---
title: "The Road to the Summit: 5 Laws of High-End Baijiu Marketing"
description: "Baijiu is an industry of time and a famously good business, with top distilleries maintaining ROE above 20% even during the pandemic. High-end baijiu, with its irreplaceable advantages in production areas, cellars, history, craftsmanship, quality, and brand, is scarce. This article summarizes five marketing principles for high-end baijiu: never promote, tell good stories, elite marketing, price priority, and high-profile positioning."
author: "王丹华"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2023-03-05"
language: "en"
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# The Road to the Summit: 5 Laws of High-End Baijiu Marketing

> Baijiu is an industry of time and a famously good business, with top distilleries maintaining ROE above 20% even during the pandemic. High-end baijiu, with its irreplaceable advantages in production areas, cellars, history, craftsmanship, quality, and brand, is scarce. This article summarizes five marketing principles for high-end baijiu: never promote, tell good stories, elite marketing, price priority, and high-profile positioning.

**Source**丨Sales and Market **ID**丨cnmarket
Baijiu is an industry of time and a famously good business. Even under the influence of the century-old pandemic, leading distilleries have maintained ROE above 20% for a long time.
In recent years, many capital groups have flocked to baijiu investment, attempting to make quick profits, especially when the economic situation is poor. High-end baijiu, due to its irreplaceable exclusive advantages in production areas, cellars, history, craftsmanship, quality, and brand, is full of scarcity.
Moutai, Wuliangye, and Guojiao are recognized as the only three high-end baijiu brands currently. If considering product level, some single products from Fenjiu, Xijiu, Yanghe, etc., in the thousand-yuan price band may also be included.
**With the continuous upgrading of the baijiu consumer market, the baijiu industry inevitably shows a "pyramid-style" agglomeration development trend similar to other industries.** The structural growth trend of "the strong get stronger, the weak get weaker" is increasingly clear.
On the other hand, Chinese baijiu is a consumer product highly dependent on the domestic consumer market. In recent years, due to macro factors, most consumer goods markets have been greatly impacted, and baijiu is no exception. Mid- and low-end baijiu, represented by regional liquors, are struggling, moving towards losses and bankruptcy. Even the high-end baijiu market faces the most severe operating situation since 2012, with problems such as inventory increases, price inversions, and slowing growth troubling manufacturers and dealers.
Many high-end baijiu dealers are deeply confused: should they change sales strategies in time or stick to old methods? No one can answer, but every day they wake up and have to make new decisions.
Your vision determines your thinking and actions. Some people look one or two years ahead, some four or five years, and others have a longer-term strategic vision, looking at the earth from the moon. Under a long-focus strategic vision, tactical measures are not implemented with so-called opportunistic actions.
High-end baijiu sales must have sufficient strategic determination. Tactical corrections must not violate the achievement of strategic goals. Observing the general trend and crossing cyclical fluctuations, such enterprises can become century-old brands with enduring success, and such dealers can navigate the business world with stability.
What repeats is not necessarily a law, but laws will definitely repeat. Therefore, based on my learning and practical experience, and on the basis of sufficient research, I have summarized five laws of high-end baijiu marketing according to its own characteristics. It should be noted that these laws are not iron laws or fixed laws, but principles based on laws.
**First: Never Promote**
Promotion is actually an information transmission based on a buyer's market. It is a collection of micro-behaviors to promote sales when effective demand is insufficient. Broadly defined, promotion usually includes advertising, but here it is limited to marketing activities in the form of discounts, lotteries, gifts, etc.
For mid- and low-end baijiu brands that rely on expense-driven sales revenue, promotion is a basic marketing task carried out almost all-weather and indiscriminately. Without high-frequency and powerful promotions, market share will be quickly squeezed. The fundamental reason why high-end baijiu is not suitable for promotion is that its brand logic and promotion logic are inconsistent:
On the one hand, the core strategy of promotion is to let potential consumers take advantage and feel value for money, thereby fully tapping potential consumer demand and winning over market "swingers." However, the core consumers of high-end baijiu do not buy based on value-for-money logic, but on quality + brand + taste logic. While tasting fine wine, they also showcase their taste and strength. Discounts and offers actually offset part of the consumption utility.
On the other hand, the biggest harm of promotion is negative suggestion, like shouting to the market with a loudspeaker: "My product is hard to sell." This is fatal for products with luxury attributes, as it will substantially damage the product brand image, hurt the interests and emotions of loyal customers, lower the consumption threshold, and thus weaken the high-end product attributes and brand tone. **For high-end baijiu, when effective market demand is insufficient, even pouring it into the river is better than promoting.**
**Second: Tell Good Stories**
When we observe the industry's top sellers, the most obvious trait that makes them superior to other salespeople is their ability to tell stories through rhetoric, maximizing product advantages and minimizing defects, using soul-stirring language art and interpersonal skills to deeply move consumers, stimulate purchase desire, and gain loyalty.
From the dimensions of production area, quality, culture, and history, the brand has a mature publicity system. High-end baijiu has strong storytelling in history, culture, production techniques, and excellent production areas. The key is how to combine fashionable media and easily accessible traffic platforms to tell stories in a differentiated way that consumers are willing to accept, and promote word-of-mouth secondary communication.
The story of high-end baijiu should revolve around its characteristics. It should not only positively "boast" about its wine quality (how good the quality is), craftsmanship (how traditional, orthodox, innovative, and exquisite the process is), and character (how the management focuses on creating scarcity and craftsman spirit), but also condense the brand culture and product tone in the most concise sentence. It should also point to competitors' shortcomings to highlight comparative advantages.
In the final analysis, **high-end baijiu has rich material and spiritual attributes. What you drink is not only the wine, but also the stories passed down by word of mouth behind it.** Whether it is the thousand-year history, the favor of political figures, mysterious raw material formulas, unique brewing environments, or effects like kidney tonifying and liver protection, prolonging life, no one delves into it, and it seems impossible to verify the truth of the stories. But as long as public opinion hotspots and stereotypes are formed, consumers' herd mentality will play a role.
**Third: Elite Marketing**
Marketing, or more precisely, its most front-end and direct form—sales—is a seemingly ordinary but extremely important job. Marx called sales the "dangerous leap" from commodity to money in Das Kapital. The greatest salesman, Joe Girard, also said that the best salespeople not only need to be proficient in business but also need to study consumers and their needs thoroughly.
Unlike the domestic job market, which generally looks down on sales positions and has uneven comprehensive quality of sales personnel, in developed countries, sales positions generally pay much higher than the average, and sales workers are generally respected by society. This is because the real threshold for sales is not low; it often requires people with high IQ and EQ to do well.
Looking at domestic high-end baijiu brands, they all attach great importance to the marketing sector, striving to build a high-quality, young, and knowledgeable marketing iron army. In recent years, they have accelerated the optimization of marketing team structure through introduction, cultivation, and other methods, recruiting marketing talents with high salaries, shouting the slogan "talent revitalizes liquor," and promoting "elite" talent reserve projects.
211, 985, Double First-Class, Ivy League, master's, doctoral... The continuously rising job requirements in recruitment announcements have attracted public attention. For baijiu, a traditional manufacturing industry with production as the core link, this is both a rare phenomenon and a necessary proactive transformation. These famous liquor companies know well that future market competition is competition for talent, competition for the rapid transformation of human resources into human capital. **Whoever first has a marketing team with abundant quantity, outstanding quality, unity and hard work, vitality, and innovation will grasp the initiative in the marketing battlefield.**
Especially in this squeezed competition era where DTC and VUCA are intertwined, a flat organizational structure plus a professional marketing team can more deeply understand the market, serve consumers, and resist and adapt to the ever-changing market situation. Moreover, high-end baijiu serves high-end circles; only peers can understand each other and share feelings, so marketing work can be done to the hearts of customers.
Thus, **high-end baijiu marketing must adhere to elite marketing in personnel for a long time. Internally, the concept that "only the best people can do marketing" must be established. Never let mediocre execution and poor creativity bring service experiences contrary to "high-end," hindering the high-quality development of the enterprise.**
**Fourth: Price Priority**
Regardless of the flavor type, regardless of the region, and even ignoring differences in scale and efficiency, high-end baijiu has a common market logic in the relationship between volume and price: only with price is there a market; only with a market is there volume; only with both volume and price rising can brand value be gradually enhanced.
Why is this? The reason is simple: **Price is the most direct signal of high-end baijiu brand value.**
High-end baijiu has unique plus+ advantages in social, gift, collection, and investment attributes, and all of this is directly reflected in price performance (except for speculative wines with price but no market). Therefore, the current terminal price distribution must be that Moutai is more expensive than Wuliangye, and Wuliangye is more expensive than Guojiao. Of course, Moutai is in a class of its own due to the financial attributes amplified by channel speculation, with a large gap between market prices and Wuliangye and Luzhou Laojiao, while factory prices are much closer.
However, raising prices is not something that can be decided unilaterally by the brand side and local government. After the implementation of the Eight Regulations in 2012, official drinking hit the brakes, and the industry faced structural adjustment.
At that time, many baijiu enterprises, including Wuliangye, faced a sharp downturn in the industry and had to make price cuts. The only ones that refused to cut prices were Moutai and Guojiao, but the results were completely different. Moutai has since officially surpassed Wuliangye to become the industry leader, while Guojiao faced a sharp decline in performance due to insisting on not cutting prices.
Why? The essence is that Guojiao and Moutai are not at the same level in market perception. Moutai, based on decades of systematic circle marketing, had accumulated strong brand momentum and could take this opportunity to release brand dividends and turn crisis into opportunity. Guojiao, at that time, was a new brand with less than ten years of history. The brand power gap between the two was obvious, so naturally they ended up differently.
Therefore, **high-end baijiu must combine its own brand development stage, apply the right remedy according to actual conditions, and especially when there is a conflict between price and sell-through in the short term, in principle, sacrifice volume to protect price, put price support first, and use thunderous measures to prohibit low-price dumping and other irregular market behaviors.**
It is undeniable that this is easier said than done for state-owned enterprises with growth indicator pressure and manufacturers with strong dealers. But Guojiao has been doing this in recent years, repeatedly issuing price adjustment notices, frequently using "small steps and slow running" to suspend shipments and raise prices. Although it suffered from price inversion and dealers complained bitterly, its follow-the-leader tactic benchmarking Wuliangye's guidance price successfully consolidated its high-end baijiu price performance. This undoubtedly provides a reference path for latecomer brands like Fenjiu trying to enter the high-end baijiu ranks.
**Fifth: High-Profile Positioning**
Any product marketing must first clarify who its target customers are. Therefore, brand positioning is crucial.
"Perception is greater than fact" is the view of Mr. Al Ries, the founder of the "positioning" theory and marketing management master, 50 years ago. He believed that the key to marketing lies in customers' perceived value, not focusing on the product itself. This was shocking at the time, but now it is gradually applied in modern marketing practice. The "seize the mind" actions advocated by mind-share competition theory followers in recent years are evolved from positioning theory.
Behavioral science research believes that consumers are not always rational; they find it difficult to accurately describe their needs and often do not know in advance. This is why Steve Jobs always had to lead consumers by one step to create demand.
As the marketing subject of high-end baijiu brands, the first question to ask yourself is: Whose mind do we want to seize? What differentiated brand perception should we shape for them?
Moutai's leaders have said: What Moutai did right in the past is to clearly recognize that for liquor as a commodity, especially high-end baijiu, the essence is face culture. This is undoubtedly "a word that awakens the dreamer."
We know that whether it is Moutai or Wuliangye, the improvement in wine quality and taste over the past decade is limited. Many people even think the old wine tasted better. But ten years ago, Moutai and Wuliangye could not be compared with today in terms of brand reputation or various economic indicators of the operating entities. The capital market now jokingly calls them typical representatives of "sauce-flavor technology" and "strong-flavor technology."
What has changed mainly lies in the rising wine prices with consumption upgrades: ten years ago, drinking four to five hundred yuan wine could support a gathering, and a thousand-yuan bottle could be a heartfelt gift; ten years later, prices follow the market, four to five hundred becomes a thousand, and a thousand must go higher, so you have to drink good wine, famous wine, aged wine, and special supply. What is this? This is the so-called "face culture."
Therefore, Moutai has been doing two things for decades: first, persistently creating hot topics in various ways to solidify its so-called "national liquor" brand perception, although it is no longer allowed to mention it; second, persistently cultivating high-end consumer opinion leaders, infiltrating and forming a group of high-level "Moutai fans," thereby driving follow-up consumption in their circles. This is based on the underlying logic of "face culture."
Therefore, **high-end baijiu must first adopt high-profile positioning, truly position its brand as high-end, and engrave this high-end into consumers' minds. It must never make the mistake of identity substitution, lowering standards, doing superficial work, or engaging in expense-driven marketing.**
That is to say: people doing high-end baijiu marketing must be high-quality, understand and integrate into the social culture of high-end consumers; the tone of brand publicity should be noble and elegant, conforming to high-level people's perception of baijiu, reflecting the essence of traditional Chinese culture (such as Wuliangye's harmony culture and Moutai's beauty culture); the cultivation of KOLs and KOCs should be precise and high-standard, targeting business leaders, cultural celebrities, and other influential people in various industries; tasting events should be high-end and elegant, absolutely not like a big party, or even the level of a dam banquet or farmhouse entertainment, but small and beautiful, small and private, with each event having its effect.
Finally, I want to say that technological progress has brought wave after wave of impact to traditional industries like baijiu. Mobile internet, self-media communities, big data, cloud computing, the metaverse, and the recently hot ChatGPT (AIGC), etc., new technologies are accelerating the change in the connection relationship between people, places, and goods, challenging the ability of operating entities to adapt to the new development environment.
High-end baijiu brands are the leaders of the industry and should make achievements in marketing management in the context of Chinese-style modernization, driving the entire industry towards certainty and achieving new breakthroughs.


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