As many imported wine merchants frequently crack down on infringing trademarks, trademarks appear to be hot spots in the current Chinese wine market. Recently, imported wine brands such as Lafite and Penfolds have changed their wines. On the one hand, in order to increase the recognition of the brand, on the other, it also reflects the determination of the wine brands to fight against parallel imports. In the eyes of the industry, the behavior of changing the bids to a certain extent reflects the barbaric growth of imported wine brands from the initial entry into the Chinese market to today's branding. The current Chinese wine market is experiencing the pain of brand rights protection.

    Imported wine "Daqi" collectively changed the mark

    Recently, Fuyin Wine Group announced at the Penfolds New Products Conference that Penfolds’ RWT mid- to high-end products officially changed its mark and added BIN798 to the label. After the comparison, a reporter from the Beijing Commercial Daily found that the three letters of the RWT on the label were still the largest fonts on the logo, but the added BIN798 appeared under “RWT”. After the change of marks, the quality of the product did not change, the price did not change, and the retail price was still around 2,000 yuan.

    Among imported wine dealers, it is not only Ben Fu's family that changed the bid. In September of this year, Rafid Rothschild Group replaced the new standard for its Lafite legendary products. It is understood that the legendary series of standard products mainly include the legendary Bordeaux, the legendary Bordeaux, the legendary Sacred Melody, the legendary Medoc and the legendary Pauillac 5, the new standard in the preservation of the symbol of the Rothschild family 5 Arrows, printed with the words "Rothschild" and "Lafite", are based on the integration of new elements of the vineyard, thus distinguishing the differences between different types of wine.

    Earlier, in fact, Casillas had rebranded because of the dispute over the "Castel" brand. At that time, the CASTEL Group publicly announced that the Chinese trademark of "Cassilele" had been registered and would be used as the company's Chinese brand name alone or legally with the CASTEL alphabet. CASTEL's name of the Chinese back-behind label maker will also be made by French Castel. Brothers Simplified Co., Ltd. changed its name to France's Cassella Music Brothers Simplified Joint Stock Company to completely end the various headaches related to "Castel".

    In the eyes of people in the industry, importers in the current Chinese wine market are paying more and more attention to trademarks, and the frequency of maintaining intellectual property rights will increase in the future.

    Market confusion causes manufacturers to value the brand

    In recent years, the sales volume of Chinese imported wines has continued to rise, and the emergence of large quantities of parallel imports and parallel goods has also increased the importance of trademarks for wine brands. In addition, the trademark registration has also become the reason why importers change their trademarks.

    In 2014, Fortune Wine Group had a legal dispute with a Chinese Wenzhou businessman about the “Ben Fu Penfolds” Chinese trademark dispute. The brand owner was Li Daozhi, a trademark owner of “Castel”. In addition to the registration of the trademark, the rampant filling of liquor also caused brand headaches.

    Beijing Daily News reporter once found a price of 29 yuan in the Gallo Knight dry red wine on an e-commerce platform, but after reading 182 users on this wine's comments, the Beijing Business Daily reporter found this The wine was also promoted at a low price of 19.9 yuan. In the content of consumer evaluations, it was questioned whether it was imported from the original bottle, and consumers felt that the color was too heavy after tasting. They suspected that the wine was blended.

    Li Xinxin, a wine marketing expert, said that the Chinese wine market was an era of brutal growth. Imported brands could not sell much wine when they entered the market, but parallel imports and fake wines became more prevalent. Today, when the Chinese wine market matures and becomes a mainstream market, the brand's power is imperative.

    According to statistics from the China Customs, from January to June 2016, the amount of imported wine in China showed an increase. From January to June, the total amount of imported wine reached 299.792 million liters, which was an increase of 21.9% compared with the import volume of 245.919 million liters in January-June 2015; the total import amounted to USD 117.114 million, which was an increase of 27.8 from January to June last year. %.

    For the replacement of its products, the relevant person in charge of Rafi believes that changing the label is mainly to increase brand recognition. In addition, ASC Fine Wines has also stated that as an agent of the Lafite Rothschild Group in China, ASC Fine Wines has been working hard to increase the degree of anti-counterfeiting of brands, so each legendary drink is affixed with ASC. Security mark.

    Li Xinxin also frankly stated that the rebranding of products such as Penfolds is aimed at starting from the perspective of corporate brands, and it is more of a commercial behavior. It also shows that these companies pay more and more attention to the Chinese market and value the value of the brand.

    Manufacturers fear to pay for a certain price

    In addition to changing the mark, the attitude of the imported wine after the change of mark has become increasingly strong.

    Recently, many businesses selling the Penfolds series of wines on Tmall have been sued by Fulan Wine Group, because the products sold by these merchants used the Penfolds trademark without permission, and allegedly infringed Penfolds wines. Intellectual property rights.
 

    Li Xinxin stated that it is a good thing for Penfolds to do so, and it is more a manifestation of the swearing of sovereignty by the manufacturers. However, in fact, it is not very optimistic that this kind of commercial behavior can hit parallel imports. At the same time, manufacturers also need to pay a certain price.

    The behavior of the Penfolds activists also attracted dissatisfaction from some businesses. Some dealers revealed to Beijing Business Daily that some agents had previously authorized the affluent wine group, but they did not obtain it. Although some wine merchants do not have authorization to use false formalities, they actually sell genuine Penfolds.

    The industry believes that many consumers are not easy to distinguish between true and false wine, manufacturers to clean up online businesses to a certain extent will have an impact on the wine brand, but in the long run is still conducive to the healthy development of the brand.