In recent years, emerging brands have been rising rapidly, with capital support, evolving demand, and category innovation making new consumption a hot topic in the industry. For most emerging brands that started online, as the online traffic dividend fades and acquisition costs rise, while online category capacity hits its ceiling, they are compelled to consider going offline, as offline still accounts for over 70% of the FMCG market. But facing an offline market where they can't see consumers or stores clearly, how can they win this battle? This is the key challenge for emerging brands. To address this, on December 23, New Distribution, together with Zhoupu Data, organized an "Offline Alley Battle"—Emerging Brand Seminar Salon. At the event, we invited executives from brands such as Uni-President, Tsingtao Beer, and Jiangxiaobai, as well as more than 20 founders and channel heads of emerging brands, to jointly discuss the methodology for winning the "alley battle" in the offline market. During the meeting, Zhoupu Data also officially launched its BASE (Business Acceleration Solution & Ecosystem) solution for brand owners' offline markets, aimed at helping emerging brands break through offline. This article will look from the perspective of Zhoupu Data—a third-party service provider—on their understanding of emerging brands going offline, and how Zhoupu Data empowers brand owners to gain insights into the offline market, providing emerging brands with advanced equipment to fight the offline battle. Why Can Zhoupu Data Empower Emerging Brands? Founded in early 2016, Zhoupu Data has spent six years focusing on data intelligence in China's FMCG distribution channels. To date, it has provided digital business solutions to over 30,000 distributors, covering 31 provinces, 291 cities, and more than 15,000 brands, with access to over 3 million retail outlets. The store information includes not only basic details like store name, type, province, city, district, business circle, and customer profile, but also operational and sales data. This is the "foundation" that enables Zhoupu Data to empower emerging brands. When emerging consumer brands achieve breakthroughs from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10 online, going offline is an inevitable choice to truly sit at the FMCG industry table. But how to go offline? What are the direction and path? At the salon, Dr. Mu Wei, co-founder and CTO of Zhoupu Data, mentioned that although the offline market is vast, one must face the offline channel systems that leading brands have built over two to three decades. How to compete and how to build one's own channel system? ▲Mu Wei, co-founder and CTO of Zhoupu Data In the early days, these leading brands, without today's technology and platform support, often had to become "omnipotent" to succeed—building channels, doing sales, opening markets, investing in R&D, and expanding production. Only after doing all these things could a brand succeed. But today, in an environment with mature internet technology and increasingly complete infrastructure, emerging brands can leverage more social resources to standardize relatively complex channels and jointly solve what previously required a single enterprise to do independently. With the empowerment of technology and data, social division of labor will inevitably drive emerging brands to use external third parties to establish a "decentralized" distribution system. In this context, the commodity circulation platform that Zhoupu Data has built with over 30,000 FMCG distributors over the past six years can provide assistance and support for emerging brands to enter the offline market more efficiently and quickly. These online, data-enabled distributors and stores can change the traditional way of fighting offline with bare hands, providing a "new weapon" for attacking the market. From Which Dimensions Will Zhoupu Data Empower Emerging Brands? Just mentioned, what is the direction and path for emerging brands to go offline? What are the specific strategies and methods? At the event, Mr. Long Ruohai, Senior Product Director of Zhoupu Data, showcased the newly launched BASE solution for brand owners, focusing on two products: Zhoupu Yicha and Zhoupu Yituo. Regarding BASE, it can be simply divided into three dimensions: 1. Before going offline: market insight and opportunity 2. During going offline: selection of regional distributors 3. After going offline: market maintenance and management First, looking at market insight and opportunity, Zhoupu Yicha offers three label dimensions for retrieval: category, brand, and region. Category view: mainly helps emerging brands understand the situation of their category track, such as in the beverage industry, for a specific regional market over certain past periods, including brand concentration, sales index, destocking market share, inventory-to-sales ratio, growth rate, gross margin, return rate, etc. Not only that, but around the category, one can also understand the market share ranking under the entire brand, product ranking, and the sales map and market trends for the corresponding region. Brand view: mainly helps emerging brands understand the market performance of the brands they benchmark in the corresponding region, including market share, distribution rate, single-store output, repurchase rate over the last three months, regional market distribution, number and classification of stores, and core single-product sales analysis of the benchmark brand. Region view: mainly helps emerging brands understand the overall market conditions of the selected target market, the competitive landscape, and distributor resources. This allows emerging brands to avoid the blind men and the elephant situation when entering a regional market, and to know the real situation before entering. Through these three dimensions, emerging brands can fully understand the real market information before entering offline, rather than relying on subjective judgment and experience. Once emerging brands understand the offline market overview, select target markets, and match corresponding channels, the next step is "Zhoupu Yituo," which includes distributor lead collection, distributor qualification assessment, and corresponding matchmaking services, with a professional customer success team assisting both parties in reaching cooperation. Zhoupu Yituo leverages the resource of over 30,000 FMCG distributors, assessing and classifying them based on: 1) Financial capability 2) Market operation capability 3) Sales capability 4) Supply chain capability 5) Management capability Emerging brands can then choose suitable distributors based on their product attributes and offline resource allocation, rather than just signing up any distributor as in the past. Being short-sighted, without a 360-degree evaluation of the distributor, often leads to one-off transactions, ending after shipping a truckload of goods, failing to achieve effective distribution coverage in stores. Finally, after products successfully enter the offline market and complete distribution, dynamic management is essential; distribution is important, but "activating" distribution is even more important. Mr. Long Ruohai introduced that as consumer demand becomes more segmented, it's not enough to just place products in stores. Zhoupu's observations have found that many emerging brands have placed products in stores but they basically don't sell. How to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of distribution is a crucial part of the BASE solution in helping emerging brands manage and maintain the market. Although many emerging brands have strong internet genes, using online to precisely know target user profiles, consumption scenarios, and competing brands, this is the online logic. When we move to offline static physical shelves, how to effectively combine users, scenarios, and competition still requires continuous optimization and testing. In the past, a new product in the offline market often took six months to know its sell-through situation. But now, through Zhoupu Yituo's full-process market development management and Zhoupu Yicha's online data exploration, it is possible to clearly grasp whether the product is placed in the right stores within one month, or even one week, and if placed correctly, the reasons for poor sell-through. Based on PSD sell-through data, observe the product's situation. Summary As Dr. Mu Wei said at the meeting, the fundamental reason why more and more emerging brands are emerging is that technology empowerment has leveled the competitive threshold. Because of the internet, B2C e-commerce, live-stream e-commerce, social e-commerce, and other platforms, emerging brands can stand on the same starting line as traditional brands, using their talents and abilities to create a good product. When you have a good product and it is accepted by some consumers online, when you go offline, don't forget why you succeeded. Because various internet e-commerce platforms can help emerging brands directly connect and reach consumers. Therefore, when emerging brands go offline, don't forget to use new tools, new technologies, and new platforms to solve old problems with new weapons, rather than repeating the old path of traditional brands. You can't find a new continent with an old map. To fight the offline alley battle, you can no longer rely on individual people to fight with bayonets and shed blood to seize the offline market! Are you "watching" me?