From "Nongfu Spring tastes a bit sweet" to "we do not produce water. We are just porters of nature" and the live-action documentary of water sources "high quality water sources nurture healthy life" launched a few years ago. Over the last two decades and more, Nongfu Spring has made "water" changed from ordinary to extraordinary by differentiated marketing, and delivered refreshing and novel experiences to consumers with its innovative positioning.
After twenty more years of hard work, Nongfu Spring has established itself as a leading beverage enterprise with scale, growth and profitability in the Chinese market. Nongfu Spring has maintained the lion’s share of the packaged drinking water market in China since 2012. A key object for Nongfu Spring’s further development is to work out how to tap market potential, because the domestic ordinary drinking water market still has growth potential. As for the domestic market, a good choice is to lay out drinking water market segments, and Nongfu Spring is very early into exploring the soft drink market.
In 2000, on nature and health grounds, Nongfu Spring announced that it would completely stop producing purified water and only produce natural water, which means Nongfu Spring has to go deep into mountains and forests to explore water sources and build factories adjacent to water sources. Nongfu Spring has laid out ten natural water sources in China at the moment, forming a unique water source layout across the nation. Thanks to its adherence at that time, the natural water source layout today becomes the biggest moat of Nongfu Spring and a competitive advantage that no counterpart can compete with in the short term. Then, Nongfu Spring strives to develop drinking water segments and has successively launched drinking natural water (suitable for infants and young children), natural mineral water flip cover type (student water), high-end water, natural mineral water containing lithium, etc.
Beyond the water source layout, Nongfu Spring has unveiled a slew of product ranges, including Farm’s Orchard, Oriental Leaf, Tea π, Water soluble C100 and more. These products all keep in line with the nature and health concept with no preservative or other extra additives added. Oriental Leaf, which made its debut in 2011, establishes a precedent of "five 0 product" (0 sugar, 0 calorie, 0 fat, 0 flavoring, 0 preservative). In March 2021, Nongfu Spring launched Wuyi Mountain spring water for tea brewing, a tea water product that takes Nongfu Spring five years to develop, and announced the recommended standard of tea brewing water partnered with the Tea Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences: electrical conductivity of 10-100 μ S/cm, which marks Nongfu Spring another foray into a new market segment and a step forward in water source layout.
As for channel distribution, Nongfu Spring has made it to the top. According to the data up to 2019, Nongfu Spring has cooperated with about 4500 distributors, covering more than 2.43 million terminal retail outlets in provincial, municipal and county-level administrative regions of China, with about 1.88 million ones located in the third-tier cities and below. Aside from the nationwide channel network, Nongfu Spring has also made unremitting efforts to innovate in e-commerce and new retail over the recent years, which not only optimizes the sales channel layout, but enriches the shopping scenarios of consumers.
The marketing method of Nongfu Spring is universally acknowledged. No matter it is the limited edition Music Review Bottle partnered with Netease Cloud Music, Bottle of the Imperial Palace in cooperation with the National Palace Museum, the title sponsor of the phenomenal variety shows The Rap of China and Idol Producer or its cooperation with the phenomenal mobile game Onmyoji, Nongfu Spring makes its marketing a great success through the product's core creative packaging and bottle body design as well as the advertisements approaching to the needs of the times.
Built on its own brand and fitting in with users demand, Nongfu Spring transforms brand memory into brand tension, increases the stickiness between users and the brand, and finally achieves users transformation. There is a lot coming out for Nongfu Spring on that front.