From a practical standpoint, Genki Forest, a startup focused on sugar-free beverages, achieved a high valuation in a niche market within just three years of its founding, making its brand marketing model indeed worthy of study and significance.
Insight 1 from Genki Forest: Avoiding the 'Minefield' of Product Innovation
- For growing companies, using so-called category innovation strategies to solve marketing dilemmas requires great caution.
- Finding a small niche in a large market for product innovation is more effective. In today's market environment, a well-suited and rich product matrix is more growth-oriented than a single product.
Insight 2: Empowering Products with Brand Thinking In the current marketing environment, the original marketing elements of 'people, goods, and places' have undergone fundamental changes.
The fragmentation of media has made communication information uncontrollable, and brand owners find it difficult to guide consumers with information. Channels have also diversified, and traditional channel control can no longer change consumers' purchase intentions. Due to information transparency and increased product choices, consumers' consumption values have also undergone tremendous changes.
Therefore, the product has become the only marketing element that brand owners can control themselves. Companies must focus resources on meticulously crafting the ultimate good product; only a sufficiently hardcore product can 'bring its own traffic.'
The 'new generation' consumers, who have become the mainstream, are individualistic, have a strong sense of 'territory,' are well-informed, and are willing to pay for what is 'worth it.' Their consumption values pursue so-called 'extreme quality and spiritual satisfaction'—they need extreme trust in quality and extreme affection emotionally.
How does Genki Forest polish its hardcore product strength to gain the extreme trust of these discerning new-generation consumers regarding product quality?
Genki Forest's product 'selling points' are no longer just a slogan or an icon on the packaging, but 'convincing objective facts': Consumers not only want you to tell them it's 'high quality,' but also 'why it is high quality.' When choosing products, they no longer just focus on what the brand 'promises,' but care more about 'why the brand can promise it.'
So, regarding the 'ultimate good quality' of the product, Genki Forest not only states it in promotional materials but also in all communication environments with consumers; not as a supporting point but as a key point; not simply but in detail; not just the result but also the principle...
Only by communicating with consumers in such detail and without getting tired of it can Genki Forest's product quality achieve 'convincing objective facts,' and the product strength truly be 'hardcore.'
Let's take the product Ran Tea as an example to see how Genki Forest spares no effort to tell consumers why the product quality is good.
Detailed explanations of the production process on different communication platforms:
High-temperature baking of tea leaves at 120-170 degrees Celsius; Extraction of the first tea infusion at 95 degrees Celsius; Low-temperature blending of dietary fiber and erythritol; Aseptic cold-fill packaging.
These concepts are clear to industry insiders, but consumers find them rigorous and impressive. This is the 'objective fact' about the product that consumers need to know now.
Digital expression is more persuasive. Emphasizing the richness of dietary fiber by saying each bottle is equivalent to three apples is vivid and easy to understand.
In the current context, emphasizing the 'authenticity' of ingredients is a hint of health and higher quality, so Genki Forest emphasizes using real tea leaves and real fruit to ensure taste and flavor.
Consumers now even know that production lines and equipment are essential for quality assurance. Genki Forest does not have its own production line, so it frankly discloses the contract manufacturer information, directly telling consumers that its products are produced in factories of reliable industry giants with high-standard imported production lines, dispelling any doubts consumers might have.
The biggest selling point of Genki Forest products is sugar-free, and the 'health' benefit promise that sugar-free brings to consumers.
Therefore, the raw materials, process, and value of sugar-free are the focus of Genki Forest's communication with consumers, with the most sufficient information and the richest forms of communication. Almost every opportunity for consumers to access product information conveys the principle and value of sugar-free.
The internet industry is good at interpreting big data and understands what 'ultimate product strength' means for startups.
So, the founding team of Genki Forest, born from the internet industry, behaves very 'internet-like' when polishing products. They believe that a good-quality beverage should not just leave consumers with a simple emotional impression of 'healthy and tasty,' but needs to do solid homework around 'health' and 'taste,' using real objective facts to make consumers recognize and believe.
In the current marketing environment, products that 'do but don't say' and act as unsung heroes are hard to survive. Genki Forest deeply understands the marketing principle of 'do and say,' continuously emphasizing its 'hardcore' product strength through effective communication channels: Enlarged and eye-catching on packaging; highlighted in promotional materials; prominent on e-commerce detail pages; highlighted in KOL soft articles and planting articles; introducing raw materials, processes, and R&D, tirelessly using various opportunities to repeatedly emphasize, through fragmented and continuous output of the same content, using information consistency to gently 'brainwash' consumers.
These communications serve one purpose: to give consumers convincing objective facts that prove the product's good quality and the benefit promises that these good qualities bring to consumers.
This is the hardcore product strength that Genki Forest has meticulously crafted.
Insight 3: Circle Consensus, Public Opinion Setting Circles do not exist because of brands; circles have always existed. What brands need is to find the circle they can integrate into, and that's enough.
When a product has gained enough good reputation within the core circle and achieved beautiful natural growth, and is already a decent niche brand, it needs to consider how to appear in public opinion, especially needing to set the tone through official or third-party PR.
Genki Forest is very internet-like in polishing products and also very internet-like in communicating with consumers. They know how to understand and respect young consumers: When these young consumers' basic physical attributes of 'healthy and tasty' are satisfied, there is also a deep psychological attribute that needs to be satisfied: the 'sense of exclusivity'—a product that belongs exclusively to these young consumers, different from what older generations consume.
This deep psychological insight into consumers explains why many old beverage brands, even if they launch sugar-free, healthy, and tasty products, still do not achieve good market results—young consumers not only need healthy and tasty products, but also need brands that truly match their taste.
So, we need to correctly understand the popular saying 'appearance is justice': high appearance is not just about being good-looking, but about being able to 'empathize' with consumers. It's hard to judge whether something is good-looking, but whether you like it or not is immediately felt.
For a specific product, whether the 'photo rate' is high, whether consumers are willing to share your product photos in their social circles, and share your brand's posts, are hard indicators of whether consumers like your product and brand.
This makes it easy to understand why Genki Forest's Japanese-style minimalist packaging design, which is not particularly outstanding, is both praised and popular: because Genki Forest understands the emotional needs and aesthetic tastes of this generation of young people who grew up in the environment of Japanese anime, and thus sets its brand style to match consumer tastes.
Not only in product packaging design, but also in the choice of communication content, expression forms, channels, and social and entertaining interactive methods, Genki Forest is based on the same consideration of matching consumer interests.
Now we all know that social media is the main channel for new-generation consumers to obtain information. So Genki Forest initially communicated with consumers through social media channels, first emerging on Weibo, and then quickly laying out platforms like WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu for product promotion.
As a planting community, Genki Forest has more than 5,000 notes on Xiaohongshu, far more than other internet-famous drinks like Perrier (over 3,000) and Hankou No.2 Factory (over 700).
Through the promotion of traffic stars and KOLs like Wei Daxun, Wang Yibo, Deng Lun, Huang Jingyu, Li Chun, SNH48, Xu Kai, and Fei Qiming, they directly drove a large number of fans to follow.
Then, through variety show entertainment placements, they continued to boost product popularity.
By encouraging consumers to share different usage scenarios of the product on social media, they continue to pique consumer interest.
From the current market results, Genki Forest has been relatively successful in attracting young consumers' attention and matching their tastes.
Insight 4: Scale Expansion—Popular Online, Volume Offline Enabling more people to purchase products continuously in more scenarios is the fundamental goal of brand marketing, so scale expansion is inevitable.
Only by achieving both public opinion expansion and channel expansion can the ultimate scale expansion be realized.
Genki Forest is good at using advantageous media to endorse its brand, as I introduced earlier. Genki Forest's shrewdness in channel strategy is also something growing brands need to pay special attention to.
Successful marketing must include the correct channel strategy.
As a brand with internet genes, Genki Forest did not insist on so-called 'new retail' channel innovation or overly rely on new online channels. Instead, it chose the chain convenience store channel as a breakthrough, which develops quickly, integrates highly with the internet, and better fits young consumers' life scenarios.
After achieving initial effects and obtaining capital injection, it then turned back to strengthen traditional channel construction. From Genki Forest's current job postings, we can see that the focus of its channel construction is now on traditional channels.
From market results, Genki Forest's channel strategy is very correct and fits the channel elements for new FMCG product breakthroughs in the current marketing environment.
In the era of big data, channels are no longer simple inventory management, playing the role of simple flow of people, goods, and capital, but are important touchpoints for precision marketing. Genki Forest has grasped this very well.
To summarize, the Genki Forest case offers several inspirations for growing beverage companies or brands:
1. Before having sufficient resources, do not easily try to innovate categories. Find small niches in mass demand to innovate products, which is the only way to get the opportunity to survive first and then develop. Of course, entering mature categories and avoiding falling into the quagmire of low-level competition requires reasonable strategic planning based on the company's own advantages.
2. Truly understand consumers, polish products with an 'ultimate' attitude, and must gain consumers' 'physical level' conviction, which is the necessary prerequisite for ultimately gaining consumers' 'psychological level' recognition of the brand. The essence of business is to understand consumers better and better, not to deceive consumers with new gimmicks. In the current information environment, products that fool people will quickly overturn.
3. Extreme conviction in quality and extreme affection emotionally are the current consumption values of consumers. So brands need to share the same taste and interests with consumers. Brands now need to learn to truly 'play' with consumers.
4. It is very difficult for the beverage industry to gain market opportunities through channel innovation. The real scale is still in offline channels, but there is no doubt that doing well in online channels helps improve promotion efficiency. The correct channel strategy determines the rational use of limited resources.
This is the marketing playbook of Genki Forest, an 'internet-innovative' beverage company, different from the traditional beverage industry.
The rapid rise of emerging brands like Genki Forest brings the most important signal to small and medium brands: the marketing environment has undergone tremendous changes, information carriers are constantly fragmenting, channel methods are becoming diverse, and big brands have lost the premise of dominating alone. The market space differentiated by these big brands will inevitably give small and medium brands the opportunity to win. Now is no longer the era of resource competition and scale winning, but the era of brand value winning.
Genki Forest has achieved remarkable market results today because of its hardcore product strength and brand temperament that matches consumer tastes, breaking through traditional marketing thinking.
If the brand wants to go further, Genki Forest needs to continue to make its brand value proposition more explicit, polishing a value proposition that truly resonates with consumers, just like polishing hardcore product strength. It should make the Genki Forest brand like a person, not only with pleasing external performance but also with soul and character, so that the brand can continue to live in consumers' minds.
In the traditional consumption era, big brands monopolized media and channels. Brand building was a process of controlling public opinion. Whoever had resources to make a louder voice could set the direction of consumer decisions.
Now consumers' cognitive ability, financial resources, and consumption awareness have greatly improved. They need valuable brands to influence their consumption decisions. Therefore, relying on strong media brainwashing and single-claim product physical attributes and benefit points only solves the basic cognition of current consumers about the brand.
A brand with vitality and competitiveness needs to be based on the company's own 'golden instinct,' creating a scarce brand value that combines both 'hardcore quality benefits' and 'resonant emotional taste.'
Zhuopu's 'Golden Instinct' brand marketing methodology is to tap into the characteristics of the company's own resource endowments, choose different endowment elements at different stages, create unique brand value to put on the market, thereby stimulating the rapid operation of demand trends to form scale, avoid brands falling into the quagmire of resource consumption competition, achieve marketing breakthroughs, and maintain brand longevity.
A valuable brand is a parallel combination of product benefit promises and emotional resonance. Without excellent product quality, the company cannot move; without emotional connection with consumers, the company cannot go far.
So, hardcore product strength can help a company quickly become popular, but only emotional recognition based on shared values with consumers can make the brand last long.
Only by tapping into the golden instinct of their own resource endowments can companies create scarce brand value that combines both 'hardcore quality benefits' and 'emotional value resonance' in parallel. And only brands with such scarce value can stimulate greater demand trends and gain greater market opportunities.
Therefore, 'Golden Instinct' is the strategic core for small and medium enterprises' brand marketing breakthroughs in the new marketing environment, and it is the accelerator to help them overtake on curves!
Source: Zhuopu Brand Marketing Group (ID: GEOPOE)
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