NEW DISTRIBUTION RESEARCH TOPIC
How can brands grow beyond price competition?
Evidence and cases on product strategy, category innovation, marketing, and channel coordination in China’s consumer market.
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4701 articles · Page 25 of 196
What Kind of Mess Did Lin Xiaohai Inherit at Shanghai Jahwa?
Shanghai Jahwa, once the undisputed leader in domestic beauty and personal care, has recently undergone major personnel changes, with former RT-Mart CEO Lin Xiaohai taking the helm. Despite the company's 125-year history and iconic brands like Herborist, Liushen, and Shuangmei, its latest half-year report reveals declining revenue and profit, a shrinking market position, and a host of challenges including an unclear brand structure, lack of blockbuster products, and lagging channel innovation.
李彦Big Bottle Drinks: The 'Premium Substitute' for Water for Money-Saving Young People
This summer, in offices and gyms, large bottles of unsweetened tea around 1L are increasingly common, a shift from a few years ago when such sizes were mocked. The trend is driven by young consumers seeking health, flavor, and value, with sales of 600-1249ml formats growing from 6.4% to 11.3% of the market from 2019 to 2023.
刀法行研Soda Water Is Popular Again
Aaron, a buyer for a well-known online retail platform, observed that since last year, many new soda water brands have emerged, with a trend toward natural concepts and zero sugar, fat, and calories, leading to price competition. This summer, Nongfu Spring launched a green bottle purified water at 9.9 yuan per pack, triggering a price war in bottled water, and soda water is now facing similar internal competition.
AaronThree Major Categories Launched: A First Look at Hsu Fu Chi's 2025 Chinese New Year Offerings
As a well-known brand in the Chinese New Year goods market, Hsu Fu Chi is a must-have for households every Spring Festival. With 2025 approaching, Hsu Fu Chi has taken the lead in the New Year goods market before the peak season. On September 26, a grand launch event for the 2025 Chinese New Year candy was held in Xi'an, unveiling three major categories: New Year candy, Chinese candy gift boxes, and peanut crisp, preheating the festive atmosphere and injecting new vitality and anticipation into the market. A new gift box creation, the Chinese candy gift box, made its debut.
New Distribution“Simmered” Health Waters: A New Billion-Yuan Sugar-Free Beverage Trend
This year, “Chinese-style health waters” have become a hot trend in the sugar-free beverage sector. These drinks, based on traditional Chinese food therapy, are typically simmered or extracted from ingredients like red beans, coix seed, red dates, and tangerine peel. With zero sugar and zero fat, they appeal to young consumers seeking health benefits, serving as a daily “water substitute.” Online sales data confirms the boom: from May to July 2024, concepts like “Chenpi Ginger Poria Drink,” “Smoked Plum and Hawthorn,” and “Refreshing Mung Bean Water” saw the fastest sales growth on Taobao's coffee/cereal/instant drink category.
LeahCondoms: From Past 'Pride and Prejudice' to Present 'Disruption and Transcendence'
In the movie 'Lost in Hong Kong,' a scene features an ad for Elephant condoms, where the brand's integration with the plot left a lasting impression. Elephant founder Zhao Chuan leveraged emotional value and seized four waves of emotional consumption—film, social media, trends, and open culture—to grow the brand to 600 million yuan in revenue within a decade, aiming to become a public social enterprise.
田静“Small Category” Distributor: Covering 3,000+ Supermarkets, Turning Pet Supplies into “FMCG” with Full Rack Output
Traditional trading businesses are increasingly difficult, so where is the way out for distributors? In the past era of “dividing the cake,” as long as you were willing, it was only a matter of eating faster or slower and getting a bigger or smaller share; but now it is an era of “grabbing the cake,” and distributors must continuously innovate to keep up with market changes. In Zhengzhou, Henan, there is a boss who initially ran a general merchandise trading business, then entered the pet supplies industry, became a supplier to Pangdonglai, and through deep cultivation of the pet category, built strong product solution capabilities, becoming a one-stop, full-store output operation solution provider for pet supplies in supermarket channels.
汪海“Self-Zai Water” Sells Big! Your Health Anxiety Has Earned Genki Forest Another 1 Billion Yuan
Genki Forest has hit the trend again. According to LatePost, sales of its “Self-Zai Water” products are expected to exceed 1 billion yuan in 2024. Launched in February 2023, the product surpassed 100 million yuan in sales within four months, making it the fastest product to reach that milestone. 2024 marks the eighth year since Genki Forest's founding, and founder Tang Binsen mentioned in an internal letter that “believing in good products” has been the company's foundation since its inception, noting that younger consumers place greater emphasis on product quality, health, and emotional value.
李杨From "Light" to "Heavy": How Meijian, RIO, and Blue Dash Are Solving the 400-Billion-Yuan Young People's Alcohol Market | Category Watch
This article discusses the young people's alcohol market, which is worth 400 billion yuan. It analyzes why some low-alcohol brands have failed while others like RIO, Meijian, and Blue Dash have succeeded, and outlines future trends in the market.
焦逸梦The Core Value of FMCG Manufacturers' Marketing Teams Is to Enhance Channel Competitiveness
The core value of FMCG manufacturers' marketing teams lies in enhancing channel competitiveness. Market share is a result indicator driven by product & brand competitiveness, channel competitiveness, and consumer competitiveness. While marketing teams can only inherit and execute on product and consumer aspects, channel competitiveness is the area they must build and develop to drive growth in a shrinking market.
高级研究员 海游Genki Forest No Longer Aggressive
In the fiercely competitive summer bottled beverage market, Genki Forest's traditional Chinese health water product 'Zizai Shui' has become a notable presence on shelves, occupying prominent positions in many convenience stores and vending machines. Distributor Qin Bin in Chongqing told Caijing that Zizai Shui now accounts for 10%-15% of his Genki Forest product sales, achieving this from zero in just 8 months, surpassing the performance of Genki Forest's flagship products at the same stage.
半熟财经Brand Rejuvenation: Baixiang Dala Jiao Opens New Channel Windows
A viral video on Weibo showed young people dressed as Honor of Kings characters moving goods at a convenience store in Shanghai, sparking a trending topic. Baixiang Dala Jiao quickly seized the moment, announcing a second collaboration with the game and launching an innovative marketing campaign that integrates online and offline channels to deepen its youthful brand image.
AmySnack Industry's Top Student: Lay's 'Fresh-Baked Naked Rice Cakes' Debut, Disrupting the Rice Cake Market
The saying 'What's scary is not that others are better than you, but that they work harder than you' perfectly describes Lay's. After over 30 years in the Chinese market, Lay's not only dominates the potato chip category but also reinvents itself year after year. Recently, Lay's Gourmet Lab launched a new product—Fresh-Baked Naked Rice Cakes—which is set to disrupt the stagnant rice cake market.
冯瑶In the Era of Channel Convergence and Shrinking Volume, How Can Brand Owners Break Through the Dilemma of Choice?
In recent years, with the rise of discounting trends, high-quality factories skilled in cost control and efficiency improvement will encounter new market opportunities. What characteristics do such enterprises typically possess? What are their strategic considerations? On August 21, Mr. Xue Wenfa, Assistant to the Chairman and Deputy General Manager of the Marketing Center of Guangdong Yinxue Group, delivered a brilliant sharing session at the 3rd China FMCG Hard Discount Conference, themed 'In the Era of Channel Convergence and Shrinking Volume, How Can Suppliers Break Through the Dilemma of Choice?' The company has an annual turnover of 5 billion yuan and is a veritable factory/brand with manufacturing capabilities.
薛文发Unsweetened Tea Faces a 'Bloody Battle'
The booming unsweetened tea segment cannot be monopolized by Oriental Leaf alone. Since the first half of this year, unsweetened tea products have proliferated, with sizes ranging from small to large and prices dropping ever lower. No beverage subcategory has ever been this lively. In a very short time, issues such as product homogenization and accelerated iteration cycles have already surfaced in the unsweetened tea industry. When a category's room for innovation is exhausted, all parties on both the offensive and defensive sides of the market will face a brutal 'bloody battle.' The 'worst-tasting beverage' is now a hit. Nongfu Spring (09633.HK) has once again tasted the sweetness of tea. In the first half of this year, the company's packaged drinking water business took a sharp downturn, while unsweetened tea became the backbone driving growth.
陈晓京Understanding the Consumer Journey: The Starting Point of All Brand Marketing | Creating Incremental Growth
The starting point of all marketing and brand building is to think back to consumer behavior patterns, so we can understand how brand marketing actually works. When we start marketing, we first focus on the consumer's purchase decision process, which is the behavioral chain of 'information search - comparison evaluation - purchase action - sharing and diffusion', to find user touchpoints and influence their purchase behavior. Consumers buy because they have needs. Human needs come from the overlay of desires and life scenarios, which are based on a person's self-concept and lifestyle.
空手Creating Increment | What Exactly Is the 'Scenario' That Marketers Always Talk About?
The term 'scenario' has been a hot concept for over a decade and is widely used. In the context of internet marketing, channels, e-commerce, stores, and other transaction venues are scenarios; payment is a payment scenario; looking at phones and browsing platforms are media consumption scenarios; specific tasks in enterprise marketing such as new product launches, promotions, and brand building are marketing scenarios. In short, everything in marketing can be called a scenario. However, the author believes that to discuss something clearly and accurately, one must start with a clear definition of the concept. The author defines scenario as: under specific spatiotemporal accompanying conditions, a specific task that appears in a consumer's life, which requires purchasing a brand to complete, thus generating specific needs and consumption behaviors. In short, scenario equals spatiotemporal conditions plus task resolution.
空手Instant Noodles Not Selling? "National Instant Noodle" Jinmailang 1桶半 Sees 24% Growth Against the Trend
During a recent market survey, distributors reported that low-priced and value-added products are selling well. Despite a decline in the overall instant noodle market, Jinmailang's 1桶半 (1 and a half buckets) achieved 24% year-on-year growth in July, driven by its high cost-performance ratio and the company's full industry chain advantages.
秦淮Pioneer of Affordable NFC Orange Juice: GanNing Brand Rises Rapidly with Dual Drive of Supply Chain and Market
In recent years, due to the downward economic cycle, consumers have increasingly valued the 'quality-price ratio' of products, posing sales challenges for high-end market categories with high production costs. In this context, quality factories capable of cost control and efficiency improvement will encounter new market opportunities. The case introduced in this article—GanNing brand—started with fresh orange business. In 2022, based on insights into consumption trends, it ventured into NFC orange juice, offering products of uncompromised quality at half the industry price, striving to break the boundaries of the high-end market.
赵胜男“Seemingly Overnight, They're Everywhere”: How This Snack Hard-Discount Chain Is Sweeping Through Communities?
Snack stores are the ultimate test of consumerism. The author, despite being indifferent to luxury goods and Michelin-starred restaurants, finds themselves irresistibly drawn to the bright, clean snack stores in their hometown, where prices are in single digits. They discover that their favorite store, "Haoxianglai," is actually a rising star in the snack industry, known for its vast selection, low prices, and strategic use of IP collaborations like Ultraman to engage consumers. The article explores how Haoxianglai, backed by Wanchen Group, leverages its supply chain and scale to offer "more, closer, better, and cheaper" snacks, achieving rapid growth and becoming a leading player in the hard-discount snack market.
Vista氢商业Scenes Create Increments: Do People Group by People, or by Scene?
Segmentation is the starting point for enterprises to operate in the market. Businesses first segment the market to identify consumer differences, then select target markets with the greatest opportunities, and finally position their products. However, as people become increasingly individualized, traditional demographic segmentation is less effective. The article proposes that scenes, as hard boundaries and soft constraints, can unify diverse consumers, leading to the concept of 'people grouped by scene' (人以场分), which finds commonalities across different consumer groups in the same scene, as illustrated by cases like Jiangxiaobai and Wuling Motors.
空手2024 'Jinsha Red' IP Event Successfully Held, Innovating Development through 'Wine-Tourism Integration'
On September 7, the '2024 Guizhou Wine-Tourism Integration Development Summit Forum and Golden Fans Carnival' was held at Jinsha Distillery. The event, themed 'Jinsha Red - Wine-Tourism Integration, Moving Forward with Innovation,' attracted over 400 guests. New Distribution, as a professional FMCG media platform in China, was invited to participate throughout the 'Jinsha Red' brand IP series activities.
New DistributionOreo and Coca-Cola Cross-Border Collaboration Insights: All Products Are Worth Redoing
In the marketing circle, if asked which brand's cross-border collaboration reaches the top level, many would mention Oreo. Why Oreo? American poet Maya Angelou once said, "People will forget what you said, forget what you did, but never forget how you made them feel." Consumers buy not just the product itself, but a series of rich experiences derived from it. In the current era, brands with long-term thinking must solve life's problems while soothing people's hearts.
田静Navigating the Era of Shrinking Volume: The New Wave from Traffic to Mindshare
From August 20 to 22, the 6th China FMCG Conference, the 3rd China FMCG Hard Discount Conference, and the 3rd China FMCG Distributor Conference were successfully held in Shanghai. Over three days, 2,000 brand owners, distributors, service providers, and retailers in the FMCG industry gathered to discuss reshaping corporate capabilities and growth paths. At the main forum on August 20, Mr. Bei Nianjun, co-host of the conference, founder of Shanghai Heyin Network Technology Co., Ltd., and founder and chairman of the MPP Alliance, delivered a keynote speech titled "Navigating the Era of Shrinking Volume: The New Wave from Traffic to Mindshare," which resonated with many attendees.
贝念军