---
title: "Three Brand Truths Behind Internet-Famous Ice Cream"
description: "The article explores the unique dynamics of the ice cream category, arguing that it offers rare brand opportunities due to its offline channel stability, low innovation barriers, and price restructuring. It distinguishes cultural creative ice cream from regular ice cream, and predicts a new brand landscape within two years."
author: "李倩说品牌"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2022-06-19"
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# Three Brand Truths Behind Internet-Famous Ice Cream

> The article explores the unique dynamics of the ice cream category, arguing that it offers rare brand opportunities due to its offline channel stability, low innovation barriers, and price restructuring. It distinguishes cultural creative ice cream from regular ice cream, and predicts a new brand landscape within two years.

**Click to read the original text for details**
Note: For ease of expression, when I say "ice cream" here, I mean the collective term for both ice cream and gelato.
Recently, media friends interviewed me about "internet-famous ice cream." I learned that Moutai has also entered the ice cream track, launching a "Moutai" flavored ice cream priced at 66 yuan. They asked for my opinion. Given my usual "anti-internet-famous" stance, you might guess I would strongly criticize and keep complaining, right?
After pondering and researching for a few days, I found this track very interesting—it's a rare category that can explain various anomalous brand phenomena. Next, I'll share my views from a brand perspective.
Without further ado, let me first give the conclusions, then delve into the reasons.
There are three conclusions:
1. Ice cream is an extremely special track with rare brand opportunities that cannot be replicated if missed.
2. Cultural creative ice cream and ordinary ice cream are two different species with two sets of business logic.
3. Within two years, the ice cream brand battle will conclude, and a new brand landscape will take shape.
Next, I'll explain how these conclusions are derived from the classic 4P logic (product, price, place, promotion) plus our relationship brand logic:

**Why do I say the ice cream industry is extremely special?**
Nowadays, any consumer brand starting up can hardly escape the fate of "brand startup equals DTC," which is almost a well-known phenomenon. At the same time, it's also a consensus that pure offline has no way out.
Behind the slogan "no middlemen to take a cut," the essence is not that there are no middlemen, but that the channels acting as middlemen have undergone tremendous changes. From traditional visible middlemen to invisible middlemen in the internet era (major e-commerce platforms, internet distributors of live-stream e-commerce, agency operators, etc.).
Therefore, based on the above two backgrounds, the reality most consumer brands face is: they must constantly run promotions and price cuts to consumers, and constantly offer low prices, buy traffic, and secure recommended slots to platform operators and live-streamers. The space in between is getting squeezed smaller and smaller. Brands with their own factories and production are better off, as increased sales can further reduce costs. Brands without their own factories and production suffer more, getting thinner and thinner—Three Squirrels has been squeezed into one squirrel.
But!
The ice cream industry is quite magical. In this era where pure offline has no way out, offline channels remain the main battlefield for ice cream and gelato sales in China. In 2021, offline accounted for 95%; even in 2022, affected by the pandemic, offline still accounted for 80%.
The dominance of offline channels is a characteristic of this category's consumption. After all, no matter how fast online logistics are, they can't beat the speed of ice cream melting. No matter how good online promotion is, it can't beat the convenience of someone under the sun immediately reaching into a freezer to grab an ice cream.
**"The immediacy of consumption" is the biggest特殊性 of the ice cream category.**
What significance does relying on offline channels have?
It's hugely significant. It greatly increases dependence on channels. In other words, the ice cream track can still rely on the traditional cold drink distribution channels and temporarily not worry about online impact. Comrades, **channel stability and concentration themselves reduce sales, marketing, and management costs.**
The stability of offline channels determines that a brand can quickly achieve product promotion by influencing a small group of core distributors and building an industry ecosystem with them within a short time.
I dug out promotional photos and logistics photos of "Meinv Pai" popsicles, China's earliest ice cream brand created by Shanghai Haining Ocean Company in 1926. For some reason, even after nearly 100 years, this industry always feels the same to me.
(The earliest ice cream was called "Bing Jie Lian," which is quite cute.)
Besides channel特殊性, **the ice cream category currently has two other special features: low product innovation threshold and price system.**
The interesting thing about these two points is that the low entry barrier means new brands can enter at the fastest speed, and even brands outside the industry can quickly succeed (like Moutai, the Forbidden City, etc.).
On the other hand, with price system changes, ice cream has reached a good time to raise prices, and this good time has been educated by others. When brands raise prices, profit margins for channel distributors increase, giving new brands opportunities.
**Ice cream repricing and product upgrades give new brands opportunities**
Since ice cream channels are so special, you might ask: these offline channel operators are so stable, and the original ice cream brands are all major dairy factories, how can new brands have a chance to enter?
Product innovation in the ice cream category generally takes two forms: one is silicone mold ice cream, which innovates the shape of the ice cream. For example, Mengniu and Universal Studios' "Minions Ice Cream," and the "cultural creative ice cream" at tourist attractions like the Summer Palace, are innovations from simple silicone mold shaping.
Another form of innovation is raw material innovation, like the Moutai ice cream mentioned at the beginning, and some new brands using fresh milk to replace non-dairy creamer and cocoa butter substitutes, and natural fruit pulp to replace chemical additives—all innovations from the perspective of raw material upgrades.
Neither of these two innovations has a high threshold.
Now about price: currently, ice cream priced above 5 yuan has become the main force in convenience stores. Especially some internet-famous brands like Zhong Xue Gao and Dongbei Daban have prices soaring to over ten yuan. This pricing is far from the traditional public impression that ice cream only costs 1-3 yuan.
Why do people still buy at such prices? Why does a 10-fold price increase seem so reasonable?
Because there are similar high-priced reference points.
**In the past, ice cream had only one comparable category in consumers' minds: soda. Ice cream and soda chased each other and substituted for each other. Therefore, pricing logic wouldn't differ much.**
**But now, ice cream has several new reference points: milk tea, coffee, and yogurt.**
This is a big deal.
Milk tea, coffee, and yogurt are major categories created by countless world-class brands with billions in marketing expenses. Their price bands were painstakingly educated into the market. Now, ice cream is reaping the benefits without effort.
A cup of coffee costs over 30 yuan; a cup of milk tea with more toppings can also cost 30-40 yuan; yogurt has been happily raising prices on the coattails of these two. As a product under the same large category of leisure cold drinks, it's natural for ice cream to inherit the consumer mindset they've already educated.
Once prices adjust, interesting channel changes begin. According to a distributor of ice cream and frozen desserts, internet-famous brand ice creams selling for 15-30+ yuan have a purchase price of only 7-8 yuan, and a cost price of only about 6 yuan or even lower. What does this mean? It means distributors profit more than before, and such profit margins are enough to support a new brand in quickly building its own sales channels. Moreover, brands that raise prices earlier gain more attention from distributors.
Therefore, in price adjustment, there is a clever channel "opportunity." Traditional big-brand ice creams generally wouldn't seize this opportunity because their stable industry ecosystem and market insights are still stuck in the past. But after the "successful trial" of high-priced internet-famous brands, ice cream brands have launched high-priced products one after another.
**"In this so-called consumption upgrade, internet-famous enterprises are crossing the river by feeling the stones, while traditional consumer big brands are crossing the river by feeling the heads of internet-famous ones."** In other categories, we've seen internet-famous brands drowned in deep water, and traditional consumer brands leveraging innovation. But in the ice cream category, a rare "win-win" situation has emerged.
This is related to the "successful price breakthrough" of new consumer brands, and also to the fact that the industry hasn't truly reached the point of "involution" yet.
So, **this is the only window of opportunity for new brands. While there are still profits and channels are still focused, if you can run out, you run out. Within two years, the verdict will be clear, because this industry's land grabbing, user education, and product innovation don't need that long.**

**Cultural creative ice cream and ordinary ice cream are two different things**
Within two years, at least 34 "crossover" co-branding events occurred among just 13 mainstream ice cream brands. Among them, Häagen-Dazs, Bright, and Deshi had the most, followed by Yili, Wall's, Mengniu, and Dongbei Daban, each with 3.
The crossover fields are also diverse, from Moutai liquor to League of Legends games, to Yuyuantan Park, Renmin University of China, Shenyang Imperial Palace... In short, they cross over with great enthusiasm.
Why cross over? What is the essence of crossing brands?
Think about it this way: **For ice cream manufacturers and brands, crossing over is a way to broaden and innovate distribution channels.** For the various other categories crossing into ice cream, it's a practice of monetizing their traffic repeatedly. With high profits, neither side loses.
You go to Yuyuantan with friends, buy tickets, stroll around, and in a leisurely mood, you have the urge to consume. But in the past, Yuyuantan didn't have truly matching good products for you to consume in that setting. Those cultural creative fans, notebooks, bottles, and jars seemed "useless but a pity to discard" after buying. Suddenly, something catches your eye: ice cream! Yuyuantan cherry blossom-shaped ice cream can both satisfy cravings and thirst, and be photographed for social media. Compared to other cultural creative products, 30+ yuan is acceptable—buy, buy, buy!
Note that at this time, the brand of the ice cream doesn't matter (it's Yuyuantan-brand ice cream), nor does the taste matter. What matters is that it serves as a prop in the "scene," mainly for showing off, secondarily for eating. After the novelty wears off, there's no repeat purchase.
Therefore, **cultural creative ice cream is a monetization product of the IP itself. It carries the brand premium of the IP. Consumers won't repeatedly buy; it relies on high profit margins and the strong, continuous flow of people from the IP itself.**
But ordinary daily consumption ice cream follows a different brand logic. In this logic, whether distributors actively recommend the ice cream, the taste and stability of the ice cream itself, whether the brand awareness gradually solidifies, and whether the brand still has price advantages after everyone raises prices—these are the logic of brand ice cream.
Internet-famous ice cream brands have caught a good track, but even so, time is running out for them. The initial pricing premium can give internet-famous ice cream a chance to break through in channels and build brand awareness. But what about when traditional big brands catch up?
**When involution begins, cost advantages, raw material innovation capabilities, and channel management will face a new round of tests. That's when new brands truly establish themselves.**
Looking forward to it.
Source: Li Qian Talks Brands (ID: liaotian78), Author: Li Qian Talks Brands
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