---
title: "A 20,000-Word Analysis of Genki Forest: How It Used Hit Product Tactics to Break Coca-Cola's Blockade?"
description: "This article compares Genki Forest and Coca-Cola China, explaining why Coca-Cola, despite its strong brand and channel management, struggles to create new hit products, while Genki Forest, as a latecomer, has succeeded through a management system that fosters innovation, risk control, and investment-like product development."
author: "冬琪 Vicky 陶程"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2025-06-02"
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# A 20,000-Word Analysis of Genki Forest: How It Used Hit Product Tactics to Break Coca-Cola's Blockade?

> This article compares Genki Forest and Coca-Cola China, explaining why Coca-Cola, despite its strong brand and channel management, struggles to create new hit products, while Genki Forest, as a latecomer, has succeeded through a management system that fosters innovation, risk control, and investment-like product development.

**Source**丨Yu Dongqi's Business Notes
**As someone who grew up drinking Coca-Cola, I have a special affection for it; it has accompanied my friends and me through various stages of life.**
Even today, at middle age, when I no longer dare to drink sugary Coca-Cola as often, I still occasionally, with a sense of reluctance, pick up a bottle of zero-sugar Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola, a century-old brand, still exudes vitality and enduring success.
Today, it remains popular among young people, evolving into what they call "happy fat-guy water," a symbol of instant happiness.
Its performance continues to grow.
At the end of last month, Coca-Cola released its Q1 2025 earnings, with quarterly revenue of $11.129 billion, a 6% organic revenue growth, and net profit of $3.335 billion, up 5%.
In the Chinese market, brands like Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Minute Maid achieved high single-digit sales growth driven by Spring Festival marketing activities.
Excluding holiday factors, its CEO once said that in the fourth quarter of last year, Coca-Cola continued to grow in the Chinese market.
Over the years, although beverage industry giants have emerged, such as Master Kong and Nongfu Spring in China, very few companies have truly challenged Coca-Cola in the carbonated beverage market.
Old rival Pepsi, which early on entered the market with lower prices (as Buffett mentioned in a conversation: when he was a child, Pepsi cost half the price of Coca-Cola), has not truly shaken Coca-Cola's position in the direct carbonated beverage battlefield. Instead, it has had to expand into more beverage and food product lines, invest more in marketing and management costs, significantly reducing its net profit margin.
In China, Coca-Cola has few rivals. Domestic cola brands that directly attacked Coca-Cola, such as Future Cola, have almost all ended in failure.
Beverage companies that have risen in recent years, like Nongfu Spring, Master Kong, and Uni-President, have also chosen to take detours. Nongfu Spring focused on the drinking water and tea beverage markets, while Master Kong focused on iced black tea and jasmine tea series.
It wasn't until Genki Forest appeared that this situation began to change.
Compared to most competitors, Genki Forest is a unique presence.
It directly entered the carbonated beverage market, creating a differentiated category—sparkling water—that Coca-Cola had not previously noticed. This forced Coca-Cola to personally enter the market with its AHA sparkling water product, but it barely made a splash. Even with Coca-Cola's capabilities, it has been difficult to take away Genki Forest's market share.
Genki Forest did not enter the market with low prices like Pepsi; instead, it chose higher pricing.
Moreover, it has repeatedly created single products with annual revenues of 1 billion yuan, such as Alien Electrolyte Water and Zizai Water.
How did it do it?
This article aims to discuss:
Coca-Cola is a powerful company: when we can buy Coca-Cola at almost any street-side shop, it demonstrates dominant channel capabilities. Historically, Coca-Cola has also created the most influential single products in the beverage industry—Coke and Sprite. Why has it failed to create new hit products in recent years?
Now everyone knows that Genki Forest is rising with a series of new products.
As a latecomer in the beverage market, without any industry accumulation or brand advantages, why can it continuously create new hit products?
As usual, because the article is long, we will first provide a concise answer.
Coca-Cola is a powerful operating machine with an unshakable industry dominance in the carbonated beverage market. It achieves extremely high profits through consumer loyalty and refined channel management. Coca-Cola also exemplifies the best practice of a profit-seeking enterprise—on the path to profit, it chose to retain only high-value links and outsource all low-value links to partners: for example, it did not build its own channels but outsourced channel management to bottlers, allowing them to bear the high management costs.
Managing a business with high execution requirements through outsourcing is inherently difficult, but Coca-Cola became the industry's earliest benchmark.
However, outsourcing channels inevitably limited its new product development capabilities. When there are conflicts of interest with bottlers, such as when Coca-Cola wants to launch riskier new products that would expose bottlers to inventory risks, bottlers are reluctant.
These factors make it difficult for Coca-Cola to launch new products under its current management system.
The extreme pursuit of profit inevitably becomes a barrier to breakthrough. As long as it does not abandon the extreme pursuit of profit, Coca-Cola is destined not to have Genki Forest's new product creation capability.
Genki Forest, lacking the brand and channel advantages that Coca-Cola has accumulated, can only break through with new products. Over the past few years, it has successfully incubated one hit product after another, relying not just on Tang Binsen or a few managers, but on a comprehensive management system for new product development.
This system includes how to continuously capture consumers' real needs and how to effectively control innovation risks and improve the probability of innovation success.
Unlike traditional beverage companies that emphasize industry experience, Genki Forest tends to prefer product managers who are more like entrepreneurs and have less industry experience, as they can more keenly grasp the changing needs of young consumers. These product managers receive a large amount of information from both inside and outside the company, as well as from Tang Binsen himself. Genki Forest gives them a more tolerant and open product idea review process, with more opportunities to bring their product ideas to life.
Genki Forest's managers also cautiously give negative judgments with more reverence. They rely more on objective test results and processes rather than their own subjective judgments. In this process, they continuously increase test frequency and reduce test costs. As the number of new product incubations increases, they learn from both successful and failed investment experiences, thereby improving the success rate of new products.
This is how we see Genki Forest's successive hit products today.
Compared to Coca-Cola, Genki Forest has found a new balance between profitability and innovation.
This article will be structured as follows:
  1. Coca-Cola achieves extremely high profits through consumer loyalty and refined channel management.
  2. This choice inevitably limits its new product development capabilities.
  3. Genki Forest: choosing young entrepreneurs, leveraging their ability to sense and act on changes in young consumer trends.
  4. The birth of product ideas: continuous emergence from internal and external sources.
  5. More reverent product idea reviews.
  6. Controlling innovation risks: extensive testing around users and the market.
  7. Managing new product development like investing.
Note: This article totals 25,000 words and takes approximately 63 minutes to read.
This article mainly compares Genki Forest and Coca-Cola China, not Coca-Cola globally. Although it is a collaborative team effort, it is still written from Dong Qi's first-person perspective. If you have different views, please feel free to correct and discuss.
Coca-Cola wins extremely high profits through consumer loyalty and refined channel management.
Today, we see many people around us who, when thirsty, want to drink a bottle of Coca-Cola, and it is available almost anywhere. We take this for granted, but few realize how strong the capabilities required to achieve this are.
I once discussed with Mr. Xiao Masong that Coca-Cola has created a remarkable system that makes it difficult for other competitors to enter its domain.
In 2024, Pepsi, through diversified beverage and food operations, had revenue nearly twice that of Coca-Cola.
But in terms of net profit, Coca-Cola still leads. If we talk about profit margins, Pepsi is far behind.
In 2024, Coca-Cola maintained a net profit margin of 22.59% globally, more than double that of Pepsi.
Over a year ago, entrusted by a client, I had the opportunity to deeply study Coca-Cola's entire system in China.
This system, in my view, has two most powerful points:
These two points are also what Coca-Cola itself considers the most important things—"make all consumers love the taste and brand of Coca-Cola" and "make Coca-Cola available everywhere."
First, Coca-Cola has built extremely strong brand loyalty, making consumers accept the taste of Coca-Cola and recognize its brand.
Coca-Cola is certainly not a necessity like food, clothing, housing, and transportation, but what impressed me was that during Shanghai's COVID lockdown, when even getting enough food and vegetables was difficult, Coca-Cola became a hard currency among necessities like rice and pork, able to "exchange for everything."
This reflects consumers' loyalty to Coke.
The taste of Coke is unique, with caffeine and sugar being addictive substances.
Once consumers get used to it, associating the taste of Coke with "happiness," they easily form a dependency, leading to high-frequency repeat purchases over the long term.
But for Coca-Cola loyalty, taste is not the most important factor.
Neuroscientist Read Montague once conducted an experiment.
In blind taste tests, consumers' preferences for Coca-Cola and Pepsi were similar. But once consumers were told which cup was Coca-Cola and which was Pepsi, three-quarters preferred Coca-Cola.
That is, in consumers' minds, what is strongly associated with happiness is not just the taste of "cola" but the brand "Coca-Cola." Some consumers even buy thermoses printed with "Coca-Cola" to drink water, a treatment other beverage brands rarely receive.
Second, it is highly refined channel management.
Almost every small shop or supermarket, as long as you push the door open, will have Coca-Cola. Even most of the time, there is iced Coke.
If you pay close attention, you will also notice that their placement follows certain standards—always fixed capacities, large bottles at the bottom, small bottles at the top, and same colors in the same vertical row.
Besides being more visible and noticeable, this top-small-bottom-large arrangement reduces the cost for users to get the packaging they want: for example, in convenience stores, the best-selling are 330ml cans and 500ml bottles, which are small packages placed at eye level for easy visibility; the largest bottle can be picked up with a slight bend of the knees.
According to Mr. Xiao Masong, Coca-Cola's sales points in China should exceed 5 million.
What does this concept mean?
In fact, many well-known brands have only a few hundred thousand sales points. Genki Forest only surpassed one million sales points in 2021.
Such extensive coverage includes many mom-and-pop shops where owners lack refined management capabilities. To achieve standardized placement and maintain stable freezing levels, someone must visit, communicate, and even arrange each store individually. This is a highly complex execution problem.
But Coca-Cola manages it very well, becoming the "Whampoa Military Academy" of domestic channel management. Later, many peers like Nongfu Spring and Genki Forest had to learn from Coca-Cola when building their own channel management systems.
Not only is it well-managed, but paradoxically, it is managed through outsourcing.
Normally, to manage such a complex execution system, you would need your own employees, because only your own people can be strictly required. But in reality, the tens of thousands of people who help Coca-Cola inspect small shops daily, complete placement, and execute complex standards are not Coca-Cola's full-time employees.
Coca-Cola chose to outsource this system to bottlers, namely COFCO and Swire. The bottlers bear the high management costs for Coca-Cola (in 2024, China Foods, which controls COFCO Coca-Cola Beverages, had a net profit margin of only 4%, far lower than Coca-Cola), allowing Coca-Cola to focus only on the most profitable parts.
Even in its home country, the United States, Coca-Cola did not build its own channel team but still outsourced channel work to several suppliers.
Why did Coca-Cola choose to do this? And how does it ensure that outsourced teams can stably execute such complex standards?
In fact, if it were possible, I believe most companies would want to outsource labor-intensive positions like channel teams. Managing them yourself is painful and unprofitable; having someone else bear the management costs makes it easier to make money.
Otherwise, because Coca-Cola operates globally, if it had a large offline team, cross-border management and different cultural management systems would cause significant waste, eating into Coca-Cola's profits.
However, it is easier said than done. Once outsourced, it is common for execution quality to drop significantly—after all, they are not your own employees. Are the right people hired? Are managers diligent? Almost everything is uncontrollable. Outsourced teams need to make money, so they will inevitably cut corners and be lazy in management.
In my view, Coca-Cola's most powerful capability is managing outsourced teams to achieve extremely high execution quality. How does it do it?
1. Product sellability is the first premise: when Coca-Cola has high market recognition and good sell-through (sales within a certain period), selling Coca-Cola is always profitable for all retail outlets.
When our team members chatted with some small shops in various parts of Beijing, they said that Coca-Cola's major products, like Coke and Sprite, sell significantly better than Pepsi and Genki Forest.
A small shop owner told us that in the same time, selling three bottles of Coca-Cola is equivalent to selling one bottle of Genki Forest.
So Coca-Cola does not face inventory problems as easily as other beverage companies, and inventory costs are lower.
High turnover also determines shelf space: as long as Coca-Cola products are placed, they will sell more, even if Coca-Cola offers a smaller margin, it is still more profitable.
2. If sales points have returns, things are easier: with good sell-through, the complexity of offline channel management can be reduced.
Because there is no worry about sell-through, Coca-Cola does not need to "hard sell" poor products. This greatly reduces the sales capability requirements for Coca-Cola's salespeople; they do not need complex persuasion skills or strong proactive thinking and aggressiveness.
What Coca-Cola needs salespeople to solve is more about the retail terminal experience.
With simplified problems, it dares to outsource the offline team (production, canning, and distribution), maintaining only a core strategy and brand team, without bearing huge inventory risks.
3. But after all, the channels are not your own people, so how to achieve high-standard management?
Who says that if they are not your own people, they cannot be managed well?
As long as you can clearly know what you want, then figure out what others need to do to achieve it, how to motivate them, and have a way to check each action, you can manage well.
How does Coca-Cola manage the bottlers' channel teams?
The process is roughly as follows:
First, know how to sell well. For example, to sell well around schools, Coca-Cola would choose 10 mom-and-pop shops with similar locations relative to schools.
Consumers coming to these 10 shops have roughly the same needs.
Because they are all around schools, and these schools are similar science and engineering colleges, mainly male students who like playing basketball or football.
When the store environment and consumer needs are the same, the factors affecting whether Coca-Cola products sell well or not are mainly: which products are placed in these stores? How are they displayed?
So Coca-Cola China personnel will regularly scan the 10 stores: who sells better?
Gradually, Coca-Cola's team will summarize a set of successful experiences for selling well.
What does the successful experience include?
First, Coca-Cola's freezer should be placed where consumers can see it as soon as they enter, or next to the cash register.
Second, a freezer alone is not enough; it is best to have two stack displays at the entrance, with several boxes of products, and the top boxes should be open so consumers can see the individual bottles inside.
Third, when opening the freezer, there should be at least 20 Coca-Cola SKUs.
This does not mean 20 different flavors, but multiple packaging options under the same flavor.
For example, several Sprite packages of different sizes, several Coke packages of different sizes, arranged in order: small on top, large on bottom, same colors in the same vertical row. From left to right, the order of Coke, Sprite, and Fanta must also be fixed.
When a consumer reaches into the freezer, the bottle they touch must be cold. So when stocking, you should stock from the back of the freezer, ensuring the outside is cold and the deep ones can be at room temperature.
These are the success factors they found that determine whether a store sells well.
After abstracting the success factors, Coca-Cola China will tell all stores and bottlers: arrange it this way, and it will definitely improve.
But this is just a wish, because whether retail outlets listen and can do it, and whether the two bottlers responsible for execution, Swire and COFCO, listen and can do it, is another matter.
So Coca-Cola China will also have people cooperate with bottlers to complete the entire implementation of the policy.
Why do bottlers agree?
Because their interests are aligned.
Coca-Cola China will negotiate with COFCO and Swire: if sales are good, what will be the raw material prices this year, and what discounts and incentives will there be? If not, what discounts and incentives?
At the same time, they will show Coca-Cola's test data: if you do these actions, your sales will grow by how much.
With data, the top management of COFCO and Swire, for performance and incentives, will definitely agree to Coca-Cola's requirements: if I can make more money, I will do it well.
In fact, the agreements Coca-Cola signs with each retail outlet are similar: what display standards to meet, and how much money per bottle sold.
The interests of retail outlets are also aligned with Coca-Cola.
Aligned interests ensure that retail outlets welcome salespeople to their stores because they help them make money.
Thus, the willingness of bottlers and retail outlets to do well is there. The next challenge is: how to do it?
It is necessary to first teach the salespeople to do it once.
After teaching, there must be a way to check whether tens of thousands of salespeople are executing properly.
A team of tens of thousands cannot be managed well by just watching people.
Coca-Cola China's IT team will directly help bottlers develop an APP that can be installed on each sales representative's phone. The APP monitors the sales representatives' actions.
At the same time, each action completed by a sales representative earns corresponding incentives. In the words of sales representatives: working at Coca-Cola, you get piece-rate wages.
What is piece-rate wages?
It means a certain amount of money for each action.
Normally, a sales representative entering a mom-and-pop shop mainly needs to complete the following actions:
First, before entering, GPS check-in, take a photo of the sign, and report to the system "I have arrived at this store."
Second, restock and rearrange the entire inventory: put the products that need to be stocked, arrange them properly... to meet Coca-Cola's standards.
Third, after rearranging, take many photos: one of the storefront, one of the entire store interior, one of the freezer after arranging, one of the stack displays after arranging, one of the top box opened...
Each photo signifies the completion of an action and also means a few yuan for the salesperson.
There is almost no more direct incentive method: the salesperson uploads the photos, and at night when calculating wages, they can know: "Ah, this photo wasn't taken properly, I earned 5 yuan less today."
So when Coca-Cola China digitally monitors each sales representative's work, it requires a sales representative to complete dozens or even hundreds of actions in one store.
But no matter how timely the system incentives are, some people will inevitably fail due to being flustered, forgetting, or the bottler not training properly.
No matter how good the plan, unexpected problems will always occur.
Whether the training, incentives, or management in the middle are done well will be reflected in the final product display in each small shop.
So, as long as there is a check on the final result, you can know whether the execution process in the middle has problems.
Coca-Cola headquarters personnel will regularly check stores themselves, actually open the freezer to touch the Coke products, take photos of the display, and understand the quality of the current strategy execution.
For example, check whether the flavors and specifications are arranged in order.
For example, if it doesn't feel cold, it means that when stocking, the cold ones were not placed outside and the room-temperature ones inside; if it feels cold, it is good execution quality.
This inspection process, along with research on whether Coca-Cola's strategy truly brings market share growth, is also completed with the help of research companies like Accenture.
If it is found that execution is not in place, it must be that one of the previous links had a problem. Coca-Cola China will find the problem, adjust the strategy, and re-implement.
Continuously discovering success factors, formulating strategies, persuading bottlers to execute, checking execution results, and adjusting strategies constitute Coca-Cola's channel management system.
Such a management system greatly reduces the number of employees Coca-Cola needs.
All physical work is borne by the bottlers, and Coca-Cola China only needs to complete the intellectual parts like strategy design and inspection of execution results.
Although, because bottlers are not Coca-Cola's "own people," direct orders cannot be given, and it inevitably takes more time to "persuade" when implementing strategies. At first glance, it seems like a waste of time.
But in retrospect, I think this is actually a state of higher execution efficiency.
Why?
Because even if you have the power to give orders, when an order goes down, everyone replies "received."
But whether they actually do it every day does not depend on your power, but on whether the executor thinks "it's worth doing" or "not worth doing" every day.
When you have strong power, due to authority, it is difficult to receive feedback from executors saying "I won't do this, it's not worth it."
In a persuasion relationship, it is different.
Only if everyone benefits from doing it this way can the strategy be implemented, and everyone's execution motivation is fully guaranteed.
In the long run, this is actually a state of higher execution efficiency.
In fact, in my view, what Coca-Cola demonstrates is a benchmark for managing retail terminals and designing business models.
Such a choice inevitably limits its new product development capabilities.
Logically, challenging a powerful competitor like Coca-Cola is very difficult.
Challenging Coca-Cola's brand and taste is inherently difficult because its brand has such strong mindshare, its taste is so universal, and it is hard for the same product to surpass Coca-Cola's sell-through.
Genki Forest certainly cannot achieve Coca-Cola's sell-through, nor can it form such strong channel distribution capabilities in a short time.
So what else can it do?
To make channels willing to sell, at least it must achieve: when consumers buy a bottle of Genki Forest and a bottle of Coca-Cola, Genki Forest can give channels more money.
As early as 5 years ago, Genki Forest's founder Tang Binsen shouted at the distributor conference to channel distributors: "In 2021, Genki Forest will still provide you with products with the largest profit margins."
So where does the extra money for channels come from?
In the short term, it can rely on subsidies, but in the long run, it must come from consumers. Only if consumers are willing to spend more money can Genki Forest afford to give channels more money.
So why are consumers willing to spend more?
There is only one way: make better products that meet their needs, make consumers like them more, and occupy their minds, like Coca-Cola, so that consumers form habits.
For the beverage category, due to the low unit price (usually under 10 yuan or even 5 yuan), consumers' purchase decision time is very short, usually impulse purchases.
When purchasing, consumers do not spend much time thinking, so at the moment they see the product, they must realize in a very short decision time that this product can meet their needs. If they can form a mindset later, the decision will happen faster.
This only path is exactly Genki Forest's choice: fully explore consumer needs, continuously create new products that consumers are willing to pick up when they see them, and try to occupy category mindshare, making consumers willing to buy them quickly and repeatedly.
On this path, Genki Forest has also achieved almost the best results among Chinese beverage companies.
In 2018, Genki Forest was the first to enter the carbonated beverage market with sparkling water, relying on the selling point of "0 sugar, 0 calories, 0 fat," achieving over 200% market growth for three consecutive years.
In 2021, Genki Forest launched Alien Electrolyte Water. In the first nine months of 2022, Alien Electrolyte Water sales reached 1 billion yuan. In 2024, Alien had already taken the top spot in the sports drink market with a 22.7% share (CICC).
In 2023, Genki Forest launched Zizai Water, which sold out within 5 days of its Tmall debut and exceeded 100 million yuan in sales within 4 months of launch. Genki Forest Zizai Water's 2024 sales are expected to exceed 1 billion yuan (LatePost).
Genki Forest has successfully placed one product after another in consumers' minds: healthy sparkling water = Genki Forest, electrolyte water = Alien, barley water = Zizai (= represents binding), becoming consumers' continuous choice.
Coca-Cola must envy Genki Forest's achievements in launching new products. It certainly wants to continuously create hit products in China and gain a larger market.
In fact, Coca-Cola China has never stopped launching new products—according to Interesting Report statistics, from 2018 to 2023, Coca-Cola launched a total of 192 new products in the Chinese market, covering soda, sparkling water, juice, ready-to-drink tea (herbal tea, fruit tea, lemon tea, milk tea, etc.), coffee, bottled water, functional drinks, and other categories.
Normally, Coca-Cola's new products should have a higher success rate than Genki Forest.
Because Coca-Cola has stronger capabilities and resource accumulation than Genki Forest.
It has the most valuable brands in the beverage industry and strong channel relationships, which make its products easier for channels and consumers to accept. It also has years of accumulated consumer data, mature teams, and years of experience.
However, Coca-Cola's new products have not achieved Genki Forest's results.
In our impression as consumers, over the past 20 years, Coca-Cola's successful products are still sugar-free upgrades of classic lines like Coke Zero.
Even after seeing Genki Forest invade its carbonated beverage territory, Coca-Cola is anxious. Coca-Cola China has also launched multiple new products positioned similarly to Genki Forest, such as the aforementioned "Aha Sparkling Water."
At the same time, while Genki Forest's products are conquering markets, Coca-Cola's benchmark products enter Coca-Cola's freezers with much fanfare but quickly disappear.
Why is this?
Why, despite more accumulation and many attempts, can't Coca-Cola create hit products like Genki Forest in China?
Honestly, when Coca-Cola chose the outsourcing route to pursue higher profits, new products were destined to be harder to succeed at Coca-Cola.
A new product at Coca-Cola will face three major obstacles:
The first obstacle is the cooperation of bottlers.
Choosing to outsource the Chinese channel management system has the advantage of reducing management costs, but the disadvantage is that its control over channels inevitably decreases, and when interests conflict with bottlers, irreconcilable differences may arise.
To launch new products in China, Coca-Cola must have the downstream support of bottlers. Because a new product involves production planning, distribution, warehouse arrangement, inventory management, etc.—these tasks, from production to distribution, all depend on bottlers.
Facing bottlers, who are not their own employees, launching new products can only be resolved through persuasion.
The problem is: if Coca-Cola China asks bottlers to do actions that can quickly increase sales and show immediate results, bottlers will see the benefits and implement them quickly.
But if Coca-Cola wants to launch new products that are risky and would expose bottlers to inventory risks, bottlers may not be willing.
Persuading bottlers to accept a new product is often difficult.
Why?
If a new product does not have strong demand already appearing and validated by market data, bottlers are unwilling to give it the best placement.
Because this directly affects bottlers' profits and exposes them to risks.
Once bottlers become the object that Coca-Cola China must persuade, the bottlers' product understanding capability greatly limits the ceiling of new products.
Bottlers can be bottlers because they have factories and channel capabilities, not because they have brand and product capabilities. Moreover, the basic quality and salary of bottler employees are far lower than those at Coca-Cola headquarters. When bottlers have veto power, their cognition limits the ceiling of new products.
When facing people who do not understand the industry, using data to persuade is almost the only feasible method. Bottler personnel usually make judgments based on current market sales data of existing products. If a new product cannot provide clear data to prove its opportunity and sales, it is difficult to effectively persuade bottlers, and the new product will struggle to survive.
The result is: before sparkling water became popular, it was difficult to persuade bottlers to accept it. But after seeing Genki Forest's sparkling water become popular, it is much easier to persuade bottlers to follow, but by then the optimal window period has often passed.
The pursuit of existing data and scientific evidence often becomes an obstacle to innovation.
Moreover, Coca-Cola bottler managers are no longer young and are no longer the core target users of beverages. These managers may find it difficult to make accurate judgments about product ideas.
If persuasion fails, the only way to get bottlers to cooperate is to subsidize them with money.
To give new products a chance to be tested, Coca-Cola has to subsidize bottlers to give them basic motivation to cooperate.
But how easy is it for a new product to succeed at once?
The second obstacle is patience.
A new product often requires longer testing and adjustment in terms of target group selection, whether the taste meets the group's needs, and whether the channel is correctly distributed.
Only when the elements become more and more correct through adjustment can the success of the new product be seen.
This adjustment requires patience.
When Coca-Cola must adjust with the cooperation of bottlers, it means actions are less flexible, and completing the same test requires more time and patience.
Taste education for new products is also destined to be a long process. It requires enduring the initial low sales period and waiting for consumer habits to form.
Even Coca-Cola was not easily accepted by the mass market in China at first. In fact, a 10-billion-yuan product takes many years of development to emerge.
New products need to be "nurtured," and they also need more time and patience.
But all patience comes at the cost of continuous subsidies and expenses. When Coca-Cola pursues profits, it is destined to be harder to give new products the patience to grow slowly and adjust continuously.
Market education and scale growth are inherently difficult. Compared to Genki Forest, Coca-Cola also has higher requirements for new product scale.
The third obstacle is past success.
Under Coca-Cola's high sell-through expectations, honestly, the success of new products is far more difficult than at Genki Forest—Coca-Cola already occupies significant shelf space in retail outlets. A new product launch requires replacing an old product to avoid significantly increasing internal management costs, which is inherently difficult.
At Genki Forest, the standard for new products is: whether it can bring overall revenue and profit growth. This standard is the same at Coca-Cola.
But Coca-Cola's single product sales are far larger than Genki Forest's, and the old product lines have been too successful in the past. For new products to grow, surpass existing products' sell-through, and replace old product lines is far more difficult than at Genki Forest.
At this point, the burden of too-good business makes it harder for Coca-Cola's new products to survive.
Even taste adjustments to existing products are harder at Coca-Cola—there are always many consumers who feel that once you adjust, it is "no longer the original taste."
When Coca-Cola achieved the highest profits in the beverage industry, the three obstacles to breakthrough also came from the pursuit of profitability and efficiency.
Every system that reaches efficiency limits becomes an obstacle to innovation. The higher the efficiency, the harder the innovation.
Coca-Cola chose to strip away the costs and risks of heavy assets and outsource channel management, which helped it win greater profits, but inevitably limited its new product development capabilities.
Pursuing profits means reducing innovation risks and using more experienced, less error-prone employees. As long as these choices do not change, breakthrough innovations are almost impossible at Coca-Cola.
In this context, even if Coca-Cola sees Genki Forest's success and wants to develop Genki Forest's new product development capabilities, it is difficult.
Ultimately, the actions Coca-Cola can easily implement are still to quickly increase sales of existing product lines: can consumers drink a few more times a week? Or do taste upgrades for old product lines?
Between "wanting profits" and "wanting breakthroughs," clearly, in the Chinese market, Coca-Cola has chosen "wanting profits" more often. What is sacrificed is the ability to break through.
Genki Forest, on the other hand, does not have the conditions to choose profits, so it can only resolutely choose "breakthrough."
Genki Forest: choosing young entrepreneurs, leveraging their ability to sense and act on changes in young consumer trends.
When facing competitors like Coca-Cola, which already has brand and channel advantages, as well as equally strong encirclement from Master Kong and Nongfu Spring, as a latecomer, Genki Forest can almost only break through with products.
We see Genki Forest's series of hit products, such as sparkling water, Zizai Water, and Alien, all hitting certain unmet needs of young consumers.
Sparkling water solves the problem of liking carbonated taste but fearing weight gain; Zizai Water solves the problem of finding plain water tasteless, wanting to drink healthily but with some flavor; Alien Electrolyte Water solves the problem of replenishing electrolytes in scenarios like exercise.
In 2023, Genki Forest also launched a cola-flavored sparkling water. Although it has the same cola taste, it is clearly more refreshing and less sweet than Coca-Cola's products.
Why can Genki Forest continuously launch hit products?
If the success of one hit product can come from the talent of managers, continuous hit products can only come from having the organizational capability to continuously develop hit products.
To form such organizational capability, Genki Forest needs the entire system to have the ability to insight into and implement consumers' real needs.
This mainly involves two links:
(1) How to continuously capture consumers' real needs within the organization.
This involves:
• How to identify who Genki Forest's consumers are? How are their needs changing?
• What kind of product managers and managers can more keenly discover and identify these needs? How to attract such people?
• How does Genki Forest ensure the information input of these product managers? How do managers review their product ideas and allocate resources?
(2) How to effectively control innovation risks and improve the probability of innovation success.
This involves:
• How to control risks through rigorous internal and external, online and offline testing processes?
• How to form more successful or failed investment experiences by continuously investing in new products, thereby improving the success rate of innovation? Continuously reducing innovation risks.
Let's first talk about how to capture consumers' real needs.
To capture needs, you must first know who the consumers are.
When I chatted with some industry experts, they told me: in fact, the vast majority of beverage drinkers are young people. Many people reduce their beverage drinking frequency as they age.
The young group is the core consumer of the beverage industry.
Genki Forest's initial target group was also young consumers with more spending power. Compared to their parents, they are more willing to pay higher costs for health and preference.
For example, in an era when Coca-Cola and other products were priced at 3-4 yuan, only by serving this group could Genki Forest's sparkling water sell for 5-6 yuan. These young people are willing to pay a premium for the desire to be healthy, tasty, and not gain weight.
It is precisely because Genki Forest chose this group that it can achieve healthier revenue and profits, supporting its later large-scale trial and error innovation costs.
At the same time, the needs and preferences of these young people are changing rapidly, with increasing attention to health and body management ("sugar rejection"), higher requirements for product ingredient lists, and lighter tastes than European and American users.
Change brings new opportunities.
However, Genki Forest is often the first to sense changes and seize opportunities, while other brands only realize changes have occurred after seeing Genki Forest's success.
For example, when Genki Forest launched Zizai Water and products with the "medicine and food homology" concept, everyone realized that health preservation had become a universal demand sufficient to support a market of over 1 billion yuan.
Among many beverage companies, Genki Forest is always the first to sense changes—it is always the pioneer of a category or the first mover and popularizer of a certain element.
The reason Genki Forest can always be the first to observe changes is that the organization has enough people who are more sensitive to changes in young people's needs.
Genki Forest chooses to recruit younger product managers and managers, who are closer to users in their living conditions and more likely to discover and identify user needs.
In terms of talent selection, Genki Forest is very different from most beverage companies.
First, Genki Forest does not focus on industry experience when recruiting, but chooses product managers who are more like entrepreneurs.
When we chatted with some Genki Forest product managers on this topic, they said that most of Genki's product managers previously had no beverage industry experience, and almost none came from old-generation beverage companies like Master Kong, Nongfu Spring, or Coca-Cola.
Genki Forest cares more about standards: young, love life, love consumption, know how to consume, and love drinking beverages daily.
Most importantly, compared to product managers at other beverage companies, they are more like entrepreneurs. They have ideas, stronger exploration desire, hope to create their own works, are willing to innovate, and crave new challenges.
• We learned about a Genki Forest product manager who is both a beverage enthusiast and a beverage researcher sensitive to experience in daily life. Whenever he drinks a beverage, he records it in a table after finishing: what scenario am I in, why does this beverage attract me? Why did I buy this beverage? What is satisfying and unsatisfying about the taste?
• Inside Genki Forest, product managers also like to share their lives. They study the logic behind people's lifestyle choices and decisions. For example: why did a certain beverage sell well in that country and era, and why did consumers later abandon it?
• I also chatted with people from both Coca-Cola and Genki Forest, and one difference I perceived is that a larger proportion of people joining Coca-Cola feel that Coke is the industry benchmark, where they can learn professional skills and systems, and it also endorses their careers. In addition to endorsement, people at Genki Forest genuinely hope to have the opportunity to make products they like here.
Since they do not recruit from traditional beverage companies, where do these product managers come from?
Genki Forest's product managers are both externally recruited and internally transferred. Their previous career backgrounds vary, including jewelry, tea house owners, and internal transfers from strategy departments.
As Tang Binsen often says: everyone can cook.
This phrase is a line from Pixar's animated film "Ratatouille," but at Genki Forest it has become a basic belief: everyone has creativity, and creative people can become product managers.
However, ideals are good, but making beverages is a professional matter.
Product managers have no beverage industry experience and do not understand beverages. How can they make good products?
Most beverage companies expect product managers to understand users, R&D, and ideally channels and business. But in Genki Forest's view, R&D and business can be supplemented by others. The most irreplaceable capability of a product manager is only the ability to insight into users and accurately understand user needs.
As long as the product manager understands users, knows what users want, and insists on standards, even if they do not understand R&D, the R&D team can repeatedly try formulas and eventually meet the standards, at most requiring a few more attempts.
The most irreplaceable thing is still the understanding of users and the insistence on standards.
At this point, the product manager not understanding R&D may actually be an advantage—not understanding and not being able to sympathize with the difficulty of R&D makes it easier to insist on standards.
Conversely, if the product is good enough, business indicators will naturally be easier to achieve.
Moreover, not understanding R&D or business at the beginning is fine; people with entrepreneurial personalities often learn quickly.
On this basis, what educational background or origin a person has is not important in Genki Forest's view.
As long as they are willing to innovate, have ideas, have the ability to insight into users, and possess continuous learning ability, they can become product managers.
Employees with such entrepreneurial traits are desired by many companies. Why do they choose to join Genki Forest?
It is not difficult to understand: the opportunities you give your team determine the candidates you attract.
The key to attracting these potential entrepreneurs is precisely that Genki Forest gives them more opportunities to create new products and unleash creativity, and the managers they face daily are generally younger and more open-minded.
These product managers, who are more like entrepreneurs, often prefer to work on new products rather than continuously optimize mature products.
This state is different from most professionals.
For most professionals, after incubating a product line from 0 to 1, they naturally hope to continue working on it, with the team growing, business becoming more certain, work becoming more familiar, and their rank increasing.
After all, higher income and lower difficulty mean higher cost-effectiveness.
Doing something with stable expectations and increasingly easier is the choice of more people.
But at Genki Forest, you will find that often after a product manager creates a hit product, when asked to spend time optimizing it further, they feel it is boring and uninteresting. Although the business is still growing and there are many areas to optimize, in their view, starting another new product is more exciting.
Even if the company requires them to stay in the product line manager position and persistently optimize, personal interest must submit to the company's authority, but personal interest also determines that Genki's product managers invest more enthusiasm in launching new products than in operating mature product lines.
People with entrepreneurial personalities are better innovators but may not be patient operators.
Genki Forest, which pursues new product breakthroughs, provides these product managers with more opportunities to create new products, solve new problems, and turn their ideas into reality.
When seeing Genki Forest's continuous successful new products, such people often come attracted by reputation.
People with entrepreneurial personalities naturally prefer to be with similar people.
The executives they face daily at Genki Forest are also a group of younger and more open-minded people.
A Genki colleague told me an interesting thing: the average age of Genki Forest's top management is already lower than that of most beverage companies. In terms of mentality, their psychological age is even younger than their physiological age.
He said: you see at some beverage companies, when top management meets, many people hold a Starbucks cup. But when Genki Forest's top management meets, they more often hold beverages like young people, twist off the cap, and drink in gulps.
People who drink beverages daily are certainly more likely to make good beverages than those who do not.
This is likely a deliberate choice by Genki Forest. When selecting executives, Genki Forest also chooses those who truly recognize what Genki Forest does and its philosophy.
How to choose?
The key is whether they are willing to share risks with Genki Forest.
This person may have previously worked at other large beverage companies with stable income. But Genki Forest will reduce their cash income and correspondingly increase long-term binding with options and shares.
That is, Genki Forest only chooses executives willing to share risks with them.
Only those who truly believe in what Genki Forest is doing and the philosophy it conveys, and who have the openness necessary to make products for young people, will join Genki Forest.
Genki Forest also provides a more suitable working environment for these "young people."
Because most employees are young and relatively love to play, Genki's Beijing office is near CBD, one of the most bustling areas in Beijing, while the Shanghai office is in Xintiandi. After work, young people do not need to commute; around them are Beijing's best restaurants, making it easier to eat, drink, and have fun.
These ensure Genki Forest's top-down youthful and open atmosphere.
The birth of product ideas: continuous emergence from internal and external sources.
This youth-friendly atmosphere also ensures the quantity and quality of product ideas.
In addition to product managers, other positions at Genki Forest also attract many young people eager to create their own products.
The question is: with these people eager to create, how to unleash their creativity? At the same time, let them truly feel that Genki Forest will give them opportunities to create?
In discovering opportunities, Genki Forest is also very different from most beverage companies.
Unlike some large beverage manufacturers we know that choose top-down product directions, Genki Forest believes that sensing life changes requires more tentacles. A product person, no matter how experienced, cannot reach every type of user, and they will age and eventually be bound by experience.
Rather than having someone "decide," Genki Forest tends to give the opportunity to propose ideas and creativity to "all employees."
Genki Forest provides more channels for employees to propose ideas.
For example, Genki Forest holds a product idea conference every month. This conference is not only for product personnel; all employees, from interns to sales, can participate, and Tang Binsen himself is present.
At the conference, employees can propose their ideas for future new products, such as unmet needs, creative solutions to current problems, and new opportunities not yet on the market.
If ideas are adopted by the product department or Tang Binsen, there are varying degrees of rewards. The product department then comprehensively considers and initiates projects.
Because the cost of proposing ideas is low, employees are generally proactive in proposing them. After review by relevant people, if adopted, there is a bonus, and the idea may be implemented. Even if not adopted, there is no loss.
For example, the initial product idea for Zizai Water came from this.
At that time, a very young post-95 employee who had crossed over from the investment industry to Genki Forest shared her understanding of "Eastern food supplementation" on site. She said she did not like drinking plain water and hoped to find a "water substitute" with a simple ingredient list but with flavor, and like drinking plain water, without health burden.
Tang Binsen heard this idea and quickly approved it, giving the product idea room to try.
Zizai Water later became one of Genki Forest's most important hit products in the past three years.
Outside the conference, the company also encourages employees to openly suggest improvements to products, including designing logos and naming products.
Once these suggestions are accepted by the brand manager and applied to the product, the employee receives a large reward, usually tens of thousands of yuan, exceeding a month's salary.
For another example, at the Genki Universe Competition, Genki Forest goes to places where young people gather—universities—to collect college students' ideas. Tang Binsen directly reviews them and can even issue offers on the spot.
A student who proposed an idea and won an award at the Genki Forest Universe Competition grew up in Beijing and loves various hawthorn foods. "Sugar-coated haws" and "Beijing cake" are her favorite hawthorn foods.
When she prepared to make a beverage, "hawthorn flavor" became the first choice.
This also became the inspiration for the later "Wumei Hawthorn Tea."
Of course, high-quality ideas cannot rely solely on inspiration; it is best to have high-quality information input.
Genki Forest also provides more input to the team to help them propose higher-quality product ideas.
Genki Forest has established a dedicated strategic research team, and their research results are open to product managers.
The research team scans various domestic and international beverage companies, including: what new products are they launching? What new products have they launched? Which products sold well historically and why? Which products were eliminated and why? Then correspond back to the current era and population: what changes have occurred in the era? Are they similar to the current Chinese population?
Tang Binsen has a belief: from a broader range of domestic and international phenomena, it is more likely to find the basic laws that determine the development of the beverage industry.
He also often shares with employees and initiates various discussions.
The reference for discussions is often various phenomena in the beverage industry.
For example:
• Sugar-free tea drinks are very popular in the Japanese market. Can they become popular in China?
• Functional drinks are popular in Europe and America. Will they become as popular in China as in Europe and America?
Such discussions often bring new thinking and inspiration to employees, making it easier for high-quality ideas to be proposed.
More reverent product idea reviews.
However, when so many people are proposing ideas, it is destined that most ideas are not fully considered.
For example, only considering the market but not competition, only considering competition but not the market, only seeing a certain change in consumer needs at the moment and arguing that consumers will like it, but not demonstrating the future market size and whether the market will face less brutal competition in the future.
But in Genki Forest's view, these are not as important as the potential opportunity itself.
Genki Forest's product managers and managers will review these ideas. More ideas mean more review time is needed. But in Genki Forest's view, if you want to seize more opportunities, this is a necessary price to pay.
Even if an idea is not fully considered, if some point in the idea touches a product manager, that product manager will also refine the idea, supplement more research, and ultimately judge whether it is an opportunity worth investing in before implementing it.
The different attitude towards ideas leads to Genki Forest's different standards for passing ideas compared to most companies.
Specifically, how does Genki Forest review an idea?
Most companies require employees to convince the company with data such as market research, because data is the most objective and easiest to persuade others.
When you show the data, the market is indeed more likely to hold.
But Genki Forest clearly did not have the conditions to enter a market already validated by data at the beginning, because such markets are destined to belong more to large companies like Coca-Cola, and entering such markets relies on stronger brand and channel advantages.
When there is not much data to validate, judging opportunities and allocating resources can only rely on managers and experts' reviews.
At Genki Forest, the entire product review process is divided into: product concept review, R&D feasibility review, financial model review, and then entering R&D and trial sales.
The product concept review determines whether a new product can enter subsequent stages.
The R&D feasibility review checks whether the product concept's requirements are achievable.
The financial model review looks at market, scale, pricing, cost, and whether costs can continuously decrease with scale growth—only with economies of scale is it a good business.
In the R&D and trial sales stage, Genki Forest first realizes the product taste requirements, then looks for lower-cost formulas.
Each stage has corresponding reviewers.
R&D and financial reviews are easier to find objective basis.
The easiest to mistakenly kill good ideas is the product concept review stage.
Most beverage companies also have product concept reviewers who have the power to decide how to allocate resources to product ideas.
But such a mechanism often kills breakthrough ideas.
Sometimes reviewers think an idea is unreliable because it is truly impossible, such as a certain taste that cannot be formulated.
But other times, when they hear an idea, they may judge: this idea was tried historically, it did not succeed 5 years ago, and it is hard to succeed now.
At such times, the judgment is mainly based on their personal experience. Inaccurate personal experience becomes the culprit that harms ideas.
A friend at Genki Forest told me a wonderful passage:
As a person ages, experience gradually forms, and therefore judgment errors also accumulate.
The longer a person works in the beverage industry, the more ideas they have had historically. When their ideas are fed back upward and released to the market, many times managers tell them it won't work, and the market tells them it won't work.
After these negative feedbacks, they form the experience: these ideas and practices do not work.
But many times, the feedback from their managers above is not necessarily correct.
The market also changes; what did not work in the past may work in the future.
Wrong feedback accumulates into wrong experience, hindering their innovation ability.
At this point, an experienced but increasingly conservative middle-aged manager appears.
How does Genki Forest avoid this problem among reviewers?
First, it is still the selection of reviewers.
When Genki Forest itself chooses managers who are younger in age and mentality and more open, this problem naturally occurs less.
Second, even more open reviewers will be more cautious in stopping an idea. When they do not understand, they should delegate downward and let the team have a chance to try.
Tang Binsen rarely says an idea won't work when reviewing ideas.
He assumes that no one can understand all users at the same time.
At the same time, he knows that over time, Genki Forest's executive team will also age, and Tang Binsen himself is aging. Even if Tang Binsen can understand men, he may not understand women.
Only those who are closer to users and whose lives are more similar to users are more likely to sense changes first and make accurate judgments.
In product reviews, the question he most often asks is: do users actually like it? Will they pay for it?
In the materials submitted by product managers, he does not like to look at large amounts of statistical data but prefers to look at one user's thoughts and opinions after another, especially the original words of users.
At this stage, he focuses more on the thinking behind the product manager's idea, including user value, market size, competitive landscape, and even product name, taste, packaging, and future marketing path.
Overall, he focuses more on whether the product manager's thinking dimensions are complete, whether all dimensions have basis, and whether there are any violations of common sense.
On this basis, as long as the product manager can submit a logically self-consistent result with factual basis and user original words, Tang Binsen usually gives a judgment: although he is not a user and cannot judge whether it is definitely feasible, he is willing to support the product manager to try.
Even if he thinks there is a problem, he will say: although I think this idea may have problems, you can try it first. Because my understanding of users may be wrong, and my understanding of taste and trends may also be wrong.
Under such cautious negative review, the team has indeed shown him surprises.
The 900ML large iced tea is a good example.
This product was not favored by Tang Binsen at first. At that time, Tang Binsen believed that everyone was pursuing health and would replace sugar with sugar-free, which is a major trend. Who would choose to drink a sugary product?
But when the team actually conducted offline research, they found that in many lower-tier cities, Master Kong's iced black tea and jasmine honey tea are sugary, but many users mistakenly believe they are sugar-free.
Moreover, for white-collar workers in offices, everyone is trying to remove sugar. But those who actually drink the most beverages—delivery riders and young people in internet cafes—are in a state of high calorie consumption all year round, and they need the sugar in beverages to replenish energy.
This exceeded Tang Binsen's cognition during the review, but he still gave the team a chance to try. This led to the later success of iced tea exceeding 100 million yuan per month.
"Assuming you don't know" and making judgments more cautiously is actually a manifestation of reverence.
What we know is that most people with industry experience often assume: I know users are like this, and the market is like this.
The assumption of Genki Forest managers, represented by Tang Binsen, during reviews is: users are complex, and I may not know.
This reverence of managers allows more product ideas to have the opportunity to be tested.
However, there is another practical problem: as product lines increase, normal companies will design more management levels—if the boss cannot oversee everything, they delegate to managers to help oversee, and if managers are too busy, they delegate to lower-level managers.
But as long as levels exist, if a new product idea needs to be reported from bottom to top, layer by layer, it is difficult to guarantee that every middle-level manager has reverence, no selfish motives, or can always make accurate judgments.
At this point, it is likely that because the idea is too far from the final decision-maker, it dies during upward transmission.
Since ideas are so important to Genki Forest—on this issue, Tang Binsen's choice is to stay close enough to frontline product ideas, directly hear all new product-related ideas, and understand employees' thoughts and information about new products in the first place.
This shortens the distance between new products and himself, allowing more good ideas and new products to survive and have the opportunity to be tried.
On this point, there is also an interesting comparison.
A friend mentioned that a team that left a large beverage manufacturer replicated Genki Forest's products in lower-tier cities. Genki Forest makes sugar-free or low-sugar versions, while they make sugary versions under the same positioning, and they are growing quickly, already with a business scale of over 1 billion yuan. However, they had to leave the large manufacturer and start their own business to achieve this. The same thing is almost impossible to do within that large beverage manufacturer because it would likely fail at the project initiation stage.
A friend who has experienced both a traditional foreign company and Genki Forest talked to me about the work state at Genki Forest: at Genki Forest, you can feel more flexibility, openness, and faster progress. There is no boss blocking you; adjustments are based on market feedback, not because the boss subjectively thinks it looks bad and requires repeated changes. Even when you need to persuade reviewers or the boss, it is easier at Genki Forest than at other companies.
In the early days of Genki Forest's entrepreneurship, people around Tang Binsen would directly propose what they wanted to do. As long as they could persuade Tang Binsen, they could get resource support.
Even interns feel significantly more freedom. If they want to conduct consumer interviews, they can directly get consumers' phone numbers and communicate with them. For example, if they want to co-brand with a certain brand, as long as the team leader nods, they can do it without further upward reporting.
Such a relaxed environment that respects ideas and creativity is hugely attractive to young people eager to make good products. Just as all hairdressers aspire to open their own salon, almost all young consumer goods practitioners we have met aspire to propose ideas, make good products, and ultimately win market recognition.
When Genki Forest lets young people see that such opportunities exist, naturally these people will flock to Genki Forest's open door that collects ideas and is willing to give more opportunities to try.
Controlling innovation risks: extensive testing around users and the market.
We see that Genki Forest does not have the pressure of having to persuade bottlers like Coca-Cola, nor does it rely on industry trend data. There are many people proposing ideas, and even reviewers tend to let ideas pass.
Such choices do make it easier for good ideas to survive and get resources, but they also inevitably lead to a lot of resource waste.
When Genki Forest chooses to give employees more authorization and more attempts, the company bears the innovation risks behind it.
These risks must be controlled by corresponding processes and control mechanisms.
How to control them specifically?
Because Genki Forest hopes more ideas get the opportunity to be tried, to reduce the cost and risk of trying, it has set up far more detailed control nodes than peers like Coca-Cola, to more accurately identify a product with future potential.
For example, Genki Forest involves users throughout the product development and testing process. Although most beverage companies do this, when Genki Forest continuously reduces testing costs, it can test more frequently.
Normal consumer goods companies also find users during testing, prepare questioning materials in advance, and invite them to the company for interviews. But this process often takes weeks to complete one test.
At Genki Forest, because many products have employees as users, it chooses to build the product development laboratory in the middle of the office.
In actual work, R&D colleagues often carry trays from the laboratory to other colleagues' work areas, with beverages of different formulas on the trays, inviting colleagues to test. After tasting, they are invited to fill out questionnaires, including which product they prefer, which fruit flavor is thicker, the taste, sweetness, whether they would recommend it to others, etc.
These test questions directly revolve around the taste requirements defined at the product concept stage, testing each concept (such as low burden, not sweet) independently. The results of R&D colleagues' office surveys determine the subsequent iteration direction of the product.
When surrounded by target users, multiple tests a day greatly increase the test frequency during the R&D stage while significantly reducing test costs.
What about populations not covered by Genki Forest employees?
After all, most people working at Genki Forest are white-collar workers who sit in offices all day. These people have lower daily energy expenditure.
These people cannot represent all populations. For example, delivery riders or couriers have more physical exertion. Compared to office workers who mainly deal with body shape and weight issues, they need more sugar supplementation.
At this point, it is difficult to complete such tests in the internal environment.
But Genki Forest, regardless of the user population, will introduce future target users early in taste testing and visual design.
How to find these future target users?
In the view of a Genki Forest friend, all Genki Forest products at birth are replacements for certain products in the market. The users of the products they hope to replace are the target users of the product.
For example, sparkling water is an upgrade and replacement for carbonated beverages like Coca-Cola.
For example, Zizai Water hopes to replace mineral water and become consumers' daily drinking water. Even before Zizai Water appeared, some consumers would cook barley water for themselves daily.
For example, large iced tea is an upgrade and replacement for Master Kong's iced black tea, with a lighter taste and less sugar. This product sells well mainly in lower-tier cities and towns.
When all these products can find substitutes as references, you can know who is currently buying the substitutes. These groups become the target groups that the product may affect in the future.
At this point, Genki Forest employees will choose to go out, find these people, and conduct tests and research with them.
For example, when making a product for students, Genki Forest's marketing personnel go to campus surroundings almost every two weeks to test the effectiveness of POSM (point of sale materials).
They will take some handwritten copy, use existing product images, briefly layout, print them out, place them in small shops, and catch consumers on the spot for testing, asking if they are interested and want to buy.
Of course, the initially set target group may not be accurate, and they will make corrections before the product launch.
After the product launch,
Genki Forest also frequently tests online and offline.
For example, Alien changed its campaign almost every month for a period.
Normally, many consumer goods companies may do 2-3 campaigns a year, because doing one campaign is a huge workload, and you have to stay up many nights before the campaign goes live.
But Genki Forest increased this frequency to once a month. The pressure on creativity and execution is imaginable, but it greatly increases test frequency.
If finding users for testing is work that everyone does, what distinguishes Genki Forest from most beverage companies is that it chooses to sell many products online first, which is also unusual for beverage companies. Because the logistics cost of selling beverages online is too high, sales are not cost-effective, and selling beverages online almost never makes money.
For Genki Forest, online advertising does not pursue profit but becomes a new product validation method with lower cost than offline advertising.
In online sales channels, Genki Forest puts a large number of ideas, including its own and influencers', through advertising to see conversion rates and ROI effects. If the data feedback is poor, they will review whether it is a population problem or a product problem.
To do online testing well and make it effective, the population and selling points must be correct.
Genki Forest has several fixed population packs. These population positions cover all their beverages. These population packs actually depict Genki Forest's long-term strategic direction.
For selling points, like product design, as long as testing costs are low enough, you can try a lot.
If advertising for unlisted products, the advertising results are mainly used to "judge the product's main selling points."
For example: Genki Forest once advertised a "soy milk" product on Toutiao with multiple materials, each highlighting different selling points such as "high protein, high calcium," "dual protein," "no added sucrose, low fat," "low sugar, fat," etc. After clicking, users would jump to the Tmall flagship store homepage, but there was actually no real soy milk product for sale. The core was to test selling points.
If advertising for products already on sale, they compare data among several products and add more advertising to whichever generates sales.
After online validation, they then expand offline.
These testing processes make Genki Forest's risk of testing new products increasingly lower and the process smoother.
In this process, Genki Forest has also formed increasingly low-cost experience in predicting whether a new product can become a hit.
In fact, to summarize:
Coca-Cola chooses to deeply cultivate old products, not because it does not know the value of R&D, but because for Coke, when it already has moats like brand and mature channel management systems, it can choose not to take risks and take a lower-cost development route, making it an increasingly profitable business.
In the face of old giants like Coca-Cola and Nongfu Spring, as a latecomer, Genki Forest can only break through through product innovation. It must equip itself with new product development capabilities and learn to manage the risks of new product development.
Managing new product development like investing.
But even so, Genki Forest's new product failure rate is still high.
Inside Genki Forest, many new products ultimately do not appear in consumers'视野, having been validated as failures and killed in the cradle. The company has a long Excel sheet listing various products, but many of them consumers have never seen.
Even if some products can be launched, if they are validated after launch as not having enough sales, they will be taken off the shelves, like the Chongji Collagen Water launched around 2017, which is now hard to find on the market.
These failed attempts inevitably bring high costs.
Earlier we said: Coca-Cola's pursuit of profit makes high-quality innovation difficult at Coca-Cola.
So, does Genki Forest not want profits?
Of course, it needs profits, otherwise investors would not agree.
However, Genki Forest has been looking for a balance between breakthrough and profitability.
Several actions show Genki Forest's efforts:
A large amount of innovation gives Genki Forest a large number of products and also conducts more tests simultaneously. All these actions translate into requirements for offline channel team distribution.
When Genki Forest's offline team has to complete such complex product management, it inevitably brings a huge increase in management costs.
To this end, Genki Forest is reducing its SKUs.
Some products are profitable on their own books, but with low ceilings and not cost-effective when management costs are included, Genki Forest is gradually cutting such product lines to simplify the offline team's actions.
As consumers, we easily see Genki Forest's innovation and flexibility. But innovation, flexibility, and openness are not the whole picture of Genki Forest.
In Genki's definition: breakthrough and innovation are the main responsibilities of all product and marketing team members. Product and marketing teams must choose people with innovation ability and maintain a flexible and open atmosphere.
But the offline channel team responsible for distribution must execute strongly and complete every required action with high quality.
Genki's offline channel team adopts a militarized management style with strict orders, strict assessment, and elimination.
In the words of a Genki colleague: although they are all Genki Forest, product marketing and channels are almost like two different companies.
These actions limit the scope of Genki Forest's innovation—only departments with more innovation value innovate, while other departments still execute strongly.
On this basis, through review meetings and adding testing links, the risks and costs of innovation failure are continuously reduced. Only then can Genki achieve healthy profits while continuously innovating and pursuing new opportunities.
In retrospect, Genki Forest's logic for reducing new product development risks and costs is very similar to the logic of managing investments.
A large number of layman "entrepreneurs" come to Genki Forest with the goal of making a product they like. Genki Forest gives a more open attitude and resource investment to everyone's ideas. In repeated tests, these people's ideas and solutions are continuously fed back and corrected by users and the market.
At this point, Genki Forest is doing angel investment in ideas and creators.
Although many products fail in the process, or sales are not that high, as long as a few big products like Alien Electrolyte Water and Barley Water appear, it can ensure the investment does not lose much money.
All failed products also help Genki Forest deepen its understanding of the market and accumulate more new product development experience.
This is the process of forming investment experience.
After having more investment experience, Genki Forest gradually learns how to more accurately evaluate an investment target:
For example, when evaluating a product, look at growth rate, not current sales.
Compared to "current situation," "growth rate" is the direct manifestation of investment value.
Like Barley Water, even before its launch, the entire barley water category had national sales of less than 100 million yuan, but Genki Forest saw the growth trend of overall sales and how barley water achieved growth scale far exceeding other beverages in a shorter time.
This growth curve also gives Genki Forest confidence, allowing them to see that even if barley water currently has only 5 million in sales, it may become a hit in the future, so they firmly invest more resources.
In this process, Genki Forest has formed experience with sales growth curves. They know that even if early sales are small, if the growth curve is steep, the product may become a hit.
Even if growth is not steep enough, if internal colleagues are excited when tasting the product, and taste tests are strong, these are also important indicators.
Even Genki Forest's internal free freezers and final internal purchase data constitute some internal test signals, becoming a reference indicator.
The appearance of these signals will gradually build confidence in a new product and give it more patience.
This is actually the process of establishing investment principles.
The establishment of these investment principles helps Genki Forest find a management framework that can give itself confidence and reduce risks. This management framework makes the risk of each step assessable and provides a stable basis for whether to add resources.
Innovation itself is an investment issue in terms of resources. Establishing a risk management framework is precisely the prerequisite for daring to innovate.
When Genki Forest manages innovation from an investment perspective, it embarks on a growth path completely different from Coca-Cola.
A new product, if at Coca-Cola, may initially receive feedback that it doesn't sell well, channels stop, and the new product is directly aborted.
But at Genki Forest, even if it initially doesn't sell well, Genki's evaluation would be: although it doesn't sell well, selling only tens of thousands a day, this is the fastest product to reach tens of thousands in the past, and it is likely the next hit.
The growth data of a large number of hit products will build confidence for Genki Forest to see more hits.
It also gives Genki Forest more patience to wait for good products to grow and iterate. Some directions that Genki Forest is optimistic about and believes consumers truly need, after several failed attempts, as long as a team wants to do it, Genki Forest will still give the team time to continue trying.
With more and more successful and failed investment cases, Genki Forest has more investment experience and will continuously improve the success rate of investment.
When the investment success rate becomes higher and higher, more and more young people will know that there is a real opportunity to create their own "work" within Genki Forest, and Genki Forest will gather more young people with ideas, creativity, and entrepreneurial traits.
Just as good entrepreneurs spontaneously gather towards the best investment institutions.
These practitioners constitute Genki Forest's tentacles extending into consumers' lives in all directions. These people can understand consumers' daily lives and keenly feel changes in consumption trends.
Ultimately, these choices drive Genki Forest's snowball to roll bigger and bigger.
Conclusion
After our discussion, we feel that Genki Forest is a company that many young people like.
Do what you believe in and serve the people around you. Everyone does not need to look too much at managers' faces; the testing process is objective, and more often, if you have ideas, you have the opportunity to directly face the market.
Looking back at Genki Forest and Coca-Cola China, you will find that their underlying pursuits drive the two companies in different directions.
At this moment, Genki Forest has become a hit product machine in the beverage industry, continuously trying to find a new balance between profitability and breakthrough, while Coca-Cola is on a path of continuously pursuing further improvement in operational efficiency and profit.
Coca-Cola chose to retain only asset-light core business, making profits healthier and not bearing too much risk of local market fluctuations, but at the cost of greatly sacrificing new product development capabilities.
However, this is a common choice for a century-old multinational giant in local markets. This is also a commonality of many foreign companies: they aim for "losing less" and grow on a stable basis—after all, for Coca-Cola, China is just one of its many markets. But it is all of Genki Forest. This leads Coca-Cola to limit high-risk behaviors when making decisions, inevitably killing many innovations in the bud.
Genki Forest has no better choice. As a latecomer, it can only rely on insight into market trend changes and more flexible continuous new product launches to break through.
Its organization is also designed for new product breakthroughs.
• Choose employees with an entrepreneurial mindset but possibly lacking industry experience.
• Openly accept everyone's ideas.
• At the same time, keep all ideas from passing through intermediate levels, directly to Tang Binsen, shortening the distance between himself and ideas.
• Maintain reverence, stay open, cautiously reject, avoid killing good ideas, and encourage attempts.
• Leave the final judgment to objective test results and processes.
• And with this as the goal, continuously reduce testing costs and form investment experience.
The core concepts that attract young people—whether young employees or young users—to Genki Forest start with Tang Binsen's own belief.
He believes: behind FMCG should be innovative organizations.
Before Genki Forest, Tang Binsen ran a very successful overseas game company.
Tang Binsen believes that the FMCG industry is similar to the game and film industries, all behind innovative organizations.
Unlike operational organizations that excel at making efficiency extremely extreme, the core capability of innovative organizations is innovation, mainly capturing user needs, making products, and doing R&D.
He believes in young people.
Tang Binsen once said: "If you are a coach organizing a group of athletes, you must look at whether their foundation is good, not how many years they have been in the industry."
So Tang Binsen believes more in those young people with "good foundations."
In his view, young people's ambition, passion, taste, learning ability, sense of responsibility, and desire to succeed and prove themselves are the most precious and hardest-to-obtain scarce traits in entrepreneurship.
He also believes: even when making hit products, you must make high-quality products, good products that you can safely bring home or give to your family to drink.
For example, he hopes all Genki Forest beverages do not contain preservatives. He often says: "When you cook for your own children, you don't blindly add a lot of ingredients. You will definitely think carefully about what they like and don't like to eat."
A Genki Forest team member said:
"Traditional beverage manufacturers often benchmark against giant brands, first determine the product price, then use that price to reverse-calculate costs, and then develop the product. If new brands also adopt this approach, they can only get worse.
So our approach is: regardless of cost, first comprehensively screen raw materials and production processes, then develop products we think are good, and finally add a reasonable profit margin to set the price. Moreover, you must believe that as long as the product is truly good, today's consumers can afford a 6-yuan bottle of beverage."
They are also, together with Tang Binsen, continuously practicing their beliefs through Genki Forest.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 冬琪 Vicky 陶程
- Published: 2025-06-02
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/a-20-000-word-analysis-of-genki-forest-how-it-used-hit-product-tactics-t-150bef59/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lsjls8ek8r1xBYNpOg2ocQ

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