---
title: "The Misunderstood Genki Forest"
description: "Genki Forest is by no means a 'light model' fast-growing product supported only by brand operations and channel dividends. The article explains how the company has built a solid business through product innovation, quality control, and strategic channel expansion, dispelling the misconception that it is just an internet-famous brand."
author: "赵继成"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2020-07-15"
language: "en"
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# The Misunderstood Genki Forest

> Genki Forest is by no means a 'light model' fast-growing product supported only by brand operations and channel dividends. The article explains how the company has built a solid business through product innovation, quality control, and strategic channel expansion, dispelling the misconception that it is just an internet-famous brand.

**Click to read the original article for details**
**Genki Forest is by no means a 'light model' fast-growing product supported only by brand operations and channel dividends.**
**-01-**
**The Misunderstood Beverage**
Genki Forest actually does not like being called an "internet celebrity" beverage.
Although it does possess many characteristics of the internet, such as using online integrated marketing and internet channels, trendy packaging, and igniting among young groups.
In 2016, Genki Forest was officially established. At that time, the domestic packaged beverage market was nearly saturated, with Coca-Cola and Pepsi battling at the top, and Master Kong, Uni-President, Wahaha, Nongfu Spring, and many others competing below. It was truly difficult to carve out a place in this market.
However, the internet is characterized by coming and going quickly, but Genki Forest hopes to build a solid business.
**With the construction of the Anhui Chuzhou factory with an annual output of 450 million bottles, people have discovered that Genki Forest is serious.**
Bing Qian, Chief Quality Officer of Genki Forest, said that the first shovel of soil for this factory was dug on September 26, 2019. Despite various impacts from the epidemic, after 8 months and 26 days, a medium-to-large-scale, modern, high-speed production base had landed.
In other words, **in the post-epidemic era of high economic uncertainty, Genki Forest has never doubted the correctness of its future direction**. From this perspective, Bing Qian felt: "We can proudly and responsibly say that we have set an example for the industry."
This certainly cannot be separated from local support. During communication with Genki Forest, local people gradually discovered that these people at Genki Forest are carrying dreams and doing things.
It is said that after the completion of the first phase of the factory covering 100 mu with an annual output of 450 million bottles, there will be a second phase covering 188 mu in the second half of 2020. A rough calculation shows that Genki Forest has set a goal for itself in 2020 of at least 1 billion bottles of production capacity.
What does 1 billion bottles mean? Coca-Cola has been cultivating the Chinese market for decades, with annual sales of just over 30 billion yuan, calculated at 3 yuan per bottle, that is about 10 billion bottles; Genki Forest is a company that has only been operating for 3-4 years, reaching one-tenth of Coca-Cola's sales volume. Such a miracle can only happen in China.
Wu Ling, General Manager of Tmall's Big Food division, also arrived in Chuzhou that day. Her speech seemed to partially explain Genki Forest's success: "**Genki Forest's products, from design concepts to product development, are made according to consumer trends** , which explains why Genki Forest has developed so well over the past few years. Moreover, not only do we have a good taste every time we drink it, but we also don't worry about it having excessive ingredients harmful to the human body."
In order to maintain international quality in production, technology, safety, quality control, and management, and to be at the forefront of the industry, Genki Forest has done a lot of homework in terms of hard strength.
For example, the advanced fully automatic aseptic filling production line: "The equipment sterilizes bottles and caps with 1800ppm peracetic acid, rinses with sterile water to achieve sterilization, sterilizes product pipelines with high-temperature steam, and the filling environment uses high-efficiency filters for air filtration and maintains positive pressure to ensure the environment is not contaminated. In this way, the contents after instantaneous sterilization can be filled in a safe environment, ensuring product safety."
There are also multiple fully automatic visual monitoring devices that inspect the bottle mouth, cap sealing effect, filling level, and the integrity of the inkjet code. In addition, product labels also have visual inspection equipment to detect label wrinkles, damage, and high-low labels; after boxing, products are weighed to ensure the quantity and filling volume of each box.
Therefore, thinking that Genki Forest only became popular because of its appearance is definitely a misunderstanding.
**-02-**
**Dividend of Consumption Upgrade**
In the post-epidemic period, economic development uncertainty has increased significantly, but people still seek new development paths. The author, synthesizing the views of several economic experts, has refined a systematic concept, **that is, the premise for the next stage of growth depends on whether companies can capture four key dividends, namely 'new consumption upgrade', 'new brand', 'new category', and 'new channel'.**
Genki Forest seems to be a special case with all "four new" elements in place.
First, let's look at the new consumption upgrade.
In the post-epidemic era, people easily have an illusion that anything "cheap" is necessarily welcomed. People will cite the popularity of Pinduoduo and Taobao Special Edition to illustrate this point.
That's true, but surveys of more people show that expensive things are also more welcomed. We can cite some examples in the same field as Genki Forest, the food industry.
For example, Bestore, a brand that repeatedly emphasizes its high-end snack strategy. According to its annual report, high-end snack sales accounted for 30.66% in 2019.
Expensive! But is it hard to sell? On the contrary, from the stock price perspective, this company has seen 15 consecutive limit-up days, with the stock price rising 500% from its listing price, a phenomenal growth.
There is also Chacha. Since elevating its mind share from the more common Qiaqia melon seeds to nut snacks, from May 2018 to May 15, 2020, its stock price rose from 13.35 yuan to 52.37 yuan, nearly tripling!
This can be viewed from two perspectives: short-term and medium-to-long-term.
From the short-term perspective of the epidemic's impact, consumers and investors have the same psychology, both seeking greater certainty and security. From this perspective, brands that mainly benefit from consumption upgrades will have higher brand momentum, and their prices and profits can convey this strong sense of security, that is, "if it's expensive and sells well, it shows I'm better."
But more importantly, China is on an upward consumption upgrade curve that is hard to interrupt. After China crosses the middle-income trap, the new opportunities arising between people's escalating needs for life and the relatively lagging market supply are the driving force for consumption upgrades.
**Genki Forest has seized consumers' attention to taste, ingredients, health, and appearance, and from design concepts to product development, it aligns with new consumption trends.**
From the very beginning, Genki Forest has adhered to the concept that "the product is the company's biggest self-media," directly extracting the characters "元" (yuan), "気" (qi), and "燃" (ran) from the names of its two hit products, "Genki Forest Soda Sparkling Water" and "Ran Tea," to form the brand symbols of Genki Forest itself. Among them, "元気" represents spirit and vitality, while "燃" gives people a feeling of high morale, unconsciously awakening a spiritual resonance for health among consumer groups.
In terms of quality, Bing Qian also said that Genki Forest exactly meets the high requirements of new consumer groups for quality: "Many post-95s are a special generation. They have rich nightlife, but they are very particular about what they eat and drink. According to surveys, when consuming food, 70% of them look at the shelf life, 75% look at ingredients, and even 100% care about the texture of packaging. Genki Forest can meet these needs. Even the coding machines we buy are the best, in order to print uniform and beautiful barcodes. Our requirements for quality permeate every aspect of the product."
Another example: there are countless sugar-free tea drinks, but Genki Forest's breakthrough lies in product innovation. Consumers like sugar-free drinks, but that doesn't mean they really don't want sweetness. Sugar-free soda water has existed for over a hundred years, but it has always been a small subcategory.
How to make it both sugar-free and delicious? Genki Forest spent a long time researching repeatedly and finally found a sweetener called erythritol. Erythritol is extracted from corn starch, is a natural sweetener with zero calories, and has a sweetness 60%-70% of regular sucrose, but its price is much higher than sucrose.
The gold standard of consumption upgrade is: when you demand a higher market premium, you must provide equivalent value increment, and Genki Forest undoubtedly fully meets this standard.
**-03-**
**Occupying the Vitality of New Brand Upgrade**
Many people confuse the consumption upgrade dividend with the brand upgrade dividend, but they are actually different. Consumption upgrade mainly obtains more premium by improving quality, while brand dividend requires more elements to support brand momentum.
A huge advantage of Genki Forest is that it faces a Chinese beverage market where brands are severely aging and weakening.
For a long time, the Chinese beverage market has been dominated by two types of brands: one is foreign brands that have entered China for decades and have solidified their brand image, such as the two colas and their derivative drinks; the other is local brands, which often occupy a market level lower than foreign brands, characterized mainly by price advantages.
**China lacks new and good beverage brands to break this outdated deadlock.**
A premise of the new brand dividend is that Chinese consumers are not necessarily "foreign-only". If local sentiment and professional attributes can be appropriately highlighted, and then precisely ignited among consumer groups, domestic brands can also enjoy brand dividends. Especially at a time when the national trend is rising and national confidence and cohesion are unprecedentedly united.
**Genki Forest can be considered a new "brand master" that combines the two major trends of the internet and the rise of national trends.**
Thanks to its youthful brand genes, Genki Forest is a common item in the lives of many celebrities. Genki Forest has therefore collected many photos of its products appearing with celebrities and spread them on social networks to attract fans to chase the same items as celebrities.
For example, in the variety show "Please Refrigerator" hosted by He Jiong, popular young star Wei Daxun directly showed a fridge full of Ran Tea. Later, Wei Daxun also became the image spokesperson for Ran Tea.
On Bilibili and variety shows, two active fronts for young people, Genki Forest is very active. While cooperating with the Bilibili hit drama "Life as Boiling," it also partnered with the popular music variety IP "Our Song," with various creative product placements.
Against the backdrop of the prevailing national trend, Genki Forest is also very good at using other brand resources through cross-border marketing to achieve multi-circle traffic sharing. For example, it collaborated with the domestic beauty brand Zhiyouquan for joint promotion, using lipstick paired with drinks to reach consumers more effectively.
Not to mention, Genki Forest has long been active on major social media platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu. Not only do celebrities like Fei Qiming and Xu Kai post about it, but top KOLs like Li Jiaqi, the number one live-streamer, also recommend it. On Xiaohongshu, there are nearly 10,000 posts about Genki Forest, five times more than Dongfang Shuoye, which is also a sugar-free tea drink.
**Genki Forest's tactics, such as Tmall Super Brand Day, celebrity endorsements, Li Jiaqi's live-streaming sales, and Douyin content marketing, perfectly achieve a brand rise path of centralized ignition and decentralized distribution through integrated marketing. Genki Forest's textbook operation in building a new brand has become a case study in the industry.**
**-04-**
**Category Rise and Channel Supremacy**
Category rise and brand rise are different concepts.
Trout's "Positioning" and its theory have long become a popular subject. It tells people some basic truths: human mind capacity is very limited, and entering the mind is even more difficult, but once you occupy a consumer's inherent perception of a certain category, it is hard to be replaced.
Category rise is about finding a blank spot in consumers' minds. Concepts like sugar-free expert and fruit-flavored sparkling water have well captured the mind gap, thus quickly occupying consumer cognition.
A young consumer told the author: "In the past, I would carefully study the ingredient list when buying a drink to see if it contained sucrose or high-fructose syrup, but now when I pick up any bottle of Genki Forest, I assume it is sugar-free by default."
In other words, in this regard, **Genki Forest has successfully locked consumers' category cognition onto "sugar-free + health," becoming the category representative for sugar-free beverages.**
Of course, Genki Forest did not complete today's mind lock in one step; it went through countless market education. Interestingly, the design language on the front of Genki Forest beverage bottles, with "0 sugar," "0 fat," "0 calories" plus three "checkmarks," has now become a phenomenal industry symbol, imitated by countless brands.
Take the author as an example. Not long ago, at a retail store of a well-known local brand in Beijing, I got a bottle of passion fruit sparkling water that was a 100% imitation of the aforementioned "three checkmarks." At first glance, I thought it was a Genki Forest product. Only after careful study did I realize it was the mind suggestion caused by the "three checkmarks."
More interestingly, when I entered the keyword "fruit-flavored sparkling water" on Tmall, I found that besides Genki Forest, countless brands such as Tsingtao Beer, Yineng, etc., have launched similar products. From keywords and core descriptions, they all directly point to Genki Forest.
The convergence of peers can be seen as proof that Genki Forest has created a new category.
Finally, the author would like to briefly discuss Genki Forest's channel dividend.
It is widely recognized in the FMCG industry that the channel dividend of the previous era belonged to large supermarkets, with traditional beverage giants being the biggest beneficiaries and holders.
Therefore, **Genki Forest avoided a head-on attack at the beginning and chose to enter through convenience stores first, then gradually penetrate online and supermarkets.**
There are many benefits to choosing convenience stores. One is that the number of convenience stores in China is growing rapidly, driving a huge channel increment; more importantly, convenience stores are mainly distributed in high-tier cities, with users mainly white-collar workers and young people, and consumers generally accept that convenience store goods have a certain price difference compared to large supermarkets. This highly aligns with Genki Forest's target group and pricing strategy. After establishing a foothold in the convenience store channel, Genki Forest leveraged its online channel advantages, with both core explosive sales like 6.18 and Double 11, as well as online content marketing and offline purchases, and online-offline integration.
It can be said that Genki Forest's channel war is like playing a game of chess: first, light troops advance aggressively, capturing many strategic gaps and laying a foundation; then repeatedly intersperse and encircle, taking strategic points; finally, heavy troops converge, combining superior forces to capture key towns.
As mentioned earlier, among the "four new" dividends, having any one can form its own growth momentum, but Genki Forest possesses all "four new." This also shows that **appearance is only superficial; strength is fundamental**, and Genki Forest has a heart to disrupt the industry.
Source: Zhao Jicheng Channel (ID: zhaojcpd)


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