As the Mid-Autumn Festival approaches, the annual "moon cake war" starts again. Guochao cultural and creative mooncakes, sugar-reduced and oil-free mooncakes, special-shaped mooncakes, snail powder mooncakes... Many merchants have made great efforts in creativity, health, shape, and taste, trying to tear off traditional mooncakes with heavy oil and sugar, outdated styles, and single flavors, etc. "Facebook" label, multiple innovations to reach "Generation Z".
Each Sanxingdui mooncake gift box selected by Bloomberg is full of features - the "Prayer Tree" can be opened to three-dimensionally restore the scene of the ancient Shu people's sacrifice; Storage Box. Ren Ren, director of the Industrial Development Department of the Sanxingdui Museum Scenic Spot Management Committee, introduced that this year is the third year that the Sanxingdui Museum has launched cultural and creative mooncakes. "Our confidence comes from young consumers' love for traditional culture."
In addition to the national tide, many moon cake merchants have also launched versions with reduced sugar, oil-free and low-fat, vegetable meat, and fresh fruit, in order to capture the "Gen Z" consumers' love of beauty and nourish their stomachs with health. "More and more consumers will look at the ingredient list before purchasing moon cakes, and give priority to moon cakes with lower calories and lower fat, and reject trans fats." Song Yan, a moon cake seller in a supermarket chain in Chengdu, introduced that sugar reduction a few years ago Sugar-free mooncakes were once regarded as the exclusive food for diabetics when they were first launched, but now some mooncake brands even put the word "low sugar" on the packaging.
When the "hegemony" of various mooncakes is in full swing, milk skin mooncakes, crayfish mooncakes, snail powder mooncakes, spicy beef mooncakes, macaron mooncakes and other mooncakes are favored by "Gen Z" due to their bold materials and styles, and quietly occupy a corner of the market. . Open the shopping website page, the circle has even become the most common shape in moon cakes. The various moon cake products made of cartoon characters, cute animals, flowers and trees are dizzying, and there are even three-dimensional flower moon cakes, which look different from real flowers. Few.
According to the "2021 China Mooncake Market and Consumption Trend Survey Report" released by iiMedia Research, although China's mooncake sales increased from 13.18 billion yuan in 2015 to 20.52 billion yuan in 2020, the growth rate continued to slow down. Analysts believe that in recent years, the public has gradually paid more attention to traditional festivals, and the demand for visiting relatives and friends has recovered after the normalization of epidemic prevention and control. The overall scale of the mooncake market industry will maintain an upward trend. It is estimated that the sales volume of mooncakes in China will reach 21.81 billion yuan in 2021.
According to Wang Yi, a professor at the School of Business Administration of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, traditionally, moon cakes are a commodity with strong emotional attributes, which play a role as an interpersonal bond for expressing emotions. In recent years, cultural and creative mooncakes, mooncakes from various Internet companies, and mooncakes from major colleges and universities have gained a lot of attention in the online social circle, indicating that mooncakes, a star product that only appears on stage once a year, have begun to have cultural attributes, which are in line with the self-expression of young consumers. value appeal.
Wang Yi said that as the "Generation Z" consumer group gradually becomes the key to the growth of the consumer market, companies can combine cultural and creative design, cross-border marketing, functional superposition, and multiple scenarios to enrich product value and break through their original boundaries and oneness. "Removing the old with the new, if you want to remove the 'Facebook' label from moon cake products, you need to establish a new label. Culture, emotion, identity expression, and even trendy play carriers can become options."
