---
title: "Dealers' Lack of Loyalty Is Justified"
description: "If you still believe that dealers are disloyal and get angry about it, you are naive about the market. All pursuits are driven by profit; in business, focus on competition. Consumers have no loyalty, retailers have no loyalty to dealers, and dealers have no loyalty to brands—only mutual interests. Loyalty is voluntary and stems from solving dealers' problems, not from demanding it."
author: "古歌读舒"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2018-09-04"
language: "en"
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---

# Dealers' Lack of Loyalty Is Justified

> If you still believe that dealers are disloyal and get angry about it, you are naive about the market. All pursuits are driven by profit; in business, focus on competition. Consumers have no loyalty, retailers have no loyalty to dealers, and dealers have no loyalty to brands—only mutual interests. Loyalty is voluntary and stems from solving dealers' problems, not from demanding it.

**1.**
If you still think that dealers are like prostitutes who want to erect a memorial arch, and you fly into a rage, it shows you are still naive about the market.
All the hustle and bustle is for profit; all the coming and going is for gain!
**Pursuing profit, besides upholding moral bottom lines, in business you should focus more on the essence of "competition."**
Do consumers have loyalty?
Before answering this question, let's first clarify: why should consumers have loyalty, and on what basis?
Do retail stores have loyalty to dealers?
In the past, most of your company's supplies were provided; who said I must cling to one tree? Remember, I can also become a tree taller than you!
Do dealers have loyalty to brand owners?
From a couple pedaling a bicycle to deliver goods, to a Wuling Sunshine van, to a 200,000-yuan Accord, to today's Q7 and X6, you might think I became rich by representing your brand and have been with you for over a decade, but now the relationship is gradually drifting apart...
But **business rapport is not gratitude!**
**2.**
Before clarifying the definition of loyalty, first understand what loyalty is based on.
It's the point of interest!
**Because interests are mutual.**
So, there is no gratitude (except for special cases), only business rapport!
**But business rapport, besides service, comes more from the product itself.**
If the manufacturer's thinking is still empirical, still the boss's maverick style, then often it's not the agent or the store that abandons you, but the consumer, because the middleman is just a channel spokesperson.
**In the final analysis, consumers have no loyalty!**
The question arises: why should consumers have loyalty to a brand?
Consumers have no loyalty; they go to this store today and that store tomorrow, ultimately because they want something new.
If your store sells the same few products, with unchanged brands, no new categories, and mediocre results, who would want to come again?
To survive, stores not only use well-known brands as signs and for image, but also sell niche brands and hot sellers; otherwise, how can profit sources support rising annual expenses? More importantly, with the impact of e-commerce, foot traffic is a key factor!
To get other goods, they naturally become disloyal to you, the dealer.
If dealers can't distribute goods, they pile up in warehouses. If they have a team, they can talk to store owners every few days and run a couple of activities, and products will sell passably, but this can't last long; if they lack a team or have scarce personnel, they can only wait while being scolded by the manufacturer's regional manager: "Next quarter, we'll take away half your market..." and complain about stores being "ungrateful"!
Once you understand this, you naturally won't demand loyalty from dealers to brand owners.
**Because loyalty is always voluntary; it doesn't need to be demanded...**
If you really want dealers to show relative loyalty to your brand, **first you must solve or understand the dealers' dilemmas.**
Let's analyze!
**For upstream: brand owners can be divided into two types.**
Well-known ones: high visibility means high discounts; after supplying to dealers and then to stores, profits are minimal, so you can only play policy promotion games: meetings! Meetings! More meetings!
Now, meetings have become the hardest thing!
Unknown small brands: push hot sellers, low discounts, and pass profits to the channel. Simply put, they transfer advertising costs to the terminal.
**For downstream: stores also come in two types.**
Top 100 stores: national chain top 100 basically don't use dealers for supply; they get direct supply from manufacturers. But for regionally strong chains, dealers supply to stores, basically "coaxing" them.
County and township small stores: these are the best opportunities for dealers to "hold their heads high and walk with pride." The more outlets, the higher their status in the brand company!
So, if you are a big brand, based on the analysis, you should adopt corresponding strategies. "Big factory bullying merchants" doesn't exist; do you use strong pressure or beneficial strong pressure? This is crucial.
Beneficial strong pressure means you can call a bunch of people together for a meeting. But the meeting must have new ideas; don't always offer travel rewards for orders. If you keep doing that, you'll need to go to the moon to make it interesting.
What are new ideas?
The purpose of the meeting is, of course, the product. The format of the meeting is, of course, how the product makes a special appearance. The theme of the meeting is, of course, that at that moment, dealers see it and immediately have a picture of placing it in the terminal...
If everyone who comes is moved, aren't you afraid they won't fight tooth and nail to convince stores and then consumers?
For small enterprises and small brands, many think small brands have higher costs than big brands, so they can only cut costs on quality to offer profits.
Actually, that's not the case. Small brands have higher costs in production, such as raw materials, fragrances, and packaging, because of smaller scale.
But as everyone knows, in cosmetics, product costs don't account for a high proportion.
**In this society, many people share the profits; more costs are in promotion and channels.**
And, in comparison, small brands save a large proportion on personnel costs.
Sometimes, I even think that if small brands want to break through, they should invest more in product costs, create a product with outstanding quality and novel packaging—that's a hot seller, bursting out like a dark horse among strong competitors, dazzling everyone.
**After all, a small boat is easy to turn!**
Remember, which local brand owner didn't take advantage of P&G's "soft spot" to become today's big brand?
So, everyone has a chance; the key is to know your positioning!
**3.**
Regarding the quality of dealers, indeed, in the entire FMCG industry, whether beverages or daily chemicals, dealers compared to manufacturers, if viewed from the brand owner's perspective, are definitely lower!
In fact, brand owners, being national or even global in the future, are undoubtedly N times higher than dealers, so such comparison is petty.
Therefore, **if the brand owner has good product technology, regularly updates promotion services, and is always considerate, naturally, even less sophisticated dealers will be willing to follow you all the way.** Besides profiting from representing the product, they can also gain knowledge and insight from the brand owner's team, which also drives their own team's growth; with team growth, staff turnover naturally decreases.
With both benefits and progress, why not?
**Dealers are not stupid; if they were, and you let them help you develop the market, such dealers, no matter how loyal, would only drag you down.**
Also, there's no need to worry about dealers creating their own brands, because the success rate is very low!
For dealers to completely break away from trading thinking and become brand owners is a long and painful process of transformation. The reason is a topic for another day.
**If the brand owner itself has competitiveness to respond to the market (technology + promotion)**, even with constantly changing market tactics, you'll see a bunch of people chasing after you...
Then look back: so that's what loyalty is all about!
On the last day of August, reviewing the hottest events of August, it's nothing more than the "Didi Hitchhiking" storm. It's a simple principle: if you invest most of your costs in promotion and neglect technology investment, you'll obviously expose many loopholes and accidents.
Didi's lesson is that more funds were put into promotion; look at how romantic and perfect their hitchhiking ads were before, with copywriting comparable to Durex. Unfortunately, in the end, even customer service was outsourced.
Even with a market value close to 500 billion, it's far worse than our 500 million cosmetics companies, at least our customer service is our own...
Zhong Shanshan's famous quote from Nongfu Spring should be repeated: The product determines success or failure from the start; marketing is just icing on the cake!
No matter how much you talk about new retail, if you don't improve product technology or product quality, it's still useless!
Source: Gugu Dushu (ID: orangeguge)
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