Recently, I visited Lao Wang (pseudonym), a snack food distributor in Hubei who covers over a thousand stores with annual sales exceeding 100 million yuan. I asked him: Do you think distributors will always exist? His view: The market may not need distributors, but it needs intermediaries. How to explain? Intermediaries could be delivery agents, like Coca-Cola's 101 model, or operators providing deep operational services—perhaps just a different term. I continued: What will you do? Focus on the present, solidify the base, because my business is still growing. In these difficult times, how does he solidify his base and excel in the snack food category locally? This article analyzes his approach from three aspects: product selection, distribution, and sales promotion.

Product Selection: Avoid Trends, Differentiate The snack food category has two characteristics: First, brand concentration is low; neither stores nor consumers rely heavily on big brands. Second, product homogenization is severe; consumers identify more with products than brands, and once a hit product appears, it is quickly replicated on a large scale. Therefore, for snack food distributors, selecting the right products is crucial. The core of product selection is product differentiation—offering products that are scarce in stores. What is scarce? Products that stores don't carry but consumers recognize. For example, if a store has many biscuit products but lacks cooked items like duck neck or dried tofu, those are scarce products.

When dealing with snack foods, avoid following trends with hit products. The lifecycle of snack food hits is short—two to three months at most, sometimes just one month. Blindly following trends can lead to a dead end.

After determining the category structure, the next step is to differentiate by price band. For each subcategory, offer only two products: one high-price and one low-price. Why not mid-price? In stores, the number of bins for bulk snacks is fixed, typically two bins per subcategory. Choose two price points per subcategory: high for branded products, low for value-for-money products. The final step is specific product selection, with two criteria: good-looking and tasty. The method: When new products enter the store, young female staff select and taste them, deciding whether to keep them. The main consumers of snack foods are young people, and women have a natural sensitivity to snacks, so young women's judgment is quite accurate.

Distribution: Create Benchmark Stores, Provide Deep Services Snack foods are priced in two ways: bulk and pre-packaged. Traditional mom-and-pop stores mainly sell pre-packaged, while bulk sales often involve exclusive arrangements, suitable for medium and large stores. Bulk distributors all want exclusive arrangements in stores; how to convince store owners? This highlights the importance of sample stores. Distributors can use benchmark stores to influence surrounding stores, making expansion more persuasive. Building sample stores can be approached from three dimensions:

1. Operational Empowerment. Stores selling bulk snacks have a basic scale. They are more capable than small shops, and owners want to grow, but daily trivialities distract them. Distributors can use their operational capabilities to help stores do business. For example, during Qixi Festival, create special scenes to help stores sell quickly.

2. Data Empowerment. For partner stores, install data terminals to make all operational data transparent. On one hand, through operational data, small stores can see their business status, and distributors can help adjust sales strategies in time. On the other hand, by comparing year-over-year sales data, distributors can determine store sales capability. Lao Wang's strategy: Store owners' sales targets only need to match last year's data, not grow. His view: Sales are made by oneself; begging others is useless. Using data to inform stores is the most direct expression, not fooling them into stocking up for fake sales.

3. Service Empowerment. Good stores need quality service to maintain customer stickiness. Sales visits are not about quantity but truly solving problems from the terminal's perspective. Salespeople should conduct deep visits, ideally 5-8 stores per day, with a frequency of once every 10 days. Besides basic maintenance, they should help store owners identify and solve operational issues. To fully execute these actions, they need to spend about an hour in each store.

Sales Promotion: Product, Scene, and Salesperson—Three in One Although snack foods are FMCG, they are not high-frequency purchases; consumers often buy impulsively. This randomness makes sales promotion difficult. How to promote snack foods effectively? There are three core levels: product structure combination, scene-based display, and diversified salespersons.

1. Product Structure Combination Different stores trial different products. Many snack distributors have hundreds or thousands of SKUs; choosing suitable SKUs for stores requires judgment criteria. The criteria are based on population: floating vs. resident population. If floating population dominates, define the store as a commercial area store, such as those in pedestrian streets or shopping malls. Consumers here are occasional; many may visit only once. For such stores, product structure should highlight novelty and uniqueness to attract immediate purchase, without focusing on repurchase rate. If resident population dominates, define the store as a community store, such as those in residential areas or universities. These stores focus on family consumption; product structure should emphasize health, taste, and value for money to encourage repurchase. A general principle: Each store should focus on 20 SKUs, with salespeople tracking closely. Once a product is found unsuitable, remove it immediately and replace with a new one to ensure all SKUs sell steadily.

2. Scene-Based Display Snack foods have impulsive purchase characteristics; conventional displays and promotions rarely attract buyers. Display must start from purchase motivation, focus on consumer experience, and create scenes. The core consumer group is young people; first understand their purchase motives. Every purchase is triggered by a motive; for young people, beyond physiological needs, emotional value drives purchases. The most typical example is milk tea: many buy Heytea or Naixue not because it tastes good, but due to external stimuli like social media check-ins or taking nice photos. The best way to trigger emotional motives is external environmental stimulation. For example, on special holidays like Valentine's Day or Qixi, carefully arrange themed scenes and exclusive displays to attract young consumers' attention. Another challenge: What scenes do consumers like? Simply put, ride on trends. When doing scene sales, distributors can follow external trends. For instance, every April-May, Wuhan hosts a cherry blossom festival with heavy promotion. For distributors, cherry blossom-themed scenes are highly suitable.

3. Diversified Salespersons In a sense, salespersons are salespeople in special environments, serving as the link between distributors and consumers. However, in daily operations, many distributors do not value salespersons highly, only using them to maintain store sales. This is absolutely wrong. With the internet, salespersons are both communication media and channel resources. Salespersons are media for product selling points. Consumers lack expertise, but salespersons have professional knowledge; conveying selling points through them greatly improves effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, salespersons are crucial for building private domain traffic pools. Imagine each salesperson contacts many customers daily; adding WeChat contacts, they can accumulate hundreds of precise target consumers, ideal for private domain operations. Therefore, distributors should define standardized processes to let salespersons play diverse roles, not just promotion.

Final Thoughts: Returning to the question at the start, whether distributors exist in the future is not important; what matters is focusing on the present. The most important thing now is to stabilize the base and maintain the ability to grow. In the past, distributors could succeed with people, money, and goods, but now, competing on price is the lowest level. From upstream product selection to downstream distribution and promotion, distributors must become more professional. If they cannot match professional capabilities amid market changes, their existence becomes meaningless.

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