Source | Lingshou In the view of Zhu Jun, Senior Vice President of Walmart China and Chief Merchandising Officer for Walmart's retail formats, the problem facing the retail industry today is not that customers have become more discerning, but that retailers need to change rapidly. Customers are not no longer visiting supermarkets; rather, they lose the desire to enter those that offer no compelling reason to return. Similarly, the market environment may not necessarily be worsening; it's just that "the old ways no longer work." This may sound abstract, but Zhu Jun cited a seemingly trivial example—a piece of Wo Jixian mung bean cake. Many private brands are often designed around financial goals, meaning they simply find an existing branded product, choose a solution with a long shelf life, low cost, and easy price pressure, and then drive sell-through through discounts and promotions. This logic is nothing more than "cheaper and easier to manage." However, Zhu Jun asked his team to break free from traditional thinking and start from the real customer experience—reducing sugar by 20% compared to most mung bean cakes on the market. Prioritizing premium global ingredients, such as the sweeter and crisper Lipu water chestnuts from Guangxi, avocado puree from the tenderest core of Mexican Hass avocados, and dried osmanthus flowers harvested only from Guilin golden osmanthus on the 3rd to 5th day after blooming, this combination gives traditional pastries a modern feel. Using ancient steaming and low-temperature grinding, it achieves a silky, smooth, and melt-in-your-mouth texture—it's not "innovation for innovation's sake," but a balance between health, freshness, deliciousness, and price. "It breaks customers' expectations of traditional mung bean cakes in terms of color, aroma, and taste," said Zhu Jun. This mung bean cake is not the protagonist, but it is a microcosm of the comprehensive upgrade of "Wo Jixian." Recently, Walmart announced the official refresh of its private brand "Wo Jixian," reshaping product standards with the new brand concept "Simple for Fresh, Wo Jixian." The first batch of nearly a thousand refreshed or new products was unveiled, covering fresh food, groceries, beverages, and other core categories. The refresh of Wo Jixian is a concentrated manifestation of Walmart's brand reshaping and strategic transformation, with product power as the core competitiveness and the creation of differentiated advantages. For a long time in the past, the logic of the retail industry was "customers will adapt to products," but Walmart's attitude is that products should meet or even exceed customer expectations. This is also the underlying logic of Walmart's current upgrade—starting from the most authentic, subtle, and inconspicuous customer feedback, and reversely reconstructing the entire product chain. This is not a marketing move of changing packaging or a slogan, but Walmart seriously answering a question: Who is the starting point of a product? In Zhu Jun's words, Walmart must stand from the customer's perspective, return to the customer value proposition, and conduct a thorough self-iteration. In my view, this is a deep innovation involving organizational culture, value systems, product theory, and supply practices, carrying out a thorough and contemporary interpretation and implementation of the retail industry's common concept of "customer orientation." China's retail industry has long been driven by the logic of "customer first on the surface, but finance first in reality": performance priority, gross margin priority, sales per square foot priority, turnover priority... Customers are just a number on the report. But over the past five years, customers' lifestyles have undergone dramatic changes—living alone, small families, high frequency and low volume, low decision-making costs, and emphasis on food safety and experience. Traditional retail is still trapped in the old logic of "the cheaper the better" and "the more the merrier," while customers have quietly turned away. Walmart chose to extricate itself from this "value mismatch." For example, the Wo Jixian water chestnut and Longjing-flavored mung bean cake, priced at 24.99 yuan for 6 pieces, has been repeatedly recommended on social platforms for its "refreshing, not greasy, and balanced taste" experience, with consumers saying it's delicious—quality is the first handle of a product, followed by value perception. This is precisely the perfect combination of Walmart's philosophy of "moving hearts with quality, starting with price" and consumers' real life need of "living well, spending less." If the mung bean cake is a product experiment starting from "raw material optimization," then the "Wo Jixian Little Green Bottle Milk" is a more thorough "experience engineering." The initial Little Green Bottle milk had a protein content of 4.0, a clean ingredient list, using only 100% raw milk without any additives. The PET light-proof bottle design ensured stable quality, priced at 9.9 yuan, with a light taste and balanced flavor. However, after launch, customers gave feedback: "It's too big; I can't finish it alone." So Walmart, after seven months of refinement, launched the "Little Green Bottle Mini": a more portable capacity and a comfortable bottle shape, which was well received by customers, and even used by many for DIY coffee milk. Why did it take seven months? Because changing specifications and packaging is not just "changing a bottle"; every adjustment requires re-reviewing food safety and quality control. Zhu Jun said that this is non-negotiable. Soon after, Walmart noticed a second round of customer feedback on this milk—the packaging was smaller, but the price was slightly higher. So Walmart once again joined forces with the factory, using technology to continuously optimize from production efficiency to transportation costs, hoping to further reduce the price while maintaining the convenience of small packaging and ensuring quality. Like other Wo Jixian products, every evolution of this milk is about listening carefully to customers. The logic behind this is that products should not only "look good" on the shelf, but also "feel good" in customers' lives. The same logic applies to HPP (High Pressure Processing) fruit teas. Walmart did not take the seemingly popular but controversial path of sugar substitutes and "zero calories, zero sugar," but instead used original juice substitution, cold brewing to preserve aroma, and precise sweetness grading to turn ingredients like guava, oil gan, chia seeds, and kale—which are "healthy but hard to drink"—into a genuine taste without gimmicks, while maximizing sugar reduction. "We never aim to create bestsellers; that's just a marketing gimmick. What we want to do is focus on customers' real life scenarios," Zhu Jun said. The starting point of the HPP fruit tea series is the same: every product should be a good product that customers can enjoy daily, and must not be made into a novelty item that customers try once and forget. When a company is sincere enough, customers can certainly feel it, because the public has sharp eyes. In fact, the slogan "Simple for Fresh" is concretely reflected in every Wo Jixian product: simple ingredients, clearer raw material traceability, reduced choice anxiety, and emphasis on a certain experience—not just "healthy," but "easy to choose, good to feel, and easy to use." However, Zhu Jun is not at all worried about other retail companies "copying homework" on ingredient lists. "If Walmart can drive the industry to accelerate toward a healthier, simpler ingredient direction, allowing more consumers to enjoy better products, that is both our responsibility and our honor." Once upon a time, the key words for "private brands" in China's retail industry were nothing more than three things: low price, big-brand alternatives, and gross margin tools. Many companies did private brands not because customers had real unmet needs, but because it could optimize financial reports and satisfy the story of "category KPIs." Walmart was no exception initially. Zhu Jun admitted: "In the early years, we were also trapped in this mindset—the more SKUs the better, wanting to do everything, focusing on sales, gross margin, and proportion indicators." The real turning point began with the recent transformation and upgrading of Walmart's retail formats. Walmart has a more focused customer base and a clear value proposition, clearly targeting urban mass-market middle-class families and single people as core customer groups, and around their real needs, established three major strategic directions: "providing high-quality fresh food and groceries, selected non-food items; stable everyday low prices and omnichannel convenient services." This is not a "concept first" slogan, but a systematic reconstruction of the underlying methodology of private brands. Inside Walmart, the criteria for measuring whether a product is worth long-term investment have fundamentally changed:

  • Customer repurchase rate;
  • Social net promoter score (sNPS);
  • Whether negative feedback response is closed-loop;
  • Whether the ingredient list is transparent, easy to understand, and burden-free; At the same time, what has been discarded are indicators from the retailer's perspective, such as the quantitative assessment of "must launch 100 SKUs" and financial goals like "private brand share must reach XX%." As is well known, in retail, products can be changed, processes can be adjusted, but the organizational inertia of a company is the hardest to change. This round of Wo Jixian upgrade is not about rearranging the product mix around financial reports, but about rebuilding the system around customers. This is actually another form of organizational gene refresh—on the surface, it's product upgrade, but in essence, it's organizational capability optimization, which may represent the real watershed for the retail industry in the coming years. Similarly, the frequently mentioned "adjustment and reform" in the industry in recent years is not new. Adjusting formats, structures, product mixes, customer flows, prices... But most companies' adjustments still remain at the level of physical structure replacement, such as replacing a bestseller with another bestseller, changing large packaging to small packaging, removing "promotion" labels and replacing them with "carefully selected" or "premium selection." The core of many adjustments is essentially cutting SKUs that should be cut, pressing costs that should be pressed, changing displays that should be changed, and then expecting improved sales per square foot, increased gross margin, and higher average transaction value. It seems changed, but in fact nothing has changed. The real adjustment is not about changing a few SKUs or subtracting from the product mix, but asking a basic question: "Are we willing to re-understand customers?" The path of Wo Jixian is exactly the opposite: starting from customer profiles, re-examining category logic, service standards, product selection strategies, and supply chain organization. This bottom-up process reshaping is a capability that the vast majority of Chinese retailers do not yet possess. Many retail companies do private brands to expand profits, optimize finances, and reduce dependence on suppliers. But Zhu Jun's view is exactly the opposite: "If we cannot create real value for customers, then we would rather not do it." The real transformation of Wo Jixian lies in shifting from "treating customers as the result" to "treating customers as the starting point": whether to make a product is no longer determined by gross margin; whether it's worth long-term investment no longer depends on financial KPIs; product development starts from customers' eating, drinking, and usage experiences, and reversely designs formulas, packaging, supply chains, and even organizational actions. In other words, Wo Jixian is not an "OEM brand," not a "cheap alternative," not a "profit engine," but it may become the most trusted choice in customers' minds. In this era of exploding options and information overload, what consumers lack most is not choice, but certainty. Every fine-tuning that Wo Jixian does is actually helping customers solve a simple need:
  • No need to spend ten minutes reading ingredient lists in front of the juice shelf;
  • No need to worry about choosing a healthy drink for children;
  • No need to repeatedly "step on mines" in categories like nuts and durian;
  • No need to anxiously decide among a dazzling array of "XX selections." In my view, Wo Jixian is not Walmart's "auxiliary brand," but the core handle for rebuilding its second curve in the Chinese market. For Walmart, physical stores are a product venue with a proposition, and product power is already far ahead of peers. Whether it's large stores or community stores, they are handles for customers to experience products, and e-commerce and delivery are no longer just channels, but have clearer product IP support. When customers form a mindset that "buying private brands at Walmart basically won't disappoint," that is the most enduring brand asset. This path is also far more sustainable than opening more stores or doing more discounts. If we were to write a footnote for China's retail industry over the past few years, it could probably be summarized as: the market has been stratified, but retailers have not yet awakened. Customer needs have long shifted from "more, faster, better, cheaper" to "value, experience, low burden, food safety trust"; but the industry's general logic is still immersed in the old cognition of "the more SKUs the better, the fiercer the promotions the better, the lower the price the better." The real competitive gap is no longer the size of scale, but the depth of values. It's not who has more stores, not who raises funds faster, but who can truly stand on the customer's side to make products. Walmart's answer is simple, but also difficult to achieve—starting from the customer, revolutionizing itself. This product revolution called "Wo Jixian" is not "doing it for the sake of doing it," nor a short-term optimization, but a fundamental renewal of organizational culture and corporate thinking. From supply chain, products, packaging, to assessment, mechanisms, and mindset, everything returns to the customer perspective, everything revolves around real value. In this top-down and bottom-up product revolution, Walmart is at the forefront. For local Chinese retail enterprises, how many dare to stop chasing gross margin and instead prioritize customer recommendation scores? How many can stop asking "how much can we sell" and instead ask "will customers love it"? And how many product teams are willing to start not from SKUs, but from customers' lives, time, senses, and choice burden? This is not only a watershed of values, but also a touchstone of systemic capability. Perhaps you will find that after 2025, the gap in Chinese retail will no longer be a tactical mismatch, but a strategic divergence. Behind the reshaping of product power is the redefinition of customer value. And retail enterprises that truly deserve the future may all need to start anew from this sentence: not to sell more, but to make customers more willing to buy. This also returns to the core origin of the dilemma of Chinese retail enterprises: Who dares to start from the customer and revolutionize themselves?