Amid the winter season, the construction of the “Lishui Shangeng” Ecological Comprehensive Demonstration Park in Zhaoan Village, Dongdu Town, Jinyun County, is in full swing. This project, with an investment of over 113 million yuan from Lishui Agricultural Investment Group, aims to leverage the brand advantages of “Lishui Shangeng” to build a model provincial-level modern agricultural service center.

This is also the latest key move made under the “Lishui Shangeng” brand since its inception in 2014, marking a significant milestone in its development over the past decade.

After a decade of honing, the brand has made a stunning impact. As the first city-level regional public brand for agricultural products in China, covering the entire region, all categories, and the entire industry chain, “Lishui Shangeng” has developed 352 members and authorized 956 products. It has topped the “China Regional Agricultural Image Brand Influence” list for city-level brands five times and was selected as a “China Regional Agricultural Brand · Annual Case” in 2023.

Renowned “Three Rural (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers)” expert, Gu Yikang believes that Lishui’s approach of “implementing an agricultural product branding strategy as a breakthrough for deepening agricultural supply-side structural reform” provides a practical path for the future of agriculture in mountainous areas across the country.

Breaking the “small, fragmented, and numerous” problem, the emergence of regional public brands

Lishui, located in the southwest of Zhejiang Province, serves as a green barrier for the province and boasts a unique and high-quality ecological environment. However, its geographic structure of “nine mountains, half water, and half farmland” has shaped the agricultural characteristics of Lishui as being “small, fragmented, and numerous”.

Despite Lishui’s abundant natural resources, the city has long lacked well-known agricultural brands, facing challenges such as scattered and chaotic products, low brand premiums, and difficulty in promotion.

“In 2013 and 2014, there were more than 7,000 agricultural production and management entities and over 2,800 agricultural brand trademarks in the city. However, only three were national-level leading agricultural enterprises, and the number of famous trademarks was very limited,” a person in charge of the Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs told the reporter. Creating a brand requires extensive publicity, packaging planning, technical support, and a significant amount of capital, as well as professional brand marketing talent. It is difficult for enterprises to make a significant impact on their own.

On one side, there is strong consumer demand for “branded agricultural products”, while on the other, numerous small entities lack the ability to build strong brands, resulting in a mismatch between supply and demand. “This made us realize that merely guiding production entities to create brands is far from enough; government involvement in directly building brands is also necessary,” the official said.

Creating a new brand with a “visible hand” presented a high-difficulty challenge for Lishui, and there were no precedents to follow even at the national level. To address this, Lishui turned to Hu Xiaoyun, Director of the China Agricultural Brand Research Center at Zhejiang University-Kettering, for comprehensive planning on brand naming, positioning, philosophy, symbol systems, channel construction, and communication strategies.

After Hu Xiaoyun and his team visited Lishui’s Liandu, Suichang, and Longquan counties (cities, districts), they found that Lishui had numerous agricultural brands, such as “Suichang Bamboo Charcoal”, “Jinyun Ma Duck” and “Jingning Huiming Tea”. While these brands have a long history and deep cultural roots, they lacked recognition and influence within the province and the nation.

Solving the problem of “many stars but few moons”, “integrating the entire region, unifying the brand” is a critical choice for lishui’s agricultural development.

In 2013, Lishui commissioned the Zhejiang University Cart Brand Research Center to formulate a plan.

Focusing on branding, e-commerce, and standardization, Lishui integrated renowned ecological agricultural products such as Jingning Huiming Tea, Qingyuan Mushrooms, and Suichang Chrysanthemum Rice to create China’s first-ever city-level regional public brand—“Lishui Shangeng”.

“ ‘Shan(Mountain)’ is a topographical feature of Lishui, and ‘Geng(farm)’ signifies deep cultivation and meticulous crafting. ‘Lishui Shangeng’ is catchy, rich in regional characteristics, and contains a wealth of cultural heritage,” said Xu Bingdong, the former general manager of Lishui Agricultural Investment Company. “The name ‘Lishui Shangeng’ condenses the landscape and cultural features of the area, filled with a strong agricultural aura.”

On September 26, 2014, at the Hangzhou Peace Convention and Exhibition Center, during the Lishui Ecological Fine Agriculture Expo regional brand media briefing, the “Lishui Shangeng” brand was officially unveiled to the province and even the whole country.

At the media briefing, Ren Shunü, the then deputy mayor in charge of agriculture, said that “Lishui Shangeng” would operate with a parent-child brand model with the regional brands of Lishui’s subordinate counties and cities (districts), and at the same time, it would form a complete brand system with corporate brands.

As a regional brand, who should own “Lishui Shangeng” and who should manage and operate it? In response, Lishui boldly innovated by integrating the city’s excellent agricultural entities to establish the Lishui Ecological Agriculture Association, which registered and managed the brand on behalf of the association.

“Adopting the operation model of ‘two signs, one team’, implementing dual-brand trademark operations,” Wang Lijun, the chairman of the Agricultural Investment Company, introduced that in this innovative process of the system and mechanism, “government-led” ensures the credibility and public welfare of the government's brand endorsement, “association management” reflects the self-discipline of the industry association, and “company operation” achieves the integration of resources and the flexibility of market entities.

“A good brand must not only conform to the regional reality and the characteristics of the times but also fully interpret its brand connotation, allowing the small and medium-sized enterprises involved to fully recognize its development philosophy,” Hu Xiaoyun introduced. Therefore, “Lishui Shangeng” proposed the brand slogan “Embrace Nature, Enjoy Purity”, whose core value is to follow natural rules and let agriculture return to simplicity and authenticity.

“With the regional public brand ‘Lishui Shangeng’, we feel like we have found a support,” said Wu Liwen, the general manager of Zhejiang Zhengde He Food Co., Ltd. Since joining “Lishui Shangeng”, the company has taken fewer detours, especially with clearer development concepts and ideas, and more confidence in market pricing. “Now, the tea-fermented ham products produced by the company have market pricing power and have ushered in an opportunity for leapfrog development. The company’s output value was only 8 million yuan in 2014, and by 2023, it has grown to over 50 million yuan.”

Public brand, full industry chain “one-stop” service

The biggest enemy of regional brand construction is that once a brand gains recognition, everyone rushes to use it, leading to a flood of counterfeit and substandard products, ultimately causing the brand’s credibility to collapse. This phenomenon is often referred to by industry experts as the “tragedy of the commons”, and it is believed that regional public brands cannot escape this fate.

The core of the “tragedy of the commons” is the monitoring and control of product quality. To solve this critical issue, Lishui focused on the key aspect of “authorized use” and carried out a series of innovative explorations.

The implementation rules for the use of the “Lishui Shangeng” regional public brand trademark explicitly state that products must be included in the quality safety traceability management system, pass relevant inspections and tests, and meet storage and transportation requirements before they are allowed to use the “Lishui Shangeng” brand.

Wang Lijun explained that the principle of brand authorization for “Lishui Shangeng” is “strict” rather than “lenient”, and “high-quality cultivation” rather than “more children, more blessings”. In the first year of the brand's launch, only 103 enterprises were authorized to use the brand by the “Association”.

Agricultural branding operations have their own uniqueness and complexity. Therefore, from the beginning, Lishui Agricultural Investment Company clearly proposed a “1+N” service system. The “1” refers to the leading “Lishui Shangeng” regional public brand, while the “N” includes elements like standardization, financialization, and e-commerce.

In Lishui, the threshold for using the “Shangeng” brand is high, with “traceability” being the first requirement. Unlike other systems that can only trace responsibility to the main body, Lishui’s self-developed traceability system not only achieves “product traceability” but also enables “supervision and accountability”. Responsibility is clear at every level, from the production entity to the township and street level, to the county government. Lishui also established a “Quality Traceability Advisor System” to help enterprises with platform operations, ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the information entered.

“Traceability” is used to gain consumer trust through data. To this end, Lishui leveraged the existing testing equipment from the Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and partnered with private enterprises to establish Lancheng Testing Company, which can test 20,000 batches of agricultural products annually. “This not only revitalized state-owned assets but also ensured the convenience and timeliness of testing, providing a guarantee for quality and safety,” said Gu Jianchao, the head of Lishui Lancheng Agricultural Science and Technology Testing Co., Ltd.

In agricultural product marketing, cold chain logistics has always been a weak link. To address this issue, Lishui Agricultural Investment Company attracted social capital and jointly established an e-commerce company, entrusting the company with the entire product service from the production end to the sales end. At the same time, the company hired the Zhejiang Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences to design and develop a storage and transportation operation manual tailored to Lishui’s agricultural products, standardizing and regulating agricultural product logistics and transportation.

The person in charge of the brand department of Lishui Agricultural Investment Company introduced that “Lishui Shangeng” adopts a dual-Trademark operation model. The Agricultural Investment Company uses the property rights trading platform to solve the capital shortage problems for the joined production entities through property value evaluation, transfer disposal, trust, and other methods, promoting the growth of corporate brands.

In November, with the crisp autumn air, workers were busy harvesting the bountiful sweet oranges and pomelos at the Daben Bridge Natural Village sweet orange pomelo base in Baimang Village, Pingdu Street, Qingyuan County. The base manager, Pan Junjie, said that previously, sweet oranges and pomelos were sold without grading, meaning the products didn’t travel far, and the flavor was a mix of sweet and sour, making fine quality control difficult.

The challenges faced by the sweet orange pomelo products were resolved with the establishment of the Lishui Mountain Farming Dream Factory. Since its establishment in July 2018, the Dream Factory has gradually formed an integrated service system for the entire agricultural product industry chain. Kong Jingwen, General Manager of Lishui Mountain Farming Dream Factory Co., Ltd., said that after passing through the fruit sorting line, the size and sugar content of the same type of fruit can be standardized. “I remember that initially, it took us 40 days to sell 325,000 kilograms of sweet oranges and pomelos. But after the fruit sorting line was put into operation, we sold 550,000 kilograms in just 12 days,” she said.

Centered around “order agriculture” and the construction of “common prosperity villages”, “Lishui Shangeng” has formed a production and sales model of “strong village companies + village collectives + agricultural operating entities + farmers”. Especially guided by market orders, it promotes the “five unifications” of varieties, standards, packaging, sales, and prices, and promotes the base to produce according to standards throughout the process, seamlessly connecting to the sales terminal market, and perfecting the new mechanism of the public brand “connecting farmers, leading farmers, and enriching farmers”.

In Xiandu Township, Lishui’s Liandu District, sweet peaches have also benefited from “Lishui Shangeng” to solve their “sales difficulties”. In May 2024, the Lishui Shangeng Dream Factory partnered with several fruit sales companies from inside and outside the city and signed a “contract farming” agreement with Xianli Village in Xiandu Township. They launched a “Peach Tree Adoption” public welfare project aimed at consumers in Jiaxing and Hangzhou, allowing tens of thousands of kilograms of sweet peaches to be “sold right off the tree”.

High-quality “Lishui Shangeng” products, in addition to continuously appearing at the exhibition and sales sites of big cities, have also been listed on more than 400 products on mobile Internet platforms such as Tmall, JD.com, and Douyin. So far, “Lishui Shangeng” has cooperated in the construction of 20 order bases and identified 35 core bases and members, and the products have entered more than 20 large chain supermarkets and provincial unit canteens. “Lishui Good Taste” is being placed on more and more consumers’ dining tables.

Brand empowerment spurs regional agricultural upgrade and transformation

Ten years ago, Suichang long zong (a type of rice dumpling) was an unknown local specialty with a sales radius of no more than 30 kilometers. Today, under the influence of the “Lishui Shangeng” brand, its annual sales have exceeded 120 million yuan, boosting the average income of over 4,600 people in the county by 18,000 yuan per person. Additionally, it has cultivated one municipal-level key agricultural leading enterprise and three county-level agricultural leading enterprises.

“In 2016, we implemented ‘e-commerce’ marketing for Suichang long zong”, Kong Jingwen introduced. The raw materials of the long zongzi are all natural ingredients, the outer packaging uses wild bamboo leaves, and the wrapping rope is replaced with dragon beard grass, highlighting the rural style. Especially, the entire production process is traceable and has obtained a food safety production license. “This carefully dressed long zong product was sought after by consumers as soon as it was launched, selling for more than 100 yuan each and still being snapped up”.

Since the operation of the “Lishui Shangeng” regional public brand, through branding, e-commerce, standardization, and differentiated development, it has effectively met the needs of the supply-side structural reform of agricultural products, urging the transformation and upgrade of Lishui’s ecological boutique agriculture.

The Qingjiang Ecological Turtle and Soft-Shelled Turtle Farming Professional Cooperative in Yunhe County was one of the first member enterprises to join “Lishui Shangeng”. The cooperative’s head, Bu Weishao, said, “Before joining ‘Lishui Shangeng’, the wholesale price was only 40 yuan per kilogram, and we had to actively seek out buyers”. Later, with the assistance of the Lishui Agricultural Investment Company, a traceability system was set up. Consumers can simply scan a QR code with their smartphones to view information on the growth process and testing data of the turtles.

Now, Bu Weishao has even installed cameras at the farm to monitor the breeding conditions in real time via the traceability platform. “In the past, my soft-shelled turtles could not be sold outside Lishui. Now, consumers in all provinces except Tibet can enjoy my soft-shelled turtles”, he said. Thanks to the traceability system and the backing of the “Lishui Shangeng” brand, each kilogram of organic soft-shelled turtles is now sold for 600 yuan, a significant price increase.

Due to the government’s brand endorsement and strengthened promotion, it not only provides confidence for consumers but also allows “Lishui Shangeng” products to quickly achieve a premium. For example, Jinyun’s hemp ducks, originally priced at around 60 yuan each, have seen their price increase to 118 yuan each through “Lishui Shangeng” brand promotion and dealer agency, achieving a 50% premium; Longquan’s high mountain small yellow cattle’s hoof circles, a niche product with a backlog of 9 tons at the time, became popular through Hangzhou’s “Lishui Shangeng” ingredient promotion, turning the niche into a hit and selling out the inventory...

Chen Xiaofang, Chairman of the Lishui Bawei Agricultural Products Cooperative, stated that by refining and uncovering the brand value of Lishui’s ecological agricultural products, and through exhibition and experiential marketing, the “Lishui Shangeng” brand has created an ecological wave in cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Ningbo. As a result, his products, including “Three-Year Old Ginger” and “Ecological Lotus Seeds”, have become in high demand after joining the “Lishui Shangeng” brand, with prices rising several times.

The role of “Lishui Shangeng” is not only to help enterprises expand their market and achieve price premiums but, more importantly, to drive standardization through market-driven methods, leading the way in improving agricultural product quality and safety. Wang Lijun explained that the product testing for “Lishui Shangeng” is very strict, and any product that fails testing will lose the brand authorization. “This has reversed the passive situation where standardization was merely being followed, and through the brand, product quality and safety are now guaranteed”.

Since the launch of the “Lishui Shangeng” regional public brand, Lishui agriculture has transitioned from “quantity expansion” to “quality improvement”. It has begun to guide production with differentiated brand thinking and market strategies. New varieties and technologies, such as sweet oranges and “Shangeng Family Banquets”, have been rapidly promoted.

The “Lishui Shangeng” brand has been well received by consumers in large cities, with distributors in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and other places eagerly vying to become agents. Zhu Xufeng, who originally worked in the electronic equipment sales industry, registered “YueXiang Commune” in Hangzhou in 2015. After introducing “Lishui Shangeng” products, the community-based agricultural product group-buying market expanded rapidly. Today, “Lishui Shangeng” accounts for 70% of his offline store products. Thanks to its quality products and strong brand, more than 20 large organizations and groups in Hangzhou have become stable customers.

“Lishui Shangeng” has also received the support of the Zhejiang Provincial Government Logistics Group. The products not only enter the dining tables of the provincial government’s canteen but also hold more than 300 “Lishui Shangeng” product exhibition and sales events every year, creating a consumption boom for original ecological green products in the provincial organs. An official from the Provincial Development and Reform Commission was deeply impressed by the “Lishui Shangeng” product exhibition and sales during the Spring Festival. He said, “The authentic New Year goods are delivered to the side, which is convenient and reassuring, and at the same time, it can increase the income of farmers in remote mountainous areas, which is a multi-benefit!”

In order to enable more Lishui agricultural products to “cross mountains and reach the sea”, “Lishui Shangeng” has adopted an omnichannel marketing strategy, deeply penetrating the Yangtze River Delta market, including Shanghai, Ningbo, and Hangzhou. By 2024, a total of 278 online and offline exhibition sales events have been held nationwide.

With “Lishui Shangeng” leading the way, Lishui has recently launched a series of “Shan(Mountain)” brand products, such as “Lishui Shanju”, “Lishui Shanlu” and “Lishui Shanquan”. These new “Shan(Mountain)” series brands have facilitated the integration of agriculture and tourism development.

Nowadays, more and more agricultural products such as mountain tea oil and local honey with the “Lishui Shangeng” logo are placed on the display shelves of “Lishui Shanju” homestays, promoting the integrated development of the “Shan” industry. Ye Lin, the owner of the homestay “Zhu 85” in Liandu Guyan Painting Township, operates three homestays and has also opened a new restaurant. She said that by integrating “Lishui Shangeng” products, guests can not only enjoy more culinary delights but also experience a wider range of agricultural activities, showing a promising future for “Mountain Integration”.

Brand empowerment has enhanced the value of ecological products, and operational innovation has driven the successful sales and upgrade of agricultural products. Today, “Lishui Shangeng” has not only become Lishui’s “golden business card” but also a well-known regional agricultural public brand nationwide, attracting over 100 study and research teams annually.

With the support of “Lishui Shangeng”, the total output value of Lishui’s quality agriculture industry chain has grown from 15.2 billion yuan a decade ago to 60 billion yuan in 2023. The per capita disposable income of Lishui farmers has risen from just over 10,000 yuan a decade ago to more than 30,000 yuan in 2023. Currently, there are 10 industry chains in Lishui with an output value exceeding 1 billion yuan, with industries such as tea and edible fungi having developed a “grow nationwide, sell nationwide” pattern.

Reciting the “Mountain Scripture” and revitalizing “Local Specialties”.

Today, Xiushan Lishui is focusing on the core links of the quality agriculture industry chain, promoting the “second leap” of “Lishui Shangeng”, and creating a linkage platform of “Agricultural Investment Group + Strong Village Companies in Towns and Townships”. By using branding to force the standardization, scaling, and organization of the industry, it activates the green mountains and waters, promotes the common prosperity of the revolutionary old district in southwestern Zhejiang, and strides towards composing a new chapter in modern Chinese agriculture!