当白酒开始经营“庄园会员”，郎酒给行业上了一堂怎样的课？

On August 19, on the left bank of the Chishui River, the 6th Langjiu Estate Member Festival arrived as scheduled. The annual event, themed “Quality and Resilience – Endless Vitality,” featured a headline-grabbing announcement by Langjiu Group Chairman Wang Junlin: a brand-new member value service system. Built around four core pillars – ultimate quality value, differentiated estate value, scarcity-based experience value, and estate-level service value – the system is regarded by industry observers as a systematic upgrade of Langjiu’s member services.

In the view of JiuYe Times, the core signal from this announcement is that competition in the baijiu industry is shifting decisively from “channel battles” to “user value wars.” Langjiu’s solution is to transform a baijiu estate that took eighteen years and over RMB 20 billion to build into the deepest foundation of member value.

The “Second Half” of Baijiu: From Selling Liquor to Cultivating People

The baijiu industry is undergoing a profound value chain restructuring. Over the past decades, the industry’s core logic was “channel is king” – whoever could recruit more distributors, secure more terminals, and invest more in advertising would gain market advantage. But this logic is gradually becoming obsolete.

As some industry observers have noted, for the baijiu industry to break free from its long-standing B-end-driven model, it must restructure the value chain through C-end transformation. The shift toward C-end operations has become an industry-wide consensus.

Langjiu has been on this path of C-end user engagement much earlier than most peers. In 2018, the Qinghualang Member Club was established, marking the beginning of Langjiu’s member system exploration; in 2019, Langjiu Estate opened to the public; in 2021, the Langjiu Estate Member Centre was launched, and the first Member Festival was successfully held. Over the following six years, member benefits have been continuously iteratively upgraded. By August 2026, the Langjiu PLUS digital member service platform, in operation for six years, had surpassed 57 million members.

A membership base of 57 million means Langjiu has achieved digital retention of tens of millions of genuine consumers – making it one of the industry’s leading private-domain user asset reserves. But the numbers are only the surface. What truly matters is how Langjiu transforms these cold figures into warm relationships between the brand and its users.

Behind the “Four Pillars of Value”: How an Estate Becomes a “Home” for Members

The “Four Pillars of Value” released by Wang Junlin were not conjured out of thin air. They represent a systematic synthesis distilled from nine years of member exploration and six years of continuous Member Festival iteration.

Ultimate quality value is placed first among the four pillars. Langjiu has established six eco-brewing zones on the left bank of the Chishui River, with an annual premium sauce-aroma production capacity of 72,000 tonnes and 300,000 tonnes of premium sauce-aroma base liquor reserves. More critically, the company adheres to a “store ten, sell one” production and sales principle – for every ten tonnes produced, only one tonne is sold externally, with the rest entering storage for aging. Wang Junlin made a commitment at the festival: “The liquor members buy at the estate will always offer the best ‘value for money.'”

Differentiated estate value is Langjiu’s hardest-to-replicate competitive barrier. Built over nearly 20 years with an investment exceeding RMB 20 billion, spanning 10 square kilometres, Langjiu Estate has become a spiritual sanctuary for its members. Landmark cultural experience sites including the Jiuzun Tower, Jingtai Terrace, and Dongxian Bieyuan are under accelerated construction and will be progressively completed by 2027–2028. The estate is no longer just a brewing facility – it has become a “members’ home” where one can live, experience, and socialise.

Scarcity-based experience value gives the membership system a distinctly luxury character. Only 8% to 10% of Langjiu’s annual premium liquor, after more than a decade of “growth and maturation,” qualifies for storage in the Tianbao Cave, Dibao Cave, and Renhe Cave. At this year’s Member Festival, three cave-aged liquors – Dibao Cave (20-year), Tianbao Cave (25-year), and Renhe Cave (30-year) – officially opened exclusive purchase channels to members. “Money alone cannot buy it” has become Langjiu’s exclusive threshold for its members.

Estate-level service value is realised through numerous detailed adjustments. The Qinghualang membership mechanism has been adjusted from a points-based system to a spending-based system; the Honghualang · 15 membership system has been expanded; and a comprehensive suite of service benefits – including knowledge empowerment, circle-based activities, exclusive gift liquors, membership-tenure-specific gifts, and purchasing privileges – has been significantly enriched.

In the view of JiuYe Times, the deep logic of the “Four Pillars of Value” is Langjiu’s systematic transformation of more than four decades of premium liquor heritage and eighteen years of estate development into tangible, accessible, and inheritable exclusive value for its members. This is not a simple stacking of member benefits – it is a complete value delivery system.

Benchmarking Against Luxury Brands: What Is Langjiu Learning?

Wang Junlin explicitly mentioned in his speech that the refinement of Langjiu’s member service system drew reference from the mature member operations and service logic of international luxury brands. This is not just a marketing slogan.

The core competitiveness of international luxury brands derives not only from product scarcity but equally from long-term relationship cultivation with members. Hermès, for example, operates a membership system that essentially filters core users – setting entry thresholds through allocation mechanisms and retaining high-value VIPs through customised services. Members can independently select leather materials, thread colours, and engrave personal identifiers. The underlying logic is clear: give core clients exclusive benefits that non-members can never access.

Langjiu is replicating this logic in the baijiu sector. Cave-aged liquors are exclusively available to members, estate immersion experiences are exclusive to members, and the World Estate Alliance Tour is open to members – these “members-only” privileges are the essence of luxury brand membership systems.

But Langjiu’s model takes a step further than luxury brands. Hermès’s member benefits rely on product strength and craftsmanship barriers; Langjiu’s member benefits, in addition to scarce products like cave-aged liquors, are backed by a tangible 10-square-kilometre physical estate. The estate is not just a production facility – it is a physical space that hosts experiences, social interactions, and accommodation. Luxury brands sell “rarity of things”; Langjiu delivers a dual scarcity of “rarity of place” layered with “rarity of things.”

A Signal Worth Watching: Langjiu × Lafite – When Two “Left Banks” Meet

On the day of the Member Festival, there was another detail worth the industry’s attention: the official launch of the Langjiu and Lafite alliance. This marks the third key step in Langjiu’s “World Estate Alliance”: a strategic partnership with Pernod Ricard in 2024, a tie-up with Penfolds in 2025, and now a collaboration with Lafite – also the first time Lafite has launched a co-branded product with a Chinese baijiu brand.

The two parties jointly launched a globally limited edition of 1,000 boxes of Qinghualang × Château Rieussec Noble Rot Sweet White Wine, and another 1,000 boxes of Hongyunlang × Lafite Rothschild Prieuré Rouge. In the view of JiuYe Times, the symbolic significance of this collaboration far outweighs its commercial value. Langjiu is using the globally understood language of “estates” to engage in dialogue with the world’s wine industry. When Langjiu Estate, alongside Château Lafite Rothschild, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, and other world-renowned estates, made it onto the “Leading Tier” of the World Estate Influence Index, Chinese baijiu gained, for the first time, a voice in the global conversation on equal footing with the world’s finest wines.

The inclusion of the “World Estate Alliance Tour” as an exclusive member benefit means that Langjiu members can not only experience the estate on the left bank of the Chishui River but also walk through the cellars of Château Lafite on Bordeaux’s left bank. This kind of cross-category, cross-cultural immersive experience is almost unprecedented in the baijiu industry.

Industry Implications: When the “Estate” Becomes a Business Model

Langjiu’s membership system raises a question worthy of deep reflection across the baijiu industry: when overcapacity and channel saturation become the industry norm, what else can baijiu brands rely on to build competitive barriers?

Langjiu’s answer is: turn time into an asset, space into an experience, and relationships into value. Eighteen years and RMB 20 billion – this is the cost of Langjiu’s estate investment. On the balance sheet, these are sunk costs; but embedded in the member value system, they translate into an unassailable competitive moat. Any competitor attempting to replicate a similar estate would have to pay an equivalent cost in time and capital – and that is precisely the confidence behind “differentiated estate value.”

As one industry insider commented, the Langjiu Estate Member Festival has integrated quality expression, estate experience, and knowledge sharing into a cohesive whole, with membership in the Langjiu Estate increasingly becoming a marker of identity. When the value of a bottle of liquor is no longer determined solely by the liquid itself, but co-defined by where it is consumed, with whom, and how, the competitive logic of baijiu has been fundamentally rewritten.

The baijiu market is moving from the “channel is king” era into the “user-centric era.” Langjiu is taking the lead in building deep trust and mutually empowering value symbiosis with its top-tier users. This is not merely an experiment for a single company – it is a subject that the entire baijiu industry should seriously consider in the first year of the “15th Five-Year Plan.”

In the view of JiuYe Times, the true value of Langjiu’s membership system lies not in which international brands it benchmarks against, but in what it has created – a new business model that transforms heavy assets into user value. While most distilleries are still debating price bands and channel capabilities, Langjiu has already redefined the substance of “membership” through a single estate.

(This article is compiled from publicly available industry information. Sources/Data: Red Star News, China Wine News, Sichuan Online, Upstream News, Dazhong Securities, Tencent News, Baijiahao, Eastmoney, The Times, National Business Daily, etc.)