---
title: "The Little Brother of Plant-Based Protein Drinks: How It Rose to Become the Industry Leader"
description: "This article analyzes how Liu Ge He Tao (Six Walnuts) transformed from a minor player into the leading brand in the plant-based protein drink category by reconstructing consumer demand, category value, and consumer perception, achieving annual sales of over 10 billion yuan."
author: "王超"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-03-14"
language: "en"
canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/the-little-brother-of-plant-based-protein-drinks-how-it-rose-to-become-t-8687c935/"
markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/the-little-brother-of-plant-based-protein-drinks-how-it-rose-to-become-t-8687c935.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/pkSyHfwoV5RlCQo7INqRCg"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E9%82%A3%E4%B8%AA%E6%A4%8D%E7%89%A9%E8%9B%8B%E7%99%BD%E9%A5%AE%E6%96%99%E7%9A%84%E5%B0%8F%E5%85%84%E5%BC%9F-%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E9%80%86%E8%A2%AD%E6%88%90%E4%BA%86%E4%B8%9A%E7%95%8C%E6%89%9B%E6%8A%8A%E5%AD%90-8687c935.md"
attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/the-little-brother-of-plant-based-protein-drinks-how-it-rose-to-become-t-8687c935/"
usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt"
---

# The Little Brother of Plant-Based Protein Drinks: How It Rose to Become the Industry Leader

> This article analyzes how Liu Ge He Tao (Six Walnuts) transformed from a minor player into the leading brand in the plant-based protein drink category by reconstructing consumer demand, category value, and consumer perception, achieving annual sales of over 10 billion yuan.

Click 'Read Original' for details.
> Source: Marketing Wang Laopao (ID: wangchaolaopao)
Nowadays, when mentioning 'plant-based protein drinks,' one must first name 'Six Walnuts' (Liu Ge He Tao), which carries the label of a 'legendary beverage brand with billions in sales.'
Before Six Walnuts, no plant-based protein drink brand had ever achieved annual sales exceeding 3 billion yuan. It was precisely because of Six Walnuts' push that plant-based protein drinks in the beverage industry achieved a magnificent promotion from a marginal small category to a mainstream category. From sales, market, and industry influence, Six Walnuts has become the leader of plant-based protein drinks.
**01**
**No Break, No Establishment; Heroes Are Always Young**
Looking back more than a decade, the world of plant-based protein drinks was entirely different from today's landscape.
In the north, 'Lulu' (Chengde Lulu) and in the south, 'Coconut Palm' (Yeguo) stood as two giants. At that time, 'Dazhai Walnut Dew,' originating from the foothills of Taihang Mountain, began to shine with the afterglow of political dividends, even appearing in Guangzhou in the south, and invited Xu Fan as spokesperson to boost brand energy.
As for 'Six Walnuts,' it was still struggling for survival, unknown, clinging to Lulu's coattails, following into the catering market of Hebei, Shandong, and Henan. The big shots drank soup, the little brother ate scraps; following behind the big shots, barely getting by, easy! But trying to leave a mark in the world and secure a position, difficult!
If the little brother wants to overtake, besides having the ambition not to be left behind, the seat determines the mind, and the mindset determines the way out. Instead of following traditional routines, simply reconstruct the plant-based protein drink category. This mindset of no break, no establishment successfully opened the path for Six Walnuts' counterattack.
The only constant in this world is change. Reconstruction is based on change, re-deconstructing and recombining existing things to form new rules and derive new vitality adapted to change.
**Often, in the face of change, experience, inertia, and arrogance can turn successful big shots into frogs in warm water, while for little brothers without baggage, there lie opportunities for counterattack.**
Before Six Walnuts, plant-based protein drinks were a supporting role in the beverage industry, content in a corner, shining alone.
'Lulu' dominated north of the Yellow River, 'Coconut Palm' held steady south of the Yangtze River. However, **the sales of each of the two overlords never exceeded 3 billion yuan,** making them a small, low-attention category in the hundred-billion-level beverage market.
At that time, 'Coconut Palm' had not yet used the mind-boggling 'white and tender' and 'drinking since childhood' slogans; it used the national banquet beverage to motivate consumption. 'Lulu' mainly went through northern catering channels, telling consumers 'drink hot in winter, add ice in summer.' At the same time, the emphasis on origin branded plant-based protein drinks as local flavored beverages—Coconut Palm is from Hainan, Lulu is from Chengde.
**Local flavored beverages, drinkable or not, with a sense of being needed that is neither here nor there, it was precisely this category construction that limited the development space of plant-based protein drinks, making it difficult for 'Coconut Palm' to cross the Yangtze and 'Lulu' to cross the Yellow River.**
No break, no establishment; heroes are always young. For Six Walnuts to counterattack, it had to revolutionize the 'traditional old comrades,' break the mold of traditional plant-based protein drinks as local flavored beverages, reconstruct the category from consumer demand, category value, and consumer perception, give plant-based protein drinks a new positioning, and strengthen the category's sense of being needed.
How to enhance the category's sense of being needed?
**02**
**Insight into the Consumption Shift from Good Taste to Good Health**
**Reconstructing Consumer Demand for Plant-Based Protein Drinks**
In the domestic market, the first generation of beverages since reform and opening up, due to long-term material scarcity, mainly focused on satisfying taste, with orange juice made from flavorings and sugar water as a representative. Lulu, Coconut Palm, and other old plant-based protein drinks also originated in that era, so traditional plant-based protein drinks as local flavored beverages had their era-specific reasons.
**1. New Demand: The Wind at Your Back**
With the improvement of living standards, consumer demand has also changed, showing a trend of diversified upgrades. Besides basic taste enjoyment, there is also a higher demand for nutrition and health. Consumer demand is shifting from good taste to good health, and beverages have entered the second generation that pursues nutrition and functionality.
Minute Maid Pulpy Orange precisely seized this change in consumer demand, launching orange juice with real pulp, 'More C, More Beautiful,' strengthening the vitamin nutrition of juice drinks.
Yinlu Peanut Milk, a beverage originating from the traditional snack peanut milk soup in Fujian, also seized the change in consumer demand through 'double nutrition,' breaking the category definition of local flavored beverages and once thriving.
Remember the experimental ads of Nongfu Spring natural water vs. purified water? The narcissus fed with natural water and purified water grew differently due to different mineral nutrition. Even bottled water joined this market reconstruction brought by changes in consumer demand.
Plant-based protein drinks, made from nutrient-rich plant nuts, have inherent nutritional advantages. Insight into the change in consumer demand, Six Walnuts reconstructed the consumer demand for plant-based protein drinks—as a plant-based protein nutritional beverage made from walnuts. Not highlighting origin, not highlighting flavor, **'What you drink is not flavor, but nutrition,' completely removing the traces of traditional local flavored beverages.**
**2. Anchoring Big Demand, Precisely Hitting the Human Weakness of Anxiety**
Under the framework of demand reconstruction, Six Walnuts further precisely locked onto consumers' nutritional needs, preventing demand defocusing caused by nutritional generalization and reducing the sense of being needed. As a plant-based protein nutritional beverage, which specific nutritional need does Six Walnuts satisfy? A deeper selection of needs is necessary.
Walnuts are rich in various nutrients. Folk and traditional Chinese medicine believe that regular consumption of walnuts can improve brain health, anti-aging, beautify, and protect heart function. Different nutrients imply different needs. In consumer demand screening, the broad spectrum and sensitivity of demand become important considerations, related to the future development space of the category and the ease of market acceptance.
Six Walnuts focused consumer demand on brain nutrition. In the era of brain competition, the brain-using population is widespread, and the intensity of brain use has increased. From school to workplace, high-intensity competition makes people generally anxious about insufficient brainpower, and the consumer demand for brain nutrition is easily stimulated.
This demand broke the regional restrictions of traditional plant-based protein drinks, greatly expanding the drinkable population, and hit the current consumers' brain anxiety, greatly enhancing the category's sense of being needed.
Seizing the wind of nutritional and functional consumption changes, Six Walnuts' reconstruction of consumer demand for plant-based protein drinks is reflected in two aspects: **First, from characteristic flavor to satisfy taste sensory needs to added-value nutritional needs, taking a completely different path from traditional plant-based protein drinks; second, refocusing the functional scope of nutrition, locking onto demands with broad population, strong need, and easy triggering, transforming low-engagement consumption of drinkable or not into high-engagement consumption for specific groups.**
The reconstruction of consumer demand through insight into consumption changes allowed Six Walnuts to tap into large demand, high sensitivity, and high engagement, bringing it a market full of imagination. This is exactly the trump card for Six Walnuts to surpass its predecessors and achieve a counterattack.
**03**
**Insight into Competitive Changes, Reconstructing the Category Value of Plant-Based Protein Drinks**
**1. Different Benchmarking Circle, Category Persona Must Keep Up**
To use a cliché: 'As big as your heart, as big as your stage.' Reconstructing consumer demand allowed Six Walnuts' competitive vision to break free from the traditional plant-based protein drink battlefield. Its competition is no longer limited to getting a share of the traditional plant-based protein drink market, but creating a brand-new value category in the large beverage market. Its competitors are not Lulu and Coconut Palm, but nutritional drinks, such as milk-containing beverages.
The change in competitive vision and thinking drove Six Walnuts to reconstruct the category value of plant-based protein drinks, shedding the low-value feeling of traditional local flavored beverages. The new value setting needs to be in the same circle as the benchmark category.
**2. Sense of Being Needed Brushes Up the Category's Presence**
**Being needed is the value of existence. Six Walnuts, which reconstructed demand, aims to hit the big consumer demand for brain health, continuously stimulate consumers, and strengthen its sense of being needed. This is the logical source of Six Walnuts' category value reconstruction.** The stronger the sense of being needed, the stronger the category's presence in consumers' minds.
By building the positioning of 'plant-based protein nutritional beverage beneficial to the brain,' Six Walnuts achieved the reconstruction of category value. In the large beverage market, it created a plant-based protein nutritional beverage with brain-benefiting added value.
The effect of Six Walnuts' category value reconstruction is significantly demonstrated in the gift market. When Chinese people give gifts, within the budget price, they look at brand, value, and weight. The category positioning of 'brain-benefiting plant-based protein nutritional beverage' undoubtedly greatly enhances the value sense of Six Walnuts, avoiding the risk of becoming a fashionable gift.
After introducing the value reconstruction positioning, Six Walnuts advanced rapidly in the boxed gift market, singing all the way, cutting into the market of nutritional milk beverages.
It is also through value reconstruction that Six Walnuts broke the curse of traditional plant-based protein drinks being divided between north and south and difficult to sell nationwide. From the base market of Hebei, Shandong, and Henan to Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Sichuan, Chongqing, and Guizhou, wherever it went, it was invincible.
At the same time, category value reconstruction also opened up the 'Gaokao season' incremental node for Six Walnuts. April to June is usually the off-season for plant-based protein drink sales, but relying on the distinct and unique brain-benefiting category value, through continuous cultivation, April to June, from exam preparation to sprint, became a unique small sales peak for Six Walnuts.
From 2008 to 2016, Six Walnuts' sales doubled year after year. In 2016, it officially entered the hundred-billion club of the food and beverage industry, far exceeding the sum of the sales of the two traditional plant-based protein drink giants. This is the inevitable result of Six Walnuts' insight into competitive changes and category value reconstruction.
**3. The Great Reversal of the Plant-Based Protein Drink Market**
Driven by Six Walnuts, plant-based protein drinks suddenly became the new darling of the beverage industry, attracting high industry attention.
Data shows that since 2010, the overall market for plant-based protein drinks in China has developed steadily, with compound annual growth rates of 24.4% for sales value and 21.3% for sales volume. It is expected that from 2015 to 2020, total market sales will grow from 5.843 billion liters to 10.797 billion liters. Giants in the food and beverage industry such as Yili, Mengniu, and Dali have successively entered the market to make the cake bigger.
Under the reverse push of Six Walnuts, Lulu and Coconut Palm have also frequently taken actions in their own value reconstruction.
Since then, Six Walnuts has driven plant-based protein drinks to shed the hat of flavored beverages and become the new darling of nutritional and healthy drinks. Six Walnuts also completed its counterattack from a little brother to the leader. At the same time, Dazhai Walnut Dew, which entered the market earlier, is now rarely seen in the market.
**04**
**Insight into Changes in the Marketing Environment, Reconstructing Consumer Perception of the Category**
**1. The Good Old Days Are Gone**
In the traditional media era, once an ad was broadcast, gold flowed in. As long as the ad was on CCTV, it basically became a nationally hot-selling brand. That's why the then 'bid king' Qinchigu said: 'Every day, throw a Santana into CCTV, and a Mercedes comes out.'
The relatively simple communication environment, consumers who were still relatively naive after just receiving market baptism, and the market still in a state of warring states, made marketing methods of that era simple, crude, but absolutely effective: **Find a star, go on CCTV, and hold large-scale recruitment; these three axes could carve out a brand.**
By the era of Six Walnuts' development, the marketing environment had already changed. The overall market competition pattern was set, the internet was gradually subverting traditional media ecology and social lifestyles, celebrity endorsements were rampant, and consumers became numb to the advertising bombardment of 'you say, I listen.' The power of the three axes greatly shrank, becoming: every day, throw a Mercedes into CCTV, and a Santana comes out.
The era of simple and crude marketing ended, the good old days are gone, and the era of brain-burning refined marketing began.
**2. Six Senses Attack: A Battle for the Heart**
Insight into the changes in the marketing environment, **Six Walnuts reconstructed consumers' perception of the category, building a refined category perception system from the six senses of 'sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind,' touching consumers and deepening the cognitive imprint of the category in their minds.**
Cognitive psychology believes that the essence of the mind is long-term memory. Long-term memory is divided into two types: episodic memory and semantic memory. Semantic memory requires continuous repetition of information to form, belonging to passive memory. Episodic memory, due to its strong experiential nature, can instantly create deep impressions, belonging to active memory.
In the era of the three axes of marketing, heavy advertising could form consumers' semantic memory, and episodic memory was basically ignored. In the era of refined marketing, semantic memory from advertising becomes more difficult. For consumers' minds to form a cognitive imprint of the category, it is necessary to mobilize consumers' six senses experience, forming two types of memory in coordination.
'Use your brain often, drink Six Walnuts more' is the core content of Six Walnuts' semantic memory. It positions the state of using the brain, stimulates the target group to identify with it, and then gives specific behavioral instructions: 'drink Six Walnuts more.' **Simple and specific, clear category value content, and consumption persuasion, with strong information sharpness. Through repeated communication, it forms consumers' positive semantic memory.**
At the same time, it positions the typical scene of using the brain during the Gaokao, through the reproduction of 'hard review, tense exams,' influencing the heavy target group of student families, forming empathetic episodic memory, evoking category attention and demand, and forming the 'mind' experience in the six senses with the advertising slogan.
In addition, choosing intelligent spokespersons rather than vase-type spokespersons, and long-term content placement in brain competition entertainment programs such as 'The Brain,' 'Challenge Unlimited,' and 'Classics Forever,' turning the program arena into a venue for category value promotion and display, forming a consistent and diversified 'mind' experience for the category value of 'brain-benefiting nutritional beverage.'
Blue was originally the follow-up color used when Six Walnuts was attached to Lulu. Blue represents calmness and wisdom, coinciding with Six Walnuts' category value. After reconstructing the category value, Six Walnuts optimized the brand's blue tone, making it more premium, fully leveraging the value association brought by the brand color from the visual sense.
The visual symbol of walnut milk flow also brings a visual sense of Six Walnuts' genuine quality association, further consolidating the cognitive imprint of category value.
In the festive boxed gift battlefield, Six Walnuts uses the slogan 'Six Walnuts, Six Six Great Luck' and red handbags, festive and imposing terminal displays, adding to the category with brain-benefiting nutritional value from the festive experience.
Through ten years of cultivation in reconstructing consumer perception of the category, Six Walnuts successfully passed the initial category awareness period, leaving a cognitive imprint of brain-benefiting nutritional beverage in the minds of consumers. A good proof is that Six Walnuts has become a regular beverage for parents to buy for students. Six Walnuts achieved a successful counterattack and became the new generation leader of plant-based protein drinks. On the other hand, Six Walnuts has also encountered some small storms of attack. Tall trees catch the wind; right and wrong are inevitable. This is the necessary trial the market gives to the leader.
**05**
**One Step Away from Mainstream Brand**
**What Does Six Walnuts Need to Do Next?**
Today, the hundred-billion Six Walnuts is a strong brand in plant-based protein drinks, but in the large beverage market, it is still one step away from a mainstream brand. Next, Six Walnuts needs to maintain sensitivity to change and continuously reconstruct the category's demand, value, and perception system.
For example, in the past decade, although Six Walnuts has systematically acted on reconstructing consumer perception, there is still room for exploration in consumers' episodic memory. Especially, the environmental patterns affecting consumer minds today are vastly different from ten years ago. In terms of affecting consumers' long-term memory, Six Walnuts needs to continuously carry out systematic reconstruction to enhance the field experience of Six Walnuts.
**Vitality never stops, reconstruction never ends.**
**-END-**


---

## Copyright and AI use

This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL.

Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671