Gree's trademark filing for "Mingzhu Zhenxuan" to cross into daily chemicals reflects its diversification anxiety and IP overextension risk as its core air-conditioning business hits a ceiling.
When Zhuhai Gree Electric Appliances, Inc. submitted a trademark named "Mingzhu Zhenxuan" to the China National Intellectual Property Administration, with its international classification precisely confined to Class 3 daily chemical products such as personal care, cosmetics, and toothpaste, the outside world's first instinct often carried a certain spectatorial absurdity. From the Gree mobile phone and TOSOT rice cooker of earlier days, to the prepared dish equipment and lithium titanate batteries it has pushed in recent years, this hundred-billion-level white goods aircraft carrier has been able to stir up towering waves with every cross-border trial.
However, if this move is merely regarded as yet another disorderly spillover of Dong Mingzhu's personal IP, one would underestimate the deep yearning and strategic wavering Gree has shown toward high-frequency consumables and self-owned channel blood-making, in the deep-water zone where its traditional air-conditioning main business has hit the ceiling and the traffic dividend of online private-domain channels has been exhausted.
Online Breakthrough Anxiety Under Air-Conditioning Dependency
Within the domestic white goods landscape, Gree has always carried an air-conditioning dependency it struggles to shake off. Even though it has long extended into refrigerators, washing machines, living appliances, and even industrial products, the air-conditioning segment still firmly occupies an absolute pillar in the overall revenue picture of its financial reports. Home appliances are extremely low-frequency durable consumer goods, and the replacement cycle for an air conditioner or washing machine often runs as long as eight to ten years.
At a time when the incremental dividend of real estate has completely faded and competition for replacement in the stock market has become white-hot, the inherently low repurchase nature of durable goods is continuously suppressing the customer lifetime value of Gree's online self-operated channels.How to inject high-frequency, low-ticket, high-margin daily consumables into official livestream rooms and private-domain malls that often command millions of followers has become a hidden pain point in Gree's online channel breakthrough.
The Business Registration Traces of the "Mingzhu Zhenxuan" Trademark
Penetrating through the underlying business registration traces from the intellectual property dimension, Gree's defensive and offensive path at the trademark level is displayed with extreme clarity in Tianyancha data.Tianyancha trademark data shows that Zhuhai Gree Electric Appliances, Inc. filed on July 31 an application for the "Mingzhu Zhenxuan" trademark with application number 93271472, with the scope of goods and services pointing directly at core daily chemical categories such as personal care, cosmetics, and toothpaste.
This naming differs by only one character from Gree's core livestream sales matrix "Gree Mingzhu Jingxuan," and the trademark rights holder is without reservation placed directly under the listed company Gree Electric Appliances itself.
From binding with Meng Yutong in 2021 to establish "Mingzhu Yutong Jingxuan," to changing its name to "Gree Mingzhu Jingxuan" after the departure of its core influencer, and now to pushing "Mingzhu Zhenxuan" into the daily chemical category,Gree's exploitation of the personal super IP has entered an extremely aggressive phase.
Defensive Fortifications and Commercial Probing
At the listed company level, having the parent entity directly apply for a similar trademark is first and foremost a typical defensive fortification. Under the normal operation of livestream e-commerce and brand IP development, homophones and derivative words surrounding the name of a well-known entrepreneur are highly susceptible to external squatting and black-and-gray-market free-riding on famous brands. Conducting a dragnet-style defensive preemptive positioning of highly associated terms around "Mingzhu Jingxuan" across all categories is a standard operation on the legal side to prevent dilution of brand goodwill.
But concentrating the defensive focus solely on Class 3 daily chemical products carries a commercial probing implication far beyond legal defense.
Daily chemicals and beauty personal care are typical fast-moving consumer goods tracks, with extremely high gross margins and very short repurchase cycles. In recent years, while vigorously promoting cleaning appliances such as washing machines and heat pump dryers, if Gree were to use "Mingzhu Zhenxuan" for OEM entry into dedicated laundry detergent, antibacterial liquid, or even personal care products, it could in theory form a so-called lifestyle-scenario bundled sale with its white goods hardware, leveraging existing customers' trust in Dong Mingzhu's image of demanding quality to achieve high-frequency monetization of self-operated channels.
Dong Mingzhu's repeated public mentions of healthy home living and life aesthetics in the past also reserved public opinion groundwork for such category expansion.
Industrial Chasm and Reputation Backlash Risk
However, this commercial vision of rigidly piecing together fast-moving consumer goods through a super IP straddles an extremely harsh industrial chasm.
Heavy-asset home appliances and fine chemicals are two industries with completely different logics. Gree possesses an unparalleled supply chain moat in mechanical manufacturing, compressor R&D, and sheet metal molds, but this heavy-industry chassis has no possibility of reuse for chemical formulations, biological extraction, flavor blending, and the stringent daily chemical filing system. If Gree truly launches its own daily chemical products in the future, it will most likely have to rely on an external OEM model.
In the red ocean market where shampoos and toothpastes are being strangled at close quarters by Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and a host of local emerging brands, OEM daily chemical products can easily fall into the awkward position of having neither a core technical barrier nor long-term brand premium.
A more severe backlash risk lies in the collateral wear on corporate reputation.
Fast-moving consumer goods, especially cosmetics and toothpaste that come into direct contact with skin and oral cavity, are high-incidence disaster zones for consumer rights protection and quality inspection scandals. An appliance failure can still be remedied through after-sales repair, but once a daily chemical product has even a minor formula allergy or quality flaw, it will rapidly ferment under the magnifying glass of social media.If Gree, which has forged a quality moat over the past decades relying on solid industrial technology, places personal and corporate reputation above the quality-control minefield of OEM materials just to earn quick money from a few bottles of detergent or toothpaste, this risk-reward ratio is extremely asymmetrical in commercial actuarial terms.
A Wake-Up Call for Traditional Manufacturing Giants
This daily chemical trademark squatting that took place in midsummer has sounded a wake-up call for all traditional manufacturing giants. When online traffic anxiety forces traditional hardware companies to continuously overdraw entrepreneurs' personal IP, any category generalization detached from their own core manufacturing advantages can easily become self-indulgent decoration after the novelty fades.In the face of cold fast-moving consumer goods shelves, consumers may generously pay for a Gree air conditioner that lasts ten years, but they may not be willing to readily apply a bottle of "Mingzhu" shampoo lacking R&D accumulation to the top of their own heads.