Introduction: With the deep integration of people, goods, and scenes, Meituan Flash Delivery is leading instant retail toward new growth!

Recently, while chatting with brand partners about growth, the common feedback was that growth has been hard in the past two years, and sustained growth even harder.

For brands, growth is always an unavoidable topic. No matter the scale a brand reaches, growth remains an indispensable part of the core agenda.

But now, growth has become a challenge. In fact, across the entire FMCG industry, starting from a decade ago, the total market volume for most categories has not seen significant growth.

So, where can brands find incremental growth?

In existing channels, fight for share; in incremental channels, fight for position. Although the total market volume hasn't changed much, the divergence between old and new channels is intensifying. The redistribution of channel sales and the iterative innovation of channel forms are irreversible trends.

Currently, there are few channels with scale and certain growth, but the instant retail front-warehouse model represented by Meituan Flash Delivery is definitely one of them.

Recently, at the 2024 Meituan Flash Delivery Ecosystem Conference held in Wuhan, New Distribution noted a set of data: Meituan Flash Delivery had only 600+ warehouses in 2021, which grew to 6,000+ warehouses in 2023, with daily orders exceeding 2 million, driving growth for many FMCG brands.

A 10-fold growth in 2 years—Meituan Flash Delivery has validated the potential for certain growth in this retail format with real data.

What is the underlying logic behind Meituan Flash Delivery's rapid growth? Why can it help brands achieve growth?

People: More Effective Audience Reach

In the consumer industry, brands adhere to an unwavering principle: Wherever consumers are, brands must go.

But the challenge now is that mobile internet has transformed people's living spaces from one-dimensional to three-dimensional—online, offline, online+offline—consumers have too many shopping paths. According to relevant data, 83% of consumers now shop across all channels, with an average of more than 8 channels.

For brands, time and resources are limited, so they must prioritize channels that effectively reach and activate consumers.

This is where the user value of Meituan Flash Delivery lies.

First, it can effectively reach more people and bring more young consumers to brands.

Consumer behavior falls into four types: stock-up consumption, planned consumption, instant consumption, and impulse consumption. Meituan Flash Delivery can capture both the "rigid demand" of instant consumption and the "business opportunity" of impulse consumption, naturally winning consumer favor.

According to public data, Meituan's annual transaction users are close to 700 million, and the number of Meituan Instashopping users is also growing, with the penetration rate among the post-2000s generation reaching 48%.

As a format that grew out of instant retail, Meituan Flash Delivery has the youngest user base within the Meituan Instashopping ecosystem: "1 in every 5 instant retail users is a Flash Delivery user."

Second, it can provide emotional value satisfaction to consumers, thereby more effectively activating transactions.

Consumers today lack not material goods but reasons to buy. Only emotions drive people's actions, but emotions are fleeting. To capture them, you cannot rely on B2C or offline visits; you need instant gratification to quickly complete transaction conversion.

For example, consider the collaboration between Suntory's "Every 3rd Day Suntory" brand day and Meituan Flash Delivery. The brand's product category was promoted on Xiaohongshu, showcasing various drink mixing possibilities, such as "Suntory Oolong Tea + Milk = Homemade Healthy Milk Tea" and "Suntory Oolong Tea + Juice = Flavored Low-Calorie Fruit Tea," which prompted consumers to imitate and effectively stimulated demand for low-sugar, healthy beverages.

This ultimately led to KOC spontaneous seeding within the platform, either by purchasing Suntory products via Meituan to recreate the drinks or by sharing tutorials on using Meituan coupons and placing orders, which then spread virally.

Every Wednesday, "Suntory 500ml Unsweetened Oolong Tea" was the main promotional product. Through Wednesday activities and product differentiation, the "Every 3rd Day Suntory" brand day mindset was strengthened, and Meituan Flash Delivery then captured the resulting emotional impulses, quickly closing the loop from marketing to transaction.

In just one month, the search term "Suntory Oolong Tea" on Meituan saw a YoY increase of over 1300%, Suntory beverage GMV grew over 400% YoY, and 1.08 million new brand customers were acquired, achieving both user penetration and overall growth in tea beverages.

Goods: More Precise Supply-Demand Matching

On a timeline, China's consumer market has gone through four eras.

The era of factory sovereignty. At that time, people's material living conditions were poor, and the supply of goods was extremely scarce. Consumers' demands for products were mainly necessities, meeting basic indicators such as quality, practicality, and price.

The era of brand sovereignty. Consumers' demand for products gradually shifted from basic needs to functional needs. During this stage, brands established brand awareness in consumers' minds through centralized media communication and deep distribution.

The era of channel sovereignty. The supply of market goods became extremely abundant, and goods were no longer scarce resources. The retail end gained the power of traffic distribution and sales. The two most direct milestones were the emergence of KA channels and the rise of B2C e-commerce, where brands relied on retail traffic redistribution.

Now, China's consumer market has entered an era of "consumer sovereignty." From the consumer perspective, the problem facing the market today is the shift in discourse power caused by oversupply.

How to make supply and demand match more precisely and efficiently in terms of time and space is a question every brand must consider in today's market. To solve this, the key is to accurately grasp consumer demand.

This is also where Meituan Flash Delivery's advantage lies. Based on Meituan's massive search data and insights into Flash Delivery consumers' shopping behavior, brands can more precisely meet consumer needs at the product level.

Let's share a set of data to help you understand the product efficiency of Meituan Flash Delivery more intuitively.

Meituan Flash Delivery itself is actually a convenience format. Compared to the average level of similar formats, Flash Delivery's monthly product refresh rate is 5 times the average, and the proportion of orders in nighttime scenarios is 30 times the average.

This high-efficiency supply-demand matching helps brands quickly achieve deep supply chain transformation to adapt to changes in consumer demand. Especially in new product incubation, it can greatly compress time and improve efficiency.

The traditional new product incubation path is upstream R&D, then e-commerce testing, and if sales data is good, it is given to distributors to distribute to offline stores for trial sales. This method not only has a long cycle but also high trial-and-error costs.

Meituan Flash Delivery's precise supply-demand matching can reduce intermediate links and help new products quickly gain market feedback.

Take Budweiser Float low-alcohol beverage as an example. From November 2022 to January 2023, it partnered with Meituan Flash Delivery to penetrate 81 stores in Shanghai. Through "flash sale + minimum 2 items" promotional activities, leveraging Meituan's delivery capabilities, users could "see it and buy it immediately."

During this period, Float's monthly sales exceeded 10,000 cans, surpassing a certain series of products from the industry's top brand in the same category. And this action, from confirming cooperation with Meituan Flash Delivery to consumers being able to purchase online, took only two weeks.

Scene: More Efficient Distribution and Sales Promotion

The underlying logic of product circulation is essentially two aspects: distribution and sales promotion.

Any FMCG brand entering the Chinese market, if it wants to do well in the offline market, inevitably faces the problem—distribution is difficult, and sales promotion is even harder.

China's market is too large, from first-tier to sixth-tier cities, with many levels and vast areas. There are numerous physical channels of various types: 150,000 CVS stores, over 6 million mom-and-pop stores, 20,000 large supermarkets and hypermarkets, and countless distributors and wholesalers. How to achieve distribution coverage is a soul-searching question for every FMCG brand.

How did FMCG manufacturers do it in the past?

The answer is deep distribution. By emphasizing the construction of an integrated manufacturer-dealer relationship, extending operational reach through distribution to retail, and establishing partnerships with distributors and retailers to gain competitive advantage.

Of course, deep distribution is still an effective methodology today, but its effectiveness is being continuously weakened.

The deep distribution system is supported by a human-wave tactic, requiring a large number of sales personnel to complete market coverage and service, to place products in all stores, and finally complete sales.

But this model faces practical problems today: on one hand, the demographic dividend has ended, making this model increasingly costly; on the other hand, deep distribution, as a standard model, is familiar to basically all brands and distributors, leading to involution competition without significant efficiency differences.

Meituan Flash Delivery is essentially also doing offline local market retail business. Like traditional offline stores, it serves consumers in the area covered by the store, except that Flash Delivery covers a larger area.

In a sense, Meituan Flash Delivery can reach the same consumers as traditional stores, or even more. Brands can achieve good product distribution through Meituan Flash Delivery, and the platform's resource aggregation and diverse marketing methods can greatly improve brand coverage efficiency at lower costs.

At the same time, in terms of sales promotion, brands and Flash Delivery can co-create more marketing scenarios.

For example, in the second half of 2023, Meituan Flash Delivery partnered with Mondelez to promote the new product "Cloud Cake" across national Meituan Flash Delivery merchants. Through bestseller promotions driving product listing, with "one-price 9.9 yuan + product discount coupons," plus on-site and off-site exposure and seeding, they achieved rapid product distribution and sales. In this campaign, the average number of stores listed per product was 376, sales increased by 73% compared to the previous month, and monthly sales were on par with a certain series of products from the industry's top brand in the same category.

At the 2024 Meituan Flash Delivery Ecosystem Conference, the relevant person in charge also mentioned that they will focus on 5 high-penetration, high-repurchase categories: snack foods, beer, feminine care, adult products, and ice cream, and engage in deep co-creation with brands.

They also proposed four exclusive rights:

First, exclusive scenes. Partner with leading brands to create a "no worries late-night shopping" scene, strengthening consumers' mindset and habits.

Second, exclusive products. Customize travel sets, mini packaging, etc., to create products more suitable for Flash Delivery distribution.

Third, exclusive marketing. Link on-site and off-site to achieve a closed loop from traffic to conversion.

Fourth, exclusive promotional activities. Find more suitable exclusive Flash Delivery promotional activities, mechanisms, and frequency to better empower growth.

This also means that through Meituan Flash Delivery, brands can create more new scenarios to stimulate consumer demand, rather than just providing products when consumers have active needs, thus truly achieving "goods finding people."

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