Baijiu makers look abroad for new markets and increasing sales figures

French businessman Cyril Camus said his favorite baijiu (white spirit) brand is Moutai. He first traveled to China more than 20 years ago when he was still a student and tried his first sip of baijiu. Of course, it was not Moutai because he could not afford China's national heritage liquor then.

"I am interested in tasting different categories of liquor, different brands," said Cyril Camus, one of the fifth-generation of the Camus family who have owned a Cognac house producing the French spirit since 1863.

Examining the price tag of a Moutai product. Camus Cognac and China Kweichow Moutai Distillery Co has set up a partnership to market Moutai products globally. [Photo/China Daily]

"I was fortunate enough to live in China in the mid-1990s for a number of years. Going out to dinner with my friends as well as some business partners, I started being offered Moutai and that's when I first developed a taste for it. That's also when I started to develop an interest in the brand's history and its qualities," he said.

Camus is now the president of the family business - Camus Cognac - and he played a decisive and personal role in promoting Moutai to the international market.

Camus Cognac and China Kweichow Moutai Distillery Co set up a partnership in 2005 to market Moutai globally. "From zero to one of the top 15 luxury brands of spirits around the world, we have started achieving some results on Moutai's internationalization but we know it is a long-term job to make it widely recognized by Westerners," said Camus. He said he cannot reveal sales figures of Moutai outside China but sales growth was very fast over the last few years and will surely be promising.

However, to make Moutai, a typical and iconic Chinese baijiu recognized by Westerners is not easy. Both Moutai and Camus Cognac agreed when the partnership was established that if they wanted to promote the traditional Chinese liquor to the overseas market, they must have the right product to sell.

Global marketing

At that time there was a lot of confusion in the West about Moutai and baijiu, according to Ji Keliang, honorary chairman and chief technical adviser of Kweichow Moutai.

From a Western perspective, the idea of baijiu could be very negative because Westerners coming into China did not usually drink Moutai or other high-end white liquors so they were often very disappointed or surprised with the taste of lower quality products.

With the help of Camus Cognac, Moutai wanted to disassociate itself from all those potentially negative perceptions. One way was to very clearly express that it had a specific blend, for the export market only, and therefore that could not be confused with any other products a Westerner might have tried in China. The result was Small Batch Blend Moutai, specially for the overseas market.

They also found the way Moutai was sold in China did not fit in with Western codes of luxury and professionalism so they made some changes. The Small Batch Blend Moutai stuck to Moutai's familiar bottle shape and style but used slightly different color codes and emphasized a different message on the label. It remained instantly recognizable as a Moutai bottle but one that indicated to a Westerner that he knew what he was buying. More details of ingredients and technological information in English were added.

Although the product was ready, how to market it was still a problem.

The first challenge was making Moutai available on the shelves of the international market. The best choice was duty-free stores, a hub of international premium brands, according to Camus. Camus Cognac sells products around the world - in most international airports and onboard a large number of international airlines, with a network of more than 200 duty-free partners covering more than 4,000 duty-free shops worldwide.

"The duty-free exposure offered an incomparable platform for Moutai - thousands of high-end and high-spending travelers who are exposed to such a small and saturated shopping space come up close with Moutai's presence, which is likely to allow the brand to have maximum impact on the international market," said Ji, adding that the duty-free market, in airports in particular, was a window into the world of luxury.

The second step is educating consumers, especially Westerners, in such an environment. "We have our own staff in the shops talking about the history of Moutai, detailing how it is produced and explaining why it is a national heritage of China and the soul of this liquor," said Camus.

"The sales were not very high at the beginning. I remember a time when I was receiving the monthly reports and we were counting the number of bottles, not cases. It was hard because non-Chinese consumers still had not heard very much of the brand, because the promoters were not used to it and all that took time."

They then decided to go down the traditional advertising route. The Cognac house placed advertisements in magazines and on some TV channels.

Moutai began to experience an uplift in global recognition through a sponsorship in celebration of the historic pilgrimage made by Chinese monk Xuanzang in the 7th century. Moutai's international offering became the official gift for a program broadcast by China Central Television in which several experts retraced Xuanzang's walk from the historic city of Xi'an, in Shaanxi province, to India. It helped explain the brand and made it better known within the duty-free trade and its operators.