Kweichow Moutai Co., Ltd. makes and markets beverages, food, and packaging materials. It has been known as the most popular marque of Moutai, which is a style of baijiu, a distilled Chinese liquor. While the drink Moutai can be traced back for two millennia, the company itself was established quite recently, in 1999. The brand has been immensely successful. For instance, when in 2020 Kweichow Moutai’s share price soared, it became the country’s most valuable publicly-listed company, overtaking China’s biggest bank.
Kweichow Moutai Co., Ltd. has been loyal to its visual brand identity over time. This is probably a natural approach for a company that makes a beverage with such a long history. So, the company is trying to stick to the logo it chose at the very beginning of the brand’s history.
What is Kweichow Moutai
Kweichow Moutai is a Chinese brand of luxury spirit. In addition to its flagship product, the spirit Maotai baijiu, the company also works in the production and marketing of other beverages, as well as food and packaging material. In 2021, it was ranked the world’s biggest beverage company.
The most obvious thing about the Kweichow Moutai logo is that it somehow resembles the logo of one of the world’s most popular soft drinks, Pepsi. The resemblance becomes obvious the first minute you look at the emblem. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that in the late 1990s, when Kweichow Moutai was released, Coca-Cola also had a roundel logo.
So, to begin with, we can assume that one of the reasons why the circle became the basic shape could be the influence of Pepsi and Coca-Cola logos.
There was also another important reason. When you take a look at the bottle, you can see that the logo is positioned on a piece of paper stuck on the side of the bottle cap. There is also a red ribbon sticking out from beneath that piece of paper. In a way, it all looks like a seal. It protects the product showing the owner that the bottle hasn’t been opened after it left the production site. Although, technically speaking, it’s not a real seal, the circular shape and the position of the logo clearly alludes to the ancient practice of this method.
When it comes to the structure of the Kweichow Moutai logo, the resemblance to Pepsi becomes even more obvious. It is especially true, when you compare it not with the current Pepsi logo but with the ones used from 1991 to 2008, when Pepsi adopted a more modern logo with a swoosh.
First, there was the combination of a red field at the top with a blue field below. The fields were separated by a thick white wave. The only thing that is different here, from the structural point of view, is that there is only the right part of the original wave. The left part of the design just mirrors the right part.
However, the designers who worked on the Kweichow Moutai emblem have added some details to create a unique touch and convey a more specific message. In the red field, they placed five stars. While all the stars are rather small, some are smaller than others.
On both sides of the thick white wave, they added thinner red waves.
The blue field below houses the ancient version of the name of the drink, Moutai. The thin lines, which sometimes almost disappear, do not contribute to legibility.
The combination of blue, red, and white, is a very popular one in logo design. Here, it seems to have been inspired by the palette of the Pepsi logo.
The type is clean and simple, due to which the Kweichow Moutai logo is possible to read despite the thin lines.