When the whole market is in a downturn, what should SMEs or small brands do? This is the time to dig into "small and specialized"—let's explore this idea through the lens of yellow rice wine packaging design!

Author: Yi Sanyao Packaging Design | 4 min read

    A baijiu... a huangjiu (yellow rice wine) owner came to us and sighed: the big brands are all running ads, and my small factory can't afford to copy them, but if I don't, nobody buys. What should I do?

His huangjiu had a decent reputation locally, but it just couldn’t break out. I asked him: why do you have to break out?

He froze.

In a downturn, stop thinking about getting bigger and stronger

When the market turns bad, many owners’ first instinct is to double down: add a few more categories, open a few more channels, make the packaging look more premium. And the result? Inventory piles up higher, prices sell lower and lower, and in the end even your old customers’ trust gets dragged down with it.

By contrast, the small factories that are doing just fine almost all share one thing in common: they know exactly where their turf is, and they put all their effort into that one spot.

— Shilongyan Huangjiu — cherry blossom themed bottle

This owner didn’t end up doing a big packaging upgrade. He did just one thing: he nailed the label “the huangjiu locals are used to drinking” onto the bottle with packaging. In spring, a cherry blossom edition bottle label; a silk lining inside the gift box; and what he gives away isn’t an ad brochure but a handwritten note explaining the vintage. What he wants isn’t for the whole country to know him — it’s for locals, when they reach for a different wine, to think of him for a moment.

“Specialized” doesn’t mean small — it means a mindshare position in consumers’ minds that others find hard to replace

I’ve taken a wrong turn before too. I used to think the real skill was making a client’s packaging “complete” — a single brand and you’d want to draw every frying, stir-frying, boiling and deep-frying onto it. Later I figured it out: what packaging should fear most isn’t simplicity, it’s greed.

The smaller you are, the less you should compete with the big brands on breadth. What you can compete on is being the one who understands that single category better than anyone: its craft, its regulars, and the occasions on which it gets drunk.

— Shilongyan Huangjiu — wooden gift box lining

The three things a small factory should really do: cut the marginal categories that don’t make money; pour the money you save into one flagship product; and let the packaging tell that flagship product as “a taste only you can make.”

Repeat purchase from old customers is steadier than money from new ones

One more thing that’s easy to overlook: when the economy is bad, the cost of acquiring new customers only goes up, while repeat purchase from old customers costs almost nothing in advertising. A small factory’s lifeline was never out there — it’s on the old customer’s table.

— Shilongyan Huangjiu — product lineup display

This is especially obvious in huangjiu. People who are used to drinking it recognize the brand and the taste — they’d recognize it even if the packaging changed. You just need to make them want to buy a second time after this bottle, and the third and the tenth will come on their own. What packaging does in this step is simply: don’t let them fail to find you on the shelf, and don’t let them feel cheap carrying it home.

Go back and subtract

The harder the economy, the less you should copy the big factories’ sprawling setups. Pick the one product you’re best at, and make the packaging so that old customers recognize you at a glance and new customers remember at a glance that you “only do this one thing.” That one thing alone is enough to keep you busy for a year.

— Shilongyan Huangjiu — gift box scene

(The content represents personal views and is for reference only.)