Source | Narrowcast Recently, in exchanges with many entrepreneurs, I often hear the same type of anxiety: should we stick to a "hero product" or quickly expand the product line? Behind this is the shift in the current business growth engine—market competition is evolving from a luck game of "betting on one hit" to an endurance race of "operating a product matrix." Hero products are fascinating, first because of their ultimate efficiency and scale. Who wouldn't want to win over the majority with one product? Many well-known giants are faithful practitioners of the hero product strategy. 53-degree Feitian Moutai has long accounted for 70% of revenue, and classic Red Bull has long accounted for 70% of revenue. These are hero products as large as they can get. Apple, since entering the smartphone era in 2008, has released almost one iPhone per year. The iPhone 4 alone accounted for up to 40% of Apple's total revenue from 2010 to 2012, and even today, iPhone products consistently account for about 50% of the company's total revenue. Tesla's product strategy has always been hero products. In the early development period of 2015-2016, the high-end Model S accounted for over 70% of revenue; from 2018 to 2020, Model 3 became the revenue主力, accounting for over 50% for a long time, surpassing the combined sales of X, S, and Y models. From 2023 to 2025, Model Y gained momentum, with revenue share exceeding 50%. Coca-Cola is undoubtedly a hero product. Classic Coke has long accounted for nearly half of revenue. The benefits of hero products are obvious: you only need to focus on the development and improvement of one product, then use all market resources to ensure sufficient demand. But such success stories are becoming fewer today. The current market soil has changed: traffic dividends have peaked, consumer attention is fragmented, and channels are extremely fragmented. Perhaps it's time to bid farewell to the era of hero products. Moutai's Revelation and the Choices of New Players To understand the peak and predicament of hero products, Guizhou Moutai is an unavoidable case. During Wuliangye's golden age from 1990 to 2004, Moutai was the "eternal second." The turning point began in 2005 when Moutai made a strategic choice that could be called a last-ditch effort: fully focusing on high-end positioning, pouring almost all brand momentum into "53-degree Feitian Moutai." By 2007, Moutai's retail price had surpassed Wuliangye, while Wuliangye's product line remained complex. In January 2008, Moutai's ex-factory price exceeded Wuliangye for the first time, marking a shift in pricing power. By the end of 2011, Moutai's price per bottle had exceeded Wuliangye by 500 yuan. By strictly controlling production, continuously raising prices, and strengthening its status as a social hard currency in high-end government and business scenarios, Moutai not only reshaped industry pricing power but also achieved an overall overtaking of Wuliangye in 2013. To this day, the Feitian series still contributes about 70% of revenue, with gross margins consistently above 90% and net profit margins exceeding 50%, which is regarded as the ultimate victory of the hero product strategy. Persisting in high-end and scarcity for twenty years is Moutai's definition of opportunity and goals. At the peak, cracks have appeared. Moutai's current core dilemma lies in the fact that the two cornerstones supporting its golden twenty years—the financial attribute of investment and collection, and the social attribute of high-end scenarios—are being challenged simultaneously. Pinduoduo's 100 billion subsidy price for Moutai Feitian (December 29) According to market data, the market wholesale price of Feitian Moutai has significantly fallen from over 3,000 yuan per bottle at its peak in 2021. In December 2025, Moutai's wholesale price fell below the official guidance price of 1,499 yuan for the first time. Some e-commerce platforms like Pinduoduo offered prices of 1,399 yuan through subsidies, with over 20,000 transactions. With the rationalization of business consumption and generational shifts, Moutai's status as an absolute necessity social medium has been diluted. In 2023, Moutai launched the thousand-yuan price band product "Moutai 1935," achieving over 10 billion yuan in revenue, becoming a new growth pole. At the same time, Moutai is also laying out zodiac wines, experimenting with ice cream and coffee, and making systematic channel reforms. These measures are strategic attempts by Moutai to find new consumer groups and cultivate new growth curves. The famous bar "Miaoqian Sanyou" uses Moutai and other baijiu as base spirits for innovative cocktails. Moutai's story belongs to the previous cycle; it seized the growing demand for high-end social scenarios and achieved a hero product. In other words, hero products accompany incremental opportunities and new companies. So where are the opportunities for new companies today? Our cross-industry research reveals a cold fact: from passenger cars and luxury goods with prices in the hundreds of thousands, to phones, computers, large and small appliances priced in the thousands, to snacks and beverages priced in single digits, we analyzed dozens of major industries, and almost none of the top ten companies were founded less than ten years ago. Many new brands we remember, such as Pop Mart (2010), "NIO, Xpeng, Li Auto" (around 2015), and Dreame (2017), have actually been on their journey for nearly a decade or more. From a brand perspective, on Kantar's 2025 China Most Valuable Brands list, only 5 were founded less than ten years ago. Among them, Douyin (2016) belongs to ByteDance, Hema (2016) and Fliggy (2016) belong to Alibaba, and the only independent companies are Luckin Coffee (2017) and Chagee (2017). Well-known emerging leading brands like Pop Mart, DJI, Insta360, Ninebot, Roborock, Miniso, and Jiangxiaobai are leaders in their niche categories, all founded over ten years ago. The three major new car-making forces, NIO (2015), Xpeng (2015), and Li Auto (2015), were all born in 2015, strictly speaking, more than ten years ago. Among companies founded less than ten years ago:

  • Luckin Coffee (2017) ranks third in China's chain restaurant market, after Yum China and Haidilao, and first in China's ready-made beverage and ready-made coffee markets.
  • Chagee (2017) ranks fifth in China's chain restaurant market and third in China's ready-made beverage market.
  • Genki Forest (2016) already ranks tenth in China's beverage market, and third in the carbonated beverage category, after Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
  • Florasis (2017) and Yixian E-commerce (2016) are representative emerging brands in China's cosmetics market, but neither has entered the top ten in the cosmetics industry.
  • Dreame (2017) and Narwal (2016) rank in the top five in China's robot vacuum segment. Dreame has achieved annual revenue of tens of billions of yuan through diversified category development and global expansion. *蕉下 (2016) ranks first in the sun-protection clothing segment. Ubras (2016) and Bananain (2016) both rank in the top ten in the underwear brand category. Laifen (2019) ranks first in the hair dryer segment and sixth in the razor segment. Canban (2015) ranks seventh in the toothpaste category. Guozishule (2019) ranks third in the sugar-free tea segment. The time it took these companies to achieve their current status reveals a cruel law of the stock market: mature giants have extremely high barriers in brand mindshare, channel networks, and supply chains. New brands have almost no chance of winning in direct full-category competition. The success path of newcomers is highly consistent: first, in a "niche gap" ignored by giants or with weak dominance, they break through from 0 to 1 with a highly differentiated sharp product; then, over a decade, they iterate technology, expand categories, or globalize, struggling to move from "niche champion" to "mainstream player." Among these companies, very few adopt a pure hero product strategy. They almost all rise from niche tracks and gain fame with extreme products—sugar-free sparkling water, sun-protection clothing, Boya Juexian, robot vacuums, coconut latte... After establishing a foothold, they all, without exception, move toward product line expansion. This is an inevitable choice in the era of "extreme segmentation of consumer demand." Take Pop Mart as an example. Its core capability is not creating a single hit IP (like Molly), but building a complete industrial cultivation system for IPs. By 2023, the revenue share of its top IP Molly had dropped from over 40% in the early days to about 10%, while subsequent IPs like LABUBU and SKULLPANDA rose rapidly. By the first half of 2025, the Monsters series, where LABUBU belongs, accounted for 34.7% of total revenue. A single hit is the traffic entry point, but a system that can continuously incubate new IPs and satisfy different fan tastes is the real engine of growth. In its 2025 interim report, Pop Mart summarized its IP matrix performance as "one super, many strong." The product turnover in the ready-made tea beverage track is even more typical. Heytea, the creator of the two hits "cheese milk cap tea" and "many-grape," had a very high proportion of hero product sales during its peak from 2018 to 2020. But as competition intensified, it had to accelerate SKU iteration. Currently, its menu maintains dozens of SKUs year-round, with new products launched monthly. Naixue's Tea financial reports also show that the revenue share of its classic hero product "Baqi Series" has continued to decline from over 30% in the early days. The cost of creating and maintaining a national-level hero product has become unbearably high, while the lifecycle of popular products is accelerating shorter. Companies face harder choices. But I believe this will be one of the most exciting themes of the next decade: how new players gradually become small leaders, continuously enter bigger ponds, and challenge the absolute giants in larger categories that have been established for over ten years. This theme will inevitably accompany multi-SKU, mergers and acquisitions, and globalization. A Guide to Product Strategy Choices So back to the initial question: hero product or multi-SKU, how to choose? The market upheaval is drastically compressing the window for strategy switching. Luckin Coffee went from igniting the market with "coconut latte" to full milk-tea-ification and multi-SKU layout in almost just one year. Facing this, how should startups think? This is not a static choice but a dynamic trade-off based on multiple dimensions. The core is to complete three key judgments:
  • Where am I (market and competition)
  • Who am I (endowments and resources)
  • Where am I going (opportunities and goals) Where am I, i.e., the market and competition stage. If a company is in an emerging blue ocean market (like robot vacuums around 2020), focusing on a hero product to build awareness and scale is an efficient path. If it is in a stock red ocean with growth peaking (like current tea drinks and beauty), it needs to enter niche demands through multi-SKU combinations. The market also includes the form of media and channels. The structure and characteristics of sales channels, in many categories, directly determine that companies must adopt a multi-SKU strategy. For example, P&G focuses on daily chemical products and has over 300 products under its umbrella. Multi-SKU R&D, production, and channel investment are several times that of a hero product. Mature companies build product matrices through multi-SKU to maximize channel efficiency. Uniqlo, Watsons, Miniso, and even Zara and SHEIN have stronger retailer and channel attributes, requiring multi-SKU to make customers browse; ultra-high turnover efficiency is the key to business success. Changes in the efficiency of communication media directly affect strategy choices. In the era of TV marketing and Focus Media advertising, brainwashing ads like "Fear of getting angry? Drink Wanglaoji" gave companies higher ROI on advertising, directly spawning a large number of hero products. In the social media era, the fragmentation of broad traffic, user attention, and the dispersion of KOLs and KOCs make it harder for hero products to emerge, but also give new and small companies a place. The "demand rigidity" and "standardizability" of a category are equally crucial. From the perspective of consumer groups, when there is a high-frequency, rigid, low-differentiation core demand in the market, a hero product can quickly break through the market. For example, drinking water (Nongfu Spring red bottle water), basic snacks (Qiaqia sunflower seeds), and smartphones (early iPhone). Such demands cover a wide population, have low decision costs, and consumers focus on certain functional value. Hero products can reduce user choice costs through unified product definition and quickly capture public mindshare. Industries with strong personalization and fast trend iteration, such as cosmetics and clothing, mostly adopt multi-SKU strategies. Of course, this judgment is not absolute. When the market is large enough, opportunities can also be found in segments of fiercely competitive markets. In 2019, Proya cut the vast majority of SKUs and relied on the Red Treasure essence hero product, which consistently contributed over 30% of revenue, making Proya the first domestic cosmetics company to exceed 10 billion yuan in revenue. In our view, Proya seized the opportunity in the essence and anti-aging track with large market space and relatively loose competition, caught the rise of ingredient-conscious consumers on social media, and established a live-streaming advantage early in sales strategy; through product serialization (Red Treasure series expanded from essence to creams), it expanded user coverage while maintaining brand consistency. The second step is to think about "Who am I." This refers to technology, production, and supply chain, as well as financial strength and team. Most tech consumer product companies start with a hero product strategy. Because tech consumer products often have long R&D cycles and high investment, the core advantage of a hero product is resource concentration. For example, early Xiaomi phones focused only on cost-effective flagship models. On the production side, large-scale production can reduce unit costs and significantly amortize component procurement costs. If you are driven by R&D, technology, and cost, you must have a hero product. Absolute cognition of "who I am" often determines major business choices. Technology-driven companies (like early DJI and iFlytek) must be extremely focused initially to conquer core technologies. Channel and supply chain-driven companies (like Miniso and SHEIN) have their advantage in maximizing channel and supply chain efficiency through a massive SKU matrix. Capital and team are hard constraints on whether multi-line operations can be supported. Finally, "Where am I going" refers to clearly defining long-term strategic goals. Product strategy must be subordinate to strategic goals. Anker Innovations early on built a reputation on Amazon with a hero product in chargers, but its goal was always to become a global smart hardware brand. Subsequently, it quickly reused its capabilities in multiple categories like earphones, speakers, and projectors, building a robust brand ecosystem. All product layouts answer the question: "Where is the enterprise heading?" Luckin's comeback product was a product called "coconut latte," but behind it was the strategic goal of the flavor coffee trend. In this trend, Luckin found "coconut latte." Or more accurately, coconut latte emerged from many products and became Luckin's "first 10-billion-yuan hero product," once accounting for over 20% of Luckin's total sales, with a single product's revenue roughly equal to the sum of the other nine products in Luckin's top 10 sales. In the incremental market of "flavor coffee," Luckin succeeded with this one hero product. But today, Luckin, with over 29,000 stores, has fully multi-SKU-ified and milk-tea-ified. Milk tea is a larger market and more in line with consumption habits in lower-tier markets. In 2024, Luckin's new store opening pace slowed, meaning its menu no longer adapted to broader market demand—then it successively launched milk tea drinks like "Qingqing Moli," and by 2025, Luckin's new store opening pace recovered. Social media users compiled Luckin-related products. Finally and most importantly: time. The timing for judging strategy changes is shortening. Because in the current market environment, the boundary between a company's "hero product" and "multi-SKU" is becoming blurred— A company may need to quickly move from a hero product and hit product in the startup stage to continuously launching multiple SKUs to occupy channel and user mindshare. This may happen within just one year; a company may also need to quickly launch many products, use a multi-SKU strategy to serve channel needs, and "naturally select" hero products and hits from them. This may also happen within one year. Companies need to think in shorter cycles as much as possible, ask inward, examine outward, and ask themselves the three questions above. The core is the definition of market opportunity: What kind of opportunity is there? Facing this opportunity, what strategy should we adopt? A more complex business environment and more brutal competition have jointly compressed the space for "single product determines success or failure." In future operations, we all need to learn the "complex equation" of multi-SKU from the "simple formula" of hero products. 【Moving Toward the C-End】The 11th China FMCG Conference Time: March 16-18, 2026 Location: Chengdu, China