Warm reminder: Click the blue text above to follow "FMCG Distributor Professional Consulting" for more marketing and distributor internal management content. If in the first half of the year or last year, discussing wine distributors, especially those operating as trading companies, advancing brand building was seen as a bonus, then in the current environment, distributors are facing a life-or-death test brought by industry changes. It can be said that exploring and attempting trading brand building has become a necessary measure worthy of attention from all distributors. For most distributors, building a trading brand is a risky long-term project. In the past, distributors often only valued product brands and neglected their own trading brand. The author believes that only by branding the trading company can distributors build core competitiveness and avoid being eliminated in the fierce market changes.
I. Why Promote Trading Brand Building?
1. Branding the trading company is an important measure for distributors in transition to avoid elimination risk and enhance competitiveness. The "golden decade" of baijiu brought profit growth and capacity expansion, also driving the crazy growth of the liquor circulation sector, with a large number of funds and people flooding into the "liquor seller" army. When market adjustments, overcapacity, and sales obstacles suddenly surfaced, distributors faced the brunt of the difficulties. The industry reshuffle first eliminated distributors without brand foundations. Therefore, while there is still a glimmer of hope to buffer, it is particularly important and urgent for distributors to complete transformation and enhance their internal core competitiveness through branding!
2. Branding the trading company can "firmly grasp" consumers and occupy the consumer high ground. The current baijiu industry has entered a new marketing era centered on consumers. Grasping consumers and meeting their needs is the core of market competition. In the past, distributors only had channel resources, lacked consumer reputation and brand awareness of their own operating entity, and had a weak consumer base. Building the trading company into a brand helps distributors better grasp consumers and achieve a more valuable presence between upstream liquor companies and downstream consumers in the long run. Once a trading company forms reputation and recognition in the region, it establishes the best platform for dialogue and communication with consumers, and thus has the ability to resist market risks. In addition, as consumers pursue high-quality, safe baijiu, they will choose more professional and standardized places to buy, and the market mechanism will become more perfect. At that time, trading companies that grasp consumer brand orientation will highlight their core competitiveness, while those deviating from consumer value will perish.
II. How to Build a Trading Brand with Core Competitiveness?
For trading brands, the market and consumers are the ultimate judges. Whether you do high-end or low-end, group purchase or circulation, if you don't grasp consumers, you don't have a firm root in the market, and you may be a flash in the pan at any time. In the past, competition among traditional channel distributors was more of a "price competition," but future competition will gradually tend toward "value competition." Only by facing the current changes and crises, focusing on building the "trading brand," intensifying efforts to cultivate loyal consumers, having a group of distributors and terminal groups willing to work together in market competition, improving team quality, innovating service methods, upgrading product structure, improving service levels and commercial reputation, and continuously enhancing their brand influence can distributors occupy an advantageous position in the fierce market competition.
The author believes that for regional strong distributors who want to build core competitiveness and their own trading brand, the following work is urgently needed:
1. Change business philosophy and build brand pattern
Distributors should take the lead in positioning their own trading company as the most standardized and professional "brand marketing service provider" in the regional market. With this as the strategic development goal, provide refined agency distribution services to upstream manufacturers, and provide meticulous distribution and brand promotion marketing services to downstream distribution terminals and customer groups. At the same time, the company's operation and management should be branded, shifting from the past "product wholesaler" to "professional brand marketing service provider" in business concepts, standardizing business behavior, and improving team execution and professional standards.
2. Optimize product structure and create star products
The core factor for consumers to contact and recognize a trading brand and eventually have consumer reputation is that the products represented make regional consumers willing to buy, consume, repurchase, and re-consume. Choosing the correct product positioning is a prerequisite for marketing success. In the current environment, distributors should focus more on the mid-end baijiu market, making baijiu that ordinary people can afford, can buy, and are willing to buy. At the same time, clarify the mainstream flavor type, alcohol content, packaging capacity, etc. of regional market baijiu consumption. Before formulating annual profit plans, clarify the ratio of profit products and volume products, clarify market promotion priorities, and create star products and bestsellers. Only by scientifically laying out products can we achieve the goal of using products as a medium to have a group of loyal consumers and consolidate the mass foundation of the trading brand.
3. Refine market operations and continuously sink channels
Continuously promote the refinement of regional market operations, ensure more refined channels, more scientific management, more detailed market services, and more harmonious customer relationships. Market sales should not be limited to central urban areas but should spread to county and town-level markets. Market sinking, channel sinking, organization sinking, and management sinking truly achieve "distribution to townships, distribution to storefronts." Channels are pipelines. The more channels a distributor controls, the greater the chance of contacting consumers.
4. Lock core groups and carry out brand promotion
Products distributed to terminals are still not sales. How to find consumers, promote transactions, and activate terminals is the core work. While refining market operations, distributors should actively develop core consumer groups, promote step by step through point-to-area, and ultimately achieve wide-range precision marketing. For mass-priced products represented, continuously carry out consumer promotion activities, ensuring promotions at every festival, grasping every banquet, and fully communicating with consumers; for mid-to-high-end products represented, shift from the past "government resources" as a breakthrough for government group purchases, focus on social group purchases, find new core consumers, and actively introduce "circle marketing" and "big data membership marketing" models to establish a huge customer platform resource. In the future, only distributors who master core customer resources can win in the survival of the fittest!
5. Stabilize business team and maintain social relations
Distributors should be guided by branding thinking and establish a professional liquor operation team. In the future, the business team under a professional trading company will no longer just be deliverymen and messengers, but should develop into primary strategists for a terminal, a district, or even a region, becoming image ambassadors maintaining harmonious relations between the trading company and core consumers. Management of salesmen should be from morning meetings, daily reports, weekly meetings to monthly assessments, promoting daily management in tabular, digital, and goal-oriented forms. Generally, manufacturer representatives will send capable business personnel to station and manage regional markets. Distributors should humbly learn and fully utilize the manufacturer's mature business management tools and processes to improve the trading company's organizational mechanism construction.
While cultivating internal strength, seeking external support is also very important. Whether it is the development of group purchase work or the needs of enterprise operation, a strong social relationship network is very critical. Maintaining social relations, expanding network resources, and building customer platforms are also important tasks for distributors in regional market development and maintenance.
Distributors promoting the branding of trading companies as operating entities cannot be achieved overnight, nor can they gain core competitive advantages in a short time. Under the current industry situation, it has become an important and urgent task. If not done, they may still survive for a while; if done, they can struggle for a longer time and may even be reborn from the ashes. Whether the promotion succeeds or not, whether it goes far or not, as a distributor group, we should realize that our core competitiveness is built on high-quality marketing services, on consumers, and on reputation. If we cannot promote trading branding due to our own conditions, at least we need to have such a "mind" to examine our business and make daily operations move in that direction rather than deviate.
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