Cigarettes are called "cigarettes", and the aroma is undoubtedly the soul of cigarettes. After smokers have experienced the aroma of cigarettes for a long time, they will develop different personal taste preferences, and behind the personal preferences are profound backgrounds from different regions, different races and different cultures.
China has a vast territory, and the large consumer groups of Chinese-style cigarettes naturally have similar taste preferences due to geographical reasons. The climate in the north is dry, and consumers have strong food tastes. They are greatly influenced by Yunnan cigarettes and prefer cigarettes with strong strength and rich aroma. Consumers in the south can be divided into spicy areas and non-spicy areas. Consumers in spicy areas prefer cigarettes that are light in taste. It is more common among smokers in the north, but is obviously more severe than in non-spicy areas.
Huaxi Lou Wang each represents a completely different smoking style, which of course is mainly determined by the taste geography. Under the influence of geographically differentiated taste choices, Chinese-style cigarettes have first formed three representative aroma styles, namely aroma types, of "strong aroma, light aroma, and middle aroma" after years of development. The corresponding representative brands are Zhonghua and Yuxi. and King Furong. However, with the diversified development of consumption, these three major flavor types are gradually no longer able to meet market demand. Chinese-style cigarettes obviously need to be supported by more connotation extensions and flavor styles. Under this circumstance, the unique "elegant fragrance" created by the Yellow Crane Tower brand, which has attached great importance to innovation for many years, came into being. The emergence of light and elegant fragrance and its recognition by the industry mark the official establishment of the four popular fragrance types of Chinese cigarettes today: "clear, strong, elegant and medium".
The aroma styles of the four major fragrance types of "clear, strong, elegant and medium" can be described in detail as follows
Long fragrance type (representative brand: Zhonghua) The smoke is rich and rich Full and harmonious aroma; the smoke is delicate, long and layered, with moderate strength; the aftertaste is clean, giving you a sweet, harmonious and comfortable feeling after smoking.
Fragrance type (representative brand: Yuxi) The aroma is elegant, natural and mellow, and the original tobacco aroma is highlighted; the smoke is soft and rich in layers; the smoking taste is sweet, delicate and round; it can give people an elegant, aromatic and natural flavor A refreshing feeling.
Light and elegant fragrance (representative brand: Huanghelou) The tobacco aroma is naturally combined with the aroma of natural herbal medicine. It is elegant and sweet, extremely mellow, has an elegant aroma, good permeability, and can be left to the throat. A distinct feeling of comfort.
The middle fragrance type (representative brand: Furong King) is between the clear and strong fragrances, leaning towards the clear. The original tobacco aroma is fully displayed, elegant and round, the smoke is delicate, the smoking taste is harmonious and mellow, and the aftertaste Refreshing and long-lasting, with a refreshing and sweet aftertaste.
Taste geography affects consumption preferences, which in turn affects the styles of cigarettes produced by tobacco industry companies to cater to them. As a result, China Tobacco has developed a diversified style. Of course, the development of style will not stop at "clear, dense, elegant and medium". As long as there is further consumer demand in the vast market and as long as many companies persist in their innovative activities, today's four golden flowers will surely lead to a hundred flowers blooming tomorrow. The fundamental driving force for the development of enterprises and industries always comes from the consumption influence of the market. The crown of "Four Heavenly Kings" will fall on the head of Huaxi Louwang, making it a well-deserved representative brand of the four major fragrances. It all depends on the market's general recognition of Huaxi Louwang. In other words, the Four Heavenly Kings are The majority of consumers "elected with banknotes instead of votes." In the eyes of many consumers, Huaxi Lou Wang’s status as the king is currently irreplaceable.
The deeper reason is explored, which is whether the company has strong enough resources. Resource strength is not only the support for corporate brand development, but also a platform for the company's all-round development. Due to the particularity of China's tobacco and historical legacy, cigarette industry enterprises have different characteristics and strengths in their resource systems. With the deepening of market operations, various enterprises may have very different methods and attitudes in disposing of their own inherent resources. Either they take it lightly and make poor use of it; they turn a blind eye and abandon it, eventually losing it; or they strive to evolve their own resource characteristics into resource strength with competitive advantages. In this way, the results will naturally be different.
When it comes to the resource strength of Chinese brands, it is not difficult to find the shadow of history and political overtones. Zhonghua Brand was founded in 1951, when the Republic of China was born, and has always been the core brand of Shanghai Cigarette Factory, a time-honored enterprise.
Before the 1980s under the planned economy, as a special cigarette for national leaders and a gift for state guests, China was able to gather the main scientific and technological strength of the national tobacco system in many aspects such as research and development, raw materials, technology and even markets, which was enough to create high-quality products. With its products and excellent brands, its industry status is naturally well-known. It is still highly valued by the State Tobacco Administration and has received policy support in tobacco leaf rationing. Consumer loyalty to Chinese brands has always been very high. In addition to historical reasons, the main reason is that China later established its own database marketing model by drawing on the advanced practices of the European and American marketing systems, carefully classifying and analyzing consumer profile data, and sorting out key consumer groups and consumer individuals for one-to-one comparison. Communicate to strengthen interaction between the two parties and form perceptual marketing. The unique brand history and profound brand culture have created China's unique competitiveness, which is difficult for other companies and brands to compare with. The representative brand of Chinese-style cigarettes with strong flavor is naturally none other than China.
The resource strength of Yuxi brand mainly lies in tobacco leaf raw materials. Yuxi's excellent natural conditions provide the most suitable environment for tobacco leaves to grow. Historically, Yuxi tobacco leaves have been famous for their bright orange color, rich and mellow aroma, ideal burning performance and comfortable smoking taste, and have been praised by tobacco experts. "Honghua Dajinyuan", which mutated from the high-quality tobacco variety "Dajinyuan" introduced from the United States in the 1920s, has long become the bright pearl of Chinese tobacco. Yuxi area even enjoys the reputation of "the hometown of clouds and smoke". Since the mid-1980s, the Hongta Group, to which the Yuxi brand belongs, has been adhering to the management concept of "the tobacco field is the first production workshop" and began to implement a tobacco field cultivation strategy in the Yuxi area, and has long insisted on providing tobacco farmers with large amounts of financial support. As the main raw material base of Hongta, the Yuxi area now grows more than 600,000 acres of tobacco year-round, and the annual purchase volume is stable at about 1.7 million tons. The unique high-quality tobacco leaf raw materials are transformed into unparalleled quality and market energy of cigarette products. This is the resource strength behind the Yuxi brand's role as the representative of Chinese cigarettes with light flavor.
The resource strength of the Yellow Crane Tower brand is more reflected in the scientific and technological innovation power of Hubei China Tobacco. Behind the "elegant fragrance" is the strong support of the Yellow Crane Tower Science and Technology Park, which has attracted the attention of the industry. Yellow Crane Tower Science and Technology Park is an open and integrated scientific and technological innovation platform created by Hubei China Tobacco. It consists of 13 institutes and one room including the Natural Herbal Flavors Research Institute, the Flake Application Technology Research Institute, the Filter Technology Research Institute, and Hongping There are three major extension parks: Shennong Baicao Garden, Yunpan Tobacco Ecological Park, and Baiquan Science and Technology Ecological Park. Since its establishment in 2003, the Yellow Crane Tower Science and Technology Park has been closely following the four strategic topics of tobacco breeding, cigarette flavoring, characteristic technology and harm reduction and scorch reduction, implementing major special breakthroughs, continuing to promote independent innovation, optimizing tobacco raw materials, spices The characteristics are more prominent, the product quality is greatly improved, and the research on the "low-harm throat soothing" project carried out in cooperation with the hospital and institute has also achieved fruitful results. Over the years, China Tobacco Hubei has always adhered to the main direction of creating a new smoking style of Chinese-style cigarettes, with the strong support of an open platform integrating industry, academia and research, and with patents, standards and special processes as the basic means, it finally independently innovated the elegant flavor style, and was officially recognized by the Tobacco Industry Conference in 2008. Since Yellow Crane Tower has uniquely created the elegant fragrance style, it has naturally become the representative brand of this fragrance type.
The resource strength of the Furong King brand may have another unique aspect, which can be said to be its excellent image communication and market operation capabilities under the guidance of brand marketing. Furong King has successively won the honorary titles of "China's Famous Trademark", "China's Famous Brand" and "China's 500 Most Valuable Brands". It is one of the high-end cigarette brands that currently ranks among the top in the country in terms of production and sales volume and brand awareness. Consumers have a good impression of "treasures in the tobacco industry". While concentrating on improving the image and making the market bigger and stronger, its manufacturer Changde Cigarette Factory also pays attention to the research of cigarette technology and the improvement of product technology content to fully meet the various needs of Furong King's high-quality production. The company has also formulated standardized product standards for the middle flavor, ensuring the stability of product quality and highlighting the natural flavor of tobacco. Image and market are the two important factors that Furong King relies on, and it has naturally become the representative brand of middle fragrance.
Just like this, China takes historical influence as the core, Yuxi takes the characteristics of raw materials as the core, Yellow Crane Tower takes scientific and technological innovation as the core, and Furong King takes image communication as the core, to carefully create their respective representative brands. status. The King of Huaxi Tower is known as the "Four Heavenly Kings", which is well-deserved and well-deserved.
The fragrance type that reflects the smoking style actually represents the so-called "category" of the product - a clustering of products with the same function or the same characteristics. Usually, there are always many brands under one category. There are exceptions, that is, a newly created category will always be "exclusively monopolized" by the brand that created the category for a longer or shorter period of time in its initial stage, just like the current elegant fragrance category that is exclusive to Yellow Crane Tower.
Nowadays, companies are paying more and more attention to building new categories, because categories are more powerful, and new categories can allow brands to gain greater differentiation advantages and thus perform better in the competitive market. Category construction is like a "highway" for brand development. To build a highway, you need to run more cars. Therefore, representative brands of the category will focus on expanding and extending their product lines, allowing the brand to gain more market benefits from product expansion. The Four Heavenly Kings have built four major flavor categories of Chinese-style cigarettes: "clear, strong, elegant, and medium" based on taste, geography and resource strength, and have achieved category expansion through product line expansion. Its expansion is divided into high-end cigarette markets and mass premium cigarettes. Two levels of the market.
Since 2004, Huaxi Louwang has been continuously developing new products with different prices and tastes in response to market segmentation needs to build its own colorful product system. Today, the four kings have all developed from a single product of a single family into a product system of "four major families" with a prosperous population.
The Chinese brand with a long history, as an outstanding representative of high-end cigarettes, has firmly occupied the top spot, but it has never stopped moving forward in the development of new products. At present, it has five main sales specifications: soft package Zhonghua, hard box Zhonghua, 11mg Zhonghua, fully open Zhonghua and Zhonghua 5000. Among them, the soft-case Zhonghua and the hard-box Zhonghua firmly occupy the main market in the same price range, while the Zhonghua 5000 was launched in 2007 to meet the needs of the 50 yuan price market. Through these products, it can be seen that the Chinese brand has always adhered to the compound aroma type with strong aroma as the main tone, and strives to create rich and full three-dimensional smoke characteristics for itself, and strictly controls the quality factors such as aroma quality, stimulation and aftertaste. Make sure you are of high quality.
The Yuxi brand has always been loved by consumers for its unique fragrance style. It is a traditional high-end brand in the Chinese cigarette market. On the basis that both soft and hard Yuxi have been selling well all over the country, the Yuxi brand has successively added family members such as "Jianjing Yuxi", "Dacheng Yuxi", "Harmony Yuxi" and "Shangshan Yuxi" in product development, building a brand that has grown from 200 yuan / carton to 1,000 yuan / carton, thus forming its own structural protection barrier in the high-end cigarette market. "Jianjie Yuxi" priced at 1,000 yuan and "Dacheng Yuxi" priced at 700 yuan use the safflower gold yuan from the small production area of ??Yuxi as the core raw material, fully demonstrating the profound heritage of the fragrance style and highlighting the elegance and sweetness of Yuxi cigarettes , delicate, round and rich-layered expert appreciation quality, bringing consumers a natural, fresh, elegant and fragrant feeling. Through product expansion, the Yuxi brand's market sales increased from 140,000 boxes in 2004 to 400,000 boxes in 2008, with an average annual growth rate of 30%.
Huanghelou, the founding brand of the light and elegant fragrance category, can be regarded as a model for the development of high-end cigarette series products in my country. "1916 Yellow Crane Tower" was launched at the end of 2004 at a price of 1,000 yuan per piece. It was a hot seller in the national market as soon as it was launched. With its low-key and luxurious elegance, this product was hailed as "the most popular new product in China's tobacco industry in 2004" and won the 2004 China Excellent Brand Image Award, becoming a banner for high-end cigarettes. Yellow Crane Tower (1916) pioneered the innovation of Chinese-style cigarettes and has become a value benchmark in the industry. Immediately afterwards, Hubei China Tobacco developed "Yaxiang Yellow Crane Tower" with a price of 200 yuan/carton, which consolidated the basic position of the Yellow Crane Tower brand in the high-end mainstream market and enabled the brand assets accumulated by 1916 in the high-end market to be reflected. Products at mainstream price points. After that, "Wandering in the Sky - Yellow Crane Tower" priced at 800 yuan/item and "Lundao - Yellow Crane Tower" priced at 300-500 yuan/item came out one after another. The four major products of 1916, Mantianyou, Lundao and Yaxiang have gone from complicated to moderate to simple, expanding the category connotation of elegant fragrance, showing the interpretation of product personality by aesthetic design, and satisfying the aesthetic psychology and spirit of the elegant people in the new era. Demand has built the Yellow Crane Tower product family. On the fifth anniversary of the creation of the light and elegant fragrance category, Yellow Crane Tower has sold a total of 50 billion pieces nationwide.
Furong King, a representative brand of middle-flavored products, debuted as a National Day gift in 1994, cutting into the gap between the mid-range price of high-end cigarettes at that time, which was between 20 and 30 yuan. Over the past 15 years, Furong King has gradually built a mid-scent category with mellow and long lasting flavor by virtue of its unique technology, achieving its status as the king in this price range. Furong King seized the opportunity to continuously enrich its products and improve its structure. Following the long-famous "Hard Yellow", it successively launched "Soft Blue", "Diamond", "Blue Starry Sky" and other blue Furong King products. It set off a "blue storm" and attracted many cigarette companies to imitate.
The above mentioned is the expansion in the high-end cigarette market. The category expansion of the Four Heavenly Kings also involves the mass premium cigarette market. Double Happiness, Hongtashan, Hongjinlong and Baisha are the "family blood relatives" of Hua, Xi, Lou and Wang respectively. Through the product line expansion of their "family blood relatives" brand, the four kings have achieved category expansion in the mass premium cigarette market and formed Structural layout with one high and one low. Double Happiness, Hongtashan, Red Gold Dragon, Baisha and Hua, Xi, Lou and Wang are all in the same category and style, and are connected by blood in the brand family. China brings Double Happiness, Yuxi brings Hongtashan, Yellow Crane Tower brings Red Gold Dragon, and King Furong With the white sand, the Four Heavenly Kings transformed into a dual-in-one "Four Families" brand system. The three brands of Hongtashan, Hongjinlong and Baisha with annual sales of 2 million boxes have also enabled the categories represented by Yuxi, Yellow Crane Tower and Furong King to expand massively.
In 2006, Hubei China Tobacco carried out the production of "Jin Shennong" characteristic flue-cured tobacco leaves and the base cultivation of "herbal flavoring plants" in the Shennongjia area, giving the light and elegant fragrance category a more solid raw material foundation. Hongjinlong's "new generation" product adopts "original" tobacco leaves cultivated with harmless biofertilizers and biological insect control technology. It inherits the category genes of Huanghelou's scientific and technological innovation, and uses scientific ingredient matching and modern process processing to truly achieve low-cost Tar, low nicotine and low carbon monoxide. The "new generation" 8-12mg adjustable focus series of Hongjinlong products with "low coke and low free radicals" will be launched soon. It will definitely inject "the power of a new generation" into the traditional pattern of the fine cigarette market and become a "new generation" choice".
Hongtashan has returned to classics in product line expansion. Since 2002, it has reused classic high-quality tobacco leaves such as Honghua Dajinyuan, K326, and K297, and launched a series of "classic" new products. In 2007, Hongtashan launched the Classic 100 and the previous Classic 1956 (soft and hard) to form a product family and became the backbone of Hongtashan. With two consecutive years of strong growth, Classic 100 has grown into a benchmark product priced at 10 yuan. Baisha has launched "Soft Mellow" and "Hard Mellow", while Red Double Happiness has launched "Low Burnt Red Double Happiness", which is also expanding its category territory in the premium cigarette market.
If the King of Huaxi Tower used to be one of the "Four Heavenly Kings", he could only be said to be a proud man or a dark horse, but now he has been promoted to one of the "Four Great Families" with deep roots and luxuriant leaves, living in history. The status cannot be compared with that of the past. From now on, people can watch his giant figure and lead his great spirit. Even though the years have changed, he will still be called it and his heart will yearn for it.