At first, some IP co-branding actions did indeed gain a lot of attention and sales. But over time, cracks appeared. New users would be successfully converted based on curiosity or love for a certain IP, but they would quickly disappear after trying it.

Henry naturally knows the reason. Consumers have become accustomed to IP co-branding. This marketing paradigm only brings fast-food-like attention and a short stay, unable to complete in-depth communication with users. It is difficult to achieve emotional links and trust accumulation between the brand and users, which makes it difficult for brand awareness to settle and unable to support the shaping of brand value.

He thought he had survived the dangerous life-and-death crisis, but he didn't know that a more challenging crisis has made Henry deeply trapped in a pressure quagmire. "Every day, I'm thinking about how to make users know and like us."

Small and medium-sized enterprises are not only faced with the problem of brand awareness, but also the cruel and increasingly intense low-price competition. This is the pain that Kevin, who is in the trendy clothing business, is currently experiencing.

Before starting his business, Kevin keenly sensed that the demand for clothing among Generation Z has shifted from the "practical" style of the past group to "personalized" and "high-aesthetic". They focus on design, fashion, and quality, so he had the idea of creating a personal brand.

When he got involved in the business, the main theme of the business narrative changed to affordable consumption. E-commerce platforms launched an unprecedented low-price competition, and various industries were involved in the low-price battle. Personal brands were deeply impacted, and he didn't know how to highlight the advantages of his products and make consumers recognize their value.

The involution competition caused by low prices only seeks to partially satisfy the consumer group. There are many people who are willing to buy a box of mangoes for 9.9 yuan, but it doesn't mean that consumers who are fond of texture and emotional value have disappeared. They are willing to pay a premium for aesthetics, quality, and things that can bring pleasure, so while the low-price hustle and bustle continues, on the other end, brands like lululemon and Arc'teryx continue to grow at a rapid pace. The essence of Kevin's dilemma is that he has not reached the target group that matches his brand, and he doesn't even know where to find that core audience.

The involution of the industry, the increase in traffic costs, the disappearance of dividends and other market changes have made some small and medium-sized enterprises realize that The marketing approach of "great efforts lead to miracles" with extensive traffic irrigation is becoming a thing of the past, which is the reality that Rachel and her underwear enterprise are experiencing.

In the early stage of starting a business, Rachel relied on abundant and cheap traffic placement and live-streaming with influencers to quickly open the cold start and achieved a sales volume of over 100 million yuan in a short period of time. But the good times didn't last long, and the problem of weak growth emerged.

First, the cost of obtaining traffic is high, while the ROI continues to decline. Secondly, the information distribution mechanism and traffic scenarios under the traffic-play determine that the private domain value is limited, making it difficult to accumulate user loyalty relationships, which requires repeated spending to acquire. The rough traffic-injection strategy only brings short-term transactions, laying a hidden danger of underestimating the brand.

How to do a good job in one's own private domain operation to achieve low-cost user reach? How to conduct in-depth communication with users and implant brand mental awareness? Various doubts haunt Rachel and urgently need to be solved.

In addition to the individual difficulties of each enterprise, they also face a common problem that capital is no longer scattered everywhere. Small and medium-sized enterprises need to build their own hematopoietic capacity and brand, but they are suffering from a lack of resources and opportunities, as well as a lack of experience in enterprise exposure and management. They need a reference sample to reduce the twists and turns.

In the current unknown environment, the craving for a sense of security among small and medium-sized enterprises has never been so strong. They want a definite crowd, a definite return, and a definite effect... but they find it difficult to find an exit in the thick fog.

The "Snowball Rolling" Methodology of Brands

In the 1998 Amazon shareholder letter, Bezos said: "We want to fight entropy (We want to fight entropy)."

The end of the demographic dividend and the traffic dividend, and the endless competition generated by the successive emergence of various emerging enterprises have made the growth of start-up companies silent. Entropy increase is no longer only a crisis that large enterprises need to resist. On the road from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 10, there are various uncertain forks filled with all kinds of uncertainties, which have become the life-and-death juncture for many small and medium-sized enterprises.

According to the data of an e-commerce platform, the survival rate of new brands settled in it is less than 30% in one year; another public data shows that the average lifespan of small and medium-sized enterprises is about 3 to 5 years, and the proportion of those with a survival time of less than 3 years is close to 50%. How short the life cycle is, the competition is how fierce.

Of course, there are also many enterprises that can finally survive through the cycle. And the consensus of these enterprises is that the brand should return to the essence of business, gain the trust of consumers, and find new people and new business increments in the stock market. If you look at the rise process of these brands, you will find that seizing the grass-planting channel like Xiaohongshu has become a common "overtaking point".

For a long time in the past, the high-speed hair dryer market in China was almost occupied by foreign brands. But after Laifen was established in 2019, it created a high-speed hair dryer in three years, and the cumulative sales quickly exceeded 3 billion yuan. Later, the enterprise made a bold decision to enter the red ocean market of electric toothbrushes with nearly 300 brands.

According to Nielsen's long-term market monitoring, more than 20,000 new products will emerge in the Chinese consumer market every year, but it is not easy to survive. In the past ten years, the average survival time of new products in the market is less than 18 months. However, Laifen's electric toothbrush products achieved an astonishing performance of 450,000 units sold across the entire network and 160 million yuan in sales during the 618 period in 2024.

Laifen has once shared the key points behind the achievements, such as deeply understanding what the real needs of the people who buy electric toothbrushes are, and then deeply combining their interest points with the product selling points such as "efficient cleaning" and "gingival protection". Through high-quality grass-planting notes on Xiaohongshu, it reaches the target groups such as luxury beauty lovers, exquisite mothers, and exquisite middle-class people who pay attention to dental health and pursue a lifestyle.

"We can find the core user group on Xiaohongshu, and the platform can provide very good user insights and data analysis, which determines the possibility of completing a closed loop here. In addition, during the process of doing it, we found that the link between grass-planting and effect conversion on Xiaohongshu is very complete and accurate." Said the relevant person in charge of Laifen.

It is reported that Laifen, which achieves an accurate match between products, content, and target groups, combined with the post-link infrastructure such as store live-streaming and buyer live-streaming on Xiaohongshu, has increased the product's GMV within the station by more than 217% in just 2 months.

According to him, today's consumers not only focus on functional value but also on emotional and spiritual value. Therefore, in Xiaohongshu notes, content, and traffic promotion, non-functional promotion will be emphasized to make users more recognition of the product and increase brand loyalty.

And the female body care brand Yujian, through grass-planting notes on Xiaohongshu, has gathered its own private domain. In the view of the founder Li Li, the private domain is a gathering place for seed users for brands like theirs, and it is a very good 'base camp'.

However, it is difficult to solve the problem of "why users stay" only by relying on low prices, and more metaphysical value magnetism is needed.

The famous marketing expert Eugene Schwartz said: "Marketing cannot create the desire to buy a commodity. It can only arouse the hopes, dreams, fears, or desires that already exist in millions of people, and then direct these 'already existing desires' to specific commodities."

And Xiaohongshu, as a platform with a high density of high-net-worth individuals, makes this arousal and matching possible. Among the many paths to compete for the user's mind, "grass-planting" has been verified as an effective way for consumers to match the "already existing desires" and even stimulate the "previously non-existent needs of consumers".

Different eras open up opportunity windows, and the brands that emerge in each platform iteration have different characteristics. It is not difficult to find that The long-term growth of "Red Brands" on Xiaohongshu is inseparable from the keen insight into user needs and the rapid penetration of segmented tracks. These brands that rise based on the "crowd logic" often have high texture, high aesthetics, high reputation, and high emotional value.

In his book "The Fourth Consumption Era", Miura Exhibition proposes that with the development of society and the change of consumption concepts, consumption will shift from "purpose-correct type" to "value-correct type". In this process, consumers pay more attention to the "beauty, goodness, and righteousness" in consumption behavior, that is, they pursue higher-quality products and services that are more in line with personal values and aesthetics.

Being able to pass on the value-correct information such as beauty, goodness, and righteousness through grass-planting and truly achieve the precipitation from the crowd to sales, to cognition, to preference, and to the brand is the difference of Xiaohongshu brand grass-planting.

The Secret That Can Be Told

"I know that half of my advertising expenses are wasted, but I don't know which half." This is a sentence said by John Wanamaker, the father of American department stores, and it has become a famous problem in marketing. This problem was once partially alleviated with the arrival of the digital age. Nowadays, it is very in line with the situation of small and medium-sized enterprises and growth-oriented brands.

In the ever-changing competitive field, it is almost impossible for small and medium-sized enterprises and new brands to build a brand relying solely on the pure traffic-play in a limited time. But grass-planting is not a skill that everyone is good at. If the method is not right, it may be difficult to see ripples even with a lot of investment.

Xiaohongshu Commerce recently launched the 'Red Brand Accelerator', which recruited nearly 30 growth-oriented brands such as Yangzhidao, Xunpu, Baozhu Cheese, Dongbianyeshou, and Yeye Bucha to participate. The purpose is to Rely on the practical methodology of grass-planting on Xiaohongshu, and through multiple types of resources such as the 'Xiaohongshu Workshop', 'Big Shot Private Sharing Class', 'Business School EMBA Course', and 'Customized Accompanying Service', to help growth-oriented brands achieve a crucial leap in business.

In fact, before the accelerator was launched, in addition to many brands mentioned earlier that have achieved new business growth through grass-planting on Xiaohongshu, there are also many brands that have achieved counter-trend growth through grass-planting on Xiaohongshu. For example, Song Dynasty Fragrance, as a new and cutting-edge brand in the domestic fragrance industry, faced challenges both internally and externally before starting grass-planting on Xiaohongshu - externally, the supply in the domestic fragrance market has tended to be saturated, and internally, it needs to bear the high traffic cost of the e-commerce platform. Even though it quickly accumulated GMV scale through live-streaming e-commerce in the early stage, the profit is low and the brand mentality cannot be accumulated.

Later, Song Dynasty Fragrance started grass-planting on Xiaohongshu, hoping to drive the business growth of the brand's online and offline channels. The first step of "grass-planting" is to deeply understand the needs of the crowd and the scene. Then, with the help of customized fragrance "grass-planting" content, the popular notes ignited the UGC word-of-mouth content, and finally achieved a 51.15% increase in the brand's search index within the station, a 1254% increase in the brand's GMV within the station compared to the previous month, and a 130.4% increase in the GMV undertaking on the e-commerce platform.

According to the observation of 36Kr Future Consumption, all brands that have successfully planted grass on Xiaohongshu cannot bypass the theme of 'people', which is also the core marketing logic of Xiaohongshu. To find the certainty of brand growth, we need to return to the product, be people-oriented, understand and meet the new needs of users, occupy more consumption scenarios, break through more crowds, and then efficiently drive the explosion of brand potential.

Just as Philip Kotler defined in "H2H Marketing" for human-to-human marketing (Human to Human Marketing), marketing should return to people, and the core of marketing is to understand and meet people's needs.

It is easy to talk about, but it is like a castle in the air for small and medium-sized enterprises without experience to put it into practice. Kevin also expressed a similar confusion, "Now everyone knows that they need to do grass-planting on Xiaohongshu, but they just don't know how to start. Xiaohongshu always emphasizes 'people', but how to link and capture people?"

This is not just Kevin's confusion, but the current situation of countless small and medium-sized enterprises who are striving but still 'in the fog'. How to make good use of Xiaohongshu to achieve a breakthrough from 1 to 10 and long-term growth has become a compulsory course for enterprises.

Judging from the currently disclosed content of the 'Red Brand Accelerator', Xiaohongshu hopes to help accelerator students quickly understand the marketing model of the Xiaohongshu platform, iterate from the'shelf logic