Le Pur yogurt Photo: Courtesy of Le Pur
The competition in China's domestic yogurt industry is very intense. How to differentiate one's products and marketing strategy is imperative to the survival and success of newcomers. One of the brands that have so far been navigating the waters well in terms of brand and product differentiation is Le Pur.
The name Le Pur is French and means the pure. It embodies the company's simple and down-to-earth ambition of providing pure and delicious, quality yogurt. With its dairy imported from countries such as the UK and New Zealand, and other ingredients, such as freshly-picked blueberries sourced from Shandong Province, hazelnut jam from Germany and vanilla from Madagascar, Le Pur aims to provide only "genuine ingredients."
Behind this simple yogurt is its founder and CEO Denny Liu, a graduate of the Wharton School and a former employee of the Blackstone Group. Liu was also a special adviser to world leading industrial companies like PepsiCo.
In late 2014, Liu gave up his career and started to make dairy from scratch. Within a year, he started Le Pur and gained over 40,000 fans on Le Pur's official Sina Weibo and WeChat public accounts. So far, the number of fans has grown to around 320,000.
Just a few months after launching Le Pur, Liu branched out into online to offline operations, and the company's daily sales volume grew to around 1,000 bottles, according to cyzone.cn, a news platform for startup businesses in China, on May 10, 2015.
One of Le Pur's marketing strategies is its down-to-earth interaction with consumers. In their concept store in Sanlitun, they showcase the yogurt's production line in a 30-square-meter room. The store has never lacked visitors.
This is just a part of how Le Pur interacts with its customers. In an interview with online news platform huxiu.com on March 25, Liu said that after they had sold 200,000 bottles of yogurt, they posted a request online for feedback on the yogurt bottle design.
"We selected 25 out of all the opinions [we received] and posted them on our official WeChat account for a public vote," said Liu. Some of the opinions that received the highest votes were integrated into the yogurt's new bottle package design.
Le Pur has also invited foodies and fans to be part of their product's innovation, brand establishment, promotion and customer experience.
"In a market that is dominated by a few tycoon businesses, the first thing we must do is to design our product in a way that is dramatically different from others through user driven strategy. Otherwise, all the operations afterward can be meaningless to the business," Liu said in the huxiu.com report.
