No Walnut Yangyuan Drinks in 'Six Walnuts' Are Referred to as Edge Ball

On the morning of April 7, in a supermarket chain on Zhongbei Road in Wuhan, the salesman looked at the "six walnuts" on the shelf and shook his head: "It's not good to sell." Frequently use your brain and drink six more walnuts. This well-known advertisement comes from walnut milk, the main product of Yangyuan Drinks. However, the marketing offensive smashed by its heavy money has recently been criticized for its advertising edge ball: the prospectus of listed company Hebei Yangyuan Zhihui Drinks Co., Ltd. shows that the highest proportion of the raw material cost of six walnuts per listen is easy-to-pull cans, up to 0.57 yuan, while walnut kernels are only 0.25 yuan. "Six walnuts" walnut milk, where are six walnuts? Six parent Walnut Companies handed in their Yangyuan drinks in 2018. Annual report shows that the company's revenue in 2018 is 8.144 billion yuan, of which walnut milk revenue is 8.02 billion yuan, accounting for 98% of the revenue of Yangyuan drinks, and gross interest rate is as high as 50.06%.

The ingredient list on the walnut milk can shows that the ingredients are mainly water and sugar, as well as food additives. According to its prospectus listed in early 2018, the direct materials of a can of six walnuts include cans, walnut kernels, sugar, and others, accounting for 91.75% of the production cost. In the first half of 2017, the cost of raw materials per tin of walnut milk was 1 yuan, including 0.57 yuan for cans, 0.25 yuan for walnut kernels, 0.05 yuan for sugar and 0.13 yuan for others. According to the annual report of 2018, the high proportion of packaging cost has not been improved. The proportion of purchasing amount of cans is 58.45%, which is 6% higher than that of the market, while the proportion of purchasing amount of walnut kernel is only 15.98%, which is reduced by nearly 7%. On April 7, a reporter from Chutian Metropolitan Daily saw that the retail price of six walnut milk on the shelf was 3.8 yuan, and there was a little discount for the whole case. "It's getting harder and harder to sell." Salesmen say that consumers have become more sophisticated in recent years, not just in what advertisements claim to believe. Many customers said they did not "catch a cold": "Why spend money on walnut milk drinks? It's better to eat walnuts directly.

False publicity effectiveness has been prosecuted many times

According to the Yangyuan Drinks Prospectus, Hubei is one of the important markets in central China, with annual sales accounting for about 4% of the total turnover. The worries of Wuhan salesmen and consumers are not alone. Journalists from Chutian Metropolitan Daily found that as early as 2012, Beijing consumers sued Yangyuan Zhihui Company for "false propaganda" because six walnuts did not really contain six walnuts. In 2015, consumers also sued Yangyuan Drinks together with their spokespersons. Consumers said that the slogan "Drink six walnuts more often with your brain" did not directly indicate that drinking six walnuts products has brain-tonifying effect, which is obviously a kind of "brush the edge ball" behavior. In response to this, Yangyuan Drinks said that "six walnuts" are the company's product name and registered trademark, not a specific description of the content of raw materials; product publicity terms indicate that the company's products have the role of supplementary nutrition, and do not indicate or imply that they have the role of health care or prevention and treatment of diseases, so they do not violate the Advertising Law. Industry insiders said that Yangyuan drinks played an advertising brush ball, using a series of advertising plans to combine products with "using the brain", but did not directly say that its products have Brain-Building effect, so that consumers themselves associate, and finally to the public to open their hands and refuse to accept the accounts: "We have not said that."