When you ask a Cantonese person what chocolate they love, they will only answer: "Kinder (Ferrero)". As Christmas and New Year approach, Cantonese people engage in a subtle competition over who receives more Ferrero chocolates. It's no exaggeration to say that Ferrero has boosted the GDP of Guangdong (and Hong Kong and Macau). Because among all chocolates, only Ferrero can achieve year-round bundled sales, packaged with skincare products and medicated oil, and many are willing to pay for the often-out-of-stock Hong Kong version. Every year, hundreds of millions of Ferrero chocolates enter Guangdong homes through Shenzhen's ports. Of course, Ferrero's popularity is not limited to Guangdong. According to Nielsen data, Ferrero holds a 28% market share in China (offline), second only to Mars (Dove). With a single chocolate ball, Ferrero has fully grasped the wallets of Chinese consumers. Creating a Super Single Product to Enter China Ferrero, which is expensive in the Chinese market, is actually a product of consumption downgrading in its home market, Italy. At that time, Italy was in a period of war, and the supply of cocoa beans was extremely unstable, causing prices to soar, which had a significant impact on chocolate bread, a staple food for the local people. Given that a kilogram of chocolate sold for 3,000 lire, while a kilogram of hazelnuts cost only 600 lire, the Michele family, in desperation, came up with a "cost-cutting" method: mixing cheaper hazelnuts into the chocolate to reduce costs. This gave birth to a chocolate spread that combined taste and low cost, known to consumers as "Nutella." By the late 1960s, Nutella had become an indispensable part of Italians' breakfast, and this chocolate spread remains Ferrero Group's best-selling product in European and American markets to this day. The Ferrero chocolate ball, improved from Nutella, is the weapon Ferrero Group uses to attack the Chinese market. Although in European and American markets, hazelnut wafer chocolate with less than 20% cocoa content is not even considered chocolate, at most a "chocolate product," in China at the same time, war, turmoil, and economic hardship dominated the lives of most ordinary people. Chocolate, as a luxury item, was completely beyond their cognition, and few Chinese knew what authentic chocolate tasted like. Or rather, the taste of chocolate in the Chinese market is determined by whoever enters first. In 1978, China opened its doors under reform and opening-up, and trade with Hong Kong became an important development direction. As the closest point for external input at the time, what was popular in Hong Kong quickly became the trend that domestic consumers pursued. At that time, the Hong Kong market was the most mature chocolate market in Asia, with per capita consumption reaching 0.5-0.7 kilograms. In the same period, the chocolate industry structure in European and American markets had basically been established, and chocolate sales even slightly declined. Major candy companies were all eyeing China, a market with a huge population, trying to enter through Hong Kong first to open up sales. In the early 1960s, when people didn't know about brand value research, Ferrero's management proposed a topic: how to make a super product favored by consumers and creating new consumption habits fly to overseas markets. Chinese people don't have the habit of eating bread for breakfast, let alone spreading chocolate paste. Using Nutella as a seed product to enter early China would definitely not work. The Chinese market needs products more suited to local habits. In 1981, Michele, named after the family surname "Ferrero," specifically developed the "Ferrero Hazelnut Wafer Chocolate" for the Chinese market, which is Ferrero's classic product in China: the chocolate ball. To this end, Ferrero spent a full year studying how to make this chocolate ball achieve the appearance that best captures Chinese consumers' psychological habits. To cater to the Chinese preference for "golden, wealthy, and prosperous," each Ferrero chocolate ball is wrapped in gold foil, named "Kinder." The spherical shape not only maximizes the luster of the gold foil but also, compared to the popular coin-shaped chocolates of the time, can be stacked to maximize display volume, achieving a more exaggerated visual appeal. The successful growth of this chocolate ball in China also quickly made Ferrero Group one of the world's top four chocolate producers. The Chocolate Ball That Captures Adults As the leader in gift-giving in the domestic chocolate market, Ferrero has positioned itself not as an everyday snack but as a high-end gift in the Chinese market, which lacks daily chocolate consumption habits (compared to European and American consumers who almost eat chocolate with staple foods every day). Initially, when Ferrero entered the Hong Kong market, the main sales channels for chocolate were concentrated in supermarkets, surrounded by brands like Hershey's and Cadbury, and the scene did not match the high-end gift positioning. Taking a different path, Ferrero chose to cooperate exclusively with Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa as its distributor, and only promoted the single product of Kinder chocolate balls. Hutchison Whampoa owned Watsons, the retail chain with the densest and highest-traffic premium daily necessities in Hong Kong, which matched Ferrero's positioning and tone. As an exclusive product, every Watsons store prominently displayed Ferrero at the entrance, especially during traditional festivals like Spring Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival. Boxes of golden chocolate balls were stacked from the floor to the ceiling, presenting a dazzling view of gold, perfectly catering to the Chinese aesthetic preference for exaggerated wealth and golden grandeur. From then on, festivals, celebrations, and Ferrero chocolate balls became linked in consumers' minds. And Chinese people value the pomp and face of festivals; no matter how frugal they are on ordinary days, the concept engraved in their DNA is not to save money during holidays. At least for holiday gifts, they must be luxurious and presentable. With years of enthusiastic promotion by Hutchison, Ferrero quickly became a must-have for holiday gift-giving in Hong Kong. As people from both regions interacted closely, Ferrero, with its bold packaging and precise marketing, left a deep impression on consumers and was smoothly accepted by the entire Chinese market. At that time, the most common gifts were summarized as the "Four Major Items," and the most popular among them was Ferrero's chocolate ball. To further increase brand awareness in the Chinese market, Ferrero invested heavily in advertising on CCTV. In an era with basically no other visual media channels, it repeatedly instilled in consumers the concept that "family reunion eating Ferrero" and "choosing Ferrero for gifts" were behaviors of "prestige and face." Later, when the consumption concept of Valentine's Day gifts emerged in the Chinese market, Ferrero launched expensive "chocolate bouquets" in various specifications such as 99 and 199 pieces, starting the consumption trend of "giving chocolate on Valentine's Day." Also, for wedding candies, to show the grade of the candy, nine out of ten times, a few Ferrero chocolates are stuffed into the candy box. Compared to other chocolate brands, Ferrero's pricing strategy is very peculiar. Generally, any product, to make consumers feel a bargain and thus promote sales, small packages are often priced higher per unit than large packages. But Ferrero does the opposite: the larger the package and the more pieces, the higher the price per piece, while the smallest package (three pieces in a strip) has the lowest unit price. If you buy it for yourself, it's cheaper; if you buy it for gift-giving to show off, you spend more. But Chinese people really do like to spend more on gifts, focusing not on actual value but on the numbers on the receipt. Ferrero knows Chinese consumer psychology all too well. Using gift marketing, it has managed to elevate a low-cocoa-content sweet snack like the wafer chocolate ball to a high-end gift position. At least until now, no other chocolate has been able to beat Ferrero in the gift-giving business. The Kinder Joy That Captures Children Ferrero's most impressive business in China is actually not the chocolate ball, but the Kinder Joy egg, which is a meme in adult comment sections and a dream for children. It's the one that "can hatch Pokémon," "eat it to get into university," "the other half is for release," and is used to call people shorty: the Kinder Joy egg. It's a food-and-toy product for the children's market launched by Ferrero Group in the 1970s, entering China in 2007, and countless children have regarded it as the top trend. The initial product inspiration for this egg came from Easter eggs in the West. With an egg-like shape, half contains chocolate and half contains various small toys. Kinder Joy comes in a blue version for boys and a pink version for girls. The blue egg mainly contains toys like Hot Wheels and cars that boys are interested in, while the pink egg mainly contains toys like Barbie dolls that girls like. It has no technical content and isn't particularly delicious. But the key point is that the repetition rate of these toys is very low, because the "prize pool" is large enough, not only covering toy types favored by boys and girls but also almost all popular anime IPs in Europe and America, such as Marvel heroes, Minions, My Little Pony, and the beloved Barbie. It's this tooth-achingly sweet chocolate and not-so-exquisite toys that can sell for over ten yuan each, with 3.5 billion sold a year. Kinder Joy is the true ancestor of blind box toys in China. For over ten yuan, you can buy two large Dove chocolates. But children are always willing to pay a higher price for less chocolate and worthless toys. Because these toys are "created" by their own hands. After opening this chocolate blind box, you don't get a complete toy directly, but several parts that need to be assembled yourself. This "hands-on assembly" process raises the value of Kinder Joy. In consumer psychology, this is called the "IKEA effect," named after the furniture store IKEA. It refers to the phenomenon where consumers overestimate the value of items they have invested labor and emotion in creating, and the more labor (emotion) a consumer puts into an item, the more likely they are to overestimate its value. Moreover, each Kinder Joy includes a small paper slip with images of other toys in the same series. Serial toys trigger a desire to collect. To collect the full set, children often buy more Kinder Joy eggs. As stated in "The Consumer Society": The purpose of consumption is not to satisfy "actual needs," but to continuously pursue manufactured and stimulated desires. If not for their parents' stern looks, every child would want to take the whole box of Kinder Joy. Of course, certain toys also have their probability of appearing, which stimulates Kinder Joy sales. But you can never collect all Kinder Joy toys because there are so many in the eggshell that there is still no exact data. Even adults today can't resist the temptation of blind boxes, enough to list a blind box company on the stock market, let alone children. As soon as Kinder Joy was launched, it became Ferrero's fastest-growing business globally, especially in Asia, single-handedly driving the group's pre-tax profit up 14% year-on-year. The general manager of Ferrero China also said frankly: "In the past 5-10 years, the Chinese market's performance has been growing steadily, and a large part of this is due to the Kinder Joy launched in China ten years ago." This product makes more money than the chocolate ball. A single Ferrero chocolate ball retails for about 4 yuan. The chocolate portion in a Kinder Joy is actually similar in size to a standard Ferrero chocolate ball, but the price is double. Human addiction to sweets keeps chocolate products enduring, and when combined with the stimulation and collection desire brought by blind box products, For the traditional chocolate industry, Kinder Joy is indeed a very powerful product. There are many counterfeit Ferrero chocolates, but few counterfeit Kinder Joy. Food-and-toy products are subject to stricter regulation than ordinary food, and without authorization for genuine IP, the more toy types counterfeit products include in their "prize pool," the higher the risk of receiving a lawyer's letter. Moreover, for domestic new IPs and new brands, squeezing into Ferrero Group's supply chain is not an easy task. For now, let's crown Ferrero as the chocolate manufacturer that best understands psychology. Although it's the unconventional innovative growth that has allowed Ferrero to survive multiple economic crises and still stand firm.