---
title: "As the Beverage Peak Season Arrives, How to Win the Cooler Battle?"
description: "During the annual June-August beverage sales peak season, coolers become the key battleground for beverage manufacturers. This article discusses strategies for winning the cooler war, including focusing resources on high-potential outlets, leveraging existing coolers, optimizing in-store displays, and adopting innovative technologies and incentive programs."
author: "刑仁宝"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-07-04"
language: "en"
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# As the Beverage Peak Season Arrives, How to Win the Cooler Battle?

> During the annual June-August beverage sales peak season, coolers become the key battleground for beverage manufacturers. This article discusses strategies for winning the cooler war, including focusing resources on high-potential outlets, leveraging existing coolers, optimizing in-store displays, and adopting innovative technologies and incentive programs.

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Every year from June to August is the peak sales season for the beverage industry. Numerous drinks compete to enter various channels, vying for consumer favor.
For consumers, in the hot summer, the most likely trigger for their choice is when the body or brain just feels the desire for hydration or cooling, and a cold drink appears right before their eyes. This scenario inevitably requires a powerful sales tool: the cooler.
It can be said that coolers are the battleground for beverage manufacturers in summer. **Those who win the cooler war win the market.** Today, based on past experience, I will discuss how to gain an edge and seize the initiative in this cooler battle.
**Focus Resources, Tilt Channels, and Target Outlets Precisely**
The cooler war is resource-intensive, both financially and in manpower. Before engaging, manufacturers must clarify **where their battlefield is, which streets to attack strongly, which points to focus on, which points to take down at all costs, and which points can be gradually eroded and penetrated.** They must not spread efforts like pepper, trying to do everything without considering the return on investment. Three key aspects need to be considered:
**First, the net sales scale of the regional market.** A large net sales scale indicates good market movement, making it a priority battlefield.
**Second, channel selection.** Analyze historical distribution data of outlets to identify high-selling channels and rank them.
**Third, outlet selection.** This should be based on both single-store sales and geographic location. For single-store sales, consider not only your own brand's sales but also the sales of major competitors in the same category, because the outlet's sales may be lower than competitors due to insufficient execution or other reasons. Since competitors have sales, it indicates there is a consumer base, providing a foundation for sales growth.
If these points are captured, the sales improvement can be significant.
**Additionally, consider geographic location.** Outlets in business districts, intersections, near schools, scenic spots, residential communities, night markets, and food stalls—areas with high foot traffic and frequent coverage of beverage target consumers—are the best offline brand promotion sites and important places for consumer cultivation. They are strategic highlands that cannot be ignored.
**Borrowing Chickens to Lay Eggs, Strict Management, and High-Frequency Visits**
Currently, coolers from various manufacturers are nearly saturated in the market. The simplest and most direct approach is to grab others' coolers.
This "**borrowing chickens to lay eggs**" method generally has three scenarios. The most common is that manufacturers pay for shelf space, typically costing 100-150 yuan per month for a full shelf layer, often paid in product form.
Another scenario is when sales personnel have good relationships with store owners and are hands-on, securing some display space in manufacturer coolers that are not strictly inspected or in their own coolers.
The third is when the product is strong, with high consumer demand and relatively high gross margins, prompting store owners to proactively place it in coolers.
As the most important terminal maintenance during the peak season, **customer relationships remain the top priority. Even if you pay, it is only effective on the basis of good relationships.**
Industry insiders know that even your own branded coolers are hard to keep pure, let alone occupying others' coolers.
If the store owner does not approve of the salesperson or the product, first, the deal to buy cooler space is hard to close, and second, it is difficult to maintain the desired display standards. This is not something that ends with signing an agreement and paying; it requires the store owner's cooperation to be sustainable and effective.
Therefore, for stores where you borrow space, **our terminal sales personnel need to visit more frequently, at least twice a week, and each time, ideally, place the products strictly according to the agreed standards in front of the owner.**
This step is crucial: it reinforces that this position must be displayed according to standards, and it also lets the owner see the hard work of the sales staff, making them more appreciative of their efforts.
Of course, this is a positive way to maintain displays. There is also a negative incentive method: **stipulate in the agreement that unannounced inspections will be conducted monthly, and each violation will deduct a certain percentage of rebate, encouraging the owner to maintain the display.**
However, the standard should not be set too high; store owners cannot achieve real-time restocking. You can require a minimum of 85% fullness and zero presence of competitors.
**Prioritize Old Stock, Make Displays Impressive, and Promotions Eye-Catching**
Once the store is selected, the next step is to consider how to maximize the value of that cooler and generate more sales.
**First, use the cooler for effective shelf-life management at the terminal.** Sales personnel should check the near-expiry status of products on shelves, stacked boxes, and inventory during each visit. Products with the worst dates should be placed in the cooler to accelerate consumption, and product cleanliness must be ensured.
**Second, choose the right display level and create impact.** When securing cooler display space, consider the size and height of the cooler, and select positions at eye level and easiest to access when opening the door.
For display standards, products should be grouped by SKU, with 3-4 SKUs per layer, each SKU maintaining 2-3 full vertical columns. If the height allows for two layers, utilize it as much as possible.
**Additionally, the display faces should be uniform, such as logos or promotional faces facing outward.** Full and neat displays enhance visual impact, letting the product speak for itself.
Of course, there are common management tools used in the industry, such as price tags, refrigerator static stickers with product display standards, refrigerator push-pull stickers with brand logos, product explosion tags with promotional information, and cooler poster barriers.
Although many manufacturers are accustomed to these, I often see in the market that these tools become a negative factor.
For example, price tag positions do not match products; push-pull stickers are too large, blocking half of the product display; cooler sticker designs are rough, and standards differ greatly from actual displays; promotional notices are expired but still hanging. I sincerely suggest that manufacturers invest more thought into this prime location, using novel designs to strengthen brand awareness and standard execution to let consumers perceive the team's dedication.
**Space Penetration, Smart Reminders, and Innovation**
In the cooler battle, there are also many innovative approaches.
**For instance, cooler suction cups can utilize the gap between the cooler shelf and the door to extend display space.** However, this requires choosing more reliable and sturdy suction cups, as the moisture inside the cooler can easily cause them to detach, leading to product damage.
**Additionally, some brands have used voice prompts when the cooler door opens.** When a consumer opens the cooler, a voice immediately announces, "XX brand, summer hot seller, buy one get one free," instantly drawing attention to their products, achieving good results.
Coca-Cola has also used sliding rail shelves in its coolers, where products can move forward by gravity, making it convenient for consumers to grab. These shelves can also be installed independently, with specialized suppliers designing and producing various models.
**Furthermore, at the front of the shelf, a flashing LED light can be placed, designed as the product logo or brand slogan,** enhancing the product's premium feel when the consumer opens the cooler.
**Dare to Incentivize, Leverage Store Staff, and Multi-Stimulate**
Nongfu Spring once ran a "God of Wealth Descends" frozen storm activity that was very effective and attracted significant industry attention.
The general plan was: **on top of the summer cooler display space purchased by the sales team, an additional round of rewards was added using third-party on-site inspections with immediate reward redemption, strengthening the number and proportion of product displays in coolers.** They based this on the types of coolers in the market, such as display cabinets and chest freezers.
**They set differentiated standards (basic SKUs, bonus SKUs, facing requirements, etc.) and then provided 1:1 product incentives—for every product meeting the display requirements, an equivalent quantity of Nongfu water was exchanged on the spot.**
This was a very aggressive move. Once the activity started, almost all coolers in the activity area became Nongfu's exclusive displays, fully mobilizing store owners and staff, leaving other manufacturers far behind.
Of course, one point to emphasize is that similar incentives require enterprises to have good digital applications at the terminal to ensure effective implementation of activity costs and quick reimbursement for distributor expenses.
**Smart Hardware, System Interconnection, and Precise Management**
Speaking of coolers, the popular Genki Forest cannot be ignored.
Since the second half of last year, they planned to deploy 80,000 smart coolers. These self-developed coolers are all networked and equipped with cameras. Every beverage sold has its sales data uploaded to the system backend in real-time.
At the same time, Genki Forest also increased assessments for distributors on the efficiency of cooler-outlet connectivity, meaning cooler data must be integrated with the enterprise's internal management system.
To achieve this goal, Genki Forest set up various assessment and incentive mechanisms and increased the staffing of cooler maintenance personnel, determined to capture this year's offline market share in both quantity and quality.
It is not hard to see that Genki Forest's rapid cooler deployment aims, **on one hand, to directly obtain sales feedback data for more timely guidance of the entire supply chain management and even new product development, and on the other hand, for brand promotion.**
Therefore, for Genki Forest, coolers have become an important digital tool for strategic development. This is a point worth learning from for traditional brand manufacturers dominated by offline channels. Digitalization must be a systematic project, leveraging every port, fully connecting, and achieving data interoperability to continuously bring data and decisions closer to the market and consumers.
The core of channel management is to continuously build and improve consumption scenarios around the behavioral trajectory of target consumers. Brand manufacturers must constantly self-examine, learn from others, innovate, and execute details to perfection to stand out in the fiercely competitive environment.
For example, in the cooler war, they can design and deploy more stylish, personalized, and space-efficient coolers tailored to the in-store layout of small offline shops, effectively addressing the common issues of insufficient terminal space and saturation of large cooler placements.
**In terms of cooler intelligence, with the development of IoT and cloud computing technologies,** there is also room for significant improvement. **By collecting data on daily door openings, product display images, consumer characteristics, device location, and display arrangement frequency, more terminal data and consumer profile information can be obtained.**
In summary, to win the cooler battle in the future, focus on the following key elements: **technology first, manufacturer-distributor collaboration, resource concentration, clear standards, efficient execution, and appropriate rewards and penalties.**
Review: Asher
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