In early March of this year, media outlets noticed that "Jia Guolong Chinese Burger" had vanished, with no stores in operation.

This signifies that this sub-brand of Xibei, launched less than a year ago, unfortunately met an early demise.

After years of meticulous management, Xibei's founder, Jia Guolong, has successfully grown the brand to a large scale, with over 400 directly operated stores in nearly 60 cities across the country, and serving more than 60 million customers annually.

As Xibei has grown stronger, Jia Guolong has long been unsatisfied with building just this one brand, as he also harbors a dream of fast food that is yet to be realized.

Five years after registering the company related to "Air Mo," Jia Guolong opened the first "Jia Guolong Air Mo" store, which was later renamed to "Chinese Burger" and continued to operate. However, now there is no trace of "Jia Guolong Chinese Burger."

Advertisement

Nevertheless, the seemingly clean withdrawal of "Jia Guolong Chinese Burger" was not an abandonment; it was merely a rebranding and a new start under the name "Dragon Burger" in another location.

Within just about a year, "Jia Guolong Air Mo" changed its name twice. The goal of opening 300 to 500 stores nationwide in a year was not even halfway achieved before it was hastily concluded.

Faced with a dead end in Beijing, Jia Guolong chose to turn around and continue moving forward.

Whether "Dragon Burger" can help Jia Guolong regain the momentum that was not achieved with "Air Mo" and "Chinese Burger" remains to be seen.After learning from the previous experience with China Burger, Longbao's first store was strategically located in Hohhot City, with the intention of starting from the lower-tier market to gain momentum.

Whether Longbao will succeed remains to be seen by the market, but it has become an undeniable fact that Jia Guolong's China Burger could not sell well. Is the market for "Chinese-style hamburgers" no longer viable?

However, with over 7,000 signed stores and an online membership base of 113 million, Tastin seems to be proving that the failure of Jia Guolong's China Burger is not just a market issue. Tastin has now become the leading brand in Chinese hamburgers, but it did not start out selling hamburgers; it began with pizza.

One of the founders of the Tastin brand, Wei Chunyou, had opened several stores of another brand, Wallace, with two other partners before starting Tastin, but all of them eventually closed down. Perhaps the painful experience of failing with Wallace made them abandon the hamburger track from the start.

In 2012, the first Tastin pizza store officially opened. After its opening, the Tastin team continuously engaged in innovation and research and development, but there was no significant change in performance.It wasn't until three years later, when they hopped on the fast train of the internet and adopted a takeout marketing strategy, that the brand's performance exploded, allowing it to break through the predicament of that time and be reborn from the ground up.

By leveraging takeout to open up sales channels and expand the number of stores, Tastin did not give up on the research and development of new products, and of course, they did not confine themselves to the development of pizza categories.

They began to experiment with combining freshly baked pizzas with hamburgers, making hamburgers in the way of baking pizzas, and officially launched the "hamburger + pizza" dual-category product model in 2017.

Tastin's R&D personnel, using their own experience in baking pizzas, made hamburgers with freshly baked buns, and the product was recognized by consumers as soon as it was launched.

A year after the launch of the dual-category model, Tastin developed the "hand-rolled freshly baked buns," combining fast food with Chinese dim sum, and redefining hamburgers in a Chinese way.

The following year, Tastin created a new category, "Chinese hamburger," which can be regarded as a turning point in the brand's destiny.

Tastin not only played its advertising slogan on a loop in its stores, telling every passerby that it is a "Chinese hamburger," but also deepened the Chinese elements in the brand through the style of store decoration and various daily activities, clearly intending to carry the "Chinese style" to the end.

Its brand logo even chose Chinese red as the main color, with the lion head as the main pattern.

Tastin perfectly integrated the national trend with the brand, once again upgrading the brand, and in just three years, by 2023, it upgraded to Tastin Brand 3.0.

Similarly, while imitating Western fast food to make Chinese hamburgers, Tastin rose step by step, but Jia Guolong's Chinese burgers did not survive more than a year.Tastin Natural not only wins in the concept of sinicization, but also excels in strategic direction, product pricing, and the closeness of products to the brand.

Originating from Nanchang, Tastin focuses on the lower-tier market in store location, and now has covered 26 provinces and 336 cities.

The price is not only an important reason for Tastin to stand firm in many small counties, but also a significant advantage compared to its peers.

In addition, the Tuesday membership day with a "buy one get one free" offer for an additional 1 yuan, coupled with the traffic support of the internet, and the live broadcast room selling various cost-effective packages, firmly retains the customer flow.

Compared to the original hamburger giants McDonald's, KFC, and Hua Lai Shi, Tastin is a close competitor, but at the same price, Tastin not only has an emotional card, but also the inferior reputation of its competitors has become an invisible help.

On the other hand, Jia Guolong China Burger, which started by setting its location in the capital, determined that its price starting point could not be too low due to cost.

Therefore, it can only benchmark McDonald's and KFC, which have a solid foundation, in terms of price. Coupled with the combination of homemade fermented steamed buns and various traditional Chinese dishes, the appeal to the crowd choosing "hamburgers" as fast food is quite limited.

Because its structure is too similar to Roujiamo, or steamed buns with meat and vegetables.

If you want to eat Western fast food, but end up with a Roujiamo, I guess many people would find it hard to accept.

Even in the booming Tastin, similar products cannot compete with traditional Western hamburger combinations like spicy chicken burgers in terms of sales.Jia Guolong's Chinese Burger, as a new brand just starting out, has products that are almost identical, but the prices are significantly higher, making it naturally difficult to sell well. However, consumers are more accepting of burgers with Chinese cuisine as fillings, such as those from Tastee, not only because of the price but also due to another important factor: user stickiness.

When Tastee's freshly baked buns are filled with Chinese cuisine, they resemble Roujiamo, but with over a decade of brand accumulation, the stickiness between users and the brand is naturally higher. Coupled with their own developed products as a foundation, the connection between the product and the brand is tighter, leading to a higher level of consumer trust.

In contrast, Jia Guolong's Chinese Burger, which is made by sandwiching Chinese stir-fried dishes between Jiangsu's intangible cultural heritage fermented steamed buns, seems to fall short. Judging from the continuous growth in the number of Tastee's stores and the increase in online membership registrations, there is clearly room for development in the market for Chinese-style burgers.

Thus, the failure of Jia Guolong's Chinese Burger is not because the market cannot accommodate it, but because consumers will not condone products that take shortcuts and act recklessly.

Coincidentally, another domestic brand that made its fortune by imitation is also beginning to decline. Dali Food Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Dali Garden), once valued at nearly 100 billion Hong Kong dollars, officially delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in September 2023. This snack giant, which carries the childhood memories of many from the 80s and 90s, seems to be admitting its lack of staying power and difficulty in leading shareholders forward through its delisting.Dali Garden, established as a veteran brand in 1998, has seen its numerous snack and beverage sub-brands enjoy their moments of glory and achieve considerable national recognition. However, many of Dali Garden's products have encountered head-on collisions with numerous brands in the market.

For instance, Dali Garden's egg yolk pies and chocolate pies bear a striking resemblance to similar products from the South Korean brand Orion, appearing shortly after Orion entered the Chinese market. When Orion first ventured into China, it continued its strategy from South Korea, focusing on mid-to-high-end snacks with exquisite packaging and moderately high pricing.

The founder of Dali Garden, Xu Shihui, realized that the production difficulty of Dali Garden's products was not high, and there was still room to reduce prices. He began to imitate Orion's product manufacturing while simplifying packaging to cut costs, successfully penetrating the lower-end market with more affordable prices.

Encouraged by positive feedback, Xu Shihui, as if discovering a new continent, moved straight ahead on the path of imitation. Subsequently, sub-brands such as Hezheng, Le Hu, and Kebike were born under similar operations.

Led by Xu Shihui, Dali Garden advanced rapidly, successfully going public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2015. With this, Dali Garden became the largest private enterprise IPO in the Hong Kong stock market that year, enjoying a moment of unparalleled glory. Xu Shihui also became the richest man in Fujian for three consecutive years due to Dali Garden's listing.

However, after reaching its peak in 2018, Dali Garden's stock price began to decline year after year. In May 2023, it experienced a consecutive drop of seven boards, and finally, in September of the same year, it officially delisted through privatization.Times are changing, and so are consumer perceptions. The old ways of doing things are starting to fail in the new era.

Dali Garden has been wearing the label of "copycat" for many years. If it doesn't remove this tag soon, it may find it difficult to regain consumer favor.

Therefore, Dali Garden has also begun to focus on product innovation and upgrading, as well as striving to develop in higher-tier cities.

Jia Guolong once said: "Innovation is such a thing, if you succeed, you reap the harvest in the current period. If you don't succeed, you enrich the soil, and these capabilities will all be transformed into the company's future competitiveness."

Whether it's Dali Garden or Xibei, viewing the current defeats within the entire corporate blueprint is just an accumulation of trial and error, after all, they have the strength to do better.

Whether it's Jia Guolong's Chinese Burger or those sub-brands imitated under Dali Garden, the only commonality is that although the products are being updated and iterated, they are not actually their own.

Jia Guolong's Chinese Burger focuses on the concept, arranging common things into new combinations, and then hastily launching them with a "Chinese" label, ultimately leading to a retreat.

On the other hand, Dali Garden is constantly creating new things, but in reality, they are all imitations of others. They can capture the market, but it is difficult to maintain a position.

Therefore, in any product development, imitation is not a long-term strategy. R&D and innovation capabilities are the most core competitive strengths.

So, how to enhance core competitiveness and create completely one's own products is undoubtedly the primary challenge for Jia Guolong to realize his fast-food dream.The market is ever-changing, although the path of imitation may be easier to tread, the road of originality is ultimately longer.