Can you imagine Starbucks products featuring "Sun Wukong"?
On January 16th, Starbucks teamed up to cause a stir in the Tiangong IP and launched a latte that would transform. It is reported that the straw of this latte product is in the shape of "Old Sun's Golden Hoop". During the 20 minute delivery journey, the latte will condense, layer, and create a sense of layering, so it is called a "transformation" latte.
At around 8:00 am on January 16th, a reporter from First Financial ordered a medium French caramel flavored frozen latte for 38 yuan on the Starbucks mini program. Unlike regular lattes, you can indeed drink "frozen" in the latte, and overall, the taste is sweeter.
According to official information from Starbucks, the "Da Nao Tian Gong Jin Guan" will only be launched on January 19th, and consumers can purchase "Jin Guan" and Da Sheng style pendants.
In recent years, the competition in the coffee industry has been particularly fierce, and the coffee market is plagued by gunpowder. Giant brands are striving to maintain market share, and co branding is one of the "trump cards".
In September 2023, Luckin's sauce flavored latte, co branded with Maotai, went viral. According to Luckin Coffee's official Weibo account, the first day sales of the sauce flavored latte exceeded 5.42 million cups, and the first day sales of the single product exceeded 100 million yuan. In addition, MANNER and Zumalong have jointly launched a new product called "Caramel Cocoa Latte", and M Stand and Swiss watchmaker Breitling have also launched a joint coffee.
Co branding is not a new thing for Starbucks, which often launches peripheral products, but as an American brand, it is not common for Starbucks to collaborate with local Chinese cultural IPs. The integration with the IP of "Da Nao Tian Gong" in ancient Chinese mythology shows that Starbucks has put in a lot of effort to attract Chinese consumers.
Regarding this collaboration, Zhu Danpeng, Vice President of Guangdong Food Safety Promotion Association, analyzed that the Chinese market, as the most core market outside of Starbucks' local market, has recently received unprecedented attention from Starbucks to China. This indicates that Starbucks has confidence in the expansion and growth of China's future coffee market, and the organic combination of Sun Wukong and Starbucks' Western coffee culture is also a reflection of Starbucks' localization strategy.
Starbucks' localization strategy is also reflected in the number of stores and the industry chain. Previously, in a media interview with reporters from First Financial, Starbucks Global CEO Nathan talked about Starbucks' expansion plan. He said, "Starbucks plans to expand the number of stores in China to 9000 by 2025, and increase the number of employees from the current 60000 to over 90000."
On September 19, 2023, Starbucks China Coffee Innovation Industrial Park was completed and put into operation in Kunshan, Jiangsu. This means that China has taken the lead in achieving large-scale integration of the vertical industry chain from raw beans to coffee in Starbucks' global markets. During the construction period of the industrial park, two additional rounds of investment were added, with a total investment of 1.5 billion yuan (approximately 220 million US dollars), which is Starbucks' largest investment in building a coffee production and logistics base in China.
The industry believes that this collaboration ultimately stems from too intense market competition. The current coffee market is extremely competitive, and major brands are aggressively accelerating the release of new products and cross-border marketing, which is one of the ways for major brands to compete with each other. Among them, Luckin Coffee is a typical representative, with a very fast release rate of new products and the emergence of popular products such as sauce flavored lattes. This has put considerable competitive pressure on practitioners such as Starbucks. Therefore, Starbucks has made a groundbreaking collaboration with traditional local IPs such as "Da Nao Tian Gong", which is believed to be aimed at attracting more consumers and emphasizing localization strategies.
At present, the coffee market in China is still in an expanding trend, which also means that major brands still have the opportunity to share a share of the competition in the second half. The "China Coffee New Wave -2022 China Coffee Industry Development Report" jointly released by Alibaba New Service Research Center, Ele.me, and Tmall Coffee shows that the market size of China's coffee industry reached 381.7 billion yuan in 2021, and is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan by 2025. The Chinese coffee market is still in its relatively early stages, with total and per capita consumption far lower than mature markets such as Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea, and great growth potential.