618 EC Campaign in 2022 has witnessed striking performance of breo, a brand well-known for massager devices. It ranked first in massager category on two major e-commerce(EC) platforms, Tmall and JD, occupying 9 seats among top 10 massagers on JD. What’s more, the new product “breo See 5R” eye massager, drew most attention, as it won Top 1 sales and achieved 2000 units under Tik Tok store just on the first launched day.
As the strategy driver for this exciting new product, Illuminera is honored to provide breo with innovation related consulting services centered on data empowerment and consumer insight, organize and participate in the whole process of product concept incubation.
The story of “breo See 5R” should be dated
back to two years ago when Covid just broke out.
As a leading brand focusing on portable massager before Covid, breo had premium stores in airports, railway stations and mid-to-high-end shopping malls across the country, targeting at elite business people. However, these core channels invested heavily by breo had undergone fatal blows due to the pandemic. To reverse the aftermath of this “Black swan" incident on overall business, breo was deadly for transforming channels and business models. Nevertheless, EC consumer group differentiated a lot with business group; when facing such younger, more trend-following and more price-sensitive consumers, breo desperately required to launch a new product to create a better turnaround for channels.
As industry pioneer, breo has nothing to learn from its predecessors but explore all on its own. Under this circumstance, what a new product is supposed to be? Which will be the entry point of this new product in EC scenario?
From business casual to exquisite beauty, breo locks new target group
Since business elites, previous offline target group, cannot accurately fit in the EC scene, nor can they all be converted to online consumers, how breo may explore new user group and create EC-friendly eye massagers?
During recent years, in online market dominated by young consumers, prevalence of the "beauty economy" has driven the upgrade and evolution of the beauty industry. While cosmetic instruments have won warm welcome among young consumers, especially eye beauty care products, there are certain developing and quite promising signs. "2021 Eye Beauty Device Category Trend Report" published by Tmall Innovation Center (TMIC) revealed that in 2020, market share of eye beauty category was 10 times of 2018, while consumers born in 1980s and 1990s, especially female and emerging white-collars have become main force in the market. Therefore, breo also aspired to innovate EC-friendly new product based on its own core technology by the trends of "beauty economy" and eye beauty care product.
Empowered by big data, Illuminera helped the brand sort out consumer segmentation and the opportunities identification. First, Illuminera carried out a multi-dimensional analysis on eye care product consumers’ cross-category purchase behaviors, which helped us identify six major groups and map consumer demands from different groups. The next step was to focus on core brand assets and key target groups for new product development. Which consumer groups had been covered by current breo products? What needs to be tapped? If any chance to expand and if there was still a market gap? In terms of strategy and technology, what new products can boost the company to easily break the ceiling without deviating from its core competitiveness?
Through careful mapping of different opportunity groups and in-depth evaluation of the existing layout of the product line, “exquisite beauty-loving group” has been positioned as the potential TA to achieve new breakthroughs in the category, which coincided with breo’s “original intention” of desiring to try beauty related innovation and research.
How did an blockbuster come into being?
After big data has locked the exquisite beauty-loving group for the brand, how to create an eye massager adapted to their lifestyle? What are their demands for eye caring? What type of needs really existed and what needs are just make-believe? What are consumers’ pain points in product use and how to tackle their pain points? How to excite their aha moment and enable new products to successfully get promoted?
Through co-creation with consumers, we found that what really hooked the exquisite beauty-lovers was not related to "beauty" and "cosmetics", but more about "relaxing eyes", "relieving eyestrain", "loving massage". Digging deeper into the characteristics of the segments, we saw that exquisite beauty-lovers were more likely to be hit by the relaxation feeling of "warmness" and "alternation of cold and heat", not the "physical acupoint massage" and "human-like hand massage" that the brand thought and used to be good at. Divergence occurred between consumer insights and breo products’ core function, and users' purchase point had deviated from the thinking orientation of brand research and development.
Digging out consumer insights, breaking the thinking inertia of the R&D team, and reshaping the product design logic - this is Illuminera’s recipe for success in providing innovative consulting services for many brands, which could match the existing product pipelines of breo with the needs of target group and delineate two directions for new product development: expanding advantages and seizing new opportunities.
This was how “breo See 5R” came into being. As the first revolutionary “Micron Water Ion” eye massager, it initiated a new era in eye massager category, which fully matched exquisite beauty-lovers’ demands for the product’s sense of warmth, light and portable, zero pressure, never destroying makeup, quick eye care and could be used in any scenario. Meanwhile, each step was guided by data, from product design, functions, consumables and modes to selling points and communications. Illuminera was driven by consumer needs and closely related to original intention of product design, which also perfectly fitted with breo’s two secret weapons - namely health and portability.
“Compared with previous product innovations, this strategy allows R&D to be more focused, more target-driven and direct when it comes to solving product technologies. In the meantime, the development process has been greatly reduced as the incubation period of new products has been shortened from one year to six months, which decreased lots of unnecessary internal friction discussions”. Jennifer, breo EC General Manager, commented on the new product launch.
Benefited from zero-loss landing of new strategy by breo’s product and marketing team, as well as end-to-end cooperation with Illuminera and TMIC, on May 7th, 2022, “breo See 5R” was officially launched on Tmall for exclusive pre-sale, presenting brilliant performance without any input of marketing resources in the early stage, breaking the celling of breo’s sales channels, TAs and categories.
Innovation of “breo See 5R” is a real disruptive innovation “from 0 to 1”. It not only inherits the core technology of the brand, but also highlights the brand's strong R&D and innovation capabilities. It realizes breo’s breakthroughs from offline to online, from business group to beauty-lovers, from massager devices to eye care products, also from durable goods to consumables business model, which introduces a series of new product iterations, layout of consumables products, continuous heated discussion on Tik Tok and so on. All these have brought unlimited business potential and opportunities for the brand.
For more information about product and innovation service, please kindly contact:
claire.zhang@illuminera.com marketing@illuminera.com
