---
title: "Distributors: Building a Base Market Is a Powerful Tool for Competitive Success!"
description: "Survival first, development second. This strategy aims to create local advantages in limited space, win a larger market share, effectively resist competitors' attacks, and preserve and strengthen one's own market position. It is a powerful tool for distributors to win competition. Before developing a regional market, distributors must first plan and coordinate comprehensively, but surveys show that most distributors have not yet established a base market—a clear and stable regional market—before expanding."
author: "师顺宽"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2018-06-25"
language: "en"
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# Distributors: Building a Base Market Is a Powerful Tool for Competitive Success!

> Survival first, development second. This strategy aims to create local advantages in limited space, win a larger market share, effectively resist competitors' attacks, and preserve and strengthen one's own market position. It is a powerful tool for distributors to win competition. Before developing a regional market, distributors must first plan and coordinate comprehensively, but surveys show that most distributors have not yet established a base market—a clear and stable regional market—before expanding.

Click 'Read Original' for details.
Survival first, development second. This is a market strategy designed to use limited space to create local advantages, win a larger market share, thereby effectively resisting competitors' attacks, and preserving and strengthening one's own market position. It is a powerful tool for distributors to win competition. Before developing a regional market, distributors must first deploy and coordinate comprehensively, systematically planning the regional market. However, in actual surveys, it was found that most distributors, when developing markets, have not yet established a base market—a clear and stable regional market—before expanding into the overall market. Their market expansion activities lack clear thinking and strategy, and lack specific feasible measures and methods, showing strong randomness and blindness. This behavior manifests in two tendencies in product sales: first, the "dragonfly skimming the water" style of "guerrilla warfare"—selling wherever possible, selling as much as possible; second, the "sprinkling pepper powder" style of "comprehensive attack"—casting a wide net, sowing everywhere, striving for "broad sowing with thin harvest."
**The above practices may achieve a certain level of sales to some extent, but their drawbacks are obvious:** First, without clear regional market goals, it is like a ship at sea without a clear course, making it difficult to achieve the distributor's various business indicators; second, without a stable market base, lacking strong market support, it is difficult to form competitive advantages, ultimately leading to a Li Zicheng-style outcome. This is a short-sighted or greedy irrational marketing behavior, extremely harmful to the overall development of distributors.
**So what is a distributor's base market?**
It refers to the part of the market where distributors can gain competitive advantages and utilize them. The base market is defined entirely from the perspective of competitive differentiation. The essence of base market thinking is to optimize profits based on the degree of competition. The base market is a market where, through professional market research and analysis, distributors can build their own competitive advantages through operations. This market is not the same as the ordinary "model market." The "base market" is the core support for the growth and expansion of distributors, providing a continuous supply of resources for distributors to compete in markets outside the base.
For distributors, base markets can be divided into: **First, regional base market:** refers to a market where the distributor ranks first in market share, influence, and profit in a certain region; **Second, channel base market:** refers to a market where the distributor has absolute influence and share in a certain channel. Regardless of the type of base market, they all share a common characteristic: within a certain period, they are the areas where distributors have the highest profits, largest market share, and greatest influence.
**The role of the base market for distributors**
> 1. **Base is the fulcrum:** a support base for material supplies in other markets, and an oxygen supply for strong spiritual motivation.
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> 2. **Base is the talent pool:** a training ground, a marketing training academy, and a talent export base.
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> 3. **Base is the experimental field:** a practice ground for new methods and explorations, and a birthplace for successful operating models.
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> 4. **Base is the banner:** it not only solves survival problems but also creates huge influence; attracts and integrates more advantageous resources; attracts more sales personnel to join.
**Five strategies for distributors to build a base market**
**1. Targeted strategy**
No matter how big the problem, it can be broken down; no matter how difficult the market, there is room for action. "Look for opportunity markets within market opportunities; look for opportunity channels within channel opportunities; look for opportunity consumers within consumer opportunities." For most distributors, due to limited human, material, and financial resources, they must combine with the company's actual situation when establishing a base market. If conditions are not sufficient for comprehensive expansion of the local market, it is recommended to segment the market, determine narrower target areas, channels, and consumers, and establish a base market in a targeted manner. This not only saves resources but also achieves twice the result with half the effort, and can create local competitive advantages, accumulating resources and confidence to establish a comprehensive base market. For example: A certain trading company, with limited personnel, funds, and other conditions, could not expand the market across the entire county. After detailed market research, they finally selected several townships to establish their base market (appropriate products to appropriate terminals; appropriate policies to appropriate terminals; appropriate advertising to appropriate terminals; different visit cycles and service standards for different stores; different sales promotion standards for different stores...). After one year of operation, the prototype of these township base markets emerged, with sales in each township reaching over 600,000.
**2. Focus strategy**
Those familiar with history know that when Nurhaci faced the attack of the Ming Dynasty's thirteen armies, he adopted the policy of "No matter how many routes you come from, I only target one route," concentrating the elite forces of the Eight Banners to defeat them one by one, ultimately defeating the Ming army. For enterprises with limited resources, as long as they focus limited human, material, and financial resources on local markets, channels, products, and consumers, they can definitely create a local base market and thus overturn the market.
**1. Market focus**
Market focus means that distributors, based on their actual situation, shrink their market scope as much as possible until they can form an absolute advantage. It is best to use townships as the market unit; if strength is insufficient to form an advantage in townships, villages can also be the target.
**2. Channel focus**
Channel focus means that distributors, based on their actual situation, if they cannot cover all channels such as hotels, hypermarkets, group buying, and supermarkets, can choose one channel suitable for themselves to operate until this channel becomes their base. Then use the product's absolute advantage in this channel to radiate to other channels.
**3. Product focus**
Product focus means that distributors should "break through with a single product," use one product to create an image, making it the "fist" product in the market, and then use the absolute advantage of the single product to radiate to other channels, achieving relative advantages and channel resonance. "Single product breakthrough" does not mean selling only one product, but concentrating resources to promote one leading product. If too many products are launched at once, it may disperse limited resources and result in none being able to break through.
**4. Resource focus**
Resource focus means that distributors, based on their resource size, concentrate resources on a certain region, channel, and product, "exchanging resources for time" and "exchanging resources for market" to form market explosive power. The most dangerous thing in base market construction is the "fuel-tank tactic and salt-sprinkling tactic," which fails to form market explosive power due to unfocused and inadequate policies. For example: If 100 store signs are scattered across thousands of terminal outlets in a county, they will not have much influence. If 100 store signs are concentrated in 2 townships, they will form market explosive power in the short term.
**5. Personnel focus**
Personnel focus means that distributors concentrate limited sales personnel on a certain region, channel, or product, fighting a war of numbers and annihilation. For example: In the new product distribution stage, if personnel are dispersed, each salesperson can only visit their terminal stores once every ten days. If salespeople are gathered together, divided into several groups, and concentrated on a small area for a human-wave tactic, the results will be significantly improved.
**6. Consumer focus**
Consumer focus means that distributors concentrate financial and energy resources to find the consumer leaders in the urban area and each township, let them recognize, approve, and recommend their products, and through the consumption of consumer leaders, establish the product's reputation and create consumption trends. For example: Because the essence of baijiu is a lubricant for social interaction and emotional communication, consumer leaders are the best group to create trends. As long as a product's popularity atmosphere is created, the foundation for a base market is established. When a distributor launched a wedding-use liquor in the county, they gathered the heads of red and white affairs committees from each village in each township for a tasting session. The company also provided these heads with a certain amount of public relations liquor. For each wedding or event they connected, the company gave a commission. As a result, the wedding-use liquor quickly became popular in the market, enhancing brand awareness and influence, and also driving sales of other company products.
**3. Speed leadership strategy**
After determining the segmented market, based on the targeted and focused principles, speed must lead and win by speed. Development strategies, promotion strategies, and sales promotion strategies must be quickly formulated, because speed leadership can make opponents unable to react before you have already taken the lead; it can form an atmosphere in terminals and consumers that they must catch up with the new opportunity; it can instantly awaken terminal and consumer memory; and it can quickly occupy terminal and consumer minds.
**4. Terminal sales promotion strategy**
The terminal sales promotion principle is to solve the problem of terminals "only stocking, not selling." It involves strengthening deep maintenance, enhancing customer relations, and making advertising more vivid, working with terminals to study how to sell goods quickly and create a sales atmosphere. In base market construction, the most feared thing is only doing distribution and promotions without solving terminal sales. In that case, the day the product is placed on the shelf is the day it becomes unsellable. It is normal for products to not sell after distribution; solving sales promotion is to make this normal phenomenon abnormal. The purpose of solving sales promotion is to enhance terminal confidence and sell products they think are unsellable and unbranded, helping them build confidence. As long as three or more rounds of terminal restocking are achieved, the market will form a virtuous cycle. For example: For terminal outlets with slow sales, the most capable salespeople should be assigned to these outlets, ensuring they always maintain the largest display, the best advertising layout, and the highest quality customer service. This reduces competitors' display space—the less conspicuous competitors' displays, the greater your opportunity—and through maximum advertising and display, directly advertises to consumers, stimulating impulse purchases. Additionally, free tasting outside these stores or during peak sales hours can help terminals sell goods, giving store owners confidence and prompting them to actively promote your products until a virtuous cycle is achieved.
**5. Process management strategy**
Base market construction is a process. Good processes inevitably produce good results. The finer and more comprehensive the controllable processes, the more links are controlled, the greater the certainty of results, and the greater the chance of successful market construction. So what should be controlled during base market construction? Distributors, terminal networks, prices, promotions, costs, market information, etc. All of the above must be controlled by sales personnel. Therefore, it is necessary to establish and improve various management systems, assessment systems, and reward and punishment systems, clarify job requirements, work content (specific to actions), and work processes, and strengthen the completeness of the four links: "plan, execute, check, and feedback." Especially, an objective and effective inspection system should be established to track execution in real time and on-site, ensuring implementation is in place.
Introduction: Shi Shunkuan. Practical marketing expert, consultant, and trainer. From a rookie in the FMCG industry to regional manager, marketing manager, marketing director, and then to the consulting industry, he has experienced the whole process. He specializes in "strategy formulation, tactical implementation, brand promotion, channel management, and sales team management" in the FMCG industry.
From August 22-24, the "2018 China Digital Innovation Conference (2018FDIC)" with the theme "Finding New Growth Engines" will be held in Shanghai, hosted by the China FMCG Industry Association and organized by New Distribution.
The conference will last 3 days, focusing on two main themes: marketing and supply chain, with six parallel forums: brand, channel, communication, B2B, same-city logistics, and innovative retail. We will invite industry experts, CEOs, and brand executives to deeply interpret the trends and drivers of digital transformation in the FMCG industry.
We will invite over 500 FMCG enterprise executives, 200+ B2B industry CEOs, and 1000+ major FMCG distributors to gather and discuss how the FMCG industry can use digital tools to achieve rapid growth again in the digital era. This conference will build a bridge for brand owners, distributors, retail enterprises, and marketing agencies, helping FMCG manufacturers obtain the latest information, understand best practices, and master more practical transformation skills.
**Proposed invited companies**
Conference time: August 22-24, 2018
Conference location: Shanghai Baohua Marriott Hotel
Conference content:
8.22 All-day check-in
14:00-17:30: Distributor same-city logistics parallel forum
18:30-21:00: New Distribution Night Gala Dinner
8.23 Theme: Marketing Digital Innovation
9:00-12:00: Marketing Digital Innovation Main Forum
14:00-17:30: Brand, Channel, Communication Parallel Forums
8.24 Theme: FMCG Supply Chain Digital Upgrade
All day: FMCG Supply Chain Conference
Registration method: Registration is now open. Long press the QR code below or click "Read Original" to register. Limited to 200 early bird tickets at half price, while supplies last!
Registration consultation:
Ticket inquiries:
Media cooperation inquiries:
New Distribution previous conference highlights
Click the link below to review the highlights of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd FMCG + Internet Conferences:
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