---
title: "Partnering with William Chan to Expand China's Functional Beverage Market: Can This Differentiated Brand Ignite Consumers?"
description: "This summer, health beverage brand CELSIUS officially announced that Hong Kong actor and singer William Chan would serve as its brand ambassador, marking the first celebrity endorsement since entering China over a year ago. With its 0 sugar, 0 calorie, and 0 fat positioning, CELSIUS aims to leverage Chan's energetic image to attract consumers and lead a new trend in healthy drinks."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2019-09-11"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ONUpcCYDKmV05hvCOjO0tw"
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# Partnering with William Chan to Expand China's Functional Beverage Market: Can This Differentiated Brand Ignite Consumers?

> This summer, health beverage brand CELSIUS officially announced that Hong Kong actor and singer William Chan would serve as its brand ambassador, marking the first celebrity endorsement since entering China over a year ago. With its 0 sugar, 0 calorie, and 0 fat positioning, CELSIUS aims to leverage Chan's energetic image to attract consumers and lead a new trend in healthy drinks.

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This summer, health beverage brand CELSIUS officially announced that renowned Hong Kong actor and singer William Chan would serve as its brand ambassador. This is the first time CELSIUS has used a celebrity as brand ambassador since entering the Chinese market over a year ago.
As one of the rapidly growing health beverages in China, CELSIUS, with its 0 sugar, 0 calorie, and 0 fat proposition, has been embraced by many health-conscious consumers. Now, with the energetic and healthy image of William Chan, a popular idol, as brand ambassador, CELSIUS is not only attracting numerous consumers but may also lead a new trend in healthy beverages.
At the end of 2017, CELSIUS, originating from the United States, officially entered the Chinese market and acquired its Chinese name "燃力士" (Ran Lishi). Prior to this, the beverage had already achieved notable success in the U.S. fitness market. It is another functional beverage to enter the Chinese market following foreign brands like Monster.
**The Huge Potential of China's Functional Beverage Market**
Entering China, CELSIUS is eyeing the enormous demand from Chinese consumers for functional beverages. According to statistics, from 2012 to 2018, the compound annual growth rate of retail sales of functional beverages in China reached 14%, and by the end of 2018, retail sales exceeded 45 billion yuan. Even so, compared with developed countries, per capita consumption of functional beverages in China is only 0.5 kilograms per year, leaving significant room for growth compared with the global average of 7 kilograms per capita. Amid such huge market demand, China's functional beverage market is not short of major brands. Brands such as Red Bull, Lehu, Dongpeng Te Yin, Jianlibao, Nongfu Spring Scream, Gatorade, Mizone, Wahaha Qili, Aquarius, and Rich Plus dominate the market with high brand recognition.
**Facing Opportunities and Challenges, How Does CELSIUS Break into the Chinese Market?**
**Healthiness**
With consumption upgrading, consumers are increasingly leaning toward healthier beverage options. As a health beverage brand from the United States, CELSIUS features a patented formula, with 0 sugar, 0 calories, and 0 fat, no preservatives or artificial colors, and contains various plant ingredients, multiple vitamins, and electrolytes. These attributes have earned CELSIUS the label of a healthy beverage.
**Multiple Flavors**
Whether it's Red Bull, Lehu, or Dongpeng Te Yin, mainstream functional beverage brands tend to have limited flavor options, leading consumers to focus more on functionality. In contrast, CELSIUS currently offers four flavors, **fully satisfying different consumer preferences and breaking the stereotype that functional beverages have monotonous flavors.**
**Multiple Scenarios**
Currently, consumers primarily use functional beverages for driving, overtime work, or staying up late, but these scenarios do not cover a broad consumer base. **As consumers increasingly demand a healthy lifestyle, they hope to have a functional beverage suitable for healthy scenarios.**
The combination of various health attributes gives CELSIUS more positive and uplifting consumption scenarios. Enjoy a can before or during exercise to feel the exhilarating sweat; have a can with meals for a refreshing, guilt-free drink; or share a can at gatherings to chat with friends all night. Thus, CELSIUS is a mass-market health beverage that can be enjoyed anytime, anywhere. With the rise of the post-90s and post-00s consumer groups, consumers are more mature and willing to pay for their interests, so products that create more adaptable scenarios are more likely to gain attention.
**Differentiation**
**Currently, functional beverage brands are highly homogenized, with little difference in formula, taste, packaging, or channels. CELSIUS, however, aims to enter consumers' minds with differentiated products.** In terms of packaging, CELSIUS uses slim aluminum cans and a vibrant, fresh packaging style, presenting a differentiated product distinct from other functional beverages. Additionally, CELSIUS differs significantly from other functional drinks in formula, flavor, packaging, and efficacy.
In marketing, CELSIUS adopts experiential marketing to attract young traffic. Through pop-up events like "Douyin: Perfect Body Factory" and "Keep: Calorie Department Store," it showcases the product's health benefits through tangible experiences, accumulating a broad young consumer base for brand communication and word-of-mouth.
This differentiation also results in a significant difference between CELSIUS's actual consumer base and that of traditional functional beverages. In the future, CELSIUS will continue to uphold brand differentiation.
With growing consumer demand for healthy beverages, CELSIUS needs a long-term, stable development strategy. CELSIUS is optimistic about the trend of consumption upgrading in the Chinese market, which is also influencing the young people who are the main force in beverage consumption. In China, CELSIUS will continuously improve its distribution channel network and strengthen deep communication with consumers, thereby becoming part of more consumers' new healthy lifestyle.
In the functional beverage segment, for a brand to achieve long-term development, it must continuously innovate in various aspects, including product, brand, channels, and promotion models. Currently, Chinese consumers' demands for beverages and their brand perceptions are constantly changing; people increasingly identify with brands that understand or even lead their lifestyles. As a product newly entering the Chinese market, CELSIUS hopes to seize and fully utilize this opportunity amid the transformation.
In fact, before CELSIUS entered the Chinese market, another U.S. functional beverage brand, Monster, had already entered, but its performance in China was not impressive. Some worry that CELSIUS might follow in Monster's footsteps.
The main difference between CELSIUS and Monster lies in product differentiation, combined with the product's health attributes to break through in channels and consumer groups, focusing more on consumer cultivation and lifestyle integration, while continuously enhancing brand strength.
This year, CELSIUS partnered with Nielsen Online to design and customize a brand ambassador selection plan, as one of the key steps in deepening its presence in the Chinese market. It decided to appoint William Chan, who highly aligns with the brand's philosophy, to jointly convey a disciplined and positive lifestyle attitude to consumers, thereby achieving better market performance and consumer recognition.
**Healthiness, multiple scenarios, and new marketing are the future directions for China's functional beverage market. Whether foreign or local brands, to establish a foothold in the Chinese market, they must continuously innovate, be consumer-oriented, channel-oriented, and quality-oriented, and constantly provide consumers with better experiences.**
**With the continuous rise of young consumers and the overarching trend of consumption upgrading, functional beverages will gradually move from niche to mass-market products. For brand owners, this is undoubtedly an opportunity, but it also presents challenges. Whether it's Red Bull, Monster, or CELSIUS, they all face transformation. And continuously meeting consumer needs is the belief that every brand must uphold.**
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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: New Distribution
- Published: 2019-09-11
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/partnering-with-william-chan-to-expand-china-s-functional-beverage-marke-c31cce27/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ONUpcCYDKmV05hvCOjO0tw

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