---
title: "Fast-Moving Goods, Slow-Moving Market"
description: "FMCG products are defined by high frequency and rigid demand, leading to rapid turnover. However, due to extreme competition, establishing a solid regional market takes a long time, often three to five years or more. This article discusses how to seize opportunities and stabilize the market base in such a slow-moving environment."
author: "袁来"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2022-06-14"
language: "en"
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---

# Fast-Moving Goods, Slow-Moving Market

> FMCG products are defined by high frequency and rigid demand, leading to rapid turnover. However, due to extreme competition, establishing a solid regional market takes a long time, often three to five years or more. This article discusses how to seize opportunities and stabilize the market base in such a slow-moving environment.

FMCG products are defined in the industry as high-frequency, rigid demand, and rapid turnover.
It is precisely because of these characteristics that products are extremely abundant, with supply far exceeding demand. Products face extreme internal competition in stores; the number of facings on a shelf or whether there is a hanging strip can affect daily sales. Competition for sales volume is not only between brands, but also between categories, and even between locations.
Therefore, **although the industry is high-frequency, rigid demand, and rapid turnover, from the perspective of a single brand or product, in the extremely competitive environment, it is very slow to establish a solid regional market, taking at least three years, or even five years or more, and may not show significant improvement.**
This is the "slow" market. Only through long-term accumulation can a brand truly take root. Although products are fast-moving, market education and promotion require long-term cultivation.
From July 12 to 14, New Distribution will hold the 7th China FMCG Channel Innovation Conference in Chengdu, with the theme "Seize the Opportunity, Stabilize the Market Base."
What is the opportunity? It is the chance discovered through market insight. What is the market base? It is **the market barriers we have built through silent cultivation and long-term effort in one regional market after another.**
How to seize opportunities and stabilize the market base? In today's pandemic-ravaged environment, we hope to bring some inspiration and thought to everyone.
******Where are the opportunities?**
Seizing the opportunity means spotting business that others haven't seen or paid attention to. Based on the characteristics of the FMCG industry, I divide opportunities into three categories:
**1. Opportunities in new business models**
**2. Opportunities in new markets**
**3. Opportunities in new channels**
Opportunities in new business models mainly manifest in the emergence of new business models, such as short video live streaming, O2O home delivery e-commerce, community group buying, private domain e-commerce, and social e-commerce in recent years. The emergence of new business models inevitably brings consumers new experiences: better, faster, cheaper, and more.
The emergence of new business models must be watched by the FMCG industry because consumers are there! Although their short-term contribution to our sales may be limited, or the category characteristics may limit shopping scenarios in new business models, this should not affect our attention to them.
**Business may be small, but we must not ignore, fail to research, or fail to try. Because these may represent the future market and future trends.**
Second, opportunities in new markets. Recently, I communicated with Mr. Xu Xiang, Southern China Sales Director of Unilever. He said that **the opportunities in the offline market are most likely to appear in "first- and second-tier cities," while changes in third- and fourth-tier markets are relatively slow, with little change in channels.**
First- and second-tier cities, due to economic level, infrastructure, and the gathering of young consumer groups, are prone to generating new market gaps and new retail formats. Examples include CVS convenience stores, fresh food chain retail, and O2O new retail, all of which are trend channels.
To seize opportunities in new markets, the first priority is to deploy young teams and young distributor partners, letting them charge ahead, seize dividends, gain the first-mover advantage, and win sales.
Third, opportunities in new channels. Here, new channels do not refer to entirely new channels, but new changes within traditional channels. The day before yesterday, Mr. Xu Xiang published an article on insights into campus channels under the pandemic, which attracted industry attention.
The campus channel has been mentioned by manufacturers and distributors in the past as a high-quality special channel, but due to thresholds, relationships, and other reasons, although various parties have promoted it, most manufacturers have not given it sufficient attention and resource investment.
**With the pandemic, campuses have become closed environments, with concentrated consumption, shopping, and promotion, instantly becoming a high-yield and easy-to-defend channel for volume.**
This is the opportunity of channel changes.
Another example: local chain retail stores exist in almost every city to some extent. In recent years, local LKAs have undergone significant changes: store sizes are getting smaller, fresh food areas are getting larger, and standard product areas are getting smaller.
This means that **for standard FMCG products, conditions for large displays, large facings, and large floor stacks are becoming more stringent than before, and sometimes due to insufficient aisle space, you cannot even conduct ground promotion activities.**
This is a challenge, but behind it lies opportunity. How to adapt in advance to respond to these changes and gain information dividends through adaptation is also an opportunity.
**What is seizing the opportunity? It is seizing the first-mover advantage. Others haven't seen it, haven't paid attention, haven't valued it, haven't acted, but you lead the way. In new business models, new markets, and new channels, you see the opportunity and seize the first-mover advantage.**
******How to stabilize the market base?**
The market base is the foundation of a company's survival. Without a market base, it is like a tree without roots or water without a source. How to stabilize the market base? Two directions:
**1. Product portfolio upgrade: promote high-end and sell new**
**2. Marketing management upgrade: deepen and increase efficiency**
The current market is already a stock market. To achieve stability and sustained growth of the existing market base, the core strategy must be: **promote high-end and sell new.**
Currently, the mainstream business base of enterprises often faces the dilemma of limited gross profit and fierce competition. Distributors lack profit motivation, channel managers have limited budgets, and internal friction among channel members is severe.
Quantitative growth is no longer possible; only qualitative growth remains. **To achieve qualitative growth, where distributors have money to earn, channel managers have money to spend, and the terminal market has voice, we must promote high-end and sell new. Through the optimization and upgrade of product portfolios, we can achieve growth in the overall market base.**
**Here, promoting high-end and selling new does not mean pushing new products forcibly. In addition to product innovation and upgrades corresponding to demand trends, it also includes product optimization and upgrades corresponding to changes in consumption scenarios and increases in consumption scenarios. This is also the logic of promoting high-end and selling new.**
In addition, in marketing management, we should "**deepen and increase efficiency**".
Even today, when we look at the problems faced in the frontline market, they are still channel conflict, price chaos, long payment cycles, high bad debts, high costs, low per-unit output, and slow sales. These were the mainstream problems 10 years ago, and they remain the same 10 years later.
**The problems in the market remain the same, but our environment and targets have changed. Today, we need to use better tools and more mature technical assistance to solve problems efficiently.**
For FMCG manufacturers, today's market base is still the traditional mainstream channels, carrying perhaps more than 50% of our business sales. Because market changes are accelerating and new channels are emerging, many manufacturers are chasing new channels for incremental growth, but reducing their exploration of mainstream channels.
**Traditional mainstream channels are not sexy and have no story, so they are gradually ignored. In fact, although these channels are old, they are still in the C position.**
As mentioned in seizing opportunities, first- and second-tier cities, similar to new retail channels, should be the focus. The changes in mainstream channels in third- and fourth-tier cities are very slow.
**Facing very slow changes, what we should do is not ignore them, but pay equal attention. In the slow changes, use new tools and methods to improve efficiency and dig out more sales.**
Of course, we should also pay attention to changes in distributor partners under the market base. In the past, the manufacturer-distributor model usually had two extremes: either deep distribution with intensive distribution, where distributors were continuously subdivided and only assumed logistics and delivery functions; or trade cooperation, where payment and delivery were made, and whether the goods sold well depended entirely on the distributor's personal ability, with no follow-up.
Neither extreme is a healthy and sustainable manufacturer-distributor cooperation model today. How brand owners and distributors can "co-invest" and "share risks" is a topic that needs consideration in the new environment.
**Summary:**
Around the above topics and content, at the 7th China FMCG Channel Innovation Conference, New Distribution will join hands with more than 70 industry founders, executives, and experts in Chengdu to discuss how to seize opportunities and stabilize the market base!
**From July 12 to July 14,** as the industry's first summit meeting during the 2022 pandemic recovery period, we look forward to seeing you there!
**Are you "watching" me?**


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