---
title: "99% of New Products Fail to Sell in CVS Due to These 9 Reasons"
description: "A brand owner, Lao Wang, finds his promotional product buried in a small corner of a convenience store chain's flyer, leading him to question the effectiveness of the marketing activity. The article explores the essence of designing attractive and high-converting marketing content, identifying nine common problems and six key elements for success."
author: "刘芳"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-01-06"
language: "en"
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# 99% of New Products Fail to Sell in CVS Due to These 9 Reasons

> A brand owner, Lao Wang, finds his promotional product buried in a small corner of a convenience store chain's flyer, leading him to question the effectiveness of the marketing activity. The article explores the essence of designing attractive and high-converting marketing content, identifying nine common problems and six key elements for success.

**Preface:** Brand owner Lao Wang received the latest promotional product brochure from a convenience store chain. He had just invested in a product for a promotional activity and was eagerly searching for his product information. After flipping through a few pages, he finally found it in a small corner of the brochure.
Lao Wang stared at it for a long time and couldn't help but wonder: **Is this activity attractive? How high is the reach of my product information? How high is user engagement? Can it sustain repeat purchase rates?**
A series of questions popped into Lao Wang's mind, and he fell into deep thought.
To address this issue, we need to understand its essence. The essence lies in: How can marketing activities be designed to create marketing content that attracts users and has high conversion power?
Before discussing this, let's clarify two concepts to avoid confusion: Are marketing and promotion different concepts, or is one included in the other? Although the debate has been ongoing, involving translation issues and different interpretations, I believe that promotion is part of marketing. I won't elaborate on the details here; I'll use "marketing" throughout the article for consistency.
Many convenience store chains of a certain scale have laid out both online and offline marketing channels (if a chain cannot simultaneously thrive in both online and offline channels, I suggest brand owners carefully weigh their resource investment). Therefore, marketing activities need to maximize effectiveness in two scenarios:
**First, how to attract users offline; Second, how to continuously dominate the screen online.**
These two scenarios ultimately come down to the attractiveness of the marketing content itself to users.
**What are the common problems in the content of convenience store marketing activities?**
After FMCG brands invest marketing resources in convenience store chains, some long-standing issues can be summarized into the following 9 situations:
**1. Products lack perceptibility**
This is mainly reflected in the product's design, packaging, and display, meaning the product lacks "silent selling power" and "display power." The most direct manifestation is that when users pass by the product, they don't even want to look at it (it doesn't attract me) or can't see it (the placement isn't in the best visual range), let alone pick it up and take it to the checkout.
**2. Forms lack novelty**
The forms of marketing activities are not fun and too repetitive; you can't find new continents with an old map. Naixue Tea is even playing with the metaverse concept, and you're still sending me paper flyers? Young people's world is in mobile games, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and WeChat. Conventional activity formats are repeated over and over, causing user fatigue.
**3. Themes lack cognitive power**
I often see marketing teams write activity themes like "City-wide Gathering of Benefits." How much benefit? What is gathered? It seems to show cultural level and create a "looks impressive" vibe, but this is a typical lack of user-centric thinking. In fact, what marketers want to express doesn't matter; what matters is whether users can perceive if it's what they want. A convoluted theme that looks impressive but unclear in meaning, with excessive rhetoric, challenges users' understanding. For example, for an ice cream discount event, naming it "Drop to Freezing Point" raises questions: What is freezing point? What degree is freezing? Instead of making users guess, just tell them directly: 50% off, starting at 1 yuan, or buy 5 get 3.
The more professional people are, the more likely they fall into the curse of expertise.
**4. Pain points lack scenario power**
What is a scenario? A scenario includes time, place, people, and behavior, designed to immerse users. For example: In the morning, Lao Wang buys a bread and a carton of milk at a convenience store. With time, place, people, and behavior all present, it's a complete scenario. All products are logically designed to address specific user pain points and needs, and these pain points and needs generate countless real scenarios. Scenarios happen around us every day, but when creating marketing content, many marketers either don't set a scenario at all or create a scenario that isn't real for users—it's fabricated. So when users see this content, they often feel indifferent; without a scenario or with a fake one, there's a complete lack of immersion.
**5. Selling points lack appeal**
Selling points are differentiated advantages compared to competitors. A key concept here is to **first find differentiation, then describe it as an advantage that moves users**—that's the selling point. For example, many products emphasize their unique formula and further link it to "authentic." "Unique formula" isn't differentiation; Zhang San has one, and Li Si might too. But "authentic" is the true differentiated advantage that moves users, implying that Zhang San and Li Si's products are called "roast duck" and claim unique formulas, but my Lao Wang's unique formula is the authentic one. This creates a clear differentiated advantage over competitors. Convenience store chains often overlook this because they've been doing channel terminals for so long, thinking traffic equals everything. They often use specific promotional intensity to cover up the product's actual selling points, then keep spinning in the price war vortex. I can only attribute this to heavy channel thinking and a lack of product and user thinking.
**6. Intensity lacks impact**
But who can be immune to worldly matters? Talking about feelings is not as direct as talking about benefits. This is still an effective method for batch marketing activities (gathering a group of products for promotion). Concessions are the most tangible value users can feel. However, in failed marketing activities, if you offer concessions, is the threshold for user participation too high? Or is the concession too small? Or did you only provide material incentives without combining spiritual and material incentives for a better combination punch?
**7. Channels lack reach**
Channels lacking reach means either the channel is too single, without both online and offline legs; or there is online and offline presence, but the reach methods, timing, cycles, content, paths, etc., are not systematic or refined, resulting in insufficient user stickiness. I've even seen internal development scale published as marketing content on B2C channels. Ask yourself: What direct relationship does the number of stores you open have with users? Users only care: Since you're so big, shouldn't you give out some benefits to pamper fans?
**8. Content lacks repetition**
For an activity's marketing content, the worst thing is changing it every day. If the activity, theme, and selling points are set, and the overall direction is clear, the marketing content must support the big direction no matter how it's expressed. If you keep changing it, marketers lose confidence, and users get confused about what the activity is trying to say. As long as you believe your activity is valuable to users, repeat the right thing ten thousand times.
**9. Communication lacks sustainability**
Many channels start marketing activities with a bang, end with a whimper, and say goodbye without even a review, lacking sustained communication. Look at Double 11: it always lets users know the total sales after the event, triggering regret that "I missed another hundred-billion or trillion-level project," then users return to the platform for the tail-end activities. Although Double 11 in 2021 was criticized by many industry insiders, it's undeniable that it's still an epic marketing activity, and the underlying logic is correct. I believe that the more chaotic things appear on the surface, the more you need to look at the underlying logic.
**What are the key elements of well-done marketing content?**
After discussing the shortcomings of convenience store channel marketing content, what are the key elements of good marketing content? I've distilled 6 key elements.
**1. Empathy**
Content with empathy expresses the common consciousness and voice of most people in society, shows common problems, and is a real sample of social issues. In 2013, I did an H5 post titled "The Road Home" on a million-level retail account, depicting various emotional close-ups of people returning home for family reunions. It was New Year's time, fitting the release of comprehensive social emotions like homecoming, reunion, and Spring Festival travel. The post got over 100,000 reads overnight, mainly by capturing people's empathy and generating huge social resonance.
**2. Entertainment**
In self-media content, entertainment is becoming increasingly widespread. Often, 6 or more of the top 10 Weibo hot searches are entertainment news. For example, Mixue Ice City's sweet and earthy song went viral as an entertaining marketing event. The video on its official Douyin account alone got nearly a million likes, not to mention subsequent adaptations and secondary dissemination, with over 7 billion views, greatly boosting Mixue Ice City's popularity. However, under the guidance of socialist core values, entertainment should be used cautiously, following mainstream values, to avoid backlash.
**3. Logic**
Good content is conceived with deductive reasoning and presented with inductive reasoning. That is, logic must be rigorous and arguments brilliant. There are 4 key points: conclusion first, classification, adjustment of order, and deletion of information. Confused marketing content is common. I think the main reason is many people lack training in logic. The main feature of logical confusion is unclear understanding of the entire user consumption scenario chain. Many marketers haven't even learned how to visually map the consumption scenario chain and deduce how to express marketing content logically, so users can slide through the first sentence like a slide, smoothly to the end.
**4. Storytelling**
This means having specific plots, being infectious, and particularly attractive. Many brand micro-films fit the storytelling element. There's a plot with ups and downs that attracts you to watch, drives your emotions, and makes you empathize with the characters. However, empathy isn't the result; participation, forwarding, and ordering after empathy are the results to pursue. Storytelling fits the core of content marketing—not hard advertising but touching hearts. Similarly, the more moving the content, the higher the production costs. Storytelling marketing content often tests the team's comprehensive conditions like manpower, facilities, equipment, and technology.
**5. Sociality**
Content with social currency helps users build their persona and is most likely to trigger viral spread. Social currency includes curiosity coins, fun coins, literary coins, photogenic coins, patriotic coins, image coins, benefit coins, etc. For example, those who know Patek Philippe should have heard its most famous advertising slogan with strong social currency: "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation." This highlights its high value passed down through generations. Wearing a Patek Philippe not only makes you the coolest person on the street but also the most valuable.
**6. Searchability**
Searchability means that when target users search on various platforms, your brand stands out. For example, when searching for a product on JD.com, is your brand in the first row? If yes, congratulations, that shows search capability or positioning capability.
**4 Easy-to-Use Methods for Good Marketing Content**
With the 6 key elements, how do you create good marketing content? I've distilled 8 characters to help understand what good marketing content should be: **Emotional, Interesting, Useful, and Tasteful.**
**1. Emotional**
Humans have six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Among them, **"happiness, fear, disgust, and anger" are four typical high-arousal emotions, which marketers should focus on.** Because marketing aims to drive users to change, and there are only two ways: either make users aspire or pursue: happiness; or make users avoid or change: fear, disgust, anger. To make users aspire and pursue, most ads create a "positive psychology" for the audience, full of energy and joy. A typical example is the Brain Platinum ads with two elderly people dancing and singing, laughing from start to finish for no reason; happiness is contagious. The impact of content on people is to combine your product with positive, pleasant images. Over time, people transfer the positive emotions from these images to the advertised product, which is called **"emotional conditioning."** The power of emotions in consumption far outweighs rational analysis and choice. Besides positive joy, evoking negative emotions like fear, disgust, and anger to trigger users' desire to avoid or change is also a common tactic. For example, the 1987 U.S. anti-drug campaign "This is your brain on drugs" demonstrated the irreversible damage drugs cause to the human brain by frying an egg in a pan. Some antibacterial and medicine ads also use similar tactics, like hand sanitizer ads showing disgusting cockroaches crawling on hands if you don't wash properly. Sadness is a special emotion; when we are sad, we feel a strong sense of helplessness; when we see others sad, we feel strong pity and sympathy. Sadness is often used in public service ads to evoke your sadness and open your wallet.
**2. Interesting**
Pursuing fun and interest is human nature. In this article, I want to give traditional FMCG brand owners and retailers a new perspective. Although this perspective comes from internet companies, I believe that when you can't find better solutions in your familiar field, cross-industry breakthroughs can work. This new perspective is gamification thinking. The biggest stimulus gamification gives users is fun and playfulness. For example, why are games like Honor of Kings so addictive and occupy users' time for so long? Because the game design principle is to cultivate your habit of using the product from the moment you enter, help you learn, deeply explore product features, add surprise elements within expectations, and use self-propagation. The achievements you gain in the game can be shared to complete self-propagation, and finally, a payment link completes the entire business loop, giving you a different product experience level. The logic of games is: **use a sticky growth model for user acquisition and retention, use viral growth models for user self-propagation, then open a payment model to give users different levels and depths of product experience.** Gamification design is now common in many marketing activities. For example, I participated in the "Meiyijia & Extra City Walk" gamified mini-program design project, which increased user usage and activity, creating more touchpoints between the product and users. Gamification design has gradually become an effective way for many marketing operators to activate and retain users.
**3. Useful**
Is the marketing content useful to users? How useful? How many people does it help? How long is it useful? How can it be useful to more people? Why are many food or beauty KOLs and KOCs so popular and have strong sales ability? Because they help users select carefully, provide feedback on products through personal experience, which is like word-of-mouth recommendation. This word-of-mouth is built on users' recognition of the usefulness of the content they recommend. Beauty experts create content based on various beauty scenarios and products to help users understand products, like "108 tips to solve acne"; food experts create various ways to eat different products, like "15 types of luosifen unboxing reviews." **The usefulness of content reduces users' choice and transaction costs.**
**4. Tasteful**
Tasteful means good quality, good taste, and good appearance. Zhong Xue Gao is the Hermès of ice cream, because of its good ingredients, high appearance, and good taste—a brand with excellent quality, appearance, and taste. In this era, consumer needs have been segmented. Some highly educated and high-income families or individuals tend to choose brands with better materials, craftsmanship, appearance, and health. Zhong Xue Gao's emergence saw this market opportunity. **The product itself being good is important, but in marketing to users, showing quality, appearance, and taste to the greatest extent is what enables users to fully understand and choose the product.**
**How can brand owners collaborate with convenience store chains to create high-conversion marketing content?**
From the above, we understand the 6 key elements of good marketing content and 4 methods to create it. These elements and methods can be used comprehensively or individually, depending on the specific marketing activity and the combination chosen. I've always advocated that brand owners should not become "hands-off bosses" in their cooperation with convenience store chains but should participate deeply. Why? Because your product and my product become a comprehensive activity at the convenience store chain, and few brands can do independent themed marketing activities with the chain. **If you don't participate deeply, you're irresponsible to your brand.**
So how can brand owners and convenience store chains jointly design high-conversion marketing content? I think there are 5 stages to grasp.
**First, the negotiation stage. At this stage, express: Deep participation.** Don't be a hands-off boss, letting the chain design the activity on its own.
**Second, the planning stage. The most important thing here is three words: Set direction.** Including the purpose of the marketing, the goals to achieve, and the value to bring to users.
**Third, the design stage. The core is also three words: Review details.** Including online content design and offline content design. Online design includes: articles, videos, flyers, communities, scripts, behavior guidelines, etc. Offline design includes: materials, posting requirements, etc.
**Fourth, the implementation stage. The approach here is: Fast iteration.** Use internet thinking to summarize and iterate online marketing in a timely manner, while offline marketing can be quickly adjusted with smart retail devices.
**Fifth, the closing stage. The most important thing here is: Detailed review.** After being clear about the data of the entire activity, quickly form a review summary. On the user side, show the activity's results, making users feel they missed a good activity and must participate next time.
**Final Thoughts:**
Overall, the core of creating high-conversion marketing content is: **All actions are to help the product be seen.**
**Whether online or offline, you must occupy users' attention and continuously occupy it.** As long as you always appear in users' eyes, you've outperformed most brands.
Bio: Liu Fang, new retail private domain marketing consultant, personal commercial brand and private domain consultant, with 17 years of experience in the retail/FMCG B2B industry, columnist for multiple business media platforms, invited new consumer private domain traffic mentor for "Wu Xiaobo Channel" 890 New Business School/New National Products Promotion Association (online + offline), and operator of a well-known retail brand's tens of millions of private domain traffic and multiple 100,000+ read articles.
**Are you "watching" me?**


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