At the November 2024 Wahaha distributor conference, Zong Fuli unveiled her first report card since taking the helm, with revenue of 72.8 billion yuan, matching the scale of a decade ago and achieving an annual growth of over 20 billion yuan compared to 2023's 50 billion yuan, a 47% year-on-year increase. This growth was driven mainly by strong sales of bottled water and AD calcium milk, with bottled water sales up 188% and AD calcium milk sales up 70%. A one-year growth of 20 billion yuan for a giant brand is unprecedented in China's FMCG history (excluding acquisition consolidation factors), possibly a peak that will never be surpassed, marking the highest point of growth in China's FMCG industry. How did this phenomenal growth come about? We do not take sides with any brand, platform, or algorithm; we only analyze this explosive growth from the perspectives of marketing and internet communication. From a traditional marketing perspective, it is hard to explain this growth through traditional product, channel, promotion, and price thinking! After all, in an era of shrinking volumes, achieving a 20 billion yuan scale increase is remarkable! Moreover, Wahaha had already signaled a 50% sales task increase for distributors in 2025! This is not traditional growth; it is nuclear-level growth! Where does the energy for this nuclear explosion come from? Wahaha's Douyin communication data: Opening Douyin, one sees that the Wahaha topic has 22 billion plays, 3-10 times that of major competitors. Coca-Cola has only 4.5 billion topic plays. By category: Wahaha purified water has 2.1 billion plays, Wahaha AD calcium milk has 4.5 billion plays... Wahaha purified water UGC images Wahaha AD calcium milk images Nuclear-level traffic attracts nationwide attention. In today's material abundance, products or brands that can evoke emotions have become scarce. A large amount of UGC content about Wahaha has been generated on Douyin. Consumers under the spotlight are hinted, guided, and swept along, heading straight from the shelves to the attention targets, leaving brands with less traffic without a choice! The essence of FMCG consumption is instant decision-making; people buy things worth a few yuan without thinking, and any information interference before purchase can change their choices! With the C-end activated, terminal stores gain confidence in stocking, and distributors who deal with terminals daily feel the change early... A phone call to the brand's investment department leads to a batch increase in the number of national distributors! Brands that could only linger in lower-tier markets successfully return to cities due to the nuclear explosion of communication; brand impressions that were about to be forgotten are activated by the incredible traffic; young urban consumers who had no impression of the brand are instantly won over by the torrential traffic. Coincidence? It might be luck or chance for Wahaha alone! But look at two other brands: Baixiang instant noodles and金星 Beer! They have also caught the internet's torrential traffic and achieved explosive growth. Baixiang was founded in 1997, and金星 Beer in 1982. Both were born in an era of material scarcity and incremental growth, competing in a giant game dominated by offline deep distribution. Baixiang and金星 Beer's Douyin communication data: Baixiang's online communication has been unstoppable since 2022, with 5.6 billion Douyin topic plays, ten times that of major competitors! With a national brand image and content focused on public welfare, it has consistently topped the charts online! It created a miracle in live streaming with tens of thousands watching Baixiang's production line. Multi-flavor instant noodles and products with topics continuously attract young consumer topics and content on e-commerce and Douyin. Baixiang's online-offline linkage has propelled it into the top three in the industry, joining the 10-billion club!金星 Beer's Chinese-style craft beer, with genius product design, exploded on Douyin in the second half of 2024, with topics causing young people to exclaim: "The wind is too strong!" The whole network topic volume instantly reached over a billion, with millions of consumer UGC works. It even triggered three "unbelievable" claims in the industry: **1. All the billion-level UGC content across the internet was created by consumers, with the company spending no money. **2. Unbelievable that金星 Beer's live stream is run by its own employees without paid traffic. 3. Unbelievable that金星 Beer is already an enterprise that can integrate online and offline. Reviewing Wahaha, Baixiang, and金星 Beer, we find commonalities: **1. The communication battlefield has shifted dramatically from text-image era to text-image-video era. **2. All are taken over by the second generation, changing traditional cognition and organizational systems. **3. All have heritage and reserves, capable of fighting hard battles. When traffic comes, they can catch it, withstand it, and win! **4. They naturally have online genes, a sense of internet culture, understand online, and understand young people! 5. They have a sense of internet culture online and a sense of touch offline. They are familiar with online-offline linkage, with integrated organization, and are adept at combining communication, e-commerce, and offline. In the past, we reflected that pure online Taobao brands couldn't reach offline, and pure online Douyin brands wouldn't last. We also despised pure offline enterprises as old-fashioned and sluggish! But today, we see that traditional offline brands that master online skills, once they obtain online traffic, break through more sharply and smoothly. Perhaps we might agonize over whether traffic is kind, whether internet celebrities can stay popular, or negative e-commerce information... For traditional enterprises like Wahaha, Baixiang, and金星 Beer, neither pure online nor pure offline is their choice. For them, it's about how to use the online spear combined with the offline shield. Consumers have awakened; demand has shifted from big consensus to small consensus. Brand systems formed during the era of mass communication and mass channels will face challenges from media changes. Marketing is communication! Communication can change cognition! Where people are, communication must cover! For today's consumers: their bodies are offline, but their spirits are online! If you only use channels to rule their bodies but cannot influence their spirits with communication, being ignored and forgotten is only a matter of time! Believe in the power of communication! The difference is: paid communication is advertising, while unpaid communication is UGC, which is the hearts of the people... Teacher Liu Chunxiong's Comment Step-Air Integration, Old Trees Sprout New Shoots **1. Wahaha, Baixiang, and金星 all belong to the second or even third tier in the traditional industry structure. After catching the internet's torrential traffic, they squeezed into the first or second tier. 2. Since 2010, the industry structure has been set. Without the internet's torrential traffic, these enterprises would have to accept their fate. Wahaha is a dual-driven enterprise of brand and channel, but it has long struggled to "enter cities." With urbanization increasing, sales declined for ten consecutive years. Baixiang is a channel-driven enterprise, struggling to "enter cities" and "cross the river" (the Yangtze River), with sales hovering for a long time.金星 was once the fourth in the industry, but in the past two decades, facing capital operations of the top three, it regressed rather than advanced. Without the internet's cause and effect, they would have to accept their fate. But the internet gave them a chance not to accept fate. **3. Traditional enterprises know how to play brand and channel, but in the face of the internet, the "money-sea tactics" of branding and the "human-sea tactics" of channels are ineffective; instead, UGC models keep creating miracles. **4. It is strange that the torrential traffic for these three enterprises coincided with the second generation taking over. Coincidence? Or is there a pattern? 5. Unlike the new consumer brands that boomed and then fizzled out in previous years, the combination of traditional enterprises and the internet is both online and offline. Wahaha has "entered cities," Baixiang has both "entered cities" and "crossed the river," and金星 completed a nationwide offline and online layout within three months. Teacher Fang Gang and I call this phenomenon "step-air integration," meaning the integration of infantry and air force. 6. The main battlefield for internet communication now is Douyin, and the content that spreads rapidly is UGC. It is the decentralized UGC creation that has created the torrential traffic and the miracle of old trees sprouting new shoots. 7. In the future, there will be no distinction between online and offline; only step-air integration, connecting the three-dimensional space, is the right path. Appendix: Five Famous Quotes from "The Crowd"
Once in a group, an individual's IQ severely drops. To gain acceptance, individuals are willing to abandon right and wrong, using IQ to exchange for that reassuring sense of belonging.
Quantity is justice.
The accumulation of crowds is just the accumulation of stupidity, while true wisdom is drowned by the flood of stupidity.
When an individual integrates into society, he loses himself. The herd consciousness of the group will drown individual rationality. Once an individual classifies himself into the group, his originally independent rationality will be overwhelmed by the ignorance and madness of the group.
The masses lack discernment and thus cannot judge truth from falsehood. Many viewpoints that cannot withstand scrutiny can easily gain universal approval! 【New Order · Symbiosis】 The 10th China FMCG Innovation Conference Time: March 17-19, 2025 Location: Chengdu, China