Have you ever bought Liang Pin Shop? Which of their snacks do you prefer to eat?

Speaking of nuts, many people will first think of the three squirrels, for the Liang Pin Shop, but there is no distinct impression, may have tasted and forgotten.

But in fact, Liang Pin Shop was established earlier than the three squirrels, but also once with the three squirrels, Bacchus flavor each occupy the snack industry, known as the three giants of the snack industry.

And now, Bacchus was acquired by Pepsi, the three squirrels gradually fell out of line, and the recent situation of Liang Pin Shop is not too good.

The former has food safety problems frequently, after the peers fierce chase, Liangpin store is now afraid of walking on thin ice.

How did Liangpinpuzi become a snack giant?

Yang Hongchun, the founder and chairman of Liangpin Puzi, was active in various societies during his college days, and had the potential to be a social cow, and later on, he was able to work like a fish in water, and his annual salary has exceeded 30w in a few years.

By chance, Yang Hongchun was awakened by the phrase "bringing the world's snacks to customers' doorsteps" and decided to make his snack business bigger and become the snack king of China.

In 2006, he opened his first store in Wuhan with borrowed funds in his pocket.

At that time, he used the "free trial" marketing activities to solicit customers, but all he got was continuous losses. Learning from his pain, he resolutely changed the design and image of the store, using cartoon characters to create the atmosphere of casual food.

Yang Hongchun upgraded Liangpin Puzi with the slogan "Let your mouth travel" and the concept of snack collection store. With good store environment design, novel slogans and diversified products, Liangpinpuzi opened up the Wuhan market and grew to 28 stores.

After more than a decade of continuous development, Liangpin Shops expanded to 2,416 stores in 2019. Yang Hongchun made a decisive choice to upgrade and move upscale. The first thing he proposed was the value proposition of "high quality, high value and high experience", which in short means inviting more popular celebrity endorsements, replacing the packaging with better-looking ones and establishing a better quality control system. And then the proposed price line, but also to highlight its high-end positioning - not to take the market customary price, continue the quality line (the price will not be low).

In 2020, Liangpinpuzi was successfully listed with the halo of "the first high-end snack stock" in China. According to the "2021 Snack Market Research Report", Liangpinpuzi has led the domestic high-end snack sales for seven consecutive years.

In the first half of 2022, at a time when peers were showing weakness, Liangpinpuzi bucked the trend of double growth, with first-half revenue of 4.895 billion yuan, up 10.72%, and net profit attributable to the mother company of 193 million yuan, up 0.67%.

Goodshop seems to have been moving along smoothly. But in fact, it is not, under the fast-growing business model of Liangpin Shop, a lot of hidden problems have been buried.

The "high-end" does not smell good?

In the physical stores, Jia Jia found a lot of snacks are more expensive, you dare to believe it? The price of a pound of duck tongue is nearly 300 yuan, confirming the eyes, this is the duck duck I can not afford to climb. And other categories, such as beef jerky, cod fish sticks and so on a catty also to reach about 200 yuan.

Worthy of the domestic high-end snack brands, the price is indeed high-end, the quality?

A while ago, "plastic was found in the mooncake" again put Liangpin Shop on the hot search. In response, Liangpin Shop responded that food safety is no small matter, and will use this as a wake-up call to keep improving.

But this is not the first time that Liangpin Shop has had quality problems; the "maggots in chicken sausage" case in 2021 was even worse. There are also thousands of complaints on the Black Cat complaint platform, many of which are about food quality issues, while a search in the Little Red Book, there are hundreds of notes trolling, a number of people have said that they have eaten foreign objects in nuts, small fish, cookies.

This makes Liangpinpuzi's "food safety is no small thing" seem like a joke, and makes the "high-end snack brand" positioning even more embarrassing.

The recurring food safety problems are closely related to Liangpinpuzi's foundry processing model. At the beginning, in order to better develop sales, Liangpinpuzi chose to lighten up and adopt the "labeling + selling" model. In short, the factory production, labeled with my brand, I will sell.

And there are a thousand kinds of products under Liangpinpuzi, which means that the foundry is also very much, Liangpinpuzi said it simply can not look over. Thus, food safety has become a major drawback for Liangpinpuzi, but this is not something that can be explained by a "weak control".

According to the financial reports of the past two years, Liangpinpuzi's investment in R&D is not high: in 2021, the investment only accounted for 0.43% of revenue, and the number of R&D staff was only 10% of the total number of people in the company; in the first half of 2022, the percentage increased, but it was not significant.

Compared to product development, Liangpin Shop is more marketing oriented. It can be said that Liangpinpuzi is to open the national market through the Internet. In the first half of this year, Liangpinpuzi spent 366 million yuan on promotional activities, exceeding the profit earned by nearly twice.

A closer look at Liangpin Puzi's spokespersons in recent years, Diligaba, Yang Zi, Zhang Zhilin, etc., are all big red flow stars, but also bought advertising space in popular variety shows such as "Flower and Youth - Camping Season" and "Lady's Law", in the flow of marketing efforts.

Not to mention the double 11 or 618 and other promotional activities, Liangpin Shop in the platform e-commerce, community e-commerce, group purchase and other channels to invest in marketing costs.

Money to buy new clothes to dress themselves, but forget that the most important quality is the substance, the cart should not be put before the horse.

Focusing on marketing at the expense of the product itself and ignoring the contradiction between marketing management and R&D investment is a huge mistake in the snack food world where the product is the core support.

In the snack food industry, the assimilation of goods is very obvious, "there are categories, no brand" has also become a common problem in the industry. The simple explanation is that you know there is hot and spicy hot, but can not name the most obvious representative of the hot and spicy brand, this category is divided by many small brands. Just like talking about melon seeds, you can think of Qiaqia; talking about snow plum, you can think of yo-yo plum, but there is no product that can make people immediately think of Liang Pin Shop.

In the e-commerce platform, there are three squirrels, Bacchus flavor, good want to kill with its fierce, product differentiation and category is not very different. For example, the good store launched "small food fairy" children's food series, three squirrels immediately also launched "small deer blue blue", Bacchus flavor launched "children's An An children", is bound to and good product Stores in the children's food track to compete.

Under such an internal volume and competing imitation, Liangpin Shop can only take the means of heavy marketing to spell an out, which also leads to a more violent contradiction between marketing and research and development. In the long run, Liangpinpuzi can only fall into a vicious circle.

Although Liangpin Shop began to realize the importance of offline stores and tried to shift its focus, the results were not obvious. Even though the stores were opened in high-traffic areas, there were few customers in the stores, and they were quite cold, which was still a long way from the expectation.

Compared to Xue Ji fried goods, panda greedy fried goods and other offline nut snack stores, Liangpin Shop's business situation is not good, OEM packaging production model in the physical store is not popular. With more intuitive words to compare is "Liangpin store is like selling bottled drinks, and Xue Ji fried goods store is like a tea store, a package ready to make a fresh now, the choice of high and low immediately."

Online competition is fierce, offline development can not fight, Liangpin store more difficult to move forward.

How far can Goodwill go?

The rapid growth of the first ten years seems to have accumulated a lot of strength for Liang Pin Shop, but it has also laid down a lot of roots of disease.

Without its own production factory assets, without the core research and development technology technology, without a perfect control mechanism of the foundry, Liangpin Shop is difficult to deal with the complex supply chain and quality control brought about by food safety problems. And once consumers decide that Liangpin Shop not only no "good product" and no "conscience", then Liangpin Shop is not far from the fall.

And in the serious snack market, there is no representative brand of product stalwarts, Liang Pin Pu Zi will be easily squeezed by the endless new products, or even be replaced. The core product is the key for Liangpinpuzi to get out of the predicament. The brand image of heavy marketing is like a pavilion in the air, and if there are a few more problems like the "plastic mooncake" food safety and quality, there may be a hidden last straw to kill the camel.

For consumers, no matter how gorgeous the product packaging, the real feeling is the taste of the entrance, only to firmly grasp the memory of the taste, in order to develop more repeat customers.

In today's three squirrels fall in line, offline fried goods can start, there are a lot of development opportunities in the stage, Liangpin store is the pursuit of short-term temporary leadership, or slow down to build a solid foundation for the long term, may determine the life of Liangpin store geometry.

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