From Bubble Mart to Wen He You, new retail under IP operation is not so much a revolution, as it is a diversified commercial practice.

During the "May Day" holiday, the "retaliatory" holiday consumption not only filled the tourism industry, but also filled the entrances of Internet celebrity restaurants everywhere with diners.

As a representative of "IP + Catering", Wen Heyou is one of the most dazzling stars in the wave of Internet celebrity catering in recent years. On May 1st this year, the grand occasion of "7642 numbers in line" once again appeared in front of Changsha Super Wenheyou Gate. According to Wenheyou, compared with the same period last year, the number of online appointments in Changsha Wenheyou has increased by about 30% this year.

As an Internet celebrity brand with its own hot search physique, Super Wenheyou not only attracted the attention of restaurant owners, but also created a whirlwind in the field of commercial real estate.

It is said that Vanke Chairman Yu Liang made a special visit to Wenheyou and preached: “When you look at commercial real estate, you will not look at Changsha first. Even when you arrive in Changsha, you will not first look at Hisense Plaza; because Wenheyou is here, the effect It's so good, so we decided to take a look." Last year Ma Yun's photos of eating crayfish at Wenheyou also became a hot topic among Changsha people at that time.

The report shows that China may be one of the world's largest and most competitive catering markets, with 11 million merchants sharing a 4.6 trillion catering market. In a red sea, why can Wenheyou stand out and become a phenomenon-level brand that has attracted much attention from all walks of life?

ONE

Three generations of national Internet celebrity restaurants

If you want to write the history of national Internet celebrity restaurants after the reform and opening up, foreign fast food such as McDonald's and KFC are important brands that must not be bypassed.

In 1992, McDonald's opened the world's largest single restaurant in China. This McDonald’s on Wangfujing Street has more than 700 seats and 29 cashier counters. Such a luxurious checkout counter setting dwarfs Wal-Mart, which enters China later.

Even so, McDonald's still can't resist the enthusiasm of the people in the capital. On the day of the store’s opening, there was a crowd on Wangfujing Street, and young people from all districts in Beijing hoped to have a try. The young people born in the 60s and 70s in Beijing are chasing Internet celebrity restaurants. They are by no means inferior to those born in the 90s and 00s in Shenzhen today.

Western-style fast food is not only a brand-new taste bud experience for Chinese people, but also a symbol of cultural thoughts-burgers without obvious price gradients reduce the comparison of diners; the way of dividing meals for one person and one castle seems independent and novel. It is in sharp contrast with the domestic large-table Chinese food, which was considered to reflect a more equal social concept at the time.

After 2000, the local restaurant chain ushered in its first spring.

Compared with the industrialized fast food management methods of foreign brands, the first phase of the expansion of the "tu" brand is slightly rough. Take South Beauty, Little Sheep and other chain restaurants developed around 2000 as examples. These brands have attracted a large number of franchisees in a short time through the model effect of start-up chain stores, combined with the targeted marketing of traditional media, and have become national Catering giants.

The number of Little Sheep Hot Pot stores exceeded 700 in 2004, surpassing McDonald's at one time; even South Beauty, which took the high-end business route, once called out the target plan of 500 stores.

The standardized franchise business model has also magnified the advantages and disadvantages of the chain model-by leveraging social funds, the brand can withdraw a large amount of cash, seize the outlets, and become a large-scale catering group in a short period of time; but the management radius is rapidly expanding At the same time, the lack of matching management methods often leads to a decrease in user satisfaction and even frequent safety incidents.

After 2011, direct chain catering companies represented by Haidilao began to rise.

Under the direct operation mode, catering companies can adopt strong intervention management methods to quickly improve the management efficiency at the grassroots level and reduce potential management risks.

Zhang Yong, the founder of Haidilao, is a top-level scene service management expert. He claims to be able to see the status of the employees at a glance-whose shoes are dirty, whose makeup is worn, who stands in place with eyes open, but heads are distracted. NS. The secret of Haidilao's management is to "train 100 young Zhang Yong."

At the same time, the Internet not only makes word-of-mouth communication more efficient, but also makes advertisements more capable of reaching the public. The nationwide commercial launch will no longer reach franchise owners from all over the country in a way that “strikes cattle”, and the power of consumer word-of-mouth communication has reshaped the ecosystem of the catering industry.

Emerging Internet media such as Dianping, Weibo, Moments of Friends, etc. have allowed Haidilao to quickly spread the characteristics of restaurants that conform to the laws of mass communication, such as "abnormal service", and help Haidilao to become a leading domestic catering company step by step.

As the fourth generation of online celebrity stores, Wen Heyou is a subversion of the first three generations of online celebrity stores.

TWO

The fourth-generation Internet celebrity shop of "Pozi Street Wang Jiawei"

The name Wen Heyou comes from the founder Wen Bin, which means "Wen Bin and his friends".

Open the Weibo of the founder Wen Bin and you will find that he is an avid Wong Kar-wai fan. If it weren't for the outdated yellow V on the side of the portrait, it might be difficult for people to associate such a literary youth with the big catering boss in the traditional sense.

The strong atmosphere of "waste film" brings out a kind of free and easy literary youth style. When it comes to travel, the most frequently used word in Wenbin's Weibo is "Dai Liu". "Daliu" is the local dialect of Hunan, meaning wandering aimlessly outside.

If you want to put some labels on Wong Kar-wai's movies, nostalgia and loneliness are the lingering colors. The birth of Super Wenheyou came from the "Wang Jiawei" deep in Wenbin's heart.

Different from the previous three generations of Internet celebrity restaurants, Wen Heyou has significant differences in IP creation, environment creation, and business model.

First of all, Super Wenheyou chose to cut into the retro IP of the 80s.

The 1980s and 1990s was not only the peak period of Wang Jiawei as an artist, but also produced high-quality films such as "A Fei's True Story", "Chongqing Forest", and "Evil and West Poison", which are also common memories of the Wenbin generation. For post-80s and post-90s, Wen Heyou means childhood memories; for post-00s, this is a more familiar and unfamiliar history on the screen.

Statistics show that 70% of Wenheyou's guests are under 35 years old.

Secondly, Wen Heyou chose a super-large complex to carry out an in-depth transformation of the "movie set" level.

The advantage of the in-depth transformation is that it can be created with a 360-degree environment, allowing guests to truly "travel" back to Changsha in the 1980s, and immersively meet the emotional needs of consumers for the memories of the times. Picking up the camera and pointing it at any corner, it seems that you can see the flowing time.

For example, the super Wenheyou of Hisense Plaza in Changsha restores the characteristics of Changsha's old city in a huge space of 20,000 square meters with a total of 7 floors.

Scene modeling is an extremely important barrier to competition for Wen Heyou.

Just like every canned pineapple has its own date, Super Wen Heyou gave up the chain model of simple replication. Around the unique "urban value", Wen Heyou designs completely different scenes in different cities, hoping to achieve "a thousand cities and a thousand faces".

For example, Shenzhen Wenheyou, where the group bypasses traditional advantageous projects such as crayfish, and uses local unique oysters as its main products; in Guangzhou Wenheyou, Shawan Shuangpi Milk and Apo Niu Mi are also unique.

Wenheyou CEO Feng Bin said in an interview with the media that Wenheyou places more emphasis on businesses with regional cultural characteristics when choosing businesses. The group has three criteria when introducing merchants: the existence time is not less than 10 years, the chain brand is not accepted, and the business is good.

Feng Bin also revealed that Nike hopes to open a trendy shoe store in Wenheyou Store, which specializes in selling limited-edition sneakers that are not on the market. "But what I said to Nike is, whether you use Nike or AJ, I have to do the design."

Empowering peripheral products through scene capabilities, as well as the entry of unique categories such as Bubble Mart and trendy shoes, will further diversify Wenheyou's revenue. Feng Bin said that in the future, the proportion of catering and non-catering revenue will reach 1:1 in an ideal state.

THREE

Guangzhou Wenheyou is full of old signs

Wen Heyou's unique "combination boxing" also coincides with the communication trend in the era of short video streaming.

Traditional Internet information dissemination often uses pictures as a medium. Through detailed introduction of dishes and environmental characteristics, the restaurant will be able to have a good packaging display on websites such as Dianping.

In the era of short video streaming media, immersive environment design capabilities have been greatly highlighted. Even an untrained amateur, with a movie-level setting, can shoot impressive short video works, and help Wen Heyou achieve rapid word-of-mouth fission.

Not only "shaking fast," Super Wenheyou has also maintained a high level of popularity in the graphic media platforms that actively transform short video streams such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo.

Xiaohongshu shows that there are already more than 40,000 notes under the topic of "Super Wenheyou". Although there is still a certain distance from national enterprises such as Haidilao, it is still very impressive that only three complexes can gain such popularity within three years.

At first glance, Super Wenheyou has subverted the conventional logic of traditional Internet celebrity restaurant chains in terms of play, that is, abandoned the pursuit of chain standardization in the underlying logic, and greatly expanded the scale of single stores. But from another perspective, Wen Heyou also brings together the many advantages of the past three generations of online celebrity stores.

Compared with the second-generation Internet celebrity store, Super Wenheyou has well balanced the management boundary problems caused by franchising.

The integrated model allows it to find high-quality local merchants to join, and evaluate the franchisees as the owner of the scene. At the same time, the management's focus on building a complex can also reduce the energy dissipation of "sprinkling pepper noodles".

On the basis of the third-generation Internet celebrity store, Super Wenheyou has captured the dividends of media and scene upgrades, and has truly achieved a breakthrough in cultural concepts.

Holding high the banner of protecting urban culture and marketing the literature and friends of retro culture, they have captured the aesthetic trend of the current era. This need for cross-temporal cultural exchanges is not only similar to McDonald’s cross-regional exchanges, but also coincides with Coca-Cola’s "zeitgeist" marketing strategy-both trying to bind oneself to something more distant in order to realize the long-term value of the brand. maximize.

But this does not mean that Wenheyou model can sit back and relax.

First of all, the retro IP behind Wen Heyou is not unique, which means that any entity can imitate it. In fact, driven by Wen Heyou, retro-renovated stores in Sichuan, Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and other places are gradually forming an atmosphere, focusing on regional culture and deepening the local market.

How to give new vitality to old cultural symbols is even more difficult. Take Guangzhou as an example. As the local traditional culture is well preserved, Wen Heyou's artificially imitated old small buildings make many locals feel unnecessary. Compared with the "true culture" in Shamian, Shangxiajiu and other areas with good quality and low price, Wen Heyou, who is located in the core business district of an inch of land, seems a bit redundant.

This also reflects the lack of cultural building capabilities of the Wenheyou team from the side. Simply copying the Changsha model may be difficult to achieve success on a larger scale.

Secondly, every major city in China has its own unique city and food culture. At present, there is no catering company that can control multiple cuisines at the same time, not to mention that the paper and friends want to control the two extremely difficult cultural loads of food and city life at the same time.

One of Wen Heyou's current solutions is to introduce local time-honored brands as a supplement. However, it is similar to the dilemma faced by the Xiaomi ecological chain-Wenheyou is often located in a large business district with high traffic costs. Once traffic is introduced less than expected, it may face dilemmas such as the withdrawal of partners.

In addition, the local brand itself also hopes to be bigger. Whether these "incubated" local brands can develop into a chain in the future, and how to deal with the relationship between the old store and Wenheyou Store, Wenheyou also needs to give the best of both worlds.

Offline consumption driven by hunting is short-lived, and repeat customers are the core of the continued development of catering.

Urban cultural IP is a new concept developed in recent years, and it is adapted to consumer groups under the age of 35. In the future, as the age structure of the main customer group changes, it is an inevitable choice for old cultural symbols to withdraw from the stage. How to keep the urban IP of the 1980s "forever youthful" and continuously give history new vitality will determine how far Wenheyou's business model can go in the future.

Summarize

Wen Heyou's success broke through the industry's imagination of traditional catering models and even traditional commercial potential. It is more like a mirror, allowing us to see the explosive power created by core IP operations and in-depth integration scenarios.

From Bubble Mart to Wen He You, new retail under IP operation is not so much a revolution, as it is a diversified commercial practice. The emergence of the forerunner has opened a gap for us to glimpse the future business form——

Whether current players can pass on for a hundred years is not yet known, but the road to inject interesting souls into business will not end. The secret of the red restaurant!