Moutai frequently collaborates with brands: the 400-year-old brand is also working hard to fight against aging

This article explains the marketing strategy behind Moutai's recent frequent joint events and analyzes Moutai's joint events. This article is suitable for people with marketing needs or those who are interested in Moutai marketing.

It seems like it was just yesterday that the sauce-flavored latte swept the Internet. Recently, the official announcement of Moutai and Dove appeared in the hot searches again.

The "Mao Xiaoling Liquor-filled Chocolate" jointly launched by Moutai and Dove claims that each piece contains 2% of 53% vol Kweichow Moutai liquor, and is divided into two series: classic liquor-filled chocolate and reduced sugar liquor-filled chocolate. The prices of 2 pieces are 35 yuan/box and 39 yuan/box respectively, and the prices of 12 pieces are 169 yuan/box and 179 yuan/box respectively. After the official announcement of the price, the question of "Is 35 yuan for 2 pieces of Moutai chocolate expensive?" once aroused heated discussion among netizens, but everyone's enthusiasm for buying remained unabated, and they were sold out soon after the sale started.

On the other hand, since the Luckin Coffee collaboration just happened not long ago, the topic #Moutai渣男# quickly became a hot search topic. Netizens talked about Moutai’s "渣男" behavior with great relish, and the ridicule that could be seen everywhere also added fuel to Moutai’s joint marketing.

The two consecutive collaborations have made Moutai the new "traffic code" of the Internet. However, as a traditional high-end liquor brand, frequent collaborations with fast-moving consumer goods inevitably cause people to worry: Is Moutai addicted to the traffic dividends of collaborations? Will young consumers really buy into it?

1. Joint-brand strategy: long-term operation and expansion of product matrix

In fact, the joint product is not a sudden whim, but has always been regarded by Moutai as an important means to promote the brand's youth and fashion, and has even been included in the strategic planning of products. The chairman of Moutai once said that in the future, they will develop chocolate with alcohol, alcoholic drinks, bars, soft ice and other products to establish a product matrix of different types, different prices and distinctive features.

After reviewing Moutai’s joint marketing in the past two years, it can be found that some of these products have been gradually realized.

In May last year, Moutai and Mengniu launched Moutai ice cream. By the first anniversary on May 29 this year, Moutai ice cream had sold nearly 10 million copies. Since the product was launched, Moutai has quickly laid out purchasing channels across the country. As of now, Moutai ice cream has 34 flagship stores and 43 experience stores across the country, covering 31 provinces and cities across the country. At the same time, Moutai Ice Cream Tmall flagship store, Douyin, JD.com, iMoutai and other online channels have been opened to normalize purchasing channels.

This year, Moutai ice cream is still being updated, with new flavors of ice cream and Moutai slush launched one after another. On July 29, it jointly launched 5 "small sticks" with Zhongjie 1946, breaking the retail price below 30 yuan for the first time, further enriching the Moutai ice cream product matrix.

The "Jiangxiang Latte" launched in cooperation with Luckin Coffee some time ago sold over 5.42 million cups on the first day, with sales exceeding 100 million yuan on the first day. Although people have mixed opinions about its taste, it has aroused widespread discussion and has undoubtedly won over many co-branded products that no one cares about. Luckin Coffee also stated in the restocking notice that Jiangxiang Latte will be sold for a long time as a strategic long-term single product.

September is not over yet, and Moutai has announced its second joint venture without stopping. Compared with the slightly exotic sauce-flavored latte, the liquor-filled chocolate jointly launched with Dove sounds like a less outrageous product. Taking advantage of the residual heat of the sauce-flavored latte, Moutai has gained a lot of popularity as expected. It is understood that at 15:30 on September 16, the "Mao Xiaoling Liquor-filled Chocolate" jointly launched by Moutai and Dove was sold out in seconds after it went on sale on multiple platforms. The current sales strategy is to start sales at fixed times every day from September 17 to 20.

The above series of strategic and planned marketing actions have made everyone realize that Moutai’s joint venture is not a “hit and run” move, but is being operated as a long-term product.

2. Causes of Anxiety: Market Decline and Audience Reserve

Faced with the continuous impact of joint efforts, netizens’ most intuitive feeling is: Moutai is anxious.

Moutai is not the first company to try the transformation of traditional brands into younger ones. Lao Gan Ma's co-branded sweatshirts appeared on the stage of New York Spring/Summer Fashion Week, Wufangzhai "changed career" to make movies, and White Rabbit Toffees launched lip balm and perfume... Faced with a completely different consumer environment and Generation Z consumers, traditional brands are full of "aging" anxiety, and Moutai is even more special.

From the perspective of the overall consumption environment, the liquor market is not optimistic. Relevant data from the National Bureau of Statistics and the Prospective Industry Research Institute show that China's liquor production and sales have been on a downward trend since 2016, and liquor production has dropped from a high of 13.584 million kiloliters in 2016 to 7.156 million kiloliters in 2021.

Although leading companies such as Moutai still have the advantage of high-end brands due to the further differentiation of consumer groups, the combined net profits of Moutai and Wuliangye account for about half of the total profits of the 19 listed liquor companies.

However, high-end brands also showed signs of fatigue in terms of sales, and the growth rate in the first half of 2023 was lower than that in the same period of 2022. Since the Spring Festival, the prices of first- and second-tier liquors have fallen to varying degrees or even reversed. As for Moutai, during the Spring Festival in 2023, the prices of mainstream products such as Feitian Moutai, Premium Moutai, and Moutai 15 years fell by about 200 yuan during the same period.

The data further shows that in the "2023 China Liquor Market Mid-term Research Report", most practitioners believe that the reason for the cooling of the liquor industry is related to the decline in consumer income, consumption concepts, and the overall demand in the liquor consumption market.

As the times change, consumers have become the center of the liquor market. In the future, the middle-aged and elderly population will gradually exit the market, so cultivating young people's consumption habits in advance has become a means for Moutai to prepare for a rainy day.

Consulting firm Roland Berger once released a report stating that among people under 30 in China, only 8% drink liquor, and young people prefer low-alcohol drinks such as beer, wine and pre-mixed cocktails.

On social platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, discussions about "low-alcohol wine", "fruit wine" and "cocktails" are very popular. Faced with the new trend in the wine market, many companies have flocked to it, and Moutai is no exception.

In 2019, Moutai launched Umeet Blueberry Craft Beer, targeting female consumers and trying to squeeze into the low-alcohol wine market. The product was also implanted in the popular female group drama "Ode to Joy" at the time. However, due to the low entry threshold of low-alcohol wine, many emerging low-alcohol wine brands also carry the labels of youth and Internet celebrities, which are more friendly than the high-end Moutai. The effect of Moutai's transformation to youth is not ideal.

The difficult problem of how to better approach young consumers has always been before us. Now Moutai chooses to start with joint ventures.

In a sense, doing a joint venture is like falling in love, one party must be more proactive and give more. The order of the logos can reveal a clue: Luckin is in front, and Dove is in the back. It is not difficult to speculate that Luckin, which is used to youth marketing and is proficient in the password of Internet traffic, is likely to be the one who took the initiative to find Moutai. Moutai has also tasted the sweetness of the sauce-flavored latte, so it took the initiative in the next joint venture and joined hands with Dove.

From the perspective of the market, ice cream, coffee, and chocolate are all products that suit young people's preferences. According to public data, the main target customer group for ice cream/popular popsicles is between 13 and 29 years old, and the post-90s and post-95s groups account for 30% of the online ice cream/popular popsicle consumers. Coffee has also become popular on the Internet due to Luckin's strong momentum.

With the help of the mature supply chain of its co-branded partners to customize and stabilize its products, Moutai was able to quickly enter the corresponding market. Companies like Luckin Coffee, which have rich brand assets, can naturally narrow the distance with consumers and bring icing on the cake to Moutai.

3. Transformation Effect: Lack of Innovation Makes Sustainable Development Difficult

Moutai's ambition is evident in reaching young people through joint ventures, expanding its product matrix, and realizing brand rejuvenation. However, the second joint venture after the explosion often has a reduced freshness effect, which invisibly increases the requirements for brand innovation and luck.

On the Internet, where attention is scarce, the popularity of joint ventures is often fleeting. How can we support Moutai's transformation to a younger generation and sustainable development? We can discuss this from three aspects: data, consumer interest, and product fit.

Judging from the data, the popularity of the joint venture is unlikely to last long. On September 5, the hot search topic #酱香拉铁一天售5.42万杯# reached 380 million views. Later, the official announcement of Moutai and Dove benefited from the bonus of the sauce-flavored latte, reaching 210 million views, which was obviously not as discussed as the former.

In addition, the popularity of Jiangxiang Latte peaked on September 5 and then fell sharply, with the WeChat index falling 25.51% month-on-month on September 13. If co-branded products want to operate in the long term, they need to think about how to better meet consumer needs.

From the perspective of consumer interest, too frequent collaborations can easily lead to aesthetic fatigue. From a psychological perspective, aesthetic fatigue stems from the boredom and numbness of users who have been exposed to the same type or form of things for a long time.

It can be seen that after Moutai launched ice cream and coffee, consumers' enthusiasm for Moutai's co-branding has obviously declined. Compared with paying attention to the co-branded products themselves, this time more people are focusing on the reasons behind Moutai's frequent co-branding, and even many consumers are beginning to question whether its co-branding strategy is correct or not.

After all, high-end brand co-branded fast-moving consumer goods can easily be labeled as "consuming brand value" if you are not careful. On the other hand, the joke makers who just exploded in the last wave also need to "recuperate". Without consumer interaction, it is difficult for Dove to reproduce the grand occasion of Jiangxiang Latte.

From the perspective of product fit, Moutai's choice is relatively conservative and difficult to be innovative. Ice cream, coffee, and chocolate are the products that most alcoholic beverage brands would choose when they cross over. Previously, Luzhou Laojiao had cooperated with Zhong Xue Gao to launch the "Duan Pian" ice cream, and Xiangjiao Liquor and Cha Yan Yue Se launched the "De Se" drink. Although it is a relatively exotic sauce-flavored latte, you can also see the shadow of the "coffee + alcohol" Irish coffee.

In the examples given by the chairman of Moutai, products such as chocolate with alcoholic filling, alcoholic beverages, sticks, and soft ice are all centered around the fast-moving consumer goods track, and will most likely continue to develop in the current direction in the future. No wonder netizens jokingly say that "Moutai has become an additive."

Moutai has always been regarded as a luxury brand among liquors, and its profit share shows its absolute leading position in the industry. Therefore, consumers have equated Moutai with a currency symbol, and have fixed high-end brand positioning and collection value expectations for it, which has also become a shackle for Moutai to break through and transform from its original category.

After frequent joint ventures, when Moutai, which lacks product innovation, really becomes an "additive", perhaps some people will still pay for the joint products because of the word Moutai and the trace additives, but Moutai's own brand assets are also being consumed invisibly, which can easily lead to a situation of "failure to become younger and unstable high-end status".

IV. Conclusion:

A joint venture, which is more about teasing consumers at the marketing level, may only harvest short-term topics, gimmicks and sales. Realizing cross-border category innovation based on joint ventures, truly developing new explosive products with normal demand, and creating new demand and new markets at the product + marketing system level, maybe this is the fundamental way for the elephant to turn around and for traditional giant brands to resist aging.

In this sense, the Dove collaboration is a step further than the Luckin collaboration in terms of ideas and product depth. However, there is still a lot of uncertainty as to whether it can truly become a regular hit product.

Some people think that "a 400-year-old brand is amazing if it is still alive". However, Moutai does not want to be a company that is buried in history and has been working hard for it. Perhaps in the eyes of current consumers, Moutai's frequent joint ventures are inevitably suspected of "lowering its own value", but its exploration of youth also shows that the brand is unwilling to be drowned in the torrent of the times.

When the ship turns around, it naturally needs to make long-term strategic plans. Brand marketing is also a long-term project. Let's see how Moutai adheres to long-termism in the future.

Author: Top Jun WeChat public account: TopMarketing