According to the official data in March 2008, Wang Laoji's sales in 2007 surpassed all other canned drinks and became the "first canned drink in China". Especially in the domestic market, Wang Laoji actually surpassed the world's first brand Coca-Cola in canned drinks, and his popularity in China is particularly symbolic. As a matter of fact, when the case of Wang Laoji was invited by Harvard Business Review, it had just been repositioned as a soda represented by Coca-Cola, and it broke through the step of 6,543.8 billion yuan in two years. At that time, Wang Laoji described the vision of "China Coca-Cola", hoping to become a model for China enterprises to build a world-class brand.
As a strategic consultant accompanying the growth of Wang Lao Ji's brand, the author believes that Wang Lao Ji's success not only benefits from his correct positioning, but also depends on his strategic course of creating positioning, that is, the strategic planning of the brand. This paper takes the case of Wang Laoji as a clue again, reproduces its brand strategy course, and explains to readers how to plan brand construction in an orderly way at the source of brand strategy, avoid all kinds of traps that make brands die out or stagnate, and carefully cultivate the growth of big brands.
Brand is created in the eyes of customers, and the meaning of brand is to represent a certain category in the eyes of customers, and then become the first choice for customers to consume a certain category. The strategic course from brand launch to initial positioning-representing a category in customers' minds-can be called the strategic origin period of the brand. This period not only gave the brand real life, but also laid the foundation for the brand's subsequent development and strategic path. Because of the careful planning of brand building in the strategic source period, Wang Laoji has effectively promoted the mutual promotion of brands and categories, achieved sustained and strong sales growth, and stimulated infinite potential.
How to determine the strategy of China enterprises
"Due to professional reasons, our practice in China is often to do" repair "work, while most enterprises have done" strategy ",which makes many plans need to be reshaped. We find that the key reason lies in "people fail to distinguish the difference between operating efficiency and strategy", which is the reason why the article What is Strategy edited by Michael Porter begins. As the most striking industrial economist in the world, Porter marveled at Japan's success in the1980s, and realized that the Japanese model relying on operational efficiency growth was coming to an end, and conducted a research on the Japanese economy together with the official economic experts of the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (see "Is Japan still competitive?" ), it is proposed that the old growth mode should be transformed into a strategic positioning mode. This conclusion was later verified by the decline of Japanese economy and adopted by many countries and enterprises. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Porter expressed his concern about China's current development model, because enterprises lacking strategic positioning are unprofitable and it is impossible to build brands. He made it clear that he is more optimistic about India, which is superior to China in strategic positioning and has established world-leading competitiveness in information technology, software, pharmaceuticals, steel and other industries. We certainly don't want Potter to be right again. However, the reality shows that China's star enterprises have fallen into huge losses, and there are indications that China is repeating the Japanese-style growth model of replacing strategy with operational efficiency. Fortunately, the 11th Five-Year Plan has clearly put forward the transformation to independent innovation and independent brand to realize the transformation of growth mode, but the worry is that enterprises still generally follow the old model in specific operations. For example, SAIC plans to invest tens of billions of yuan to build its own brand, and plans to enter the mainstream car field from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, which is almost doomed to be a difficult strategic direction, because the existing mainstream car product line has almost no positioning opportunities to establish new brands, and it is necessary to find another way to build its own brand. If it is enforced, it is likely to fall into the temporary survival of operating efficiency and low profit, and the cost will be amazing with the inevitable additional investment in the future. There are many similar examples in China, which makes people feel urgent: this is not entirely the fault of enterprises, but largely caused by knowledge asymmetry. Rereading Porter's classic papers at this time should provide enlightenment for realizing the new transformation, because the essence of strategic positioning growth is innovative economy, which is based on brand.