导语 Why do companies say 'no terminals means death, but doing terminals means suicide'? How to break this deadlock? Can ten forwards win the game for Chinese football? What is Jack Ma's 'New Retail' really about? Terminals are where products are sold, and the work there is often called the 'final kick'—extremely important. Given its importance, companies naturally place great emphasis on it, resulting in massive resource investment in terminals, dubbed 'terminal is king'. Many companies have adopted passionate or even fierce slogans like 'terminal wins', 'decide victory at the terminal', or even 'fight to the death at the terminal'. The underlying logic is: since the final kick is so important, let's all just shoot. Midfielders, defenders, goalkeepers—production, supply, R&D, finance—can be makeshift; the forward is key, and scoring is what matters. Nowadays, companies universally attach great importance to terminal construction: special displays, terminal visual merchandising, DMs, various activities—they do everything possible. The famous 'Eight Steps of Terminal Visits' circulates in the industry, and many companies wish to make it ten or twenty steps, believing that the more 'detailed' the work, the more controllable the process, and the more 'solid' the terminal work. In fact, the long-advocated 'terminal is king' may be the biggest pitfall in corporate marketing over the past decade or so. First, although terminals are important, they are explicit; investment shows results immediately. Many people do marketing by intuition, and the role of terminal work is greatly exaggerated. More critically, a company's operations and marketing are a holistic system. Resource allocation must balance all links; overemphasizing terminals often leads to misallocation. Once resource allocation is wrong, the harder you try, the more you fail. Professor Zeng Xiangwen once gave this example:
A company's overall sales performance is poor, but a few terminals sell well. The boss finds that the promoter at that point is capable, diligent, familiar with the product, and amiable, so he concludes that performance depends on personnel quality, and thus trains and replaces staff... Does this scenario seem familiar? The results are almost invariably the same: Competitors offer higher wages, and all the staff you painstakingly trained and recruited jump ship. The key is you can't follow suit because competitors can profit while you cannot. Your system is poor, so your overall performance is poor. You changed promotional power, but the same promotional power can create greater value in a better system, so they leave, and your local efforts merely serve others. Here's another more common phenomenon. A company's new product has been on the market for a few months with little market movement, but some terminals are selling well. The company finds that these terminals have good displays, prominent images, store push, and proper maintenance. So: display is the life of sales, terminal construction is the key to marketing success. Thus, they replicate and launch a nationwide terminal campaign... The results are also similar: You invest heavily in terminal expenses, but sales increase only marginally, and profits actually decline further. The truly good terminals are few, and even those often decline quickly and cannot be sustained. Worse, it's easier to go up than down. Once you invest, it's hard to withdraw; high personnel maintenance costs become an unshakable burden. The logic is similar: your system is poor, so your overall market is poor. Individual terminals, due to chance or misjudgment, allocate resources to you, but this cannot be replicated because terminals will allocate resources to systems that generate more value. Unless you maintain high fees, pay platform fees, or effectively bribe terminals, which causes more severe losses; when bribes decrease, sales collapse. Old Miao gave an example earlier. In the past, Master Kong could beat Uni-President through its intensive distribution, and Coca-Cola's biggest weapon against Pepsi was direct terminal control. Some big brands have tasted success in terminal operations. So many emerging and second- and third-tier brands are imitating, from Master Kong's intensive distribution to Coca-Cola's 101 model. Countless senior marketing professionals parachuted into private enterprises wave the banner of terminal construction, but almost all fail. Marketing deficiencies cannot be compensated by strengthening sales. The biggest deficiency of second-tier brands is weak communication with consumers. A brand that hasn't entered consumers' hearts, when merely placed before them, incurs very high channel and terminal costs. More severe and common is that due to poor communication with consumers, the better the terminal work, the higher the exposure, the lower consumer acceptance, and the faster the product dies. This is the root cause of the saying 'no terminals means death, but doing terminals means suicide'. Let's calculate a disheartening account for third- and fourth-tier brands. For the same special display, P&G only needs a special price to get it free; Slek may need to pay 1,000 yuan per slot; some third-tier brands may need 2,000 yuan per slot, plus the price difference for the special offer. Sadly, P&G might increase sales by 10,000 yuan, Slek by 5,000, while third-tier brands might increase by only 2,000 or even less. It seems like the same battlefield, but different brands are not competing on the same platform at all—this is very unfair. The so-called 'terminal is king' often means big companies lure you into an open field called 'terminal', then use a weapon called 'brand' to mow you down, and you, unarmed (without brand), have no power to fight back. The so-called 'terminal is king' is just a local feature of the 'channel is king' era. The first decade of this century was the era of 'modern terminals' represented by supermarkets. Terminal resources were scarce; whoever was closer to consumers had more say, and traditional FMCG companies mostly went through distributors to terminals, basically not touching consumers. Greater market power and scarce resources made terminals very strong against most suppliers, with big stores bullying customers. Moreover, retail system buyers are often rigorously trained in purchasing, easily manipulating the mostly low-professional sales staff, squeezing suppliers (both manufacturers and distributors) to the maximum. Life was too good, so they got carried away. Many terminals transformed from sellers into platform operators, changing their profit model from earning sales margins to collecting 'protection fees' (various entry fees, barcode fees, anniversary fees, delivery fees, etc.). Only brands that can afford higher platform fees and reach more people in a fixed trade area can be sold in these expensive terminals. Some niche and personalized products are shut out. This makes products in major terminals increasingly similar, and consumers gradually lose interest in browsing stores. Some large retailers may be proud of this business model, but transforming from seller to platform is a degradation. Sellers aim to provide customers with more convenience, better experience, and greater value, while platform operators focus on collecting various fees, inevitably leading to product homogenization and mediocrity, thus losing their value. The platform business model of KA stores has been proven to narrow, and suppliers who were led by the nose, investing heavily for the sake of 'brand image', have died in droves over the years. E-commerce terminals have become the latest 'modern terminals', playing the game much more smoothly than the previous 'modern terminals'. First, using internet development dividends and free means, e-commerce platforms like Taobao quickly gained massive traffic and built huge platforms. Then they collect 'protection fees' much more fiercely than supermarkets: various activities, various slot fees—truly a pit! What's more impressive than traditional supermarkets is that if you don't pay promotion fees, you have no exposure opportunity. First-tier brands still have significant say when facing traditional large supermarkets, but with big e-commerce platforms, they have to do whatever they say. After paying, as for how to do promotion and operations? Sorry, you have to do it yourself; I'm just collecting tolls. Thus, most manufacturers who are not good at marketing directly to consumers are forced to do their own market promotion. Costs are high, the united front is broken, manufacturers fight alone (in the traditional model, promotion functions were done by intermediaries), so once the traffic dividend period ends, almost all e-commerce operators are losing money. But as the 'national dad', Jack Ma is no slouch. He knows that if this continues, suppliers will be played to death, and he'll have no wool to shear, and might accidentally become a 'former modern terminal'. So, right after Taobao's Singles' Day set a sales record of over 120 billion yuan, Ma made a thunderous statement: 'The term e-commerce will soon be eliminated, and the pure e-commerce era will soon end.' Old Ma, what are you up to? I just got pants without holes, and you're cutting holes again? I just got married, and you're playing single? The pace is too fast; I can't keep up! Ma proposed the concept of 'New Retail', which in framework is 'online + offline + logistics'. What exactly is it? The industry is also confused, with many rushing to explain. Competitor Qiangge also said, 'Hey, haven't I been doing this all along?' Amid the dazzling changes, our education has taught us to 'find differences' and observe changes, often forgetting that what remains unchanged is often the most essential. Let's return to classic marketing and see how old man Kotler interprets retail and terminals. Retail includes all activities involved in selling goods or services directly to final consumers for their personal, non-commercial use. Fearing people might go astray, the old man specifically said the following. Whether these goods or services are sold (in person, by mail, by phone, or by vending machine), or where they are sold (in a store, on the street, or in the consumer's home, now we need to add online) is irrelevant. Old Ke is always old Ke; he saw and predicted that retail formats are diverse and varied, and new forms will continue to emerge. He also asserted that terminal types, like products, will go through stages of development and decline. Kotler called this the 'retail life cycle' and used the 'retail rolling hypothesis' to analyze the law of terminal type innovation. I won't elaborate; those who love learning can check the master's 'Marketing Management' chapter on 'Managing Retailing, Wholesaling, and Market Logistics'. Let's return to the concept Old Miao has always advocated: the essence of marketing is to influence and change consumer behavior. The form and method of terminals are far less important, and not as magical as legend has it. Wherever you can deeply communicate with customers, where there is deeper consumption experience, where you can influence consumers to the greatest extent, that is the more valuable terminal. Using customer communication, product exposure, profit, and sales as four parameters, Old Miao divides terminals into five categories. They are deep terminals, high-value terminals, sales terminals, ordinary terminals, and trap terminals. Based on the characteristics of these five terminal types and the products sold, combined with the resources the company can invest, a combination of pre-terminals, post-terminals, core terminals, and wing terminals is formed. This is the 'new terminal-driven model reconstruction' under the new terminal value perspective that Old Miao advocates. -END- The best learning platform for FMCG distributors in China Focusing on providing professional, practical, and applicable tutorials for companies and distributors Committed to helping Chinese FMCG distributors grow rapidly The most professional and practical knowledge base in the FMCG industry Reply with the red number below to get corresponding content Reply with number 1 to view the complete knowledge base | 001 Excellent article selection | 002 Distributor market operation | 003 Terminal visit management | 004 Sales supervisor skills | 005 Sales improvement techniques | 006 Channel expansion | 007 Managing distributors | 008 Distributor development | 009 Distributor internal operations management | 010 Team management | 011 Efficient distribution techniques | 012 Sales manager's eighteen skills | 013 KA operation methods and strategies | 014 First lesson for new salespeople | 015 Internet, brand | 016 Distributor B2B transformation | [Long press QR code to follow]