---
title: "Four Strategies and Four Measures to Solve the Problem of Your Product Being Intercepted at the Terminal"
description: "To get your product into consumers' hands through retail outlets, completing distribution, display, restocking, and delivery is not enough; you must face fierce terminal interception. This article provides four strategies and four measures for effective terminal counter-interception, emphasizing the importance of identifying key terminals, concentrating resources, analyzing competitors' weaknesses, and building barriers to weaken competitors' interception efforts."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2014-07-26"
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# Four Strategies and Four Measures to Solve the Problem of Your Product Being Intercepted at the Terminal

> To get your product into consumers' hands through retail outlets, completing distribution, display, restocking, and delivery is not enough; you must face fierce terminal interception. This article provides four strategies and four measures for effective terminal counter-interception, emphasizing the importance of identifying key terminals, concentrating resources, analyzing competitors' weaknesses, and building barriers to weaken competitors' interception efforts.

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To get your product into consumers' hands through retail outlets, merely completing the aforementioned distribution, display, restocking, and delivery work is far from sufficient. Because next, you will directly face fierce terminal interception.
Terminal interception is not only a battle for channel resources and consumer resources but also a brutal war entangled with information overload, terminal sales guidance competition, and profit erosion. Its forms are not only reflected in shelves, end caps, and related promotional positions but also, very intuitively, in the competition of promoters stationed in KA stores.
All living beings are human-centric! In terminal interception, deploying promoters is also the most effective terminal interception and counter-interception activity. But when everyone deploys promoters, some problems arise:
If you deploy them, it seems to only serve a defensive role.
But if you don't deploy them, you seem to be at a disadvantage.
Yet in any first- or second-tier city, there are many KA stores. If you deploy promoters in all of them and fight battles with competitors in every KA, the cost would be too high for you to bear?!
Facing this situation, how can you fight this terminal interception and counter-interception battle well?
**I. Four Strategies for Terminal Counter-Interception.**
To carry out effective terminal counter-interception and improve the efficiency of terminal marketing resources, first, we must do a good job of pre-analysis and strategic planning for terminal counter-interception.
**(1) To carry out effective terminal counter-interception, you must identify your key terminals.**
Should you carry out counter-interception at every terminal where competitors intercept?
The answer is obviously no. Because:
1. You will be limited by your available marketing resources and your expected sales profit. In many cases, this may determine that you are unable or not realistically allowed to follow the opponent's footsteps and bloom everywhere, removing every landmine the competitor has planted at the terminal.
2. Even if you equip most of the outlets where competitors carry out terminal interception with mine-clearing weapons and set up a long counter-interception electric grid, you may still not stabilize or improve the sales data on the sales report. Because many of these terminals may be nests where you can only occupy a position but cannot lay many eggs. All these determine that before carrying out terminal counter-interception and allocating limited marketing resources, we must refine key terminals.
In fact, as long as you have done prior data analysis on sales statistics and growth potential of various outlets, it is not difficult to find the 20% of terminals that contribute 80% of your performance from the outlets where competitors carry out terminal interception.
Of course, the final determination of which 20% are key terminals for terminal counter-interception depends on whether you are oriented by sales volume, profit contribution, or a combination of both.
Similarly, terminal interception is not limited to large supermarkets; your terminal counter-interception should also extend from KA to key terminals at various levels such as grocery stores. This raises higher requirements for refining key terminals by different levels of outlets.
Moreover, many facts in reality are: although the single-store sales of small and medium supermarkets are difficult to compare with large supermarkets, due to lower entry barriers, lower terminal interception costs, and more flexible interception methods, their single-store profit contribution rate may not be much less than that of large supermarkets (in fact, many suppliers have already, due to this and related reasons, not entered large supermarkets and have returned to traditional channels).
**(2) Concentrate counter-interception resources on key terminals.**
As a giant in the tea beverage market, Master Kong once carried out a "sweeping leaves" terminal counter-interception against Wahaha's iced black tea. Taking the Guangzhou market as an example, it is reported that in order to more forcefully counter Wahaha's vivid terminal interception, Master Kong "purchased" Wahaha's iced black tea at various retail stores, "exchanging" its own products for Wahaha's products. In addition, Master Kong also promised greater benefits and signed "exclusive agreements" to deal with continued interception by Wahaha and other competitors. Its intensity was not small.
But for the vast majority of weak brands, dispersing limited terminal marketing resources among secondary and important intertwined terminals is obviously inappropriate. This determines that using precision-guided "cluster bombs" to strike key targets is the terminal counter-interception strategy we must adopt.
This actually means that you cannot waste limited marketing resources on terminal interception and counter-interception with competitors in stores where sales and profit contribution rates are actually small and difficult to achieve major breakthroughs in the future. Instead, you should find the key points, shorten the battle line, and concentrate firepower.
Of course, if it is a newly entered store, there is no history of sales and profit contribution to evaluate; the store's business performance, popularity, etc., are things you need to consider.
If you operate products such as alcoholic beverages that enter both supermarkets and hotels and require channel segmentation, you need to choose places in segmented channels that are very important to you and where the competitor's terminal interception is relatively weak to carry out terminal interception.
**(3) Analyze competitors' interception methods, use differentiated counter-interception means targeting competitors' weaknesses to allocate marketing resources, and carry out "highland counterattack".**
To hit a snake, hit its seven inches; terminal counter-interception should also counter at key points. This determines that terminal counter-interception strategies and actual measures must not only be based on research on consumer behavior but also be competition-oriented.
"The fighter in mobile phones" Bird, when tearing open the terminal interception net of foreign brands, specifically targeted weaknesses such as the long channel system and thin profits of foreign brands, using "human wave tactics" to arrange salesmen to carry out carpet-style street-level distribution and build rapport with store clerks. As soon as phones were sold, they immediately gave commissions to the stores, effectively improving their own sales volume in terminal interception.
Of course, in practice, the weaknesses of competitors' terminal interception and your differentiated counter-interception means are not limited to this small level. That is to say, details determine effectiveness and success or failure; you should do more specific analysis:
1. What is the form and tightness of the binding between competitors and outlets? Is there an opportunity to directly dismantle the opponent's interception from the terminal?
2. What is the content of competitors' terminal interception activities that affect consumer motivation? To what extent does it affect consumers' purchase decisions? Can you provide counter-interception activities that meet consumer needs that competitors cannot兼顾 and satisfy?
3. What are the information interception carriers of competitors, and what is their influence radius? How should your counter-interception information enter the minds of consumers visiting the store in the first time and even multiple times?
4. In the arrangement and organization of competitors' terminal interception activities, are there places where consumer contact is insufficient? Are their promoters dissatisfied with the amount of compensation and timeliness of payment? What is the skill of these promoters in inducing customers to buy? Are there gaps that can be used for my benefit?
5. What are the consistent systems and behaviors of competitors in terminal maintenance such as outlet visits? How will these factors affect their terminal interception? Is there an opportunity?
6. The volume of music at competitors' off-site promotional activities, the design of promotional language... There are many more questions and analyses similar to the above about what competitors are intercepting at the terminal. It can be said that as long as you find the answers to the above questions, it is almost certain that your terminal counter-interception activities have found the weaknesses of the opponent's terminal interception and its more effective differentiated guarantee.
**(4) In counter-interception, purchase terminal interception barriers for competitors, weaken the effectiveness of competitors' terminal interception as much as possible, and increase the cost of their continued terminal interception.**
Regardless of the strength of the brand or enterprise, this should become a basic principle for our terminal counter-interception activities. In this regard, P&G's terminal counter-interception against the local brand that poses the greatest competitive threat to it—Slek—is worth learning from.
In order to effectively counter Slek, which is famous for terminal interception, P&G used advertising posters, continuous sun umbrellas, promotional price tags, fun mini-games, hot-selling areas (or gift areas) dozens of meters away from the promotional table, and stationed promoters, etc., to set up multiple visual barriers in the transition zones between promotional points and shelves with competitors like Slek, greatly weakening Slek's terminal interception effect, and further prompting C-Bons Group to be exhausted by interception, keeping its terminal sales costs high.
**Four Major Measures for Terminal Counter-Interception**
Earlier, we discussed some strategies for formulating terminal counter-interception. Combining these contents, let us next focus on how to carry out specific terminal counter-interception.
**I. All evils and goods are human-first.**
This mainly includes the following situations:
**1. Direct promoters.**
Stationing promoters is one of the most effective terminal interception and counter-interception methods. For these promoters, whether they wear uniform store uniforms or their own promotional clothing, their quality and business ability can be judged immediately by sales data.
But the contribution of promoters to terminal counter-interception is not only influenced by their own factors. If we are too eager for quick success or pay insufficient attention in training, those promoters who cannot make persuasive recommendations to consumers, do not master consumer psychology analysis, and lack closing skills may not match even one of the opponent's three or four; if product sales are unstable or have obvious off-peak seasons, and the base salary, bonuses, and commissions we give promoters are always paid in a fixed form, then promoters may become periodically inactive, and may even engage in "eating from the inside" by helping other brands or even competitors promote products.
"Attitude determines everything." In this case, our efforts to counter-intercept through stationed promoters will naturally be greatly reduced. Therefore, in addition to doing a good job in competitive recruitment and elimination of promoters, training on enterprise, brand, product, closing skills, corporate culture, and necessary spot checks and supervision, more importantly, we need to use competitive and timely compensation (including payment time) systems, humanized emotional maintenance, and other measures to win over promoters' hearts, increase their sense of identity and loyalty to our enterprise and brand, and maintain a positive attitude. Only then can promoters' effectiveness be better utilized.
**2. Store sales guides.**
Under the increasingly severe situation of terminal interception and counter-interception, given that we cannot station promoters in all stores and store sales guides have control over recommendation rights at these terminals, the phenomenon of "winning over and corrupting" sales guides with benefits and emotions has become more "intensified" in recent years.
For example, P&G's CCM calcium, under the basic strategy of "terminal interception, comprehensive penetration, and deep communication with consumers," launched a "Trojan Horse Plan" aimed at communicating, training, and winning over terminal sales clerks. Its technology licensee Ankejie selected 50-80 terminals in each target city, frequently and regularly dining and engaging in activities with sales clerks, and giving away books like "Who Moved My Cheese?" or P&G products like Head & Shoulders, or practical small wallets, pocket watches, and other carefully designed gifts, to deeply maintain relationships with sales guides.
Terminal interception like P&G CCM calcium raises the threshold and difficulty of our terminal counter-interception. In such a situation, if we cannot pay store sales guides equal to or greater than what competitors give, we should increase the flexibility of our compensation, such as cash settlement, weekly settlement, etc.; we should invest more in emotional investment from both positive and side angles, such as watching movies, giving gifts, greetings, picking up and dropping off children, helping their families solve problems within our ability, etc.; we should put more effort into helping them fulfill their spiritual honor needs, such as making the top representatives paid training lecturers, store consumer consultants, and selecting best honorary employees and market supervisors.
**3. Small store owners.**
In some grocery stores and small supermarkets, the owners often play the role of sales guides, and in some information-underdeveloped areas (especially the vast rural markets), these small store owners also serve as opinion leaders. In this case, how to close the relationship with them becomes an important task for our terminal counter-interception in these places.
For small store owners, the methods can still be roughly divided into several main forms: benefit maintenance, emotional reinforcement, and providing value-added services. If our products are not selling quickly for the time being, when planning the channel profit system, we might consciously increase the profit returns to these terminals; we might focus on carrying out channel promotional activities for terminal members; we might even take the lead in occupying small store sales resources through display awards, sales competitions, purchasing shelves, exclusive agreements, etc.
If we cannot afford the cost of using "human wave tactics" to strengthen our relationship with small store owners, we might invite them as guests to retailer representative conferences, owner联谊会, and other activities; we might consciously arrange for these personnel to visit some small store owners during middle and senior management market inspections; we might send greetings and gifts on their birthdays or holidays, even if it is a pound of meat, a few pounds of rice, or a greeting card, "the gift is light but the feeling is deep," making them feel a level of attention from manufacturers they may never have felt before.
When the terminal centripetal force is enhanced, counter-interception naturally has more effective guarantees and can form barriers for competitors to continue terminal interception.
**4. Sales personnel.**
All terminal counter-interception cannot be separated from the efforts of sales personnel. If the sales personnel responsible for terminal sales lack pressure from sales targets in mature markets, lack enthusiasm for restocking and replenishment, lack supervision of terminal information carriers and terminal display equipment, lack supervision of promoters, and lack visits and contact with terminal-related personnel, it is imaginable that our terminal counter-interception behavior, lacking maintenance and execution capabilities, will increase the possibility of "doing hard work but getting no credit."
**II. Use the opponent's interception resources to achieve counter-interception.**
Because this can effectively save sales expenses and increase the effectiveness of our terminal counter-interception, this is a point that deserves special attention in carrying out terminal counter-interception.
To break it down specifically, here are a few main summaries:
1. Use the opponent's release of consumer promotional advertising information at the terminal to appropriately reduce our advertising investment, and at the terminal, counter-intercept the opponent's consumer popularity brought by terminal interception by increasing store publicity, stationing promoters, and carrying out our own terminal promotions.
In fact, a considerable number of enterprises at present often have situations where "high-altitude" publicity and promotions cannot land, which provides us with opportunities to carry out counter-interception based on their weaknesses, making consumers see the opponent's ads, enter the store, and come out carrying our products.
2. Use the popularity at the opponent's promotional activity site to arrange our promoters to wander around the periphery of the opponent's activities or on the consumer's必经之路 to the site, introducing products, distributing flyers, and achieving counter-interception.
3. Use flexible methods such as cash settlement to win over the opponent's promoters to recommend our products.
4. Use the opponent's terminal display equipment to post our promotional posters and place our products.
Many enterprises carrying out terminal interception have poor terminal visit and maintenance implementation in this regard. As long as we increase emotional investment and give a little benefit, we may make relevant terminal members "turn against" the opponent's terminal display equipment.
In fact, it has become a very common phenomenon for terminal members to use a certain enterprise's terminal display equipment irregularly for their own autonomous behavior, considering cost savings and profit increases.
5. Exploit the institutional drawbacks of the opponent in terminal maintenance and interception.
This is either poor execution or overly procedural and rigid in related systems. For example, the time when many enterprises' sales personnel visit terminals is almost regular and predictable.
This provides us with opportunities to join hands with terminal members to carry out counter-interception against those terminal interceptors who "sign agreements with retailers, declaring that the counters of a certain brand must not display other competing products, otherwise the freezer will be taken back or the freezer deposit will not be refunded."
**III. Expand the counter-interception radius outward, first influencing customers at the terminal; set up multiple layers of counter-interception defense lines internally to influence customers' consumption decisions.**
If we follow the opponent in setting up a promotional table at the store entrance, we might, if the store does not object, move the promotional table to a position that can first contact customers; or even negotiate conditions with the bicycle parking point outside and move the promotional table to the area where customers集中 park and pick up bicycles. If it is difficult to find an opportunity in these aspects, we might arrange promoters to distribute flyers farther than the opponent, add special sales and gift areas, or win better results through music, dance, etc.
Speaking of this, I can't help but think of Cat Duoli. Cat Duoli, with Yunnan characteristics, is a new force in leisure food, and its rapid growth is inseparable from the role of terminal counter-interception. Its typical method is to compile the benefits of the product into an advertising song with folk style—Cat Duoli ya, Cat Duoli... continuously creating sound waves at the store's promotional area. Once this advertising song is played, the shouts of other brands' promoters next to it cannot be heard at all.
If we have done a relatively clear analysis of the residential communities of our target consumer group, we might expand the radius of terminal counter-interception to the relevant residential communities to reduce the opponent's terminal interception resistance further outside the store. If the opponent is holding activities outside the store, we might arrange our promoters to wander at multiple levels at the store entrance, in the classified display areas of our and the opponent's products, in the transition zones of our shelves relative to the opponent's products, and next to the opponent's display positions, to prevent "fish that slip through the net" customers.
**IV. Avoid the strong and attack the weak; advance and retreat need to be circuitous.**
For many small and medium-sized enterprises, it is often difficult to bear the high sales expenses caused by dealing with opponents' terminal interception. For example, they cannot station promoters in as many stores as strong opponents, and cannot afford the cost of frequently or long-term purchasing end caps, stack heads, and promotional carriers. Under such circumstances, to carry out effective terminal counter-interception, it is difficult to avoid circuitous warfare and guerrilla warfare. That is to say, if you have combat capability and can win, you can fight; if you do not have combat capability and cannot win, do not stubbornly resist and do not fail to seek other opportunities. This may also make some opponents exhausted by terminal interception, increase interception costs, or even create loopholes.
For example, carry out counter-interception activities at your key terminals (especially those key terminals where the opponent is temporarily unable to reach and interception is relatively weak), rather than forming face-to-face hard resistance with every wave of the opponent's terminal interception; for example, spread the cost of terminal counter-interception in large supermarkets to small and medium key stores where the point and surface effects may be greater and the opponent's interception may be weaker; for example, extend the tentacles of terminal counter-interception to some regional markets and second- and third-tier markets and communities that the opponent cannot attend to.
If the opponent falls into a terminal interception fatigue war, and at the terminals where they previously focused on interception there is a temporary rest or lack of strength, we might make a "return thrust" at the key terminals among them.
From the above, it can also be seen that terminal counter-interception should be based on effectiveness, with flexibility and diversity. If you go down one alley to the end, it is not difficult for the opponent to find regular patterns and opportunities to grab braids, making it easier to be blocked and hit a wall.
At the same time, it should be noted that terminal counter-interception is a relatively complex and systematic issue. In addition to the above content described by the author, there are many details that affect the effectiveness of terminal counter-interception, and among them, there are also some basic-level factors. Such as product packaging, quality, price, brand influence, skills and intensity of terminal promotional activities, differentiation of promotional appeals, the pros and cons of existing shelf positions, and the degree of attention and rationality of consumer and terminal services, etc. They are all sufficient to have a significant impact on our terminal counter-interception. Therefore, while carrying out some terminal counter-interception behaviors, we should not forget to start from these more front-end basic competitive levels.
However, it is worth thinking about: if we only look at the terminal interception problem "in this mountain" to find a way out, we may fall into the thinking trap of "not knowing the true face of Lushan," and fall into the quagmire of a war of attrition where you intercept me and I intercept you in a certain store, which is exactly what most are not good at. For this reason, we also need to jump out of the "besieged city" to look at the problem, to better weaken and even avoid terminal interception.
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