The Wizard of Oz: The Wizard of Oz for a Licensed Brand

The Wizard of Oz has two meanings.

An implication comes from the ancient Chinese legend "Eight Immortals will meet the tea forest". According to legend, the Eight Immortals flew to a tea forest in Taiwan to play chess when they had nothing to do all day. During the ups and downs of the chess pieces, the immortals were thirsty and took off the tea leaves beside them to make tea. Unexpectedly, the tea taste was very bland, and Yaxing was defeated.

Zhang Guolao didn't rush, got up and took out a jade rabbit from his arms and put it under the tea tree. After a long while, I picked the tea leaves, brewed new tea again, and the long tea fragrance came to my nostrils. The immortals were amazed and left happily.

Wu Bochao, a Taiwanese businessman, founded the "Rbt" brand with a rabbit as a symbol. Now, it is the world's largest bubble tea business brand, and also the largest international franchise brand founded by Chinese, and has won the title of China's excellent franchise brand for three consecutive years.

Another meaning comes from the famous American fairy tale "The Wizard of Oz". The little girl Dorothy was swept into a dream country by the wind. She is determined to rely on her own efforts to return to her hometown. She went through hardships and witty to overcome many challenges such as the Wicked Witch, and finally returned to her dream home.

Like Dorothy, Wu Bochao also relied on perseverance and wit to write the legend of "The Forest of the Wizard".

Original in Taiwan: The phone rang and the road of no return

One day 16 years ago, Wu Bochao, a Taiwan veteran who was about to be discharged from the army, was walking on the street while thinking about his livelihood after being discharged from the army. Suddenly, a line of phone numbers came into his eyes and changed his life.

"Teach bubble tea techniques, please call: xxxxxxxx". Wu Bochao dialed the phone number on the carriage of the truck, and since then he has entered the black tea shop and embarked on a road of no return.

Bubble milk tea, this drink "elf" made of black tea, milk, and traditional snack powder, is the representative work of Taiwanese black tea. It was supposed to bring good luck to Wu Bochao. However, his entrepreneurial journey has been stressful. Competitors' imitation and replication, fierce homogenization competition, and even lack of funds, each has the opportunity to crush him.

He chose to leave. In 1994, with a positive thinking head, he set foot on the hot land of Hong Kong and started his second business.

Hong Kong Prosperity: Tea Fragrance and Tea Taste Different

"How to do the biggest business with the least capital?" Wu Bochao, who was deeply suffering from lack of funds, decided to start a new road by franchising.

He knows that branding is the key to a franchise. He began to reshape the brand, taking the meaning from the legend of "Eight Immortals Meeting Tea Forest" and changing the store name to "Xianzonglin". The decoration style of the store highlights factors such as "immortal", "forest" and "trace" to attract customers.

However, his initial foray into the Hong Kong market did not go well. His Taiwanese milk tea has faced competition from Hong Kong-style milk tea in Hong Kong tea restaurants from the very beginning. He rents a store of 85,000 Hong Kong dollars a month, and the turnover is only 80,000. He found from customer feedback that they prefer the heavier Hong Kong-style milk tea.

The breakthrough lies in clear product positioning. He did a careful market research and found that the crux of the problem was that customers didn't really understand the difference between Taiwanese milk tea and Hong Kong-style milk tea. He positioned his Taiwanese milk tea as "providing tea aroma to customers" to distinguish it from Hong Kong-style milk tea "providing customers with tea flavor", and promoted it in newspapers and TV.

After the advertisement, the first month achieved a turnover of HKD 400,000. Continuously, his franchise business has grown. In the following months, he opened more than 20 franchise stores in succession. A whirlwind of Taiwanese bubble tea is rapidly blowing up in Hong Kong.

Wu Bochao found that if the brand is done well, it can stand out in the fierce homogeneous competition and remain invincible. Since then, improving the competitiveness of the brand has become something that he will spare no effort to do in his life. Whether it is entering the mainland market or preparing for the global battle, he does it all.

The mainland takes off: a swing is used as a fulcrum

The chess falls at the urban-rural junction. In 1996, Wu Bochao decided to enter the Chinese mainland market. He put the first piece on the junction of the suburban and urban areas of Shanghai. Opened the first store there, targeting customers aged 20-40. Chief among them are young students and teachers in many universities and colleges.

The first time I set foot on the mainland market, the business is not bad. Wu Bochao has successively opened 6 or 7 stores in the urban and rural areas of Shanghai. However, the copying and imitation behaviors and homogeneous competition in the mainland market are no worse than those in Taiwan. The question he faces is: how to make Xianzonglin stand out in such a market environment?

A swing is emerging. Wu Bochao's work habit of careful observation and positive thinking has once again allowed Xianzonglin to lead the market. When he returned to Taiwan once, in a park not far from his home, he saw a mother and son snuggling together, swinging on a swing and drinking drinks. This intimate, fluttering fairy-like mood suddenly caught his eye.

He decided to install a swing seat wrapped in ivy in the Xianzonglin store. Soon, customers distinguish the "swing shop" among the many teahouses with the same decoration. In their minds, Xianzonglin is a beautiful swing. The Xianzonglin brand quickly rang out in Shanghai.

The first use of the swing chair was at Xianzonglin's Huaihai Road branch in Shanghai. Opening a store on Huaihai Road was a bold and correct major decision made by Wu Bochao against the strong opposition of all shareholders (including his wife). On Huaihai Road, where every inch of land is expensive, the annual rent of a store costs 2.4 million yuan. Mrs. Wu is worried, how many cups of milk tea do you need to consume a day to make up the rent?

However, Wu Bochao calculated another account. Opening a store on Huaihai Road can take advantage of the prime location to enhance the image of Xianzonglin as a foreign-funded enterprise and greatly enhance the brand value. In this way, it can also form a mutual support trend between urban-rural integrated department stores and prime location stores. The former provides cash flow for the latter, and the latter supplies the brand value stream for the former.

His decision proved very effective. With the improvement of the brand, the speed of investors joining is getting faster and faster, and there are more and more stores. By 2000, Xianzonglin had opened more than 80 stores in mainland China. This was a considerable amount for the leisure beverage industry at that time.

Confront Starbucks. In 2000, Starbucks entered the Chinese market with a high profile, diverting many target consumers of Xianzonglin. Because at that time, the younger generation of China began to embrace foreign culture enthusiastically, and Starbucks coffee is the representative of this culture.

Wu Bochao was forced to make changes. He removed the swings in the store and changed the decoration style to be closer to Western culture. However, these changes are not recognized by the market. Because, even if other teahouses have installed swing chairs, customers still have to sit on the "authentic swing" of Xianzonglin.

To make matters worse, Wu Bochao found that the speed of store expansion exceeded the limit that management could bear. Due to the poor management of the headquarters, many franchisees often take advantage of the headquarters, fail to manage the stores in accordance with the requirements of the headquarters, purchase raw materials that do not meet the quality standards, or sell beverages unrelated to Xianzonglin tea.

Due to internal and external difficulties, Xianzonglin's operating income has dropped by more than 30%. Wu Bochao had to stop franchising in 2001, closing more than 30 franchise stores, concentrating on management and culture.

The franchise starts again. After a year of research, Wu Bochao believes that only when the three rounds of brand, management and cultural experience are turned together can franchising be able to hit the road again. He decided to restart the franchise model from 2002.

From then to now, Wu Bochao has changed the way he used to rely mainly on the brand to walk on one leg, and at the same time is committed to improving the management of the franchise system, as well as the store environment and the cultural taste of tea.

Wu Bochao began to standardize the selection of franchisees. Investors who want to join Xianzonglin must have entrepreneurial experience and specific personal conditions.

Specifically, franchisees must have basic entrepreneurial judgment and experience in effective leadership or the ability to play talents. Have a good regional network and market awareness. Have the will to succeed, the spirit of hard work and hard work. Be good at getting along with people. To actively participate in the comprehensive training of the fairy tale forest. Have the appropriate financial strength.

Wu Bochao implemented the franchise store manager trusteeship system in the Xianzonglin franchise system. Xianzonglin dispatched a store manager to the investor who had just joined. The store manager strictly followed the requirements of the headquarters to manage the franchised store for a period of one year, and then the franchisee took over. During the "hosting" period, franchisees must hire the store manager and pay reasonable wages.

The store manager trusteeship system allows franchisees to overcome the blind spot of management in the early stage of business. For Xianzonglin headquarters, it is also a good move to implement effective supervision.

Wu Bochao implemented the regional agency system in the Xianzonglin franchise system. He set up a regional office in each target city and dispatched a person familiar with local business to be in charge of the training, promotion, management and other affairs of the region.

The biggest role of the regional agency system is to provide services, technical support and strong supervision for many stores in the area, so as to avoid the problems that the franchised stores did not comply with the headquarters' norms.

The improvement of the management level and the maturity of the franchise system make Xianzonglin on the track of sustainable development. In the past three years, it has been continuously selected as "China's Excellent Franchise Brand", and thus won this year's "China Franchise Award" award.

Dream in the world: To be a Starbucks in the East

Xianzonglin once competed hand-to-hand with Starbucks and experienced the powerful impact of Starbucks. Wu Bochao has been unable to let go of a thought: why is Starbucks popular all over the world?

The conclusion of his thinking is that what Starbucks sells is not coffee, but a leisure culture and a way of life that can be accepted worldwide.

The next question is, can Xianzonglin be able to establish a culture or way of life that is recognized worldwide by using tea as a carrier like Starbucks does with coffee?

Wu Bochao made a lot of attempts. He incorporates elements of Western culture into traditional Chinese tea, which is called "New Tea Doctrine". He launched a new brand, happy lemon fresh tea, which uses a tea maker to make tea just like Starbucks makes coffee with a coffee machine. He believes that by doing so, while ensuring the same quality of each cup of tea, it also meets the fast-paced life and convenient consumption of modern people on a global scale.

Wu Bochao is experimenting with Xianzonglin's international route in Shanghai. He opened a restaurant called RBT GARDEN in a prime location by the Huangpu River. It is actually a "testing field" for his internationalization strategy. Here, the swings, pebbles, and tree stumps unique to the fairyland are all gone. Here, too, the eating style has undergone major changes. Tea drinks are paired with various western desserts to make desserts of different flavors, and test whether foreign customers in Shanghai like it.

Wu Bochao said that if the store is successful, it will use this model to open stores in New York, Tokyo, Europe, and all over the world.

By then, his franchise empire will not only be limited to more than 100 stores in Chinatowns around the world, but will appear more in the local mainstream society.

However, he has a long way to go.

The author is the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the CEConline website.