Pricing, claims and loyalty as one discipline

A pastry sold in a Nanchang shop, a county-town franchise and a livestream is one product with three audiences, and each can see what the others pay. I decide list price, member price, franchise wholesale price and any channel-specific offer together, and the lowest legitimate price of the season is written down before the season starts. Where a channel needs a sharper offer, I prefer a distinct pack with different contents to a cut on the classic box. A different product can carry a different price without telling members they overpaid. Franchise partners see the season's pricing before it is announced, because a public offer below their purchase cost would damage them more than any competitor could. When a regional price war begins, I also examine what it is doing to competitors' recipes and portion sizes before deciding whether we should follow.

China's advertising law prohibits absolute terms such as 'best' or 'top grade', requires claims to be truthful and supportable, and does not allow an ordinary food to suggest a health function. The nutrition-labelling rules set conditions for content and comparative claims. I do not treat these as a late veto from the legal team. Our quality and regulatory manager reviews a proposed claim, its evidence and the product name at concept stage, and the approved wording is then issued unchanged to packaging designers, shop colleagues, our own hosts and outside creators. If a phrase cannot be supported, we describe flavour, ingredients or method instead. Heritage claims receive the same scrutiny. We state our 1992 founding, do not borrow an older history and never suggest an official recognition that we have not received.

Live selling accounts for about two-fifths of our online revenue, and I manage it as advertising rather than as an entertainment budget. Our own hosts and contracted creators work from approved product facts and a written list of statements they must not make, including sugar or medical claims, invented scarcity and comparisons with named competitors. Paid creator content must be identifiable as advertising, and our contracts require that disclosure in every session and post. I favour mid-sized creators whose audiences sit in our regions over the very largest hosts, partly because their terms rarely seek control of our pricing. Recorded sessions are reviewed weekly for accuracy as well as conversion. A host who sells well but improvises claims is coached once, with the brief corrected if it was unclear, and then replaced if the pattern continues.

Our free membership programme has 4.2 million registered members, of whom 1.1 million bought in the twelve months to June 2026. I judge it by repeat purchase at a sustainable margin, not by sign-ups. The monthly coupon we ended in 2025 had taught members to time their visits to the discount. The replacement benefits favour what a pastry shop does well: fresh items held for collection, a birthday pastry, points exchanged for products and two member price days around major festivals. Member data is used only for the purposes customers accepted when they joined, and our privacy notice is reviewed whenever we change what we collect. I also pay attention to older customers who joined with paper cards, because a benefit moved entirely into an app can quietly exclude the people who have bought from us longest.

Lower-tier expansion is often described as opening more shops in cheaper places. In county towns, our partners understand local festivals, gifting customs and rents better than we do, but their customers compare our prices with what relatives pay in Nanchang or Changsha. I keep city and county list prices identical and adapt the range instead. A shop of around sixty square metres carries about forty-five items, with more gift packs before the Spring Festival and fewer fresh cream products. We assess a town on household spending, existing bakeries, travel time from our central kitchen and the partner's own capital, not on population alone. Since 2019 we have opened sixty franchised shops and closed six. I review each closure as carefully as each opening, because every one of them represented a partner family's savings.