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For a company, especially an FMCG company, the most headache-inducing issue during the initial product manufacturing stage is the product itself. Once the company gets past this period, it often becomes troubled by the brand. For example: weak consumer recognition, insufficient market pull, and so on. As a weak brand, how do you resolve the troubles caused by the brand?
1. Invest heavily in advertising. There is a famous saying in the advertising world: "If you don't advertise, you wait to die; if you do advertise, you're looking for death." Weak brands are weak partly because they lack sufficient funds, making heavy advertising investment unlikely. Moreover, in today's world of advertising overload, the credibility of advertising is already in crisis.
2. Engage in various promotional gimmicks. A walk through the market reveals that many companies have racked their brains over promotional tactics, not only in methods but also in choosing promotional items. However, often sales only move when there's a promotion; without it, they stall.
3. Offer low prices and discounts for value. Price is the most effective promotional tool, but cutting prices is like "bleeding" for a company. As long as you have endless "blood," you can bleed more or continuously. But once the consumer market accepts your low price, it becomes "addicted," and once the market opens up, it's almost impossible to raise prices.
If advertising, promotions, and price cuts don't work... where do weak companies go from here?
1. Never take shortcuts. Market development follows rules, and any attempt to break these rules will be punished! Every brand, from launch to consumption and habitual use, must go through stages: display, awareness, purchase, and acceptance. No product can jump directly from the display stage to acceptance. When managing your brand, you must advance step by step, down-to-earth. During the display stage (launch period), the company should expand product points of sale as much as possible while ensuring distribution channels, supplemented by awareness tools like POP displays, to stimulate consumer senses repeatedly. With appropriate in-store promotions, encourage first trials, gather market feedback, and use it to improve the product. These steps are complex and difficult to execute perfectly in practice. Companies might skip some steps and take shortcuts, often ending up unable to manage both ends.
2. Never trust distributors. Distributing products through distributors is the easiest path: take the money, ship the goods, and the company's job is done. As for how the distributor sells the goods, the company can at most advise, and sometimes even pricing is decided by the distributor. Often, if you catch a big distributor, you get a big market; if you get a small one, you just leave it to fate. The company operates behind the distributor, making the distributor the "dare-to-die squad" for taking the hill. The company has only two approaches to this squad: 1) "Hype them up" to charge forward, promising "treasure" at the top; 2) Pay on the spot, with heavy rewards for the brave. Either way, the company pays a high price in "profits" and "kickbacks."
So, if you can't take shortcuts and can't trust distributors, where does that leave the company?
1. You must conquer the territory yourself! Weak companies cannot tackle the national market, but they can still do well in a few counties or one or two prefecture-level cities. Concentrating limited resources on a few markets and cultivating them intensively is far better than scattering seeds everywhere. Consumer markets have a herd mentality and a Pareto effect: 20% of people determine 80% of consumption trends. If the company can firmly grasp these consumption leaders and guide them toward your product, you'll get closer to your market goals. In recent years, the "plate-in-plate" strategy of "Anhui liquor" is a good example. For baijiu, a county-level city has only 1,000-2,000 points of sale. The company can assign 3-5 professional salespeople to visit according to standard procedures, supported by professional assessments, and take on the "hill-taking" task itself, with distributors acting as "local troops" to clean up the battlefield and hold positions. This way, the company not only gets close to the consumer market but also changes its role in the attack formation, avoiding the embarrassment of being bullied by big distributors.
2. The closer you are, the stronger the bond! The purpose of production is profit; profit comes through marketing; marketing is about meeting consumer market needs. The connection between the company and the consumer market cannot rely solely on distribution channels. Relying on channels means you must satisfy channel interests, but you're separated from the consumer market by a door, and information transmission can be distorted. New product launches would rely on intuition, and when products don't fit consumers but only cater to channel interests, they often have short lives. For example, the current trend of OEM production in the baijiu industry, where many liquor companies design numerous trademarks each year, or even design packaging based on the number of distributors. From a marketing definition perspective, satisfying the channel cannot be called marketing. Even if it succeeds, it becomes increasingly tiring and can even harm the company itself—it's a classic lazy approach.
Is it enough for a company to do all this? The answer is: No!
When conquering the market, the company must have strong execution as a guarantee. How do you build your execution capability?
1. Employees never do what is "hoped" for; they only do what is "assessed." Building execution cannot start from employee "self-discipline." Simply emphasizing personal cultivation and quality may have some effect, but it's not fundamental. The company must have a mature training and assessment mechanism. While telling employees how to do things, use "assessment" as a benchmark to measure their actions, continuously guide and correct them to align their work with your goals.
2. To conquer cities and territories, you need an "iron army" or "wolf-like division"! Being able to build a marketing iron army is a dream for many companies. Without a strong "iron army" as a guarantee, even the strongest brand support is just "tough talk but weak legs." The way to manage an army is to reward and punish appropriately! When building your marketing system, you must start with detailed execution, turning your sales team into an "assembly line," making each marketer a link in the chain, clarifying responsibilities, refining targets, and letting goals show results bit by bit!
3. Iron camps, flowing soldiers! In the military, the best execution often comes from new recruits; veterans have rich combat experience but often don't execute well. As the saying goes, "Newborn calves are not afraid of tigers." Newcomers have an innate advantage in creative execution. For a company, grassroots marketing personnel must maintain turnover. Only letting people in but not out, or only out but not in, is not good. This requires the company to have sufficient training resources and hardware support, such as job standards, visit records, customer files, etc., so that natural attrition doesn't leave you at a loss.
Big brands are what every company aspires to. Building a big brand is not an overnight task, nor is it just about having money for advertising. When a company successfully builds its marketing execution capability, it is actually not far from becoming a big brand. Like a football match, the brand is "having possession," and execution is "scoring goals." A match with only possession but no goals is the most awkward, because only scoring wins the game!