---
title: "Wahaha's Zong Fuli: Consumers Say They Don't Drink Carbonated Drinks, but Their Actions Speak Louder!"
description: "At the recent APEC forum, Zong Fuli, president of Hongsheng Beverage Group and head of Wahaha's brand PR department, shared her views on the new industrial era. She believes that in responding to consumer demands, companies need not only data as raw material but also a framework system to deconstruct data. A framework is similar to strategy but broader and deeper; without it, data can mislead, as seen when consumers claim health is their top priority and dislike carbonated drinks, yet sales of such drinks are rising."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-07-25"
language: "en"
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markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/wahaha-s-zong-fuli-consumers-say-they-don-t-drink-carbonated-drinks-but-b17ea649.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/EaqGbSFj1NkLOO7pSq31gA"
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---

# Wahaha's Zong Fuli: Consumers Say They Don't Drink Carbonated Drinks, but Their Actions Speak Louder!

> At the recent APEC forum, Zong Fuli, president of Hongsheng Beverage Group and head of Wahaha's brand PR department, shared her views on the new industrial era. She believes that in responding to consumer demands, companies need not only data as raw material but also a framework system to deconstruct data. A framework is similar to strategy but broader and deeper; without it, data can mislead, as seen when consumers claim health is their top priority and dislike carbonated drinks, yet sales of such drinks are rising.

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At the recent APEC forum, Zong Fuli, president of Hongsheng Beverage Group and head of Wahaha's brand PR department, shared her views on the new industrial era. She believes that in responding to consumer demands, companies need not only data as raw material but also a framework system to deconstruct data.
**A framework is similar to strategy but broader and deeper. If a company lacks a framework, the side effects of data are obvious, easily leading people into blind spots.** For example, many consumers claim in surveys that health is their top priority and that they dislike carbonated drinks, but in reality, sales of carbonated drinks are increasing.
The following is the full text of Zong Fuli's speech:
Hello everyone, I am Zong Fuli.
The theme of this APEC conference is "New Industries Create a New Era," which is something I have been paying attention to. In recent years, the concept of "industry" has been discussed many times, though with different terms—"industrial era," "industrial revolution," "new industrial economy," etc.—but the essence is the same: it reflects that the current era is vastly different from the past.
The biggest difference lies in the change of production materials—from coal, oil, and electricity in the industrial age to data now, which has become an important production material. When data becomes the primary production material, digitalization is also breaking through corporate boundaries, and industries are tending to converge.
As traditional manufacturing enterprises, Hongsheng and Wahaha are also in the wave of industrial transformation. In practice, I believe that in the industrial era, data is important, but equally important is the framework. Framework and data are dialectically unified and indispensable.
A framework is similar to strategy; it is the structure of our interpretation and thinking about things, but it is broader and deeper than strategy: there are strategic frameworks, product frameworks, data frameworks, management frameworks, etc.
In the new industrial era, besides the change in production materials, industrial contradictions are also changing. **The new industrial contradiction is concentrated between consumer demand and production relations; consumers are more individualized.** Responding to new consumer demands requires both data and framework in parallel.
Specifically in industrial application, framework and data complement each other, and framework is superior to data.
**Industries need framework guidance; otherwise, data is meaningless**
Hongsheng Group has been undergoing digital transformation since 2003, establishing core systems such as CRM, ERP, SRM, MES, and QCS, connecting all aspects of the supply chain and implementing information system integration across the entire supply chain. Wahaha Group started informatization as early as 1997 and has accumulated over 20 years of production data in its information warehouse.
The challenge we face now is how to structure this data. If not structured, data is scattered, unusable, and meaningless. This requires building a data center, starting from the data layer, then the logic layer, then the interface layer, which is mainly presented in the form of reports.
Theoretically, a decision layer should be built on top, but it involves many dimensions of consideration and cannot be fully realized by AI or data at present; it must rely on human subjective strategic frameworks.
We see that data is just raw material. If a company does not have its own system for analyzing and understanding the industry, no amount of data is meaningful.
**If the industrial framework is missing, it will lead people into blind spots**
In the past two years, our sales data shows that our carbonated drink sales are increasing. But when Wahaha conducts market surveys with consumers, many consumers rank health as their top choice and do not like carbonated drinks in surveys. From the results, consumers say no on the surface, but their actions are honest. So if we only look at data, I think no company would be willing to put much effort into promoting carbonated drinks.
Charlie Munger said, "Some of the worst business decisions I've seen were made with detailed analysis. Higher mathematics is a precise illusion." I think Charlie Munger is not criticizing data itself, but pure data logic. **Before using data logic, there must be an underlying logic, and often that underlying logic is the strategic framework.**
Data itself is not wrong, but data is often partial. People who look at the data world for a long time are like blind men touching an elephant: the longer they touch, the clearer their understanding of the part, but they still do not know what the elephant looks like. Therefore, industrial renewal must have its own framework; otherwise, it will fall into blind spots. Currently, all industries lack good frameworks and such talent.
**Lagging and rapidly changing consumer demand forces companies to prioritize frameworks**
The beverage industry is actually a fast-iterating market; 80% of products have very short popularity cycles, which brings challenges to companies in collecting and analyzing industrial data. For example, when you discover that everyone is drinking sparkling water and then start developing it, similar products may already be everywhere, losing the first-mover advantage.
Generally, consumer demand data feedback to corporate decision-makers is often lagging. In the face of the new industrial revolution, past experience is insufficient to guide the present, and current data is insufficient to guide the future.
While demand lags, it also changes rapidly. For example, statistically, most consumer demand data follows a normal distribution, but now consumers are increasingly individualistic, and the normal distribution tends to flatten. Large-scale enterprises can no longer "cut corners" with a one-size-fits-all approach as in the past.
From a data perspective, many consumer demands now also show a long-tail distribution. For example, download counts on some online music platforms show that even the most niche songs have a fixed audience downloading them. Conversely, even the most niche products have a market.
The rapid changes in consumer demand make the lag of data more obvious and force forward-looking companies to walk ahead of data and build new frameworks.
As the saying goes, the industrial age is about meeting demand, while the industrial era is about creating demand, because you find that you can never catch up with consumers; sometimes consumers themselves do not know what they want. Of course, framework-first also means trial and error and risk, which is not currently the mainstream in the industry.
What is remarkable about Apple is that when consumers were satisfied with phones with full keyboards, it dared to create a new touchscreen phone framework system, and then came the mobile internet.
It should be noted that while we emphasize frameworks, we do not underestimate data; the two just play different roles and have different functions. Generally, a mature industrial digital platform has both framework and data. In the industrial era, frameworks combined with big data can infinitely approach objectivity.
In recent years, we have attached great importance to **collecting consumer-side data and built a C2M-style Kellyone business unit framework, collecting new consumer demands through reverse customization from consumers;** we are also doing Haba Amusement Park, which has exceeded one million registered users in half a year, also hoping to collect consumer data to revise and validate existing frameworks.
We also attach equal importance to production-side data. In 2016, we established a digital intelligent beverage factory in Hangzhou, carrying out high-end digital simulation and design, breaking the information islands of single-machine equipment, achieving interconnection of production data across the entire line, and ultimately achieving flexible production and quality traceability. This is the first such factory in the domestic beverage industry.
But overall, I believe data is not the end. As I said, **digitalization is just a tool; companies should not get on the bus just for the sake of getting on. How to better realize industrial consumer value through the organic combination with frameworks is the core pursuit of enterprises.** Therefore, **people in the midst of industrial upheaval should value frameworks and not blindly follow trends, otherwise they may lose themselves. In many cases, framework is strategy. It is very important for entrepreneurs to systematically conceive, even vaguely, how they will go, where they will go, and whether it will work.**
Finally, I want to say that the new industrial era has arrived. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for enterprises. I hope to work with colleagues here to forge ahead on the path of industrial digitalization and inject more new ideas and vitality into industrial development.
Source: China News Service | Compiled by: Food Business


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