Click to read the original text for details. Now, an interesting change is taking place in the entire retail ecosystem: a shift from the past serious, stern-faced professional stores to playful, warm stores that don't speak properly, where "not being serious" has become a label of humanization. Of course, my definition may be a bit extreme, but the general trend should be like this. This involves an important question: where should products be sold in the future, and where will consumers go to buy products? Actually, this question is not new. Since the advent of buying and selling, where to sell and where to buy have always been important questions. However, as the buyer-seller relationship tilts toward the buyer, selling has become increasingly difficult, and "selling in creative ways" is what sellers need to consider more. After entering the Internet era, internet platform companies have come up with many new concepts, making already jittery distributors feel like they are walking on thin ice. Whether the new or the old, virtual or physical, will prevail is not the key point of our discussion today. However, some concepts proposed by internet tycoons actually follow the principle of "the duck is the first to know the warmth of the spring river," which are thoughts they began after testing online retail. These changing trends may also apply to offline consumers, such as the "people, goods, and places" reconstruction concept proposed by JD.com in July 2017. In early April 2018, I joined a 4-day tour of Zhangjiajie with my wife. Under the arrangement of the local guide, we stayed in a local hotel that seemed decent. As soon as we entered the room, we saw an antique tea table with a complete set of tea utensils. On the table, there was a brochure promoting Zhangjiajie's native Eucommia, with the words "Hometown of Eucommia" prominently displayed on the cover. More importantly, on the other side of the tea table, there were two small packages of tea bags labeled "Eucommia Tender Buds" with "Free" marked in both Chinese and English. Next to them was a printed note: "April Eucommia tender buds, only for honored guests arriving in April!" I was clearly moved by this marketing tactic. I went through the motions of washing the cups, adding tea, waiting for the water, brewing, skimming the foam, rinsing the pot, warming the cups, and pouring the tea. While savoring the tea, I flipped through the "Hometown of Eucommia" brochure and unconsciously accepted the concept of Eucommia being "both food and medicine." Plus, being able to taste this spring tea in April, without any salesperson guidance, I ordered two boxes at the hotel front desk. I didn't even have to carry them myself; I just left an address and had them delivered by courier. For a hotel at a tourist attraction to upgrade its standards, providing each guest with a few thousand yuan per jin of Jin Jun Mei or a ten-thousand-yuan cake of Pu'er to try would be too costly, and even such teas might not attract consumer attention. Instead, local specialty teas better satisfy tourists' curiosity and the vanity of having been there, just like drinking Moutai in Guizhou feels more ceremonial than drinking it in Chengdu. The sales point for tea is no longer fixed in so-called tea shops; sales recommendations can be completed in hotel rooms. This is a re-innovation of the sales scenario. This scenario-based design minimizes consumers' defensive psychology because it appears only where consumers need it. During the peak of WeChat business in 2014, the concept of scenario-based sales was already being discussed extensively. However, at that time, scenario-based sales became exclusively an online marketing patent. A glance at internet tycoons' definitions of scenario marketing gives a hint. For example, Baidu Baike defines scenario marketing as: a new marketing concept based on the fact that netizens' online behavior always falls into one of three scenarios: input, search, and browsing. Through electronic tools like browsers and search engines, it provides support for information collection, information acquisition, online entertainment, and online shopping in these three scenarios, constructing a new online marketing model with "interest guidance + massive exposure + entry marketing" as the clue. This definition, with obvious "internet discrimination," completely excludes offline scenario-based sales, dealing another heavy blow to distributors' fragile hearts. In fact, the need for scenario-based offline sales is the reality for the majority of sales transactions. Embedding products into specific scenarios, awakening consumer needs at the right time, following consumer consumption logic, and creating a warm store is an important logic for upgrading offline stores. The re-innovation of offline distributor sales scenarios, based on current cases of distributor scenario innovation, basically follows the four innovation principles: consumer object innovation, consumption location innovation, consumption time innovation, and consumption category innovation. I summarize this as the 4W model of scenario innovation. Who else can buy? (Who) Who else can buy: This involves switching the identity of the product's user in multiple ways, finding the corresponding objects for each identity, and then innovating sales scenarios based on the scenarios where these objects appear collectively. For example, for a product like upgraded study desks and chairs, the users are children aged 6-12. Since the unit price is high, ranging from 3,000-4,000 yuan to over 10,000 yuan, the buyers are usually the child's father or mother. Expanding with this "who else can buy" approach, we can list: schools buying for students, friends buying for friends' children, elders buying for younger generations, grandparents buying for grandchildren... List them one by one, argue and eliminate, and finally list the most likely targets. As the Jiangxi agent for a study desk brand, General Manager Jiang, based on this approach, identified the clue that grandparents could buy for their grandchildren. And the grandparents who have both spending power and belong to this group are more concentrated in senior universities. Logically, senior universities are places where a group of people with money and leisure can easily form one-to-many sales. Subsequently, General Manager Jiang found the person in charge of the local senior university through friends in the Aging Committee and the Civil Affairs Bureau. Through event sponsorship and classroom explanations, he quickly developed the first batch of seed customers at the local senior university. Later, using retirement certificates as a threshold, he obtained a steady stream of high-quality new customers referred by old customers. Where else can they buy? (Where) Where else can they buy: Besides displaying and selling products in stores, where else might consumers consume this product, including purchasing and using? Such places are opportunities for sales scenario innovation. For example, tea is a category with relatively many purchase and usage scenarios: drinking tea while chatting in the office, buying tea at specialty stores for gifts, drinking tea after meals at home, and having a taste of tea before meals in hotels. Among these scenarios, the first three are either not suitable for sales contact or not easy to control. Only the action of tasting tea before meals in hotels, because it is in a public space, has a higher probability of sales contact and control. Mr. Liu from Changsha is the Hunan agent for China Tea Group. In addition to setting up outlets in tea wholesale markets and street-facing locations, he has started offering ready-to-drink tea in hotels and restaurants. In the early stage, they negotiated to enter hotels, stationed a tea art guide, with Mr. Liu's company responsible for the guide's salary, commission, tea props, and promotional materials, while the hotel provides the venue, utilities, and meals for the guide. The revenue is split according to a fixed ratio. The specific operation model for ready-to-drink tea in restaurants is: for each customer dining, the tea art guide comes to the table and lets consumers choose between regular tea seats, 10 yuan/person, 20 yuan/person, or 40 yuan/person. In higher-end hotels, especially for banquet-type consumption, most will choose the 10-40 yuan tea seats to try. For customers with high tea consumption, the guide will selectively perform a 10-minute tea art performance. Through this operation, Mr. Liu turned whole-box sales into single-package sales. The tea industry's inherent high profit, coupled with the mature single-store sales model, allows a single store to break even and become profitable within at most two months. From the start of operations at the end of 2017 to July 2018, Mr. Liu kept sending me good news: the independently assessed ready-to-drink tea channel had officially begun to profit, and now even the factory leaders of China Tea Group have come to Changsha to learn the operational approach for restaurant tea. In fact, from buying tea to drink at home to drinking it here, a change in sales scenario is a profitable channel. When else can they buy? (When) I once gave an extreme example: if a Coca-Cola kiosk were opened at the door of every household, even if the carbonated beverage market continues to decline, Coca-Cola's sales could still rise. The reason is simple: the immediacy of FMCG consumption is very important. When I'm thirsty and want a drink, if it's within reach, the first drink I see will definitely be my first choice. It's just that the input-output ratio makes this idea unrealistic. Why did the "Connotation Duanzi" app, which was shut down last year, accumulate over 100 million users? I think besides the fact that some content with improper values catered to some people's low tastes, the app's promotion ability was crucial. For a period, whenever I typed anything containing the word "duanzi" in any WeChat port on my phone, a link would pop up asking, "Are you looking for Connotation Duanzi?" Clicking it would lead directly to download. At that moment, I felt "Connotation Duanzi" was really thoughtful. The scenario innovation of "when to buy" is essentially about segmenting consumers' demand points to see at which time points purchase needs arise and which time periods have more concentrated purchase needs. The next question is: how do we reach consumers at these time points? What else can it be bought with? (What) What else can it be bought with: This mainly considers what other products our product can be bundled with to add value to the other product, especially for high-end products. A colleague of mine, Teacher Wang, after years of consulting and training experience, invested several million yuan in the first half of 2018 in Lingnan Tiandi, Foshan, to open a very high-end Chinese restaurant. To drive restaurant sales, considering the many business owners in Foshan and his many corporate students, Teacher Wang creatively combined lectures with dining. Consumers who come to this Chinese restaurant not only enjoy delicious food and wine but also can listen to the latest courses on corporate management, branding, and marketing with their clients, which precisely hits the pain points of Foshan business owners. As long as you become a corporate member, you can enjoy the privilege of booking a course table in advance and get one question opportunity each time to listen closely to Teacher Wang's latest thoughts on a specific issue. The 100,000 yuan threshold for the first batch of VIP corporate members did not dampen the enthusiasm of business owners to recharge; the first batch of memberships sold out quickly. To summarize, the 4W model of sales scenario innovation requires us to switch the identity of the user in multiple ways, list all environments where consumers use and purchase this product, then find the points where consumer demand arises along the timeline, and finally consider what other products our product can be bundled with to enhance the other's added value, especially for high-end products. After this logical review, we can extract the sales scenarios that can be innovated. -END-