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Having read Liu Chunxiong's recent first article "How Many People Misread Jiangxiaobai" and also seen some online articles questioning Jiangxiaobai, as a beer industry professional, I have always followed Jiangxiaobai and have seen or even participated in debates and doubts about it since its founding in 2012. For example: Does youth-oriented small liquor have a future? Is baijiu the drink of young people? Can Jiangxiaobai only be a regional brand of Chongqing?
Of course, the most recent controversies are: Does Jiangxiaobai taste good? Does Jiangxiaobai sell well? Some also say: Jiangxiaobai does great content, but its sales are not high.
In fact, controversies surrounding Jiangxiaobai have never ceased.
When it first started in Chongqing, some said it couldn't succeed; when Chongqing succeeded, some said it couldn't leave Chongqing; when Chengdu succeeded, some said it couldn't leave the southwest; when it went national, some worried it wouldn't last; after several years of national presence, some say: Jiangxiaobai is so popular, why are its sales far behind Laocunzhang...
- Doubt and controversy may be a good thing, but in any case, we cannot impose conclusions on a child or a youth!
Founded in 2012, Jiangxiaobai is only six years old. This time point coincides with the end of the golden decade of Chinese baijiu and the inflection point of Chinese FMCG, when many traditional consumer brands began to slide from their peaks!
After this time point, apart from on the internet, almost no new large-scale brands have emerged in traditional offline fields, especially in Chinese baijiu. Jiangxiaobai, targeting the literary and artistic youth group with the appeal of "life is simple," forcibly carved out a small piece of cake from the traditional baijiu field, seemingly doing something as foolish as "squeezing milk from a stone."
In reality, Jiangxiaobai went ahead and squeezed milk from a stone, and it did squeeze it out. This stone is the young people who traditional baijiu believes cannot drink baijiu!
Of course, it would be best to squeeze milk from the herd, but the herd of Chinese baijiu has already been occupied by major brands. If not from the stone, where else? If it had gone to the herd, some would say: conservative, no innovation!
Comparing Jiangxiaobai with Moutai, Wuliangye, or even Erguotou and Laocunzhang is like comparing our own six-year-old child with successful people or students admitted to Peking University and Tsinghua.
With inconsistent reference dimensions, various comparison results will inevitably appear. So what to compare? Why not compare which child under six years old in Chinese baijiu is the most outstanding?
- The controversy over good taste vs. bad taste.
Three years ago, in training sessions for some beer companies, I said that Jiangxiaobai was competing for the beer market because its consumer base almost overlaps with beer.
Beer is almost the first alcohol for young people (the first sip of life). Of course, beer has low alcohol content and is more like a beverage. For many young people, Jiangxiaobai has almost become the first high-alcohol drink.
For young people, the first drink is not about whether it tastes good, but whether it is fun, and it also depends on who you drink with and where.
Novice drinking is simple: liquor is liquor, pure and uncomplicated! Expert drinking seems complicated: taste, aroma, brand, grade, venue...
In many cases, those who say Jiangxiaobai doesn't taste good are mostly not novices but veterans in the liquor world. These people use professional tasting knowledge to describe why Jiangxiaobai is not good, some saying it's not as good as Moutai, Wuliangye, not as good as Waizuilang, Jingshi, not as good as Erguotou, Laocunzhang...
I once saw an online article: an expert saw that Jiangxiaobai was very popular, so he bought a case to entertain his professor friend at a university. The friend thought it was not as good as Moutai, or even beer, and decisively switched drinks and stopped drinking it...
This is a very interesting phenomenon: it's not your dish, why force yourself to swallow it? If you can't swallow it, do you declare it's unpalatable for everyone in the world?
Sake is popular in Japan, but it's hard to sell to the general public in China. Many people take a sip and lament that it doesn't taste good, but this doesn't affect the sake market in Japan, nor does it stop many young Chinese from drinking sake in Japanese restaurants!
Jiangxiaobai happens to be at the opposite end of traditional baijiu: simple, low-alcohol, with composite characteristics similar to Western spirits and sake, suitable for young people's tastes.
- Communication is only the surface; the lower body and backend are the real skills!
Because of the beer industry, I have always been mindful of the lower-body skills in terminal execution. It's clear that Jiangxiaobai's sales come from two parts: offline sales and online sales, with the main body from offline. And the main offline sales come from restaurants. So when I travel around the country for the beer and beverage market, I also pay attention to Jiangxiaobai. In many places, especially in the Jiangbei region, there is almost no blank area for Jiangxiaobai. Jiangxiaobai's terminal execution ability is almost in no-man's land: quotes, door pushers, bars, display racks, price stickers... The execution rate and maintenance rate of serialized props have almost no rivals. The operation standards are standardized, and execution is strong, resulting in the ubiquitous scene-based performance of Jiangxiaobai terminals.
Jiangxiaobai factory area
Jiangxiaobai's sales system has zero weight for sales assessment: no sales assessment, no warehouse pressure, no inventory pressure. This must be guaranteed by a strong execution system, such as the supervision department directly managed by the boss and the fast-acting post-90s sales system. Of course, Jiangxiaobai's online sales are also doing well; being able to rank in the top three for baijiu on Double 11 is not easy.
- Doubts about Jiangxiaobai's sales.
Traveling around the north, in Beijing, Shandong, Henan, Hebei, and the three northeastern provinces, I can see Jiangxiaobai's distribution in many places, especially in restaurants. Asking the restaurant owner: How is Jiangxiaobai selling? Most answers: Not bad, young people buy more...
A couple of days ago, I read an article by Lao Miao, which compared Jiangxiaobai's WeChat index and Weibo index with Moutai. The gist was: Jiangxiaobai's index exceeds Moutai and Wuliangye, so why are its sales not as high? Actually, this is a common phenomenon. Many traditional brands have low indexes, such as Tsingtao Beer, which is much lower than Jiangxiaobai, even lower than some new beer brands. This only shows the difference in communication fields and paths, and further shows that traditional brands have not gained an advantage in internet communication. Internet communication can be measured with data at times, while traditional communication often relies on energy accumulation and means. Compared with CCTV and satellite TV, internet communication requires higher content quality. Especially for niche brands, they should firmly walk in the opposite direction of the masses, becoming a stubborn contrarian. What satisfies everyone is a category; only what satisfies some, a small part, is a brand.
There are multiple versions of Jiangxiaobai's sales data. Whether the doubts are many or few doesn't matter. The key is that Jiangxiaobai itself has no plan to make the brand a hundred billion or a trillion. With urban literary youth as brand users, it will naturally attract middle-aged and even elderly consumers.
It is said that the Chinese baijiu market is over a trillion yuan. Making a few billion is only a few thousandths. However, China's annual baijiu export is less than $350 million, less than two-thousandths of Chinese baijiu, with an annual growth rate of only 15%...
If we deny Chinese baijiu based on this alone, it's like denying Jiangxiaobai based on sales. After all, Jiangxiaobai took less than six years to go from 50 million at the start to one billion today.
Roland Berger once released data: the proportion of people under 30 drinking beer is 52%, and drinking baijiu is 8%. This means the young people's baijiu market could be 50 billion yuan and 1 million tons. Squeezing out 10% of this 8% niche market could be 5 billion.
Source: New Beer
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