Recently, a friend in the liquor industry sent me an article titled "Rio's Downfall: From a Billion-Dollar Product to Rapid Decline," and he asked, "Kris, this article says Rio failed due to excessive brand marketing. What do you think?"

Wait a minute, is business failure the fault of brand marketing? Whenever these two words are mentioned together by our entrepreneurs and founders, my heart automatically sends out a warning signal.

Brand is brand, marketing is marketing. Brand is the ultimate business goal a company aims to achieve, while marketing is a series of tactics to promote the brand and drive business.

Admittedly, brand and marketing are both market operations of a company, with a natural connection like bones and tendons, but there are inherent differences in the order of operations between Eastern and Western market perspectives.

Chinese companies have always required that any market move must deliver visible results to be considered real capability. In contrast, international brands consistently follow the approach of brand before marketing: marketing actions must be preceded by brand actions, marketing must align with brand logic, and brand equity ultimately achieves positive growth. Market performance speaks louder than words, and with a slight push, they can easily outshine Chinese companies.

After carefully reading the article, I found that Rio, a brand that originally pioneered the premixed cocktail category and ambitiously aimed for a billion-dollar market myth, experienced rapid ups and downs—from birth, to peak confrontation, to decline—within just two or three years, ultimately turning to dust. It's a pity. The final failure was attributed to marketing failure, but it also mixed in brand factors, hence the opening question.

In 2014, Rio became the leader with 9.87 billion yuan in revenue, surpassing its competitor, Icey, backed by the century-old company Bacardi.

The industry generally attributes this achievement to Rio's massive marketing efforts.

Even in an era of declining TV advertising, you could still see Rio ads everywhere, along with various celebrity endorsements, product placements in hit dramas, and sponsorships of reality shows.

Behind the big spending was extravagance. According to media reports, Rio's advertising expenses in 2015 reached 330 million yuan, comparable to some consumer industry giants. Some even regarded Rio as a model of entertainment marketing. But unfortunately, besides the shocking spending figures, I can't see where its brand strategy and marketing tactics lie.

Now that it has encountered a commercial Waterloo, some people are saying it's a mistake of excessive marketing. If we must blame marketing, then how do we view Jiangxiaobai, which emerged as a dark horse in the liquor industry?

In terms of the intensity of the liquor market, it's dozens of times more competitive than the new cocktail category. A new brand, without the core advantages of traditional liquor brands like cultural heritage and long history, competes with a 20-yuan small bottle packaging against premium packaging that often costs hundreds or thousands. How did it manage to make waves, maintain 100% growth, achieve 300 million yuan in sales, and become a dark horse in the liquor industry?

All this success also seems to be attributed to the success of brand marketing. Both are in the liquor industry, both use brand marketing—so where exactly did it go wrong?

Please allow us to first separate brand and marketing to see who is focusing on brand and who is focusing on marketing.

Chinese companies often simply confuse marketing with brand, either thinking that if marketing is done well, the brand can rest easy, or if the brand is done well, there's no need to worry about marketing actions. All these are ideological killers that lead our brands to commercial Waterloo.

In simple terms, the success or failure of a brand is closely related to strategic decisions, while marketing failures are mostly attributed to improper tactics. As I often say, if the direction is wrong, no matter how good the method, it's useless. If the brand doesn't provide a clear direction, even the best marketing guru's clever tricks may not work.

Looking at the two cases above, I'll boldly use a simple and crude observation method to characterize the two brands.

Jiangxiaobai focuses more on brand, while Rio focuses more on marketing.

Why?

Which comes first: direction or method?

In front of the established liquor giants, Jiangxiaobai seems to adopt the STP (Segment, Target, Position) principle, positioning itself for the younger generation, promoting the brand concept of "youthful new liquor," and integrating this throughout all brand touchpoints to create a consistent and coherent brand experience.

This brand positioning is clearly strategic. The traditional liquor market has existed for years with a fixed landscape: Moutai's position is unshakable, and brands like Jiannanchun, Yanghe Daqu, and Wuliangye have captured various segments with unbreakable marketing tactics. Without huge marketing budgets, you'd basically be beaten black and blue. However, the young people's liquor market is almost blank, with few players, but the potential is enormous.

Jiangxiaobai precisely discovered this precise market segment, positioning itself as "youthful liquor with attitude," from pricing to packaging, closely aligned with this positioning. The slogan "I am Jiangxiaobai, life is simple" may seem ordinary, but compared to the traditional liquor culture of "pretentiousness," this simplicity and directness resonates more with young audiences.

Only when the direction is right can various methods be effective and achieve twice the result with half the effort.

From the inspiration for Jiangxiaobai's IP to the copywriting for Weibo marketing, from various attitude posters to bottle labels, you can clearly perceive the brand vibe of "attitude and youth." If only one or two points were done well, Jiangxiaobai's brand wouldn't be so deeply rooted in people's hearts. Firmly integrating brand positioning into marketing actions also indirectly shows that Jiangxiaobai's brand is well-operated internally and well-managed.

The image above is a supermarket photo I took casually during a business trip to the Northeast.

In contrast, Rio entered the blue ocean of cocktails under the banner of "new category," with inherent advantages over the blood-soaked liquor market. Generally, new categories have a better chance of capturing the market.

For example, Red Bull, which entered the Chinese market early, pioneered the energy drink category with "Drink Red Bull when tired and thirsty." Another example is JDB, which recently swept from south to north, turning a medicinal drink with strong regional restrictions into a universal functional drink for hotpot to prevent getting heaty. They all successfully captured consumers' minds as leaders of new categories, making everyone willingly open their wallets.

But after flipping through Rio's various ads, including trailers, posters, and PR articles, I found that Rio's slogans, from "Let's Rio" during Zhou Xun's endorsement to "Super Free" with Yang Yang and Guo CaiJie, fail to convey a clear, unique, and deeply rooted brand perception. This is precisely what a correct brand positioning should convey.

A vague positioning, even with all kinds of good methods, can still fail.

Rio's failure, on the surface, is marketing failure, but in reality, it's more about improper branding.

Compared to cocktail competitors, the most likely rivals are beers with lower alcohol content, suitable for gatherings. The beer market is also highly competitive and brand-intensive, a red ocean where emotional appeals and spiritual resonance have been overused by domestic and international giants like Tsingtao Beer and Carlsberg. In comparison, "Super Free," which also follows an emotional route, is essentially homogeneous output.

No matter how much entertainment marketing or media advertising is done, it may be futile and end in vain. It's like a pretty girl who might be the campus belle at a sports school, but once thrown into the Central Academy of Drama exam, she immediately disappears into the crowd.

Summary

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Brand positioning is the direction; all subsequent actions may be marketing actions, continuously reinforcing the brand positioning in the audience's mind, ultimately achieving brand awareness, preference, and loyalty.

As one of the most important outputs of brand strategy, we often say brand positioning is crucial, but such an important positioning concept is rarely communicated directly; instead, it's often conveyed through more creative slogans. In other words, a slogan is the external expression of a brand's positioning philosophy.

To use a not-so-appropriate metaphor, it's hard to reach a person's soul, but their catchphrase somewhat reflects their inner world.

In summary, the thinking logic of this article is to use slogans to infer the brand positioning direction of the two brands, and then based on the direction, evaluate whether the marketing methods used are appropriate.

I've rambled on so much, but the goal is to make everyone clearly distinguish between brand and marketing. When brand marketing fails, is it a brand failure or a marketing failure?

Source: Chief Brand Officer

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