---
title: "No Matter How Popular Online, How High the Volume, Offline is the Main Battlefield for Internet-Famous Brands!"
description: "In recent years, the rise of the new consumption wave has made online platforms an incubator for new consumer brands, creating many bestsellers. New Distribution has interviewed and reported on dozens of innovative consumer brands, and through communication with founders, it was found that these brands, after achieving online popularity, encounter many challenges when entering offline channels."
author: "道农"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2020-09-27"
language: "en"
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# No Matter How Popular Online, How High the Volume, Offline is the Main Battlefield for Internet-Famous Brands!

> In recent years, the rise of the new consumption wave has made online platforms an incubator for new consumer brands, creating many bestsellers. New Distribution has interviewed and reported on dozens of innovative consumer brands, and through communication with founders, it was found that these brands, after achieving online popularity, encounter many challenges when entering offline channels.

In recent years, the rise of the new consumption wave has made online platforms an incubator for new consumer brands, creating many bestsellers. New Distribution has interviewed and reported on dozens of innovative consumer brands, and through communication with founders, it was found that these brands, after achieving online popularity, encounter many challenges when entering offline channels.

**-01- Why Go Offline?**

First, before discussing how online brands can establish a presence offline, let's look at why these internet-famous consumer brands must go offline. There are four reasons:

**1. Online traffic costs are rising.**

Online traffic costs are increasing, which is evident to all practitioners. As online platforms mature and competition intensifies, the low-hanging fruit of traffic dividends has been picked.

In the era of stock, internet user growth has slowed, the internet dividend period has faded, and competition for remaining new traffic is fierce. When online traffic becomes expensive and costs approach offline levels, online internet-famous brands are turning their attention to physical channels.

**2. Online growth hits a ceiling.**

On a 100-point exam, scoring 60 is easy, but improving to 80 or 90 points increases difficulty exponentially. The online market capacity is limited; once a certain scale is reached, making further progress requires more effort and resources than in the early stages, as you need to compete for sales from other brands.

At this point, innovative consumer brands often have two choices: **1) expand product categories horizontally; 2) go offline.**

Expanding categories horizontally, although innovative consumer brands with product and user thinking excel at category insights, is like adding a new product rather than a new specification or flavor, which is very challenging. Developing a new category is akin to starting a new venture, and many innovative consumer brands often lack such capability.

Compared to expanding categories, going offline is a more economical approach. Mature online products can be sold offline to harvest sales, so for many consumer brands, going offline is an inevitable path for business growth.

**3. To become a national brand.**

The size of the pond determines the size of the fish; the market space you operate in determines the size of the brand you can build. As the saying goes, "The bigger the sales, the bigger the brand." Higher sales mean reaching more consumers.

**For FMCG categories, offline business still accounts for over 70% of sales. To become a national brand, relying solely on online is insufficient.**

**4. Consumption attributes determine it.**

Eating skewers with beer, drinking Red Bull when sleepy, or eating spicy strips to whet the appetite—these are immediate needs with strong instant consumption. Categories like beverages are inherently offline businesses; no matter how popular they are online, they cannot survive without offline presence.

No matter how popular you are online, no matter how much volume you have online, offline is the main battlefield that every innovative consumer brand must enter!

**-02- Understand the Business Logic of Offline**

Now that we understand the necessity of going offline, let's look at how to position offline. Although both online and offline involve consumers buying products, the underlying logic is completely different.

**Online has infinite shelf space, so products can serve not only the mass market but also niche and personalized needs. However, offline has limited shelf space, like one radish per hole, and focuses on mass, high-frequency products.**

When online brands prepare to enter offline, they must carefully consider which segment they serve: niche demographics? Niche categories? Or niche scenarios?

**Because offline must target mass-market consumers in niche scenarios, not niche consumers in mass scenarios.**

This sounds abstract; for example, New Distribution previously interviewed an innovative chili sauce brand called "Hubang Chili Sauce," which focuses on the food delivery scenario.

This is how Hubang Chili Sauce approaches the offline market: making mass-market chili sauce but entering through the niche food delivery scenario. By deeply integrating with delivery meal combos, this became the foundation for Hubang's rise.

**-03- How to Execute Offline?**

Finally, let's discuss the implementation and strategic layout for offline.

**The business models of online and offline are fundamentally different. Before new consumer brands that rose online enter offline, they must design top-level strategies based on traditional offline logic, including organizational structure, product portfolio, and distribution model.**

When talking about offline, the 4Ps are essential. From the perspective of marketing 4Ps, let's discuss the transformations new consumer brands need to make when moving from online to offline.

**First, from the product perspective:** Reconstruct product logic. Offline stores emphasize sales per square foot and turnover rate, so all products must be mass-appealing bestsellers, not long-tail, niche, or personalized items.

**Second, cost structure changes:** In the early online days, 80-90% of the budget might be allocated to product development and production, with the remaining 10-20% for brand exposure. But after going offline, there are more intermediaries—distributors, secondary wholesalers, retail terminals—and each level needs its own margin.

This involves pricing design and rebuilding a new price system. To meet channel structure needs, differentiate product specifications by channel (e.g., hypermarkets, convenience stores, small shops, online) to avoid direct price conflicts, protect partner profits, and prevent price system collapse.

**Then, offline channel design:** Online business is direct-to-consumer (2C), where products can be shipped directly from the factory without warehousing. In other words, merchants face consumers directly and often focus on user operations.

But offline, after products leave the factory, there is a crucial step before reaching consumers: distribution. Many innovative brands have deep internet roots and experienced teams, but when they first go offline, they are at a loss. Not to mention whether products can sell through; even getting products distributed into stores is a challenge.

Of course, they can try B2B platforms for trial sales, but true deep distribution still relies on distributors.

After products are distributed into stores, the next challenge is sell-through. Online videos, images, and text explanations are far more vivid than cold offline shelves, and the sell-through logic is completely different. Offline competition is also far more intense than online.

**Finally, moving from online to offline is a parallel relationship, not a dimension reduction attack.** Many new consumer brands inherently feel that the internet is superior, thinking, "I am leading a revolution, disrupting, while offline is traditional and low-end."

The first thing innovative brands must do when entering offline is to re-understand offline business. If they don't adjust their mindset, rushing into offline will inevitably lead to total loss.

**Summary:**

**Entrepreneurship is inherently a matter of survival against the odds. Innovative brands have succeeded by leveraging traffic dividends and consumption upgrades to create differentiated, high-quality products. But to achieve further success, they need to re-understand the market—not just online, but more importantly offline—and find their new ecological niche to truly establish a foothold.**


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