---
title: "FMCG Brands: Consumption Is Marketing"
description: "Most traditional brands still rely on continuous advertising for maximum exposure, then use a funnel model to filter target audiences and drive sales. However, mature brands often lack neither awareness nor product novelty, making such exposure wasteful. The article argues that marketing should be integrated with product strength, using examples like Coca-Cola's nickname bottles and Guliduo's One Piece collaboration to show how creating new product variations can drive consumption and brand building."
author: "杨不坏"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-10-15"
categories: "Brand Marketing"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/n3wGybCHQhSrcDdpYCNbPQ"
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attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/fmcg-brands-consumption-is-marketing-0572f302/"
citation: "杨不坏. “FMCG Brands: Consumption Is Marketing.” New Distribution, 2019-10-15. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/fmcg-brands-consumption-is-marketing-0572f302/"
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# FMCG Brands: Consumption Is Marketing

> Most traditional brands still rely on continuous advertising for maximum exposure, then use a funnel model to filter target audiences and drive sales. However, mature brands often lack neither awareness nor product novelty, making such exposure wasteful. The article argues that marketing should be integrated with product strength, using examples like Coca-Cola's nickname bottles and Guliduo's One Piece collaboration to show how creating new product variations can drive consumption and brand building.

Most traditional brands still market by continuously advertising to maximize exposure, then filtering target audiences through a funnel model to achieve sales.
Many brands use the same advertisement for decades; we've memorized them, they're nationally known, but does purchase decision really depend on who memorizes the ad better?
In fact, most mature brands do not lack awareness, and the product is still the old one. Blindly seeking exposure is undoubtedly wasting the marketing budget.
In the summer of 2013, Coca-Cola launched its nickname bottles, and that summer belonged to Coca-Cola. As a carbonated beverage that hadn't changed its formula in a century, switching to nickname bottle packaging that summer brought huge sales growth and a flood of social sharing, making people feel as if Coca-Cola were a newly launched product. This classic case may offer some inspiration for traditional brands.
Especially in the internet age, knowing a brand, or even liking a brand's ads, does not mean consumers will buy the brand. **The new generation of consumers increasingly values absolute product strength.** So in contemporary times, marketing should be attached to product strength, integrating marketing with the product.
Today we discuss how traditional brands, especially FMCG brands, can break through in marketing. Besides the funnel model, what else can they do?
**Disconnected Communication and Product: Meaningless Exposure**
Let's first talk about the problem. Do you recall any brand that markets well but doesn't sell products? I won't name brands. But I can give an example: there was a viral video called "Tomato and Egg" (番茄炒蛋). As an industry professional, I looked it up and found it was for China Merchants Bank's study abroad credit card. The ad agency was the biggest winner. The content was good, but it had nothing to do with the product or brand.
In other words, **good marketing content does not equal good marketing. Good marketing makes people praise the product.**
Another issue is that most mature brands face not a awareness problem but a more fundamental product strength problem. However, since marketing personnel are powerless to change the product, they can only start from the marketing angle, so they stick to old products and make new ads. People see the new ads but still don't buy the old products.
A few days ago, I saw a practitioner's comment: they bought ads on a major high-traffic platform, got over 1 million exposures, over 6,000 clicks, and zero conversions. This is meaningless exposure. For big brands that spend millions on grand ads, the final result might be that industry insiders comment on the production quality and creative level, but no one talks about the product, let alone converts to purchase.
For traditional FMCG marketing, we must return to the more fundamental product issue, or rather, solve product problems through marketing—whether it's product aging or product perception—ultimately aligning consumer expectations with brand expectations.
So, how to solve product strength issues within the marketing scope? How to better integrate product and marketing to create more effective communication? Let's illustrate with cases:
**Marketing Should Dare to "Develop" New Products**
When I wrote "Marketing Department Skills Sink" (市场部技能下沉), a key point was that marketers should do product-oriented creativity and operation-oriented creativity. Most people think this is for internet brands, and for traditional brands, the marketing department can't touch the product.
Yes, we can't change the product formula, but as the Coca-Cola nickname bottle mentioned at the beginning shows, even without changing the formula, you can still change the product in other ways.
Marketing personnel should dare to touch the product, dare to "develop" new products. While ensuring product quality and not changing the product's essence, they can develop marketing-oriented products, experimental products, drive consumption with innovative products, and consumption brings product reputation, thereby achieving sustainable growth.
The next case is Guliduo's co-branded packaging with One Piece. Guliduo is Yili's first grain milk with large grains. One Piece aired in 1999, and now it's exactly the 20th anniversary. It has many fans in China, and Guliduo's audience happens to be the generation that grew up with One Piece.
This case is not a simple brand crossover; it's a product innovation crossover sold through all channels, so it's worth discussing.
One Piece is a story about dreams. The protagonist Luffy inspired a generation's growth, and Guliduo's selling point is "hunger resistance." Through this co-branding, they aim to shape Guliduo's brand image and concept of providing strength to people on their dream-chasing journey.
The key to this marketing is not just creating brand content but creating new products. Without changing the product's essence, they create a different product through IP co-branding, giving consumers freshness and endowing the original brand with richer attributes.
And communication based on the "new product" becomes more concrete and has a focal point, making it effective exposure. Next, we'll interpret the case from three levels: incremental information, mass communication, and brand building.
**Incremental Information**
For traditional products like Guliduo, a product typically goes through a long preparation and experimentation period from R&D to actual launch. Once it becomes a mature product, its essence almost never changes.
Similar products are common in the FMCG field. A mature product may not change from packaging to formula for decades, making marketing very difficult.
For such products, marketers should also dare to innovate and create incremental value. Guliduo's solution is co-branded packaging, crossing over with the One Piece IP.
We can imagine that from the packaging dimension alone, there are many ways to play. IP co-branding is one way, similar to Coke's nickname bottles. Wei Chuan juice has played similar games, and there must be more ways worth exploring.
Through the above methods, you can create an innovative product lab, make a packaging, run small-batch experiments, and if feedback is good, follow up with large batches. Sustainably run more experiments, continuously create incremental information, and bring freshness to consumers. For Guliduo, this might be its market solution.
**Mass Communication**
For mature brands' old products that already have awareness, there's no need for repetitive communication. But when there's a One Piece co-branded custom packaging, you can do communication. How to communicate for such products is also worth learning from. Guliduo chose to combine product selling points with IP attributes, using the theme "Real grains resist hunger, ignite dreams and set sail" (实粒扛饿，燃梦起航) for a round of new product communication.
When there's a concrete new product, the purpose of mass communication becomes clear: push the new product out and tell the people who should know. I generally divide communication logic into two types: **one is slow communication, accumulating strength under the water surface first, then surfacing for strong exposure when the momentum is strong enough; the second is fast communication, leading with events or big exposure, then slowly engaging in deep communication.**
Guliduo belongs to the second type because One Piece's momentum is large enough; no need to accumulate. On August 21, the One Piece custom packaging launched on JD.com. Two actions happened simultaneously that day: first, big exposure—Moments ads, Weibo opening screen, Weibo feed, new media KOLs, and inviting Wei Daxun as celebrity spokesperson. Exposure continued until the 24th, doing saturated placement to get the message across.
The second thing was launching a One Piece H5 simultaneously, coordinated with Moments ads, Weibo feed, and other media channels. But the H5's purpose was to gather fans and prepare for the next action. The H5 was customized for One Piece fans and offered many benefits, including limited gift boxes, custom packaging, One Piece merchandise, etc., creating viral communication within the fan circle.
The H5's grand prize was tickets to a sea press conference. The sea press conference was held on August 24, inviting 100 One Piece fans. Celebrity Wei Daxun served as captain, boarding the ship with fans to fulfill the dream of sailing with partners. It was Guliduo's press conference and also a tribute to One Piece's 20th anniversary.
Then from August 24 to September 24, in Guangzhou, where One Piece fans are most numerous, they did subway car and station media placements, forming iconic media placement for fans to share and take photos. Finally, in September's back-to-school season, they went deep into college student groups for interaction, holding large events for Guliduo and One Piece.
To summarize, the overall communication logic is first strong exposure—the saturated placement on WeChat and Weibo on the 21st—then deep interaction with fans starting from the H5, from the sea press conference, Guangzhou subway car and station placements, to the upcoming campus activities in the back-to-school season.
Of course, with such a big communication event, channels must keep up. After the JD.com launch on the 21st, the product was fully available across online and offline channels nationwide, with a total of 2 months of all-channel sales.
**Brand Building**
The short-term benefit of IP co-branding is sales conversion; the long-term benefit is the IP's tone added to the brand, accumulating intangible brand assets. Short-term is effectiveness, long-term is brand, achieving both.
The essence of brand building is to reconstruct the brand through marketing-oriented products in a productized way. What Guliduo reconstructs is the brand's personality, linking hunger resistance with dreams, then marketing in a productized way, ultimately achieving brand consensus and taking the brand further.
Facing contemporary consumers, brand building is no longer about preaching but direct experience. So when we only rely on ads to teach consumers to be themselves, to be free, to have dreams, it's no longer effective. The right way is to integrate brand values and the message into the product, letting consumers directly experience the product.
Just like Guliduo is doing: linking the brand with dreams, so directly create a product related to dreams. The hardcore point of this case is that it's not just an ordinary IP co-branding; it's sold through all channels for 2 months. For a marketing case, this is true productized creativity, with countless product coordination, channel chain integration, etc. It's a case that drives the whole company, not just the marketing department. So I admire this hardcore project.
It's also why mass communication is willing to invest, because this product can be seen in all channels; maybe it's already on the shelves at the small supermarket downstairs. **Ultimately, product is media, consumption is communication.**
**Summary: Consumption Is Marketing**
The trend is a return to product strength. Absolute product strength brings absolute brand strength. Brands detached from products will have no value.
The new generation of consumers is a generation that has seen the world and is not easily fooled. Their consumption decisions place more emphasis on product strength than on awareness and brand scale.
In this context, the role of marketing is diminishing, or the role of advertising is fading. Good marketing and good ad creativity often cannot drive sales growth.
If marketers continue to follow the old ways, only caring about marketing and ignoring products, leading to a disconnect between marketing and product, there will be a lot of ineffective marketing. Even if they produce quality content, if it's not related to the product, it's still ineffective.
In the past, it was small products with big brands. Brain Gold spent over 100 million yuan annually on advertising. Now it's about emphasizing product over advertising. Heytea, a new consumer brand, is valued at 10 billion yuan and never does traditional advertising, yet it has built a very good brand. This is the victory of product strength.
So for traditional consumer goods, product strength will be greater than brand strength. For marketers, they need to go deep into the product and carve out a marketing-oriented product path to create products for the brand.
For traditional products like Guliduo, marketers can't change the product formula, so they develop new products outside the formula. Coke's nickname bottles and Guliduo's One Piece co-branding are good reference cases, and these should be what marketers do.
There are more new consumer products that can open up marketing-oriented new products. For example, Heytea with extreme product strength and high-frequency new products; or traditional apparel brand Li-Ning, where an e-commerce runway show style directly drove brand upgrade.
For many traditional consumer brands, **the marketing department should become a new product lab, reverse-developing products based on marketing insights, and then using products to drive the brand.**
As for mass communication, its mission is simpler and more direct: more as notification, exposure, and explanation of product functions. **What truly builds the brand will be absolute product strength.**
**Source: Yang Bu Huai (ID: yangbuhuai01)**
Tips will be paid 400-2000 yuan once the tip is adopted. **China FMCG + Internet Professional New Media** **Committed to FMCG manufacturer and distributor transformation and channel digital solutions**


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 杨不坏
- Published: 2019-10-15
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/fmcg-brands-consumption-is-marketing-0572f302/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/n3wGybCHQhSrcDdpYCNbPQ

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