The theme of this conference is 'New Order, Symbiosis.' In the FMCG distribution chain, brand owners and distributors are the most critical links. Today, this link faces a severe challenge: in an era of shrinking volumes, can traditional joint business plans still work? In the past, leading brand owners typically cooperated with distributors by annually setting joint business plans, clearly informing distributors of growth opportunities and guiding them to enhance key capabilities to formulate growth points. But in the past, as the overall economy grew, business grew naturally, and often capability building and market exploration might end up as mere embellishments to business results. Was the exploration of local market opportunities solid? Was the growth from capability building genuine? When growth is no longer easy, can these seemingly jointly planned business plans truly support sustainable growth? As a data company serving over 40,000 distributors, we have continuously tracked our distributor clients over the years. In 2024, we found that only 24% of distributors experienced growth, making the perception of shrinkage very clear. So, when growth is no longer easy, the old order may face collapse, with challenges in two points. First, do brand owners truly understand the local market? Do they have firsthand knowledge of the local 10,000-20,000 stores? Where are the low-hanging fruits? Second, can brand owners truly understand distributors? Are the actual difficulties of distribution, actual sales efficiency, and actual fulfillment pressure reasonably assessed? Are there appropriate benchmark peers for comparison? If we call the past top-down model of brand owners setting targets, issuing indicators, assigning tasks, checking, and rewarding as a planned economy, then today we have arrived at the window from a planned economy to a market economy. What is a market economy? Both brand owners and distributors freely choose each other, respect bilateral business order and business principles, empower each other, and achieve symbiosis and common prosperity. So, how can both sides achieve symbiosis and common prosperity?

  • Brand owners provide three capabilities at the headquarters level:

First, insight into the local market competitive landscape, including trends of their own and competing products.

Second, provide marketing resources including new products.

Third, provide abundant training resources.

  • Distributors need to enhance three capabilities:

First, insight into their own capabilities; no one knows themselves better than they do.

Second, compared with many distributors with similar capability structures, where are the advantages and disadvantages.

Third, systematic capability building to help achieve excellent service capabilities. Both brand owners and distributors also need to achieve two synergies. The first synergy is local market insight. Both sides jointly build the most authentic understanding of the local market: how many stores can I access, which stores are particularly sensitive to my category, and which stores must be fully covered by the brand. The second synergy is efficient channel collaboration, including data and execution actions. Behind such a symbiotic and integrated bilateral cooperation is a set of digital and intelligent channel service capabilities, which can be summarized into three points:

  1. Brand Owner: Precision Guidance
  2. Brand Owner: Efficient Collaboration
  3. Distributor: Capability System Brand Owner: Precision Guidance First is channel data analysis of own and competing products. The core purpose is to help brand owners formulate precise sales strategies, including price trees, price fluctuations, promotion timing, promotion forms, and inventory pressure rhythms for both own and competing products. We rely on 400 billion GMV to sort out this data, guiding brand owners to have a clear distribution understanding and trend awareness of marketing/pricing for own and competing products, thereby winning sales strategies. Second is a comprehensive survey of terminal stores. Through data governance, we identify real stores, achieving 'removing false and supplementing true': first, remove duplicate stores; second, filter out invalid stores; third, supplement real stores. Through efficient positioning of uncontrolled stores, we quickly find million-level business growth points. On the basis of the basic survey, precise store expansion uses digital tools to precisely screen out stores that should be fully covered for the brand or category locally, which we call 'high-value stores' or 'golden stores.' With limited resources, distributors cannot cover all 10,000-20,000 local stores in a fiscal year, so helping distributors find the highest-value stores for distribution, spending money on the cutting edge, and ensuring sales resources are focused on these high-value stores can achieve a higher return on investment. Behind this is also a SaaS tool, where provincial and regional managers can clearly know the tasks for high-value stores, execution results, and efficiently coordinate tasks with distributors, further helping distributors optimize sales resource investment. Similarly, existing partner stores also have ROI issues; how to find the best stores that bring 10 yuan in revenue for 1 cent? So, besides sales resources, marketing resources also need optimization, including promoters, store display rebates, and new product samples. Through data and AI large model analysis, relying on 400 billion GMV to accurately identify store sales response under different marketing forms, we can find the most suitable marketing forms and investment targets to break through sales bottlenecks. Through the above measures such as channel insights of own and competing products, discovery of golden stores, and store investment analysis, we can comprehensively help brand owners formulate precise sales strategies, optimize sales and marketing resource allocation, enhance market competitiveness, and achieve business growth. Finally, precise network building to achieve channel investment lead matching. When brand owners enter blank markets, we can also help them match the most suitable local distributors. Zhoupu Data has full-chain label assignment and profile depiction for tens of thousands of distributors, and based on the brand owner's target profile, we perform precise matching, greatly improving the brand owner's local investment efficiency. Brand Owner: Efficient Collaboration First is data collaboration. Brand owners should actively encourage distributors to achieve data collaboration, including data exchange, marketing strategy distribution, and execution action checks, to avoid unnecessary duplication and data waste. The essential value here is to achieve synergy in overall investment and execution efficiency, including marketing resources, through data and action collaboration, ensuring extremely low loss from headquarters to stores and extremely high execution efficiency. The specific working model is that brand owners and distributors upload and download basic data such as files, orders, and marketing content. Refer to cases for details; we won't elaborate here. Second is training resources. Brand owners should translate their rich brand and training resources into training forms that distributors are accustomed to. The first is digital training for distributors, including live learning and online courses. We provide live learning platforms and systematic online courses for distributors and their teams (including marketing managers, salespeople, logistics supervisors, finance, etc.). The second is that we also help brand owners customize personalized offline training, providing customized online and offline independent courses based on distributors' actual needs, deeply empowering distributors and enhancing their comprehensive operational capabilities. In addition to courses, brand owners can also encourage distributors to go out more, participate in study tours for distributors of the same or even cross-category, helping distributors improve capabilities in practice and achieve mutual improvement of both brand owners' and distributors' capabilities. Distributor: Capability System To improve distributor capabilities, it is first necessary to systematically decompose indicators to structurally deconstruct the distributor's business. We need to concretize the distributor's business into actionable execution points. Measure business performance through clear dimensions, which must be operable and actionable. Specifically, we need to consider multiple dimensions such as investment efficiency and front-end/back-end work efficiency, ensuring each dimension has clear evaluation standards and improvement directions, including 21 indicators covering capital, people, goods, stores, warehouse, picking, and distribution, so that distributors can optimize their business through the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) logic framework. To help distributors clearly know how their business is doing today, by comparing with distributors of similar city tier, similar category structure, and similar business scale, distributors can clarify their position nationwide. For example, among 500 similar distributors nationwide, what levels are each indicator at? What is the median? What is the average? How does the best distributor perform? Through this comparison, distributors can quickly identify their 'wooden barrel shortcomings' and take measures to fill the gaps, allowing their capability system to quickly improve. When distributors have a clear understanding of their own capabilities, the next step is systematic construction of supply chain capabilities, mainly divided into the following three aspects: The first is full-chain digital inventory governance capability. The core point is inventory turnover. The distributor boss, as the number one, should directly be responsible for inventory management and take full responsibility for inventory turnover rate, without shirking. On this basis, distributors can set a clear goal to increase inventory turnover rate by 15% from the current level. This can be achieved through scientific stocking, inventory backlog warnings, and terminal sales tracking. The second is integrated online and offline refined sales capability. Sales cost reduction and efficiency improvement is a common topic, and online-offline integration is the only solution. Through online and offline, enhance salespeople's initiative, release their productivity, and help distributors reduce front-end sales costs to 5% or even lower. Many distributor friends can use 5% as an indicator to evaluate their current situation and optimize from actionable points such as per capita coverage and SKUs per store. The third is intelligent fulfillment and distribution capability. Distributors can set 4% back-end costs as a standard, and even aggressively consider 4% warehousing and distribution costs as the entry threshold for the next generation of distributors. If they cannot achieve this, distributors will be in a very dangerous position in the future. This can be achieved through warehouse-picking-distribution strategies, algorithm scheduling, and intelligent hardware. Based on such bilateral digital and intelligent services of brand owner precision guidance and efficient collaboration, and distributor capability system construction, brand owners and distributors can achieve a new order of symbiosis and common prosperity.