What is Sauce-aroma Baijiu | Why Qianpai |
GSP brand loyalty growth empowers "Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu"
to become a dark horse among sauce-aroma Baijiu OEMs
Author: Deng Fei
When it comes to sauce-aroma Baijiu, without a doubt everyone thinks of Maotai Town, a place kissed by God. Here there is the water of the generous Chishui River, a subtropical humid and mild climate most suitable for sauce-aroma Baijiu fermentation, and skilled brewing craftsmen and master blenders. The small Maotai Town contains a whole world. In an area of less than 200 square kilometers, there are over 5000 distilleries of various sizes, creating a gross output value of hundreds of billions. These businesses include the famous Moutai and Guotai, as well as unknown distilleries of all sizes, and even more businesspeople from across the country who want to enter the world of sauce-aroma Baijiu and compete in the market.
The protagonist of today's story is Old Song, who has been dealing with sauce-aroma Baijiu in Maotai Town since he was 17 years old and is now in his fifties, known as the Song Jiang of the sauce-aroma Baijiu world. Old Song's current identity is the head of brand incubation at Zunyi Liquor Group and also the founder and CEO of Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu. He has his own unique insights into the sauce-aroma Baijiu business. If you meet him, he can talk with you for half a day.
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PART 01
The Origin of the "Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu" Brand
"The existing small and medium-sized distilleries in Maotai Town are too traditional in their thinking, with large style differences and inconsistent standards. We need to break conventions, unify the style, and use internet thinking to make liquor."
—From the sayings of Old Song
Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu had its embryonic form as early as 2018. At that time, Old Song already saw the "problems" in the sauce-aroma Baijiu industry of Maotai Town.
Problem One: OEM distilleries are a mixed bag
Supply-demand matching is hard to maintain
Large distilleries with their own facilities make their own brands, while small ones only do traditional OEM. When big clients grow, they abandon the distillery; small clients feel that small distilleries provide insufficient service or even deceive them, and worry about cooperating with small distilleries. The OEM distilleries in Maotai Town lack outstanding quality and cost-performance, and their competitive advantages are not obvious. Some only handle sales without production, some only handle production without sales, and in the end, the OEM distillery brands are not doing well. Workshop-style distilleries are chaotic, with no planning, no brand, and no service; sales rely only on networking. After capital entered, some market-scale practices were seen, business models became more novel, and some brands did quite well, earning respect.
Problem Two: Maotai Town has fermentation pits but lacks standards
Sauce-aroma Baijiu quality is uneven
What Maotai Town has in abundance is fermentation pits, but each plays its own game. There is plenty of liquor, but there is no unified standard. Everyone claims their product tastes like Moutai, and everyone claims they supply Moutai.
We often encounter that the same batch of liquor from the same distillery can have very different flavors, and even worse, there are alcohol-blended liquors, non-Kunsha liquors, etc. Opportunism cannot build a good distillery; cutting corners, passing off inferior goods as superior, and shortchanging happen from time to time.
Old Song, who has been deeply involved in the sauce-aroma Baijiu business for many years, saw the opportunity here. First, sustained and stable sauce-aroma Baijiu quality is an important guarantee for sustainable development; second, a good brand reputation is the guarantee for a steady stream of customers; third, only with effective new marketing methods and new thinking can one possibly get out of the predicament and look to a larger market space.
Therefore, Old Song brought in talent, invested tens of millions in a blending laboratory and a sauce-aroma Baijiu testing center, hired national-level brewing masters, and assembled a team of doctoral students in sauce-aroma Baijiu to establish a data center, making sauce-aroma Baijiu a favored, sustainable, high-quality, and uniquely flavored personalized choice for customers. At the same time, he established a marketing center in Shanghai, upgraded the marketing team with new strength, armed himself with digital marketing methods, and strived to make a cup of high-quality sauce-aroma Baijiu that customers love and that carries sentiment.
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PART 02
The Brand Challenge of "Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu"
Old Song's keen judgment of the industry and his pursuit of the cause are a blessing for the sauce-aroma Baijiu industry. Entrepreneurs must have both idealism and realistic pragmatism, balancing emotion and reason. Dreams are the driving force of entrepreneurs—what if they come true? But we also often say that ideals are full, while reality is always skinny. In fact, there are many specific challenges before Old Song.
Rebuilding Brand Salience
From a brand perspective, facing an OEM market where customers have lost confidence in sauce-aroma Baijiu, it is not easy to make customers regain confidence. First, we must figure out what the most important differentiated value of the Qianpai brand is. Once the outstanding brand value is found, we still need systematic products, services, content, etc., to create a good reputation. There are so many distilleries of various sizes in Maotai Town serving a national market worth hundreds of billions. There are no fewer than 20 OEM brands that can be named. Some distilleries have impressive facades, some have production capacity, and some have customers. How can we stand out in this red ocean and take an unusual path to immediate success? What are our advantages, and what are their disadvantages?
Perception of High-Quality Products
From a market perspective, we see the different needs of clients of all sizes. In some regions, the consumption of Baijiu is still large, especially for the sauce-aroma flavor. Therefore, although the market's trust in "Maotai Town" has generally declined, sauce-aroma Baijiu is still sought after. Everyone hopes for stable, high-quality, and cost-effective sauce-aroma Baijiu OEM manufacturers and OEM brands that meet market interests. Some clients need closed-loop services from liquor selection to brand design, product packaging, and marketing services. To meet the needs of different market levels, we must unravel the complexities, proceed from easy to difficult, and ensure that our products and services are concretely perceived at every touchpoint with customers, rather than relying solely on salespeople's talk. Therefore, the perception of high-quality products and the perception of service processes are a dual challenge that seems easy but is actually difficult.
Reviving Strategic Determination
Beyond the brand strategy report, strategic determination is an even more arduous task for brand development. From our own perspective, strategic determination is about turning "the boasts we once made" into reality and persisting step by step. In the process of reviving strategic determination, we need to think about the following questions: How can the thinking of the original team be turned around? How can the interests of the new and old teams be balanced? And how can the original company structure empower the new brand strategy?
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PART 03
The Rebirth of the "Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu" Brand
Reshaping Brand Growth
After analyzing and sorting through a large amount of information from the market, competitors, and our own resources, we found that the core problem Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu needs to solve now is how to find a key, while conforming to the market, to unlock the indescribable lock in customers' hearts—their love-hate relationship with "Maotai Town." Then, combining Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu's resource advantages and several major future layouts, we return the brand to the origin of providing high-quality, customizable sauce-aroma Baijiu. Based on extensive preliminary research and later verification, we found six words for Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu: "Traceable, Master-brewed."
At the same time, we concretely interpret "Traceable, Master-brewed," elaborating on these six words, and use "Traceable, Master-brewed" to guide Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu in further designing high-quality liquor products and professional, personalized services, fully enabling customers to experience the value of "Traceable, Master-brewed."
Product Visualization Reengineering
Intuitive product visualization is an important part of brand reshaping. Scientifically quantify the flavor of the liquor body visually. In this way, on one hand, customers can perceive the liquor body more intuitively, which is also a reference for the future promotion and design of their own sauce-aroma Baijiu brands; on the other hand, it can establish standards for expressing sauce-aroma Baijiu aromas in the industry. In general consumer perception, the liquor body of sauce-aroma Baijiu seems to have only "Moutai aroma." In fact, that is not the case. If you taste carefully, you can also smell osmanthus fragrance, honey fragrance, etc. Designing a three-dimensional radar chart for tasting sauce-aroma Baijiu can define the state and preferences of a sauce-aroma Baijiu from the five senses, re-establishing the market's cognitive salience of sauce-aroma Baijiu, thereby establishing new market discourse power for the Qianpai sauce-aroma brand in the OEM industry.
In addition to product visualization reengineering, the experience of the sales service process has also been fully upgraded.
Brand growth is not achieved overnight. GSP Innovation Consulting empowers Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu through the three focuses of brand loyalty growth: growth in brand salience, business growth, and capability growth.
In the post-pandemic era that others see as sluggish, Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu returns to the essence of business, seizes industry opportunities, holds high the banner of quality, directly attacks industry pain points, stands out, and adds a brilliant stroke to Maotai Town, this important place for sauce-aroma Baijiu.
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Before writing, I met Old Song again and talked with him for 4 hours. To further consolidate the brand reshaping path of Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu, we determined four unified new directions (common expectations), and together we look forward to the sauce-aroma Baijiu market's long-term prosperity. We also look forward to Old Song's Qianpai Sauce-aroma Baijiu brand, like a fine horse, "breaking out" of the mixed bag of sauce-aroma Baijiu OEMs.
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Editor | San
Images | Clay
Design | Tom