---
title: "FMCG Brands Refining CVS Channel: Brands That Don't Understand User Positioning Get Hurt"
description: "Where you fall, you get up and try again. Lao Wang once again brings several products to negotiate cooperation with a convenience store chain, but still has no clue: who are the main user groups of this convenience store brand? Are my products suitable for sale? Product suitability is crucial. Lao Wang holds the products in hand but still feels uncertain. The same scenario is encountered by many brand owners. Starting from this article, I will analyze from multiple dimensions and provide brand owners with methods to \"fill the pits.\" In this article, I will answer: What methods can be used to understand the user groups of the convenience store brand you are cooperating with, so that your products are more suitable for sale and reduce the failure rate of cooperation?"
author: "刘芳"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2021-11-12"
language: "en"
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# FMCG Brands Refining CVS Channel: Brands That Don't Understand User Positioning Get Hurt

> Where you fall, you get up and try again. Lao Wang once again brings several products to negotiate cooperation with a convenience store chain, but still has no clue: who are the main user groups of this convenience store brand? Are my products suitable for sale? Product suitability is crucial. Lao Wang holds the products in hand but still feels uncertain. The same scenario is encountered by many brand owners. Starting from this article, I will analyze from multiple dimensions and provide brand owners with methods to "fill the pits." In this article, I will answer: What methods can be used to understand the user groups of the convenience store brand you are cooperating with, so that your products are more suitable for sale and reduce the failure rate of cooperation?

Where you fall, you get up and try again. Lao Wang once again brings several products to negotiate cooperation with a convenience store chain, but still has no clue: who are the main user groups of this convenience store brand? Are my products suitable for sale?
Product suitability is crucial. Lao Wang holds the products in hand but still feels uncertain. The same scenario is encountered by many brand owners.
Starting from this article, I will analyze from multiple dimensions and provide brand owners with methods to "fill the pits." **In this article, I will answer: What methods can be used to understand the user groups of the convenience store brand you are cooperating with, so that your products are more suitable for sale and reduce the failure rate of cooperation.**
**Why should brand owners understand convenience store users?**
Some brand owners may ask: **Why should I understand convenience store users? What are the differences among user groups of various convenience store brands? Isn't a convenience store targeting a broad user base?**
If brand owners think this way, they are completely wrong.
When negotiating cooperation with convenience stores, brand owners cannot just look at the convenience store channel's large number of stores, wide regional coverage, strong brand, and mature supply chain, and then become absentee bosses. Because each convenience store brand has a different positioning, and the consumption awareness and spending power of user groups vary greatly.
Can the underlying consumption logic of users be the same between a convenience store in an upscale community and one in a factory area? If not analyzed, the laziness will eventually end in product introduction failure, returns, and clearance sales.
So brand owners not only need to take the "pit-avoidance" lesson from our previous article, but also need to learn this lesson: how to analyze the user groups of convenience stores, and even how to do user analysis together with the convenience store system.
If brand owners have such awareness and capability, they also have the opportunity to push the convenience store system to provide more comprehensive and complete information.
In business cooperation, there is often such a game: if you don't understand, I won't give; the profit is all in the information gap.
**For brand owners, there is only one thing that is right: how to sell their products well through the convenience store system. To achieve this goal, the tuition fees and lessons that need to be paid and learned are probably not a penny less.**
**Who exactly consumes at convenience stores?**
At this point, we need to gradually solve a problem: who exactly consumes at convenience stores? The "2021 China Convenience Store Development Report" mentions that the main new consumer groups for convenience stores are young people, new middle-class women, silver-haired people, and people in lower-tier markets.
Different convenience store brands have significant differences in their target groups. According to a survey in the report, a certain convenience store brand in Guangdong positions its user group as: **80% of existing consumers are aged 18-35, mainly young white-collar workers in CBD, 57% of consumers are women, and they enjoy desserts and snacks during meal times and afternoon tea.**
But this is not enough to represent the full picture of all convenience store brand users, and some brands may have significant differences in user profiles compared to this survey.
Let's look at some user change concepts proposed in other fields:
Liu Run mentioned in his speech "The Power of Evolution" that there are 9 keywords for user changes: **abundance, sensibility, appearance, patriotism, independence, pet ownership, laziness and homebody, health preservation, and meaning.**
China's population structure is undergoing slow but severe changes: aging, fewer children, childlessness, unmarriedism, and single economy. These people are also high-quality user groups for the convenience store format.
Different regions also show great differences in politics, economy, society, and technology.
Therefore, different convenience store brands must target different user groups. In such a situation, a set of universally applicable and effective user positioning methods is even more needed to lock in the channel's user groups and target product placement and activities.
**How to understand convenience store user groups?**
In my upcoming new book "Traffic Monetization," I propose a "149 Pyramid Model" for traffic monetization.
And "positioning" is the top-level thinking for gaining user traffic tilt.
Precisely positioning users is to solve 4 problems: **clarify the product's targeting; clarify the product's market competitiveness; help oneself open new markets; determine the product's development field.**
Precisely positioning users can use the "7-step positioning method" to quickly find user groups:
**First, preliminary definition of users**
Regarding user definition, I propose extracting key points from general attributes such as basic, economic, cultural, social, hardware, and software attributes. Doing this well sets a big framework for positioning users, rather than blindly searching for users.
**Second, analyze users with purchasing power**
Users must be people who can afford your products; otherwise, the users you encounter will definitely waste your time. If you often encounter such ineffective users, it only means you haven't accurately positioned your users.
**Third, map users based on consumption history**
To know what people will buy next, look at what they recently bought and what they are currently buying. Marketing guru Philip Kotler once said: "The way to infer what people will buy is to observe what they have bought and what they are buying." Only by finding out what users want to buy can you know who to sell the product to.
**Fourth, judge purchase needs to determine users**
Why do users buy? Only because users have needs. If users don't have a need in this area, they definitely won't buy. Therefore, user needs determine the speed and possibility of spending money. User needs can be seen from their consumption history and focus points.
**Fifth, filter users based on consumption frequency**
The higher the consumption frequency, the greater the user value. Locking onto high-frequency consumers makes it easier to close deals. Because people who frequently buy this product already have a deep understanding of it; all you need to do is show them the value of your product.
**Sixth, segment the market to lock in users**
Market segmentation aims to focus on the group of users that can most easily generate benefits. Market segmentation helps avoid competition. By segmenting, you carve out a market area where you have an absolute competitive advantage.
**Seventh, extract the characteristics of precise users**
Extracting user characteristics helps clearly know who are valuable users. Through the detailed analysis in the above six steps, by the seventh step you can grasp the detailed characteristics of users. Extracting user characteristics facilitates more precise product placement and marketing later. When extracting user characteristics, there are two more things to do.
**One is to analyze old users.** You can select exemplary users from already closed deals and analyze them to extract common characteristics, such as age, preferences, consumption history, and places of activity.
**Two is to analyze competitor user characteristics.** You can analyze the user composition, average order value, and user characteristics of competitors, combine them with your own brand's market segment and user characteristics, and list your own user characteristics.
Through the above analysis, you can now list the characteristics and standards of your golden users, such as: 30-40 years old, income, where they like to go, who they trust, what they like, etc., and then concentrate the firepower of products and marketing, through digital marketing and promotion channels, to attract and move users and close deals.
Brand owners may say again: I can't get such detailed data, so how do I do these 7 steps of positioning?
First, if brand owners really hope to improve the success rate of their products after being introduced into the convenience store system, data is important. For many individual systems (especially those with insufficient scale), their data volume is also insufficient. Even for super-large systems, the true market value of a single system's data silo may not be that high. Instead, integrating data can form synergy, maximize market effect, and benefit the promotion of supplier relationships.
This can be communicated and transacted through market-based methods, and then seek professional data analysis institutions to integrate and judge.
In fact, as I said earlier, if brand owners don't understand this underlying logic, then in this cooperation transaction, the one who benefits the most is the party holding the information gap. In such a loose cooperative relationship, the cost of the information gap is: product introduction failure.
If brand owners can master the method of positioning users, they should find ways to persuade the convenience store system to do it together. I believe that all convenience store systems ultimately hope that the success rate of introduced products is high, which can form a virtuous cycle and a good supplier relationship. The convenience store system often does not provide such refined data, also because brand owners themselves lack these capabilities.
If every brand owner can develop the skill of "how to sell products well in the convenience store system," then reducing the risk of product introduction failure is still guaranteed.
**Final words:**
FMCG brand owners and the convenience store system should generally improve their ability to precisely position users. After all, they can't always rely on feelings to place products and marketing activities.
I strongly emphasize joint improvement. Brand owners cannot rely on the convenience store system and then become absentee bosses; the convenience store system cannot take advantage of the information gap and turn a blind eye.
Experts plan before they act. I wish brand owners and convenience store practitioners can all become industry experts.
**Author Introduction:** Liu Fang: New retail private domain marketing consultant, personal commercial brand and private domain consultant, with 17 years of experience in the retail/FMCG B2B industry, columnist for multiple business media platforms, invited new consumer private domain traffic mentor for "Wu Xiaobo Channel" 890 New Business School/New National Products Promotion Association (online + offline), and operator of tens of millions of private domain traffic and multiple 100k+ viral articles for well-known retail brands.
**Are you "watching" me?**


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