Chapter 37 1. "Warmly welcome Robust"

In 1989, an opportunity came to He Boquan, the deputy secretary of the Youth League Committee and the deputy director of the town-run pharmaceutical factory in Xiaolan Town, Zhongshan, Guangdong. The town government decided to allocate 950,000 yuan for him to start a new enterprise, what to do, how to do it, It's all up to him.He Boquan dragged his four old classmates Yang Jieqiang, Wang Guang, Li Baolei and Peng Yanfen to start their adventure in an office room of only 13 square meters.These five young people were later called "Four Dragons and One Phoenix". In the next 10 years, they will advance and retreat together, sharing weal and woe.

He Boquan and his entrepreneurial partners At that time, there was already a drink called milk yoghurt in the Chinese market, and it was the French company Danone that brought this new concept that had just become popular in Europe to China. The destined European beverage king.Danone’s active milk product needs to be fermented with live bacteria. The production process requires high requirements. It must be refrigerated during the sales period. The longest drinking period is no more than one week. The retail price is 4 to 5 yuan.These conditions are obviously not suitable for the Chinese market, which is just in its infancy.It is said that at that time Danone's sales staff in Shanghai ran all over Nanjing Road, the busiest road, and only found two beverage stores with freezers.Moreover, in Shanghai, China's largest commercial city, the bleak fate of Danone's active milk can be predicted.

He Boquan went to Hong Kong to "Lingshi Noodles". This was the experience of some enterprise directors with advanced market awareness at that time. They hung up their cameras and went to Hong Kong and foreign countries. The United States and Japan are their favorite places to go, and Hong Kong is often the first stop.He Boquan discovered a formulated milk yoghurt (also known as fruit milk) in Hong Kong. Its raw materials are milk powder, sugar, citric acid, potassium sorbate and essence. The production process is simple, the input equipment is limited, and the retail price does not exceed 1 RMB, and no need to refrigerate.

At that time, the domestic children's beverage market was almost blank, and He Boquan intuitively determined that this must be a new product worth developing. After identifying the right products, recruiting troops, and investing in equipment, He Boquan was already empty-handed.In order to open up the market as soon as possible, he found a marketing expert named Fang Shi, who had just left the famous Sun God, and started to build a beverage brand called Robust (at that time the best-selling beverage brand in Hong Kong was Watsons, named Robust's inspiration is probably related to this).He Boquan fell in love with this brand at first sight, and he owned the right to use Robust's brand by selling shares. "Two companies with one brand will be louder than one", He Boquan's thinking is very simple.

This is how the entrepreneurial career of He Boquan, a young Zhongshan youth, began.Robust milk was first sold in the Pearl River Delta, and He Boquan and his subordinates can be said to have conquered the world with nothing.They couldn't afford advertisements, and even the cost of printing 10,000 posters was astronomical for them, so they bought red paper and wrote banners in every city they went to - "Warmly welcome Robust to the market", one night Dozens of stickers are posted in a city every day. He Boquan gave this practice a very exciting name - "Red Storm Blitz".

Relying on this calf spirit, He Boquan created a new world.By 1992, the sales of Robust milk had reached 80 million yuan, and it had become famous in China. At that time, the sales of Wahaha children's nutrition solution had just exceeded 100 million yuan.At this time, He Boquan began to worry about the future of the Robust brand.What he didn't expect was that in the next 10 years, he would always be entangled with this problem as fate.He Boquan is an ambitious person. He realized the value of the brand very early, and his first decision was to "rename". This year, he went to Peking University to recruit graduates, and signed more than 200 people in one go.At the same time, he publicly "asked for a daughter's name" from the talented Peking University students.A name proposed by a female college student named Yuan Ying finally moved He Boquan: "Today".

Around 1993, with the rise of Wahaha and Sun God, the health care product market in China was fully activated. It is impossible for He Boquan, who walks the market every day, not to feel this heat wave. One night in December 1993, before going to sleep, He Boquan accidentally opened a magazine "Beyond Eight Hours" and found an article entitled "The Magical Ma Jiajun", and came across this passage: "Every night in the middle of the night , Ma Junren got up quietly, and spent a long time in the kitchen alone, cooking a pot of soup. At 6:30 in the morning, the girls came to Teacher Ma's house on time, drank the hot soup one by one, turned around and ran to the playground , tirelessly running lap after lap..." At that time, Ma Junren led a group of girls who came out of the ravine to repeatedly break the international women's long-distance running record. peak.He Boquan jumped up from the bed, and immediately dialed the manager of the Northeast Market: "Contact Ma Junren immediately, I will arrive in Shenyang in two days."

One month later, on January 19, 1994, at the China Hotel in Guangzhou, under the attention and applause of hundreds of media reporters, He Boquan solemnly handed over a large check for 10 million yuan to Ma Junren. The latter exchanged a large envelope to He Boquan.Immediately, He announced that today's group insured the secret recipe with a huge insurance sum of 200 million yuan. The mysterious envelope was packed into a dark green box, held by a burly man with a hulking back, boarded a police car with sirens blaring, and drove into the underground vault of the Guangdong Branch of the Bank of China surrounded by a group of armed police.The key to open this dark green box is in the hands of He Boquan, the president of the Guangdong Branch of the Bank of China, and the mayor of Zhongshan City. The three people need to be present at the same time to open it.

The prosperous Ma Junren, the mysterious oriental nutritional secret recipe, the scene design full of Hollywood 007 colors, the largest intellectual property transaction between an individual and a company since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and a record-setting huge insurance policy for a single item—all these concepts have been developed from the beginning to the end. It was doomed from the very beginning that this would be an extraordinary business plan.The much-anticipated newborn was named "Life Nuclear Energy" oral solution. When the national media was dazzled by this mysterious formula, He Boquan started to implement the next amazing new plan: he toured the whole country, claiming to publicly auction the general distribution rights of "life nuclear energy" in all provinces.The overwhelming news bombardment in the early stage has already boiled the market to the verge of explosion.Wherever it went, "Bionuclear" sparked a news frenzy.He Boquan returned 18 million yuan from the auction after only traveling to 6 provinces. He not only returned the formula fee paid to Ma Junren, but also had a surplus.

In this round of business operations, He Boquan's keen business intuition and generous planning ability are fully revealed. In Hangzhou, he said confidently to his subordinates: "Can any of you help me come up with a reason why 'life nuclear energy' is not so popular?" However, the market quickly gave He Boquan a question mark.Under the powerful news and advertising campaign, the distribution rate of "Life Nuclear Energy" was extremely high, and the initial sales volume was quite amazing, but since then, sales began to decline rapidly, and the repeat purchase rate was unbelievably low.It is obviously not a successful product if the sales of a product can only be driven by repeated advertisements.A very embarrassing fact is that when He Boquan spent a lot of money to buy the formula and sell the distribution rights non-stop, he never had time to ask himself the most basic question: Who is the "life nuclear energy" for?Why should consumers buy it?

The most appropriate explanation seems to be: He Boquan didn't think about this problem because he didn't think it was a problem at all——Ma Junren's achievements have proved the miraculous effect of the formula.However, the problem is that there are a few people who buy "life nuclear energy" for the purpose of becoming long-distance runners like Wang Junxia!With the headquarters at a loss, sales companies around the world began to "fabricate" the target consumer groups in their minds: postpartum weak people, middle-aged anxious people, people facing college entrance examinations, elderly fatigue people, menopausal women, etc. There are more than ten kinds, and This kind of marketing method of grabbing eyebrows and beards is obviously unable to find "real consumer groups". In fact, He Boquan has not been able to find this "core point" very well.One year later, the core function of "life nuclear energy" was determined to be: "anti-fatigue".However, as some marketers joked, "The best way for Chinese people to fight fatigue is not to take medicine or drink nutrient solution, but to sleep, because in the eyes of many people, time is not a resource worth buying with money." In the spring of 1994, He Boquan launched a "full refund for invalid" campaign in East China and South China markets in order to forcefully launch the market. A full refund is requested within one week after that.This adventurous activity brought a round of moderate sales to "Life Nuclear Energy", and what is surprising is that less than 10 candidates asked for a refund after the college entrance examination. However, no amount of genius planning can make up for the shortcomings caused by the disordered product positioning. Although He Boquan and his marketing team tried their best, "Life Nuclear Energy" has never been a popular product. Its sales never exceeded 100 million in the best year, which is undoubtedly a very disappointing performance. In 1995, CCTV's "Oriental Time and Space" suddenly exposed the "Chinese soft-shelled turtle essence incident".The report revealed that the soft-shelled turtle content in the product was so low that it could be ignored in the form of unannounced interviews. So far, the soft-shelled turtle essence market has been in a slump, and the reputation of Ma Junren, the advertising spokesperson for "Chinese soft-shelled turtle essence", has also been severely damaged.Under the overturned nest, there are eggs, and in the news bombardment full of mud and stones, the "life nuclear energy" that is inextricably linked to Ma's army is naturally hard to escape.He Boquan, who has gradually lost confidence in "life nuclear energy", fought and retreated, and gradually faded out of the health care product market. In the future, when He Boquan himself looked back on this battle, he lightly pushed the cause of the defeat to Ma Junren. He said, "Biological nuclear energy did not achieve the market effect we expected. The biggest reason is that it is too close to celebrities. A celebrity will change his image greatly due to many factors, but a company or a product needs a kind of stability. Being too closely connected with a celebrity is not good for the company and the product.” Such prevarication, in our view It is debatable: He Boquan did not objectively reflect on himself. In any marketing process, the interaction between celebrities and brands is actually in the hands of the company. But when it rises to a certain height, the rocket needs to be separated from the booster, and then fly in the sky with its own strength. A product that always needs to rely on celebrities to help it can only show that it has not yet formed its own quality and characteristics. From big hits to "die without a problem", "life nuclear energy" made He Boquan's popularity soar, and he has since entered the first rank of China's new generation of entrepreneurs.On the other hand, it also made him feel the potential cold current of the health care product market, which prompted him to stay away from this place of right and wrong, and finally did not get involved in the storm of irrational health care products in the future.