"Every company has its own festival. The significance of jar sealing for sales will be reduced in the future. We want to turn the jar sealing ceremony into a festival for dealers and consumers and a festival of upstream and downstream sides as well as 'Zhenjiu fans’.” said by Wu Xiangdong.

On June 9, the grand jar sealing ceremony 2018 of Zhenjiu in the theme of “Treasured Jiang Flavor and Rare Jar Sealing” was held in Zhenjiu distillery in Zunyi and attended by Wu Xiangdong, Chairman of the Group, Li Jianchu and Tang Jun, Vice President of the Group, Hu Bo, General Manager of Zhenjiu Company, nationwide dealers and partners, suppliers and media personnel, totaling more than 1000 people.

Near the Dragon Boat Festival, the Jiang-flavor liquor ushered in the golden season of brewing. Firstly, this is the best time for making Jiang-flavor yeasts; secondly, this is the liquor brewing and production period of the best third, fourth and fifth rounds of liquor brewing among the seven times in a year. The holding of the jar sealing ceremony of Zhenjiu at this time indicated its traditional brewing concepts of respecting heaven and earth and feeling grateful for all things.

On the ceremony, Zhenjiu launched 500 jars sealed in 500kg (RMB 188,000/jar) and 2000 jars sealed in 25kg (RMB 12,000/jar) of the year 2018, which were all subscribed and paid.

Under the upgrade of consumption, the Jiang-flavor liquor ushered in its development period. Hu Bo, General Manager of Zhenjiu, revealed that as of May this year, the overall sales volume of Zhenjiu increased by 113% on a year-on-year basis, among which the sales volume of “Zhenjiu? Zhen 15”, the core product, had a year-on-year growth of 346%. Behind the rapid performance growth, what has been done by Zhenjiu that deserves our attention?
 

By Investing RMB 1.5 Billion in 9 Years, Wu Xiangdong Determined Traditional Jiang Flavor Process with Yeast for Zhenjiu

“The quality of Zhenjiu is really good. It can be said that in addition to Maotai, Zhenjiu can rank the first among Jiang-flavor liquors.” Boss with surname of Li, the owner of Guilin Tailai Liquor and its dealers and partners shared their opinions of Zhenjiu.

In fact, the reason why Zhenjiu gets such a high evaluation from the people who knows liquor comes from many factors. First of all, Zunyi, where Zhenjiu is located, has a “Zunyi microclimate”, i.e. it rains almost every night in June, July and August, hottest time of every year. Raining causes the temperature here to drop and this kind of temperature and humidity are very beneficial to growth and reproduction of microorganisms for brewing.

Wu Xiangdong said that Zunyi is an important production area of spirits worldwide. In such a geographical position, Zhenjiu sticks to the traditional process of one cycle a year, twice feeding, making yeast during the Dragon Boat Festival, discharging sorghum during the Double Ninth Festival, nine times of stewing, eight times of fermentation, seven times of liquor distillation and long-time collection. The birth of a bottle of Zhenjiu, from its brewing to delivery for sale, has to go through for at least five years.

Since the acquisition of Zhenjiu in 2009, Wu Xiangdong has invested RMB 1.5 billion in nine years to improve and improve and enhance the quality of Zhenjiu.

Jiang-flavor liquors are very difficult to make. On one hand, the production of Jiang-flavor liquors has relatively high uncertainty. Mr. Ji Keliang once said in his memoir that before 1979, the production of Maotai was not up to the standard in almost 50% of the years and sometimes not a drop of liquor could be distilled in the second round. On the other hand, the environmental factor is also a reason. For example, if it gets hot earlier in this year than previous years, but the brewers fail to take any measures, then production of this year will be limited and besides, the process flow cannot be the same as that of the same period in the last year, which causes great uncertainty to the traditional manual brewing and invisibly increases the cost of brewing Zhenjiu.

In Face of Rising Jiang-flavor Development, Scare Jiang Flavor Creates a Differentiated Brand Image of Zhenjiu

“According to Lei Jun, Jiang-flavor liquor is now on the rise, and even pigs can fly in the wind. Not to mention we have a good brand, a good team, good product quality, together with unique and elegant taste. It’s natural to fly up.", said by Wu Xiangdong.

The consumption upgrade has been promoting the rapid development of Jiang-flavor liquor. Obviously, Zhenjiu does not just want to go with the wind. In addition to adhering to the traditional process, Zhenjiu has began to create a scarce, high-quality Jiang-flavor liquor brand, which is dependent on the arrival of the new consumption era.

For the new era of consumption, Hu Bo believes by analysis that the most important is the emergence of a great number of new luxury populations. Different from the old luxury populations who “buy expensive foods instead of the right ones only for the sake of vanity”, the new luxury populations pursue a concept of high-quality, personalized and healthy consumption. This can be drawn from the continuous decline of traditional luxury brands such as LV in the Chinese market in recent years. In contrast to the decline of traditional luxury brands, a large number of new luxury brands with “high quality and relatively low price” have appeared and been commercially accepted.

To this end, Zhenjiu launched a product group centered on “Zhenjiu?Zhen 15” in 2016 and occupied the price range from RMB 300 to RMB 600 to create a brand image of scarce Jiang-flavor liquor next to the high-end. The so-called scarcity is not just saying. Wu Xiangdong said that the current production of high-quality Jiang-flavor liquor is 3,000 tons, which will be expanded by 1,000 tons in the next year, by another 1,000 tons in the year after next and so on based on good market conditions. In other words, the sales limit of Zhenjiu in the coming 5 years is 8,000 tons. However, the current figure is less than 3,000 tons at most because a part of aged liquor has to be reserved to brew flavored liquors. 

Two Major Empowerment Measures, Partnership + Special Training Camp, Improve the Channel Network of Zhenjiu

A salesman of Zhenjiu shared a case on the scene, saying that a partner in Jinan especially regretted not to “enclose” the market in the first time with Zhenjiu and thus could not be a partner for the complete region.

In fact, since the launch of the “Partnership” system in October 2016, the market of Zhenjiu in other provinces has witnessed overall growth from 2017, especially in Henan, Shandong and Hunan, where the performances have seen linear growth. The partnership model turns the previous regular business relationship to a cooperative relationship and increases the intensity of input to partners. In this model, Zhenjiu insists on placing partnership achievements before own achievements, thus reducing the rivalry of interests and jointly operating markets with partners.

Zhenjiu will only develop few but sophisticated terminal partners to avoid oversupply and consequent excessive competition at low profits. At the meeting, upon the news that “Zhenjiu?Zhen 30” would recruit 50 franchised dealers nationwide was released, quite a few qualified potential partners and agencies were attracted right away for negotiation and the signing ceremony with the first batch franchised dealers was carried out.

Hu Bo said that Zhenjiu regards altruism and achievements of others as the enterprise purposes. For this reason, Zhenjiu even launched a special training camp to empower partners and improve their operation capabilities. New retail experience venues of Zhenjiu brand were launched nationwide in the aim of sales transformation and marketing innovation under the environment of new tendency and providing partners with diversified ways to earn high premiums.

Wu Xiangdong said that Zhenjiu will develop a three-in-one customer system of “business community, destiny community and wealth community”, so that Zhenjiu and its partners can form mutually beneficial relations.

Compared with the sales of RMB 100 million on site, Zhenjiu attaches greater importance to the successful building of a belief, i.e. to make its employees and partners believe that the future of Zhenjiu will be better. This can be seen in the tasting parties. Actually, a total of 11,000 tasting parties have been conducted outside Guizhou Province from October 2016 to date. On every tasting party, customers cheered up for Zhenjiu. It is conceivable that the collection of beliefs will promote better development of Zhenjiu.