** Superstar Journal.
Edit |Three-Body Problem.
He is known as the "Beverage King" and has built a leading beverage enterprise in China in the past 33 years; It has more than 15 branches and 30,000 employees, but the company only has a chairman and a general manager, and he is the only one. In 2019, at the age of 74, he once again stood at the forefront of innovation and deeply cultivated the ...... of industrial digitalizationHe is Zong Qinghou, chairman of Wahaha Group.
In his speech as the "Top Ten Economic Figures of the Year in 2019", Zong Qinghou said that it should be said that there are difficulties in doing everything, and if there are difficulties, you need to overcome them, otherwise what do you want to do? The results are achieved by constantly overcoming difficulties. This may be the reason why Zong Qinghou and Wahaha have been able to break through the encirclement and stand proudly in the business world.
Late start-up, timely success
In 1945, Zong Qinghou was born in Suqian, Jiangsu, and moved back to his ancestral hometown of Hangzhou with his parents at the age of 4. There are 5 brothers and sisters in the family, and they are relatively poor.
At the age of 17, Zong Qinghou left Hangzhou and went to Zhoushan Mamu Farm and Shaoxing Tea Farm, "where we dug ditches, repaired sea ponds, and did heavy physical work." "Fifteen years later, when Zong Qinghou returned to Hangzhou, he was already a 33-year-old middle-aged man, what else could he do? Eventually, he replaced his mother and became a worker in the school-run factory.
In 1987, the spring breeze of reform and opening up swept China, and 42-year-old Zong Qinghou resolutely decided to start a business. He borrowed 140,000 yuan and contracted with two teachers to contract the school-run enterprise distribution department in Shangcheng District, Hangzhou, which was losing money continuously. The following year, it was renamed Wahaha Food Factory.
At the beginning, he only did consignment sales, wearing a straw hat and pedaling a flatbed truck every day, selling textbooks, selling popsicles, and stationery, rain or shine. But during the delivery process, Zong Qinghou found that many children had problems with loss of appetite and malnutrition, and felt that this was an opportunity. In 1988, Wahaha Oral Liquid, the first nutrient solution specially designed for children in China, was launched, setting a precedent in the industry. But it's not enough to have a product, you have to be able to sell it.
At that time, few people were advertising conscious. Zong Qinghou went to the local TV station in Hangzhou to inquire about the price, and asked for 210,000 yuan as soon as he opened his mouth. Although I only have 100,000 yuan in my hand, I have to borrow money! The classic advertising slogan "After drinking Wahaha, eating is fragrant" quickly spread all over the streets and alleys.
In the first month, Wahaha sold 150,000 bottles. In just a few months, Wahaha's sales reached 4.88 million yuan. Relying on the path of "advertising bombardment - recruiting local ** merchants - comprehensive distribution", Wahaha has created countless sales miracles.
1987 was the beginning of the first years of China's health care products industry.
During this period, in 1991, Zong Qinghou began the first expansion of Wahaha, and Wahaha, which was in short supply, merged the state-owned Hangzhou canning factory, which was dozens of times larger than itself, and established Wahaha Group, which set a precedent of "small fish eating big fish" in the country. However, when faced with the choice of direction, Zong Qinghou relied on intuition to choose the children's fruit milk market. And just three or four years later, the health care product industry, which was based on advertising, collapsed.
When Wahaha fruit milk came out, Zong Qinghou made a big gift in Hangzhou, which was the only large-scale scene in China at that time, and consumers flocked to it. In this regard, a reporter from the Associated Press wrote with emotion: "Today, in socialist China, entrepreneurs who ponder consumer psychology and know how to market sales have finally appeared. ”
Subsequently, Wahaha Children's Nutrition Solution, Wahaha Pure Water, Wahaha Nutrition Express, and Shuang Crooked were listed one after another. And behind almost every single item is a huge red ocean.
According to Zong Qinghou, during the peak sales period of Nutrition Express, 7.5 billion bottles were sold in a year, with an average of 5 bottles per Chinese. The annual sales of the two products of Nutrition Express + Shuang Crooked can reach more than 30 billion at most, successfully creating a domestic "beverage empire".
"Joint sales body" system
Create "Extreme Control".
With selling drinks, in 2013, Zong Qinghou was named the richest man on the Forbes Chinese Rich List with a net worth of 11.6 billion US dollars, and in the same year, Wahaha also set a record of 78.3 billion yuan in revenue. This was unbelievable at the time.
But Zong Qinghou's theory seems to be very simple: the essence of marketing is to solve the problem of "who buys and who sells". "Who will buy" is to find out the real needs of consumers, which Wahaha already has the core competitiveness; "Who will sell" refers to how quickly the product is developed and pushed to the consumer through the sales channel. In this regard, Zong Qinghou believes that this is due to Wahaha's "joint sales" system.
In 1994, most of China's business forms were to ship first and settle later, resulting in many dealers defaulting on payments, bad debts, triangular debts and other problems.
To this end, Zong Qinghou proposed a margin system plan that made all dealers dumbfounded: dealers must pay in advance to get the goods, Wahaha pays interest first, and Wahaha returns the mortgage money after the sale, and withdraws rebates to dealers. This has no precedent in the country.
Since then, Zong Qinghou has started one of his most important layouts in Wahaha Group: the "joint sales body" marketing model. In this model, Wahaha's first-level distributors pay a deposit to Wahaha to pick up the goods, and act as a logistics provider, responsible for warehousing, capital and delivery to the terminal, etc., while managing the second-level wholesalers in each region. Wahaha's provincial branches send people to help dealers manage business such as distribution, tally and advertising. In this way, a sales community with "common goals and interests" is formed.
The joint sales system has laid a huge marketing network for Wahaha Group. Wahaha's new products can be paved from a small town in Northeast China to a small fishing village in Hainan in less than a week.
From "very ridiculous" to very cola
Build a national brand
In 1996, in order to further form a large-scale operation, Wahaha Group cooperated with Danone, a Fortune Global 500 company with annual sales of 13 billion euros, to form a joint venture.
However, unlike many joint ventures at that time, which were keen to use the banner of "foreign" brands when launching new products, at the beginning of the cooperation with Danone, Zong Qinghou insisted on two "musts": we must hit our brand, and we must fully manage it. And every time Zong Qinghou goes to Danone in Paris, France to hold a high-level board meeting, a five-star red flag will be raised in front of the company's headquarters.
When Zong Qinghou made the decision to go public in 1997, Danone did not support it, because at that time Coca-Cola and Pepsi had crushed almost all the local cola brands in China. So much so that after Zong Qinghou made this decision, there was a comment from the outside world: "Very cola, very ridiculous." ”
Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have crushed the fight back of almost all of China's homegrown cola brands. So much so that after Zong Qinghou made this decision, there was a comment from the outside world: "Very cola, very ridiculous." ”
In the following seven or eight months, Zong Qinghou personally implemented it, and participated in the formulation, design, and advertising one by one. He hopes to package Very Coke as a Coke for Chinese and become a symbol of the happy life of ordinary people.
In 2001, the extraordinary series squeezed into the top three with production and sales of 620,000 tons (Coca-Cola 1.3 million tons, Pepsi 900,000 tons), and the competition between the two heroes has officially become a three-point world. In the face of cash profits, there is no longer a "ridiculous" statement.
On April 28, 2004, when the first batch of Very Coke landed in the U.S. domestic market, it even attracted great attention from American scholars, and Harvard University decided to include Wahaha's case in the MBA teaching plan of Harvard Business School.
At the time of the launch of Very Coke, Wahaha played the slogan of 'Chinese people's own Coke', "Zong Qinghou said that in the future, Wahaha will continue to prove that Chinese national enterprises are not inferior to multinational giants."
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