In the past summer, "ice cream (ice cream) back to the age of 5 yuan" several times on social platforms hot search.
Once the red-hot "ice-cream assassins" have quietly withdrawn from the convenience store freezer, instead of occupying a large area of space is 5 yuan below the pro-ice-cream.
The Economic Daily News visited a number of convenience stores in Xicheng District, Beijing, and the person in charge of one convenience store said that the best sellers this year were "Green Mood" and "Kauai Duo", with the price of a single one being less than 5 yuan; another convenience store posted a price list of Erie's products for the year 2024 in the North China Region, Beijing South District, in a conspicuous position. Another convenience store prominently posted Yili's 2024 product price list in Beijing South, North China Region, displaying 90 kinds of ice cream products, more than 60% of the products below 5 yuan.
The ice cream market, has changed.
This is both an opportunity and a challenge for most of the dairy companies that produce ice-cream and ice-cream products.
On the one hand, "ice-cream assassins" quietly retired to release a considerable amount of ice-cream consumer market; on the other hand, "affordable ice-cream" competition will be more intense, when the price convergence, ice-cream will need to rely on more differentiated features to attract the target consumer groups.
Therefore, dairy companies need a set of more consumer-savvy digital intelligence products to gain comprehensive insight into market changes and capture market opportunities in a timely manner.
In 2023, Volcano Engine launched a new model of enterprise digital intelligence upgrade, Data Flywheel, which emphasizes the rotation of the two major scenarios of data construction and business application driven by data consumption to help enterprises achieve better and faster digital intelligence.
Focusing on the new opportunities and challenges that dairy companies are currently facing in the ice-cream market, the Volcano Engine Data Flywheel has been able to give solutions through its number intelligence products including VeCDP, GMP, DataFinder and DataTester.
Taking insights into consumer needs as an example, dairy companies can use growth analytics DataFinder to gain full insights into consumers in private domain positions such as public numbers and applets, such as which product recommendations are preferred? Are they interested in coupons? etc. At the same time, by introducing the customer data platform VeCDP, dairy companies can also refine the characteristics of consumer groups with different preferences, so as to understand who prefers what flavor of ice-cream, and who is looking forward to the issuance of a new round of coupons, in order to formulate the corresponding marketing activities.
When it is necessary to distribute marketing messages to different groups, dairy enterprises can also push the target customer groups directly to the growth marketing platform GMP according to the different groups' demands as insighted by VeCDP; GMP can generate corresponding marketing copy and push it with one click according to the demands of different groups of people.
From finding the target group in the ice-cream market, to gaining insights into the potential needs of the group, to completing the production and pushing of marketing content based on the needs, through the interlocking Digital Intelligence products, dairy companies will be able to seize the new opportunities in the market in front of them in a one-stop manner, and find new growth in the stock market.
It is worth noting that the growth of the ice-cream business relies on one hand on the precise insight of the market by the number of intelligent products, and more importantly on the other hand, on the control of quality.
"After 2023 of market volatility, the return of affordable ice cream reflects the market's self-correction of excessive marketing." China's food industry analyst Zhu Danpeng said. In the past, the price of an ice-cream could easily cost dozens of dollars, and you even had to queue up to snatch it - which, to a certain extent, drove up consumers' expectations of ice-cream.
However, in most cases, consumers were raised expectations can not be followed by the consumer experience to meet, which led to the psychological gap between consumers against the "ice cream", but also directly affects the "ice cream" category of the word of mouth.
Ice-cream return to the affordable market, although to a certain extent can reduce the expectations of consumers, but Zhu Danpeng emphasized, "Consumers on the quality of goods than the price requirements have been raised, and only take into account the quality and price of the brand in the future will be more marketable."