Warm Tip: Click the blue text above to follow "FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting" for more insights on marketing and distributor internal management.
As the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day "double festival" approach, the increasingly intense "festival marketing" battle is about to ignite. For manufacturers and distributors, whether festival marketing is a "fat piece of meat" or a "chicken rib," no one is willing to easily give up this huge opportunity that could rewrite annual sales performance. However, in this contest of strength and wisdom, who will ultimately prevail and become the true winner? The bloody competition has stained the "symbiotic" market ecology red, and "win-win" has become a verbal call and a mental knot for everyone. The game of haggling over every penny is constantly interpreting and enacting many people's sigh: "Festival marketing: if you don't do it, you're waiting to die; if you do it, you're asking for death." How to clear the fog and enter the blue ocean of sales and profits? This is a practical issue facing every enterprise.
Problems Faced by Festival Marketing
Current festival marketing, although it calls for novelty and creativity every year, often lacks exactly that. However, as the saying goes, "thinking determines the way out." If you cannot break through your own mental boundaries, festival marketing without creativity will inevitably fall into the following two fatal misunderstandings:
First, equating "price war" with "discount promotion." As we all know, one of the main means and methods of festival marketing is "discount promotion," with advertising and promotions revolving around price. But many enterprises rigidly believe that discount promotion means engaging in a "price war," focusing their marketing efforts on lowering product prices, often resulting in nothing more than losing money for applause. I remember last Mid-Autumn Festival, when I went to the supermarket and saw mooncake promotional ads, they were either "all items at special prices" or "buy more, get more." I felt quite heavy-hearted. Faced with such commonplace "gifts" or "discounts for more sales" ads, consumers are already numb. Who would pay for such unattractive shouting?
Second, sticking to conventional marketing routines. In my years of working with clients, I've found that many enterprises have a common problem in their promotional strategies for specific festivals: they basically follow habits in festival marketing, and their thinking patterns become more entrenched. Before each festival, manufacturers and distributors attach great importance strategically, emphasizing the need to seize the festival opportunity for marketing planning, brand promotion, and promotional activities. However, the tactical implementation is often casual, without in-depth market research or professional external brainpower for comprehensive planning and advisory support. They simply repeat the same routines year after year. As a result, festival marketing that appears lively on the surface often lacks any appeal that resonates with consumers, yielding half the results with double the effort.
Jumping Out of the "Price War" Nightmare
Festival marketing is a part of an enterprise's annual marketing strategy, or rather, a preset dish in the festival marketing feast. How well an enterprise performs in its annual marketing feast depends on the carefully planned specialty "dishes" for different festivals, which play an important decorative role. If done well, this decorative role can even transform into a "turning point" for the enterprise's annual marketing success. So, how can we carry out "festival marketing" to the end? A realistic reminder is: do not simply equate festival marketing with "discount promotion." As the saying goes, "Forewarned is forearmed; without preparation, you will fail." We must proceed from the overall situation and make systematic and comprehensive plans and preparations.
First, shift the focus of festival promotions from "price reduction" to "highlighting selling points." Smart merchants will never achieve sales performance by shouting, "I'm cheap, buy me." Because consumers do not consume price; they consume the use value of the product. Therefore, without products that can move consumers as support, festival marketing will be like a tree without roots or water without a source.
Products that can touch the nerves of most consumers during specific festivals usually have "festival-oriented" selling points. Therefore, capable and visionary manufacturers will boldly innovate for specific festivals, research and explore consumers' festival consumption psychology and behavior, the actual needs of the festival market, and the characteristics of related products. They will formulate effective product portfolio strategies with festival characteristics, suitable for festival marketing, and launch new products that fit consumers' life, leisure, and study needs during the festival. This way, they can find a new path, seize the initiative, and smoothly open the festival market channel.
Second, experience "winning" sales. With the improvement of income levels and lifestyle tastes, consumer demand is gradually shifting from mass consumption to personalized consumption, with customized and personalized services becoming new demand hotspots. "Experiential marketing" adapts to this change and thrives.
Customers loyal to "experiential marketing" not only consume the products or services provided by merchants but also a spiritual pleasure experience. At this point, they are no longer sensitive to price; they are willing to pay several times or even dozens of times the value of the product or service to buy a feeling they like.
In festival marketing activities, enterprises should focus on exploring and stimulating consumers' "experiential needs." Before the festival arrives, enterprises should organize distributors to train frontline terminal sales personnel, set up activity areas at the promotion site, create consumption life scenarios, and use professionally designed "scripts" and skilled guidance from sales personnel to let consumers quickly enter the role, stimulating their desire to "try it out," thus making them "fall in love at first sight" with your products amidst the dazzlingly decorated counters and array of goods.
Third, emotional "winning" sales. Emotion is a "gentle knife," but consumers are often willing to be cut by it, and sometimes even applaud after being cut. Because when your product and brand have cultural emotions such as festival customs and folk customs as the foundation and cornerstone during sales and communication, you have already injected "faith" and soul into your product. Consumers, during specific festivals (or more precisely, in the specific festival cultural atmosphere), are not just buying material products but the emotions, culture, and even "faith" attached to the product. This spiritual satisfaction will infinitely amplify the "use value" of the product in consumers' minds, often cultivating and retaining loyal consumer groups through subtle influence. Because your product has become a material symbol of the emotions consumers seek and satisfy; when consuming, they often unconsciously equate the product with their own emotions and psychological reactions. Once you reach this level, you can continue to achieve sales miracles even with price increases. Why do roses sell well even when their prices double every Valentine's Day? That's the reason.
Fourth, respond to changes with "constancy." In the field of marketing, an indisputable fact is that the market changes, customer tastes and preferences change, and competitors change. In such a context, if an enterprise truly "responds to changes with constancy," it will absolutely not work.
I have always insisted on advising clients with dialectical thinking: the essence of "constancy" is that the purpose and principles remain unchanged, but the outward appearance of "constancy" is to "change face" according to the times and circumstances. It's a simple truth: as a profit-making organization, an enterprise exists to make money, but it cannot be separated from the premise of "creating value for customers." If the enterprise's operations cannot create value for customers, and the products and services provided cannot effectively meet consumer needs, then the enterprise will naturally have no profit.
Therefore, festival marketing must adhere to the purpose of "better meeting customer needs and better creating value for customers." By staying on the right path and innovating, customers benefit and enterprises profit. Only such marketing is healthy and sustainable. In fact, during festival promotions, the products promoted must "vary by festival" and conform to the festival atmosphere and consumer psychology. For example, during the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day "double festival," enterprises can adopt a "nested" marketing approach, combining their products with festival necessities like mooncakes and wine for promotions.
Breaking Through Conventional Thinking
Sun Tzu's Art of War says: "In all battles, use the orthodox to engage and the unorthodox to win." This principle also applies to the battlefield of festival marketing. In the increasingly bloody festival promotion war, merchants not only need to integrate various effective marketing resources and promotional tools but also need to know themselves and the enemy, plan ahead, and make overall arrangements to innovate in activity planning and sales promotion.
First, set marketing goals in advance and establish quantitative indicators. To put it bluntly, festival marketing refers to accurately grasping consumers' festival consumption needs during the festival period, comprehensively using marketing tools such as advertising, ground promotion, and on-site promotional presentations to increase product sales and enhance brand image. Remember, although "festival marketing" is part of the overall marketing plan, since it is festival marketing, we cannot ignore the time frame of "during the festival." In a relatively short period, it is very difficult for "festival marketing" to be all-powerful and all-encompassing. Setting expected marketing goals, to some extent, means making trade-offs, prioritizing, and ensuring specificity and executability. Only then can we concentrate superior resources, focus on key breakthroughs, and achieve twice the results with half the effort.
In addition, festival marketing is a systematic project. The competition between an enterprise and its competitors at the frontline is never a simple PK of corporate strength and product brand. It involves the dispatch of various resources inside and outside the enterprise's marketing system. Whether the marketing elements and resources can be reasonably and efficiently integrated is the key to determining whether the product and brand can win in the frontline terminal competition against competitors. Therefore, it is necessary to establish quantitative assessment and evaluation indicators for each link under the established goals. Only in this way can our festival marketing activities achieve steady progress in planning, assessment, evaluation, and control. Quantitative indicators typically include sales volume, market share, gross margin, year-on-year growth rate, repeat purchase rate, and promotional advertising reach rate.
Second, formulate a reasonable promotion plan and do a good job in frontline terminal sales promotion. Sales promotion is the main link and means of the festival marketing communication system. Formulating a complete and effective sales promotion plan is the key to the success of festival marketing. What needs to be emphasized here is that a "reasonable" promotion plan means that, on the premise of investigating and analyzing the target market, upstream manufacturers should guide and assist downstream distributors and store terminals in formulating plans and designing promotional strategies according to local conditions. The plan must be practical and feasible, and work should be carried out step by step.
The main battlefield of festival marketing is the frontline terminal. When distributing products, manufacturers should never unilaterally think that success is achieved once the product is placed in front of consumers. Smart merchants always try every means to place the product into consumers' minds. Specifically, at the frontline terminal level, this cannot be separated from creating a themed atmosphere inside and outside the consumption venue. Generally speaking, this consumption atmosphere includes two parts: first, the on-site atmosphere, including promotional posters, POP displays, decoration arrangements, background music that matches consumer tastes and festival themes, etc. Specifically, it means doing a good job in air and ground communication, highlighting the festival atmosphere from visual, auditory, sensory, to plans and activities; the other atmosphere is the mental state of employees. Manufacturers should fully mobilize employees' proactive attitude and enthusiasm to attract customers.
Third, integrate and coordinate marketing elements and internal and external resources. Festival marketing involves a wide range and large investment, no less than a major battle. It is not only the responsibility of the marketing department but also involves production, distribution, human resources, finance, logistics support, and other departments. It often requires external resources, such as relevant government functional departments, news media, advertising agencies, consulting firms, and suppliers of auxiliary promotional materials like gifts. Therefore, festival marketing is not just the responsibility of the marketing department; the entire company should attach importance to it. It is best to establish a special mobilization and coordination committee for festival marketing, and within the permitted scope, tilt all corporate resources toward the festival marketing campaign. Otherwise, once the festival marketing battle begins, if products are insufficient, promotional items are not in place, customers cannot buy what they want, or cannot get what they should, it will inevitably affect the enterprise's marketing plan during the festival.
Fourth, evaluation and follow-up. Marketing effectiveness evaluation is an inspection and review of marketing work. On the one hand, it can identify which marketing methods are effective and which are less effective or even ineffective, thereby adjusting marketing thinking and implementation plans, and pointing the right direction for subsequent marketing activities. On the other hand, it can timely understand the progress of festival marketing and the quality of various marketing tasks, evaluate and solve obstacles encountered in the marketing process, and improve the quality and effectiveness of festival marketing. After all, the purpose of festival promotions, besides hoping to increase customer traffic and sales during a specific period, is more importantly to encourage customers to continue visiting in the future.
Evaluation indicators for festival marketing generally include: sales performance, on-site reputation of products and services, awareness and favorability of products and brands, customer return rate and loyalty, input costs and profit output, and market performance compared with competitors. Evaluation can be conducted through questionnaires, in-depth interviews, field observations, and other forms, covering the entire process from pre-event planning, event promotion, to post-event feedback.
Among them, the key link is customer definition and segmentation. Only by selecting the most valuable customer segments can we, in subsequent marketing follow-up, integrate the best marketing resources to leverage and meet the consumption needs of these customers, effectively enhance customer value, and increase corporate profits.
-------------------------------------- Like this article? Feel free to click the top right corner to share it to your Moments.
About us: WeChat Name: FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting Management Account Introduction: 20 years of experience in FMCG distributor operations and management, professionally targeting distributor internal management: We understand distributors better than manufacturers, and we understand internal management better than distributors. Senior marketing experts help your enterprise develop.
Click the "Read Original" link below to enter our micro-community for interactive communication and questions. Learning and Exchange QQ Group: 344257092 Reply 1 to enter the micro official website to view historical messages. -----------------------------------------