---
title: "Why Is Mainstream Shift Difficult? Master These 5 Rules"
description: "Since Liu Chunxiong and I published the viewpoint of mainstream shift in 'Sales and Marketing' in August 2014, the term has been attached to new products by many companies in 2015 and 2016. However, labeling doesn't bring market share; nearly three years later, few new products or brands truly qualify as mainstream shift, and even those that are genuinely 'new' are far from becoming mainstream. So, is mainstream shift an idealized dream? Or where is the path?"
author: "史贤龙"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2017-06-03"
language: "en"
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---

# Why Is Mainstream Shift Difficult? Master These 5 Rules

> Since Liu Chunxiong and I published the viewpoint of mainstream shift in 'Sales and Marketing' in August 2014, the term has been attached to new products by many companies in 2015 and 2016. However, labeling doesn't bring market share; nearly three years later, few new products or brands truly qualify as mainstream shift, and even those that are genuinely 'new' are far from becoming mainstream. So, is mainstream shift an idealized dream? Or where is the path?

Since Liu Chunxiong and I published the viewpoint of mainstream shift in 'Sales and Marketing' in August 2014, the term has been attached to new products by many companies in 2015 and 2016. For a time, mainstream shift was a basket, and new products wanted to share its glory.
But labeling doesn't bring market share; nearly three years later, few new products or brands truly qualify as mainstream shift, and even those that are genuinely 'new' are far from becoming mainstream.
So, is mainstream shift an idealized dream? Or where is the path?
We repeat the basic viewpoint on mainstream shift: mainstream is first a quantitative concept, meaning that products (and brands) occupying dominant market share are mainstream. Discussing mainstream shift without sales volume and market share is meaningless.
Therefore, mainstream shift necessarily means that the new products representing the shift must occupy the top two positions in category market share to be considered successful. This is what I meant by mainstream shift being a 'big reversal'.
Obviously, such a mainstream shift is like entering a greenhouse era from an ice age; biological species not only evolve, but old species disappear and new species become protagonists.
This kind of sea change has actually occurred several times in the evolution of consumer goods over the past 30 years, but people quickly forget the recent past: home appliances, consumer electronics, building materials, food, daily necessities, etc., are constantly changing.
Who still uses Walkman, MP3, or cameras? How much of today's seafood, fruit, and beverages on Chinese tables were regularly eaten 10 years ago?
Product categories have changed greatly, and brand patterns have not changed much, but almost all leading brands in every category have experienced negative growth.
The recent hot topic of Wahaha's decline of over 10 billion yuan was already explained in our 'Ceiling of Quantity Growth' at the end of 2015: the decline of the leader is actually the overall decline of the old category. This is a sign of mainstream change.
Wahaha's continuous decline for three years since 2014, viewed through accidental factors, shows Zong Qinghou's helplessness. He knows there is a problem, but this time his market intuition hasn't found a solution.
Another recent hot topic is Xiaomi: its ecosystem is lukewarm, the explosive growth of its core product, smartphones, has stopped, and domestic phone brands like Huawei, OPPO, and Gionee have left Xiaomi no room to grow freely like a lone jujube tree.
Good luck has a shelf life, and even leaders cannot escape the curse of rules.
Wahaha's problem is that its past three successful tricks (big advertising, channels, and imitative products) have failed; Xiaomi's problem is that at a scale of 100 billion, weak links in the industry chain (manufacturing, R&D) have become constraints on growth. Wahaha's strategic issue is to keep up with the new era, while Xiaomi's strategic issue is to adjust its strategic mindset.
Wahaha and Xiaomi represent the two main entities of mainstream shift: today's industry leaders and new upstarts who have risen from nothing.
It can be seen that leading enterprises indeed lack 'innovation hunger', meaning the new mainstream will not be an orderly improvement by former industry leaders.
Wahaha is accustomed to investing in external innovation (packaging, brand, taste, advertising, etc.) in beverages, but is unwilling to invest in internal innovation (raw materials, R&D), which is a path dependence of long-term speculative thinking.
In the direction representing the future new mainstream of beverages (NFC healthy original ecological drinks), Nongfu Spring's NFC juice has taken the first step of internal innovation.
Part of Wahaha's lost sales is precisely fragmented by future mainstream new products.
Xiaomi's rise is already an anomaly in the mobile phone industry. The innovation that led to Xiaomi's rise was essentially the e-commerce dividend and China manufacturing dividend that reduced channel links and improved consumer cost-performance experience.
Today, Xiaomi is overtaken by Huawei, OPPO, etc., ultimately because these two dividends are no longer Xiaomi's exclusive advantage, and Huawei and OPPO quickly hijacked the e-commerce dividend and also leveraged the momentum of offline channels where Xiaomi is weak.
More importantly, Huawei and OPPO have core advantages in R&D or manufacturing, which allowed them to surpass Xiaomi in sales and even price.
From fragmentation to mainstream, this is a process from small to large, from edge to dominance, which will not be completed within three to five years.
Apple and Samsung, which rose in the mobile phone industry, are both 'outsiders' like Xiaomi, entering the smartphone industry from computers and TVs, but in just over a decade, they washed out former communication industry giants like Nokia, Motorola, and BlackBerry. This itself is a big reversal of edge becoming mainstream.
Apple went from the Macintosh in 1984 to the iPhone in 2007, passing through iMac and iPod, magically seizing the best and last 10-year development period of MP3, and timely (even three years ahead) turned to the iPhone (2007), finally becoming mainstream in phones from an anomaly and niche in computers.
The latest data shows Apple's cash reserves reach $250 billion, surpassing Germany; market value is $769 billion, entering the G20 ranking of global GDP countries. At this point, Apple is undeniably mainstream, and from its development history, it is a typical representative of mainstream shift.
Looking at the above three cases together, one represents the past industry leader (Wahaha), one represents the innovative upstart (Xiaomi); one is the best practice of completing the transition from niche to mainstream.
Their time spans are all within the last 20 years, and considering Apple's challenge starting in 1984, we can see that the road from edge innovation to becoming mainstream is not only long but also full of forks and uncertainties. But we can already draw key conclusions about the path of mainstream shift from these three cases:
Conclusion 1: Mainstream shift will not be the self-improvement of industry leaders; it will definitely start from edge innovation.
In fact, only by starting from the edge can industry leaders avoid quickly grabbing the market, and innovation can have a period of 'independent development' in innovation loneliness. This loneliness period is a black hole; perhaps most edge innovations cannot escape this time black hole.
Conclusion 2: The core logic of edge innovation is not to patch up past mainstream elements, but to discard old elements and directly introduce new elements.
Tesla is a car, but also a computer; Atour is a hotel, but also a living space; NFC is a beverage, but also a bottled fresh juice. This time, it truly acts as nature's porter, a qualitative leap, not just improving juice content from 10% to 30% as 'a bit better'.
Conclusion 3: Edge innovation is not a stepwise upgrade of products, but a leap upgrade.
Consumers with more disposable income and consumption desire do not gradually rise from bottom to top according to the 'brand contempt chain'; the typical characteristic of nouveau riche consumption is to jump three levels into high-end brands. This is not a Chinese characteristic but a world characteristic; Europeans and Japanese do the same.
Therefore, mid-range brands globally have only a very short time to shine; consumers generally tend to polarize purchases: when they can't afford it, they consume low-end products; when they can afford it, they go directly to high-end brands. This is why iPhone, with a price gap of 2-3 times compared to challengers, still becomes the best-selling brand.
Conclusion 4: Cost-performance is a pit.
True innovation does not consider cost-performance, only whether the product is good enough; that is, innovative products care about the praise of enthusiasts, not the criticism of conservatives.
True edge innovation does not benchmark against old mainstream products, doing better or with higher cost-performance, but pops out of benchmarking to show its difference, like the Macintosh in 1984, which was an anomaly in computers, not an optimization of IBM computers.
Along the way, all Apple products have no cost-performance; on the cost-performance track, there were giant computer brands: Dell, HP, Samsung, IBM, but today's computer world has only two types: MacBook and non-MacBook.
Conclusion 5: The process of edge innovation moving to mainstream has no battles, only advancement.
How is mainstream shift completed? Real cases tell us: there will not be price wars like those repeatedly staged in Chinese home appliances, or any hand-to-hand business battles.
After edge innovation passes its geek (niche trial) stage and enters the mass market, it will not fall into price wars with old brands or new competitors, but continue independent development. Simply put, sustained horizontal growth, meaning as long as there are sales opportunities and consumers have purchasing power, purchases will automatically form (this is the logic of selling a kidney for an iPhone).
After edge innovation enters the mass market, there is no mystery and no concern about competition, because at this point it has gained strategic development initiative (capital security, core competitiveness, operational firewall).
Xiaomi's dilemma is still trapped in the path gene of cost-performance, which is what I call the strategic mindset problem. But to this day, Xiaomi still stands at the forefront of mainstream shift; its ecosystem chain, from a business model perspective, represents advanced productivity, and it still has a chance for great success.
In the past decade, China's service economy exploded, and the surging tide of Internet plus mass entrepreneurship and innovation masked the trend of upgrading and shifting in physical products (including services), but the core issue of consumption upgrade—product upgrade (i.e., mainstream shift)—has not been resolved.
Ele.me and Meituan have moved restaurants online with one-click ordering and delivery; has the food become better? On the contrary, the quality of restaurant dishes has not only not upgraded, but the Internet has become a protective umbrella for shoddy production. So there will naturally be a round of true product upgrades.
Consumption upgrade and mainstream shift are essentially the replacement and elimination of backward productivity by advanced productivity.
As consumers' willingness for independent choice and quality orientation grows, dual-low products (low quality, low price) will inevitably be eliminated. Innovative products representing high quality and new generation interests, even if starting from overlooked edge innovations and fragmented markets, once they cross the time black hole of innovation loneliness, will shine brilliantly and be unstoppable.
**Source: Bonarui Cheng (ID: chief-wisdom)**
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