Recently, I heard the innovation head of a leading FMCG brand mention: the company has invested heavily in new products over the past few years, with projects coming one after another, but has never managed to launch a truly scalable big single product. The team is puzzled. Where exactly is the problem? In fact, innovation is not wrong, and investment is not wrong either. The real problem lies precisely in the starting point: why be obsessed with creating a big single product? At this point, you might want to argue: in past experience, a big single product often means category dominance, channel sell-through capability, and deterministic growth. Isn't that common sense? But it is precisely this common sense that has trapped many brands, preventing them from seeing that today's industry environment is no longer fertile ground for easily creating "universal big single products." Why is it so hard to create a big single product today? The birth of a big single product has never been the result of a genius product manager's brainstorm, but rather a product of a specific era. From the mid-1990s to the early 2010s, the Chinese market was transitioning from "having it or not" to "good or bad." Big single product myths like Six Walnut, AD Calcium Milk, and Braised Beef Noodles emerged one after another. They were supported by the combined effect of three factors:

  • On the media side, in the era of traditional media represented by television, companies could achieve nationwide "cognitive penetration" in a very short time through high-density advertising, creating a shared consumer perception across the country;
  • On the channel side, a strong deep distribution system could quickly spread products to terminals nationwide, from cities to counties and townships, with continuous shelves. Once brand communication gained momentum, channels could quickly convert it into sales;
  • On the consumer side, mass demand was highly homogeneous. For example, buying milk meant buying nutrition, and buying health products meant buying social face. Demand was simple, supply was also single. As long as a brand occupied a mental position and coordinated distribution, it could achieve huge sales at extremely low marginal costs. But today, the conditions and environment that gave rise to big single products have changed. Media has gone from a single antenna to thousands of algorithm-driven content platforms. Everyone lives in their own information cocoon, and no single entry point can create a "national planting grass" moment. On the channel side, from community group buying, discount stores, to instant retail, social e-commerce... the number of channels has grown geometrically, and the audiences they reach are increasingly vertical and segmented. The more critical change lies in people themselves. Today's consumers are no longer an average. Why don't consumers pay for your product? Zhao Bo, founder of New Distribution, proposed that to understand changes in consumption structure, there is an unavoidable concept: the Odyssey crowd. In ancient Greek Homer's epic, the hero Odysseus left home as a youth and returned after many hardships. Sociology borrows this imagery to refer to the period between graduation and truly settling down as the "Odyssey period"—a time of exploration, drifting, and not yet settled. "The two generations have completely different trajectories in this regard." Zhao Bo gave an example: suppose the previous generation typically graduated at 22 and married at 24, then most of their lives were lived within a family, and consumption logic naturally centered on the family. But today, more and more young people are still living alone at 30, some marry at 40, and others remain unmarried. The Odyssey period has significantly lengthened from two or three years to over a decade or even longer. What does this mean? A large number of consumers have shifted their life focus from family needs to self-needs. They keep pets, pay for emotions, are frugal yet willing to spend on things they like. Their consumption is personalized, fragmented, and highly emotional—not buying "function" but buying "self-pleasure." The logic of the greatest common divisor that big single products rely on is bound to fail completely in today's population structure. At the same time, consumer profiles are further segmenting. Among women, some are refined white-collar workers, some are new mothers, some are outdoor enthusiasts. Among young people, some pursue health, some are addicted to staying up late, and others are willing to pay a premium for experiences. In this context, trying to develop a greatest common divisor that everyone can accept will only result in a mediocre product: it touches a bit of everything but doesn't have any point that truly moves people. If it suits everyone, it means no one particularly needs it. Continuing to treat big single products as a goal will only lead further astray. Why are we still obsessed with big single products? Since the environment has changed, why are so many large companies still obsessed with big single products? Clayton Christensen mentioned in "The Innovator's Dilemma": the more successful a company is, the more likely it is to be held hostage by its own successful experience. For FMCG companies, a big single product is never just a product; it represents the core operating mechanism of the entire company. R&D investment direction, production line capacity planning, sales team KPIs, distributor cooperation logic—all modules are built around the big single product. Every screw in this system serves the same thing. Using the human body as an analogy: what you see is the "product" organ, but behind it is the entire company's nervous system, digestive system, and blood circulation. These systems are structurally only familiar with one mode. When the consumer market demands small, refined, and rapidly iterating niche products, this system is structurally mismatched. It cannot tolerate low volume, cannot quickly trial and error, and will not allocate resources to an opportunity that "doesn't look big." This creates a vicious cycle: using old tools to solve new problems, the more you do, the more frustrated you become; the more frustrated, the more anxious; the more anxious, the more you want to find a "once and for all" big single product. This is not a lack of capability, but a wrong system. For some companies, the urgent task is not to force adaptation to an already invalid goal, but to adopt a new underlying logic. What you should be focusing on is the customer, not the big single product "Today's FMCG brands should shift their core focus from the greatest common divisor to new demographics, new needs, new scenarios, and new channels." According to Zhao Bo's summary, these four are not independent but progressive. The so-called new needs, new scenarios, and new channels are all based on new demographics. Saying goodbye to the "universal adaptation" logic of the big single product era essentially means saying goodbye to the "vague mass consumer" and focusing on specific new demographics with distinct needs. In other words, it's not about thinking what product to make first, but about clarifying who you want to serve first. Take金星啤酒 (Jinxing Beer) as an example. Founded in 1982, Jinxing Beer was long trapped in the red ocean competition of traditional beer. In recent years, due to its precise positioning of young consumers, especially capturing the neglected female "tipsy" demand, it successfully turned around in the Chinese-style craft beer track, and successively iterated flavors such as jasmine tea and candied hawthorn, regularly launching new products to adapt to demand. Data shows that in the first three quarters of 2025, Jinxing Beer's revenue was 1.109 billion yuan, with net profit of 305 million yuan, of which Chinese-style craft beer contributed 78.1% of revenue, with a gross margin of 47%, far exceeding the traditional beer gross margin range. Among its core consumers, women aged 18-35 accounted for about 50%, up 40 percentage points from before, achieving a complete restructuring of its customer base. The transformation of劲酒 (Jing Wine) also confirms this logic. For a long time, Jing Wine, deeply rooted in the health wine track, had a core customer base highly concentrated among men. Correspondingly, its revenue hovered around the 10 billion yuan threshold for years—considerable in scale but always struggling to break through growth bottlenecks. After realizing this limitation, in 2022, Jingpai Company began to proactively adjust its direction: on one hand, it established a dedicated content marketing team to enter new channels such as short videos and Xiaohongshu; on the other hand, it shifted its focus from "operating existing customers" to "developing new customers," redesigning product consumption methods, packaging, and usage scenarios around Gen Z and female customers, gradually breaking the inherent stereotype of traditional health wine. Image source: Xiaohongshu @中国劲酒 According to Wang Nanbo, president of Jingpai Company, in the past two years, Jingpai has added approximately 9 million young users and 4 million female users. At the operational level, in 2024, Jingpai Company's annual revenue was 12.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.3%; it is expected that Jing Wine will grow by about 20% in 2025, and Jingpai's overall performance growth is also expected to reach about 10%. It can be seen that the successful transformation of these brands is not about making a "universally adapted" big single product, but about serving a clear demographic. Product iteration, channel selection, and marketing tactics all revolve around the needs and behaviors of this demographic, and growth is just the inevitable result of this process. This is also the underlying logic shift from "making products" to "finding the right people." Final Thoughts Many companies' anxiety today is actually quite similar: while innovating, they are betting on the emergence of a big single product, as if once it arrives, all growth problems will be solved. But the real problem is often not that the product is not good enough, nor that investment is insufficient, but that they are still making judgments using the logic of "developing a big single product." In today's consumer market, this path to success is increasingly difficult to replicate. Perhaps big single products will still emerge, but they are more like a result rather than a goal. The difference lies in: do you first determine the product and then find people, or do you first see people and then decide what to do? The answer often lies in the latter.