Moutai: where the brand and the land are one
Updated: 2013-07-16 17:40
By Tony Murray (China Daily)
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So there're 10,000 Irishmen living in and around a Guinness factory and it's your job to induce them to move. What are you going to suggest?
It's an analogous problem to the one facing the management of Moutai, makers of China's premium brand of baijiu.
In the town of Moutai two hours drive from Zunyi, the brand and the land are one. Some 80 percent of the population is employed in alcohol production of one kind or another, with securing a job at the distillery a distinct badge of honor among the local populace.
It is said that the girls from the neighboring Chongqing, a region renowned for its feminine beauty, seek out boys employed by the distiller as a one-way trip to financial wellbeing.
The cityscape dominated by its facilities is said to be home to 2,000 different brands of alcohol and more than 200 distilleries - and that's just the official ones.
At the height of the production cycle, the atmosphere alone is said to be quite intoxicating, but amid all this liquor luxuriance, the Moutai brand reigns supreme.
Visitors to the town will have the chance to tour the brand's extensive museum, which charts the rise of China's premium tipple.
Here you will see an extraordinary gallery of oriental and occidental politicians caught, perhaps unwarily, endorsing the brand with a snifter or two.
It is home to images of Richard Nixon having a gambay - "bottoms-up" in Chinese - and even a shot of former UK Prime Minister John Major looking distinctly apprehensive as his 15th toast of the evening looms.
Here you will also find a life-sized statue of Charlie Chaplin - likely the only one of its kind in China - picturing the usually silent comedian meeting with one of Moutai's senior executives in Geneva in 1954.
The museum is open to all visitors, but tours around the Moutai factory itself are harder to come by. Like Coca-Cola, the brand is insistent on keeping its exact production processes and ingredients a strict secret, but visitors, booking well in advance, are occasionally granted an audience.
The success of the brand has signaled inevitable expansion for its production plant, a process restricted by 10,000 employees that live in and around the facility.
The company has earmarked 3.5 billion yuan to relocate them, a sign of the high value of local property.
Their certain windfall is undeniably going to be celebrated in one particular way - as one employee told us: "There's no banquet without baijiu." Especially in Moutai.
(China Daily 09/21/2009 page6)