The national tide has returned and killed all sides.
In recent years, more and more Chinese consumers, especially young people, have placed higher expectations on domestic brands and have given more support.
"Bee Flower" shampoo, "Lotus" monosodium glutamate, "Vitality 28" laundry detergent and other old domestic products have finally ushered in the wealth of the sky.
At the same time, the golden monkey toffee is also being mentioned, when it sold 2 billion annually, a US company bought it at a price of 2.7 billion, and after tossing for 3 years, it was bought back at a price of 270 million.
What's the story behind this, and where will the golden monkey toffee go?
Transformation, revitalization!
In 2008, the market at that time belonged to the narrow road where the brave wins, and the advertising slogan of "three golden monkey toffee is a cup of good milk" still makes the "post-80s" and "post-90s" memorable.
In the candy tray and in the pockets of children's clothes, the classic golden monkey toffee is indispensable.
With its "assured milk source", it caters to the public and the market, and has reached a sales miracle of more than 20 million in the first year.
Later, Golden Monkey Milk Candy won the pinnacle of the brand in one fell swoop, with annual sales reaching 2 billion yuan.
I thought this was just the beginning of the golden monkey toffee's "domination" of the candy industry, but what I didn't expect was that this was the beginning of its slow fading out of the historical stage.
A few years later, Golden Monkey Milk Candy was sold to the American Hershey Group for 2.6 billion by its founder Zhao Qisan.
Everyone didn't understand what was going on, but in fact, Zhao Qisan had his own troubles.
The reason why Zhao Qisan founded the candy company was because the original company couldn't go on anymore and had to make a transformation.
In 1979, in Shenqiu County, Henan Province, Zhao Qisan, who was 31 years old at the time, became the new director of the township-run electrical appliance factory.
The young and promising are obviously not very appropriate at this time, because Zhao Qisan was originally just an ordinary worker, and he took over this factory purely because he was in danger, and the electrical appliance factory was on the verge of bankruptcy and was burdened with a huge debt of 1.22 million yuan.
More than 30 employees looked at the newly appointed factory director Zhao Qisan, not knowing what the fate of this family-raising factory would be.
1.22 million is not a small amount today, let alone in the 70s of the last century. Zhao Qisan was burdened with the hopes of the employees of the whole factory, and he had to find a way to make the factory "live".
He tossed and turned, researching the reasons why the electrical factory was on the verge of bankruptcy, and soon discovered the problem.
In the 70s, the people's living standards were far from being able to buy electrical appliances at will, and electrical appliances at that time could be said to be "luxury" for ordinary people.
Without consumer groups, the efficiency of electrical appliance factories will naturally not be much better. Thinking of this, Zhao Qisan found the source of the problem and also thought of a solution to the problem, that is, transformation.
After many investigations, Zhao Qisan decided to transform the original electrical factory into a food factory. As the saying goes, "food is the sky", electrical appliances are luxuries, but food is a necessity.
Just do it, a food factory called "Shenqiu County Food General Factory" has sprung up. At the beginning, everything was not so smooth, financial problems, food master problems, equipment problems, etc., worried Zhao Qisan, but there are always more ways than difficulties.
The raw material of the food is wheat, and the wheat is made up by the employee's family, Zhao Qisan has mixed tastes in his heart, he borrowed 10,000 yuan ruthlessly, invited a few pastry chefs from the south, and made some popular pastries.
Squatting on the dock, sleeping at the station, and selling along the street, the hard days slowly passed.
After earning the first pot of gold, Zhao Qisan knew that the food industry market prospect is broad, and in the future, the income of his food factory has increased year by year, and he has continuously launched popular products, such as beef jerky, canned food and other products sold to many first-tier cities.
For decades, under the painstaking operation of Zhao Qisan, the market value of Shenqiu County Food Factory has reached tens of millions of yuan.
In 1991, with the improvement of people's living standards, candy is no longer a good thing that can only be eaten during the New Year's holidays, but has become a daily consumer product for adults and children.
Zhao Qisan saw the market, and in the following year, he bought the new pillow toffee technology of the Shanghai Food Research Institute and founded the "Golden Monkey".
Golden snub-nosed monkey toffee "dilemma"
In 1992, the Year of the Monkey in the lunar calendar, the Golden Monkey Milk Candy founded by Zhao Qisan catered to the consumer market of that year.
People want to celebrate Geely's choice of this brand, and the Golden Monkey Milk Candy is as real as advertised, with a strong milk flavor, and in this way, the Golden Monkey Milk Candy quickly stood out among the candy brands and jumped to the front row.
Zhao Qisan selected milk sources in Henan and Inner Mongolia. In 2008, the melamine incident broke out, and the Chinese people's awareness of food safety rose to a higher level.
A large number of toffee brands have been removed from the shelves in the strict investigation and crackdown, and the golden monkey toffee has steadily earned a wave of "iron fans" by virtue of its assured milk source, and is known as "conscience domestic products".
thought that this was the awakening of the golden monkey toffee, but after this year, the golden monkey toffee gradually faded out of the public eye.
The reason for this is just the problem that most of the current domestic brands have, that is, the lack of innovation.
Judging from the history of Golden Monkey Milk Candy, Zhao Qisan has been following the pace of the market from the beginning, imitating the popular products on the market, rather than jumping out and doing brand and product innovation first.
At that time, cylindrical milk candy was popular on the market, so make cylindrical milk candy, and a certain brand of gummies was very popular with consumers, so we also made the same type of gummies.
However, the consumer market has such a Xi, which brand launches a new product first, it has priority to enjoy the right to be chosen by consumers, and other brands follow suit, not as good as the original original brand.
In those years, when copyright awareness was not very good, it became the norm for many brands to follow the trend and emulate the experience of successful brands, with different brands making similar products and consumers buying them according to their personal preferences.
However, with the awakening of everyone's brand awareness and the strengthening of copyright awareness, it is difficult for "copycat" products to have a place, and the usual "following the trend" state of the market has changed dramatically.
Because of this trend, brands such as Golden Monkey Milk Candy have also ushered in a lot of negative news and even lawsuits.
Zhao Qisan is already powerless, in the past, the employees could revitalize the factory by collecting wheat to make pastries, and they could make a fortune, no matter how difficult it was, they could survive.
But now, the Golden Monkey brand is invisibly attached to the products launched by the same type of brands on the market, and it does not have its own brand soul.
Since then, the sales of Golden Monkey have never been able to make a breakthrough, the market competition has become more and more fierce, and the brand has not been able to create a new world.
In 2014, the disheartened Zhao Qisan watched his once extremely proud "child" fall out of the top ten in the candy industry and failed to go public.
The fate of Golden Monkey Milk Candy was settled when the United States Hershey Group threw out the intention to buy it.
Hershey's Town
The once well-known domestic toffee eventually fell into the pockets of foreign companies, and many consumers felt very uncomfortable.
But the matter did not end here, not long after the American Hershey Group took the Golden Monkey brand under its command, it found that this deep-rooted Chinese brand was not compatible with the classic American management model.
On the one hand, the golden monkey is a native Chinese brand, and the internal management of the brand is intricate, which is very different from the management style of American companies, and it is difficult to integrate internally.
On the other hand, since the Golden Monkey brand was acquired by a foreign company, many consumers have not bought it.
In the past, it was a domestic brand, carrying the memories of consumers, and it was still relatively popular in third- and fourth-tier cities.
The American Hershey Group also took a fancy to this, and they wanted to enter the Chinese candy market through the Golden Monkey brand, but they did not achieve the desired effect.
Three years later, the American Hershey Group sold the golden monkey to Henan Yuxiang Food Co., Ltd. for 270 million, and the golden monkey brand has since returned to the embrace of the motherland.
But the glory of the past is gone, and it is difficult to regain it now.
Domestic products are out of the encirclement
Looking back at the development and decline of Golden Monkey Milk Candy, it actually reflects the situation and difficulties faced by many domestic brands.
When the domestic brand was first founded, it must be full of ambition and have the ambition to get ahead, hoping to make products that the Chinese people like and are suitable for, and then go abroad and go to the world.
Often, such hopes will encounter a bottleneck in the first and second stages.
The creation and development of a brand is inseparable from its strong spiritual core, which is the soul of the brand given to the brand by the founder and team.
Where does the soul of the brand come from? It is probably the continuous pursuit of higher quality, the continuous updating and strengthening of sales methods, the continuous innovation of more cutting-edge product categories, and the continuous extraction of the essence to remove the dross, and update and iterate.
Some time ago, an eyebrow pencil of 79 yuan was hotly searched on the shelf, and under the continuous ridicule of netizens, the popularity remained high.
The domestic brand "Bee Flower" took the right time to "enter the harvest", launched several sets of 79 yuan product packages overnight, "picked up" hundreds of thousands of fans, and the live broadcast room once sold out the product, and netizens affectionately called Bee Flower "Huahua".
The "post-90s" hairconditioner brand that has been used since childhood suddenly became a hot search, and many people were pleasantly surprised and said that they wanted to make a show.
While Bee Flower is picking up fans and bringing goods on the front line of "eating melons", many domestic brands have also joined in.
The anchor in the live broadcast room opened the microphone even more passionately: "How many things can I buy with 79 yuan?" "I can't make up a huge package of 79 yuan even if I put all the products together!"
Later, the live broadcast rooms of many domestic brands began to engage in linkage and cooperate to make money together.
Many netizens can find that Bee Flower's approach is actually to bring the "routine" of successfully getting out of the circle to other domestic brands in difficult situations and pull brother brands.
Including the linkage of other domestic brands that followed, they were all unexpected tricks in the fierce market competition.
It has to be said that this is a sight that is difficult to see in foreign markets.
Later, Bee Flower was complained by netizens that the product was a good product, but the packaging design remained unchanged for decades, which was too earthy.
As a result, the official media platform quickly released news and widely solicited the design of the new packaging, and many netizens joined in to give advice, or directly submitted the paper to participate in the selection.
In fact, this reflects why domestic brands have not been able to catch up with the forefront of the trend and gain more attention and recognition like some big brands.
Domestic brands pay more attention to quality and effect, and do not spend more time researching publicity, packaging and image endorsement, which is actually an outward extension of the core of the brand's spirit.
It is precisely because there are no "bells and whistles" that domestic brands often show the characteristics of "good quality and low price".
I hope that domestic products can break out of the encirclement with their original intentions and bring more and better products to the domestic and foreign markets, and what we can do as consumers is to give domestic brands some time and patience, and support more conscientious domestic products in the selection of the same type of products.
What other old domestic products do you know?Let's talk about it and find the memories of the past~
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