---
title: "Business Wisdom in Specific Scenarios"
description: "Reflecting on a National Day holiday, the author identifies a common thread among three seemingly unrelated business models: hangover drinks in restaurants, specialty yogurt in scenic areas, and cultural creative ice cream at tourist sites. Each thrives by leveraging specific consumption scenarios, targeting hidden markets, and seizing opportunities in untapped market spaces."
author: "湃动研究院"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2022-11-17"
language: "en"
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---

# Business Wisdom in Specific Scenarios

> Reflecting on a National Day holiday, the author identifies a common thread among three seemingly unrelated business models: hangover drinks in restaurants, specialty yogurt in scenic areas, and cultural creative ice cream at tourist sites. Each thrives by leveraging specific consumption scenarios, targeting hidden markets, and seizing opportunities in untapped market spaces.

It's another dull workday. I wonder if anyone else, like me, while scrolling through photos during a break, revisits the enjoyable National Day holiday.
During the seven-day break, I first gathered with friends. Just as we were getting tipsy, a restaurant staff member timely served a hangover-relief drink. Then, at a scenic area's snack street, I was attracted by "pure handmade" old yogurt and couldn't resist buying some. Finally, at a museum, I saw a Peking opera mask-shaped cultural creative ice cream at the entrance and spent 30 yuan on one.
Upon reflection, these three scenarios seem unrelated, and their business models differ, but they share hidden commonalities. What are the approaches? Where are the commonalities? Let me explain in detail.

**01**
**Going All-In on a Single Channel**
**Hangover-Relief Drinks Exclusively for Restaurants**
Work dinners, friend gatherings, hometown banquets... Under the influence of thousands of years of drinking culture, Chinese holiday tables are always filled with toasts and various forms of urging drinks. When you're tipsy, what do you use to sober up?
Most people probably don't take "hangover pills" or "hangover tablets," but prefer honey water or pure milk to alleviate drunkenness. In China, hangover drinks are closer to consumer habits than pills.
Thus, hangover drinks commonly seen in restaurants are emerging. **First, Mengniu launched a kudzu-flavored yogurt called "Tian Xing" (Sober Awake),主打解酒功能; Bright Dairy followed with yogurt "Jiu Qian Yi Ke" (Moment Before Drinking), with a name that directly tells consumers when and why to drink it; a yellow-bottled "Jiu Qian Jiu Hou" (Before and After Drinking) also sells well, securing tens of millions in financing within two months.**
Behind the popularity of hangover drinks lies a baijiu market of over 600 billion yuan, with up to 600 million drinkers, harboring a blue ocean of about 100 billion yuan.
Since the function is to "relieve hangover," the focus should be on amplifying the consumer's hangover process, turning the previously overlooked act of sobering up into a fixed consumption step, and then evoking the target group's needs in drinking scenarios, rather than placing products in convenience stores or supermarket chains where purchase is less stimulated.
For such products, sales channels are paramount.
For example, **"Jiu Qian Yi Ke" focuses on the restaurant channel—placed on dining tables, like paid tissue boxes, effectively reaching customers.**
Wholesaler videos on Douyin show that "Jiu Qian Yi Ke" retails at 12 yuan per box, with a wholesale price of 55 yuan for a box of 8, higher than regular ambient yogurt.
In 2021, it leveraged Bright Dairy's provincial distributors and Yufan Group's restaurant supply chain, achieving **over 1 billion yuan in sales** by connecting with restaurants and hotels.
"Jiu Qian Jiu Hou" targets the B-end with another model—**borrowing the shared power bank model, placing unattended vending machines in KTVs, bars, clubs, restaurants, and restrooms to increase exposure and stimulate purchases.**
To quickly expand locations, **"Jiu Qian Jiu Hou" set up small, medium, and large self-service vending machines based on different scenarios and foot traffic.**
Among them, the **small vending machine** costs only 200 yuan, powered by built-in batteries, holding 1-2 bottles of hangover drink, achieving full coverage in bars; **medium vending machines** are placed at front desks, "on par" with shared power banks; **large vending machines** are placed at venue entrances, using large posters for advertising revenue.
I called the official website number and learned that a bar can sell "Jiu Qian Jiu Hou" in two ways: one is **buying the equipment and drinks, bearing all profits and losses;** the other is **renting equipment from city agents, with profits from drink sales shared proportionally, typically around 30% for the bar.**
Additionally, Juexing hangover drinks, also sold via self-service machines in hotels and KTVs, have entered 80 cities with over 100,000 offline points, selling more than 300,000 bottles in the first four days of the 2020 May Day holiday.

**02**
**The Third Path for Selling Yogurt**
**Who Doesn't Drink Scenic Area Yogurt?**
However, for most people, old yogurt in scenic areas is more suitable for all ages than hangover yogurt.
No matter which scenic area you visit, old yogurt always flaunts itself in front of you. While tourists complain that "all scenic areas are the same," they don't realize that squid skewers, grilled gluten, and old yogurt are all profit models repeatedly validated by the market.
**After all, in scenic areas with high rents, high foot traffic, and mostly one-time consumption, only products with high profit margins, stable supply, and efficient space utilization can survive.**
Scenic area old yogurt generally comes in two types: one is **"local specialty"** from dairy factories across the country, such as Beijing Shengxiang, Kunming Diequan Lao, Qingdao Qinpai, Chengdu Huaxi, Qinghai Xiaoxiniu, Dunhuang Shuangyuan, etc.
The other is **made by merchants themselves**, labeled "pure handmade" or "exclusive fermentation," always attracting a crowd of tourists, and has now spawned diverse products like yogurt fruit bowls, fried yogurt, thick-cut yogurt, and yogurt fruit tea.
Both are essentially models where scenic area real estate rents out shops, and individual tenants either buy goods to resell for a margin or make handmade goods for labor fees.
We found that in a tourist town called "Yuanjiacun," **yogurt priced at 6 yuan per bottle not only reached a peak daily sales of 100,000 bottles, with annual profits exceeding 10 million yuan, but also pioneered a new model, achieving mature commercial operations.**
Yuanjiacun started with "Guanzhong folk culture" farm stay experiences, initially with just an old street showcasing traditional crafts, and later developed a snack street.
"Yuanjiacun Yogurt" was initially made and sold fresh by villagers, with raw milk squeezed daily, sterilized, cooled, fermented, and packaged. As foot traffic increased, small workshops couldn't keep up with sales; some villagers earned too much, and the wealth gap reduced villagers' enthusiasm, threatening tourism development.
Therefore, **village officials suggested that villagers turn their yogurt workshops into joint-stock yogurt companies, calling on other villagers to invest and buy shares.**
On one hand, **the original yogurt workshops further cooperated with professional dairy factories, adhering to the original recipe, scaling up production on assembly lines, balancing output and supply;**
On the other hand, **the profits from "old yogurt" are distributed to villagers according to shares, and the binding of the interest chain also boosted villagers' enthusiasm. On Dianping, tourists flock to Yuanjiacun, and many buy five or six bottles to take away.**
Such development paths are common in Yuanjiacun, where handmade sweet potato vermicelli, chili powder, vinegar, and rapeseed oil each have mature production chains and shareholding combinations.
Rural handmade specialties + visible production process + guaranteed ingredient quality have built a brand. Yuanjiacun currently has experience stores in three cities including Xi'an, and also sells specialty foods on its WeChat official account, further expanding revenue channels.

**03**
**Creativity and Coolness Soar Together**
**Cultural Creative Ice Cream in Tourist Areas**
After discussing scenic area old yogurt, we must mention the broader scenic area economy. According to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, in 2021, there were over 14,000 A-level tourist attractions nationwide, receiving 3.54 billion visits. Tourists' core demands are simply to enjoy the view and have fun, and they have a higher acceptance of prices for scenic area goods.
For example, if you buy a 20-yuan ice cream at a convenience store, you'd surely vent on Weibo about the "ice cream刺客" (ice cream assassin); but a 30-yuan cultural creative ice cream in a scenic area, you'd buy without hesitation and immediately take a photo to post on WeChat Moments.
Both customers and merchants know well: **cultural creative ice cream is bought for the culture and social atmosphere; outside the scenic area, affordability and taste are what matter. In essence, this business uses ice cream as a vehicle for IP, no different from Disney merchandise.**
Currently, numerous tourist area IP ice creams have two main revenue models:
The first is **tourist area licensing, charging IP agency fees.** Shenyang Imperial Palace Museum licensed the cold drink brand Deshi to produce co-branded 3D ice cream, sold through Deshi's own channels. According to Deshi's Tmall flagship store, cultural creative ice cream sales are far lower than other ice creams.
The second, more common model is **profit sharing between the tourist area and partner companies based on ice cream sales.** This also gives rise to two paths: one is that the scenic area provides the ice cream design to a contract manufacturer, orders from the manufacturer, and the ice cream profit is the sum of the manufacturer's profit and the scenic area's profit.
The other is that the tourist area only needs to provide a sales location and shares profits with the partner company based on sales, ranging from 20% to 60%. The former has the advantage of no middleman taking a cut, while the latter avoids concerns about storage and inventory costs.
**In the second case, cultural creative ice cream is generally only sold within the tourist area; only a few cultural IPs that represent city characteristics expand to related local channels, and the sales scope is highly tied to the scenic area.**
Furthermore, cultural creative ice cream has been popular for four or five years, giving rise to a batch of supply companies focused on creative design.
Take Beibeiping, the most influential among them. The company covers the entire chain from design, development, production, logistics, warehousing, promotion to operations, with a market share of over 80%. It sells over 11 million creative ice creams annually, has signed contracts with over 310 scenic areas, and designer Zheng Aonan has designed over 800 ice cream varieties for scenic areas.
**Beibeiping's cultural creative ice cream production line is mature: Zheng Aonan designs the ice cream and packaging, contacts partner manufacturers for production, and each new ice cream is promoted through channels like Weibo and Xiaohongshu to make it a viral product, requiring much more marketing effort than peers.**
Despite this, design companies aren't as prosperous as imagined. Beibeiping, the "big brother," was recently acquired by Ocean Park Haichang, and "Between Taste," which created the viral Yellow Crane Tower ice cream, has had to develop products outside the ice cream peak season to ensure annual revenue.
Ultimately, **cultural creative ice cream priced at 20-30 yuan doesn't have the profit margins of regular ice cream.**
According to People's Cultural Tourism: for a 20-yuan cultural creative ice cream, the cost covers the mold, production, transportation and storage, and scenic area labor costs, **resulting in a final profit of only 3 yuan per piece, a gross margin of 15%, which is not high compared to Yili's cold drink business gross margin of 48.6%.**
Most critically, **the 3D models of cultural creative ice cream are intricate, and many molds require manual demolding, preventing machine assembly line work. Coupled with channel restrictions, it's hard to increase volume to reduce costs; an order of hundreds of thousands is already a large order, and the "mold opening" cost cannot be ignored.**
For example, the highest mold opening fee for a cultural creative ice cream is 20,000 yuan, with starting prices usually above 1,000 yuan. After opening the mold, silicone molds need to be produced, averaging 30-40 yuan each. If ordering 1,000 molds, plus the mold opening fee, the cost of cultural creative ice cream exceeds 30,000 yuan.
Even though some merchants on 1688 sell ready-made silicone molds, with a minimum order of 500 pieces for only 7,000 yuan, there are considerable copyright risks.
But the high costs correspond to the diminishing appeal of cultural creative ice cream. Besides the viral ones and popular attractions with high foot traffic, **the conversion rate of cultural creative ice cream in general commercial streets and scenic areas is only between 3% and 5%.**
Transitioning from a novelty to a standard tourist attraction feature, coupled with ordinary taste, will cultural creative ice cream, like the once-bright milk tea track, grow into a new category, or will it be classified as a "gimmick" under "cultural creativity"? Whether the internet-famous will disappear like shooting stars remains to be seen.

**04**
**Business Wisdom in Specific Scenarios**
In summary, hangover drinks, specialty yogurt, and cultural creative ice cream—three seemingly unrelated business models—share the same traits:
**1. Scenarios Stimulate Consumption**
First, the consumption of cultural creative ice cream, hangover drinks, and specialty yogurt has strong scenario attributes. Companies involved are not serving a limited niche market but are targeting the true mass market.
Any consumer at a dining table or in a scenic area might pay for hangover drinks or scenic area yogurt or ice cream. At the same time, such consumer groups are fluid; today's and tomorrow's consumers are different. Products that seem to have ample profit margins place higher demands on quality, as only with a solid reputation can they break through the "one-time consumption" scenario limitation and drive repeat purchases.
**2. Markets Are Relatively Hidden**
Second, the three markets we listed are relatively hidden; their products rarely circulate in supermarkets, convenience stores, or online malls, and companies are less likely to become hot investment tracks.
At least for now, most consumers don't see these products as necessities, and substitutes are easy to obtain. To convert them into high-frequency products through user cultivation and marketing, both product quality and channels are indispensable. There are few "predecessor" experiences to imitate, so recognizing reality, staying agile, and leveraging initiative are key to forging a path.
**3. Opportunities in Blank Areas**
Through the above business models, we can also glimpse the complexity of the business world.
Just as researchers often use Michael Porter's strategic group analysis matrix to predict markets, in this classic model, the blank areas in the coordinate axes are markets not yet observed, often signifying new opportunities.
We often focus on ABCD, while the "unremarkable" EFGH slips from our sight. But EFGH has always been there, forming a more common and fundamental part of business, even accounting for 80% of the share. Only by seeing them can we understand the world more clearly and comprehensively.
And in essence, this is the charm of the business society, especially the Chinese market.
**People's needs remain, and the market pie remains, but compared to the era of mass growth that only required covering basic needs, market insight + scenario breakthrough + ultimate product are what can ignite a prairie fire across the vast land.**


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