If there was one of the hottest keywords in 2020, it was community group leaders. Major FMCG brands from beer to beverages to food to condiments to daily chemicals made their appearances, and the position of community group leader suddenly entered the top 1 searched job in the FMCG industry, becoming the apple of every FMCG company's eye. Overnight, community group leaders were all snapped up!
The community group buying channel was enthusiastically embraced by manufacturers, who placed their hopes on it as a lifeline during the pandemic. My article 'Ten Questions: The Marketing Model of Recruiting Community Group Leaders in FMCG' also sparked heated discussion among FMCG practitioners and marketing gurus. As the saying goes, a knife can kill or cut vegetables; the key is who uses it and how. The knife itself is neither right nor wrong.
Recently, I did a live broadcast on the New Distribution platform about recruiting community group leaders. I saw many comments agreeing with my viewpoint: any model has its own development boundaries and limitations, and the future is full of uncertainty. Pessimists are often right, but optimists often succeed.
-01- Key Point 1: Brand owners should clearly define the positioning of recruiting community group leaders
How to recruit group leaders and how to better avoid risks? I have summarized the possible situations. Each company should benchmark against its own situation and take targeted actions.
Positioning is the direction, strategy, and top-level design that determines how far the model can go; the underlying logic determines whether the tactics are correct. Whether the brand owner positions it as selling goods or as communication, different positioning naturally leads to different tactics.
Selling goods can be divided into short-term behavior as an emergency measure during the pandemic to clear inventory; or long-term behavior as a new incremental channel or supplementary channel for the enterprise in the future. This is crucial.
If the function of community group leaders is positioned as communication, then focus on product user experience, product iteration and upgrade, collection of market information feedback, promotion of brand activities and new products, cultivation of consumer activity, brand loyalty and reputation, and consumer participation. The goal is to quickly connect with users, optimize products in time, expand the communication radius, and make timely market responses.
If the function of community group leaders is positioned as a short-term emergency measure to sell goods and clear inventory, the best approach is to adopt appropriate consumer promotion methods to accelerate sell-through without affecting the price system.
Depending on brand strength: if the brand is strong, directly offer special discounts during special periods; if the brand is weak, at least provide differentiated products or physical gifts as bonuses. Group leaders should be locked in as convenience store owners near the community or group leaders of certain community platform operators.
-02- Key Point 2: Clarify the essence of the operating model to be adopted
If the function of community group leaders is positioned as long-term selling behavior, it is a strategy, which is more complex. From product positioning, establishment of a community and social group department, group leader empowerment, and operations, the following elaboration is also based on the brand owner's long-term selling positioning.
First, thoroughly research the business logic of the community operating model you plan to enter. Community group buying has community commercial attributes, group buying attributes, and social new retail attributes. Community commerce is a typical stock competition business, not a traffic business. Stock business only serves a fixed group of people.
Community group buying is a community-scenario group buying model that combines online and offline. It is centered on the community, based on LBS (location-based services) and acquaintances and semi-acquaintances. By recruiting group leaders, who then pull friends and neighbors with similar consumption needs into groups, community group buying groups are formed and sales conversion is achieved.
Community is the connection between people in physical space (even neighbors across the door may not know each other); social groups are the connection between people in virtual space, where they can connect anytime, anywhere.
Currently, the mainstream forms are internet group buying e-commerce platforms and social new retail. The earliest categories for individual companies to do group buying were milk and newspapers.
Method 1: Borrow a chicken to lay eggs—cooperate with other mature community group buying e-commerce platforms. The brand owner is only responsible for platform-exclusive product development, profit sharing planning, and simple product copy material libraries. The characteristics are relatively light operations, low entry cost, easy implementation for traditional enterprises, and low risk.
Method 2: Self-reliance—recruit group leaders yourself and empower them. Establishing an independent department, for traditional enterprises with traditional marketing tactics, requires relatively more investment, time, effort, and manpower, with higher operational requirements, relatively higher risk, and lower probability of success.
-03- Key Point 3: Focus resources, charge with a single product
Product selection: either find a product from the existing product line that matches the community user scenario; or create a community-exclusive product. The advantage is that there will be no sales conflict with products circulating in existing channels, the operational space is relatively free, constraints are small, and you can advance or retreat.
Creating a community-exclusive product: Community commerce is a typical stock competition business, not a traffic business. Stock business only serves a fixed group of people, which determines that the product must meet the requirements of good quality and low price, and good service experience. It must be a high-frequency necessity with low unit price, frequent promotions, good quality, and strong experience to sustain repeat purchases.
Borrowing a chicken to lay eggs tactic: Product characteristics: special channel cash flow volume products, often on special offers, labeled as affordable, large capacity, suitable for family consumption scenarios.
Self-reliance tactic: Suitable for social new retail model operations, with high gross profit margins and sufficient profit for hierarchical distribution to meet the needs of agent fission and upgrade. Examples: Mengniu's 'Wan Shang Hao' and 'Man Ran', Wahaha's 'Tian Yan Jing Jing', Wang Laoji's 'Ji You', Yili's 'Xin Shi Ji', etc.
Some may say these are micro-business models, brand authorizations, but sales are still considerable. Currently, for this self-reliance tactic, social new retail is the most suitable, but the condition must be high gross profit.
Never use the full product line; the disadvantages are difficulty in communication and sales, excessive resource occupation, heavy betting on exploratory channels, and higher risk.
-04- Key Point 4: Analysis of the target profile of recruited group leaders
Category 1: Stay-at-home moms—target profile of group leaders.
Stay-at-home moms, or full-time housewives in the community, have a lot of leisure time and a strong desire to do business. They especially need work to realize self-worth and supplement family income.
This group has close relationships with residents in the community, with a tight network of acquaintances, making it easy to quickly fission online through social networks, establish group buying WeChat groups, and lower the difficulty of community operations.
However, most stay-at-home moms have experience in micro-business, either with lingering shadows of being 'cut leeks' (exploited) or as loyal followers of the micro-business model. Micro-business products have high profit levels, and they are highly dependent on the micro-business model, making conversion difficult. But if you can win them over, they can get started easily.
Category 2: Courier station owners/convenience store owners and other community small shops—target profile of group leaders.
They usually have frequent interactions with community residents and have a certain social network foundation. They have always played their professional roles, making it easy to transition to new roles and quickly adapt to community group buying business.
They have physical stores that can serve as offline pickup points and platform display points, facilitating traffic aggregation, combined with offline ground promotion, making it easier to carry out offline related business and quickly divert traffic online.
Category 3: Property management personnel and community 'celebrities'—target profile of group leaders.
They are relatively familiar with community residents, making it easy to build groups, do product promotion, sales, after-sales service, and other sales actions. However, this group has low willingness to engage in community group leader roles. Although they have resource advantages, they lack operational experience. Even if they accept the role, they need strong support and empowerment services from the brand owner.
-05- Key Point 5: How to implement BC integration
Professor Liu Chunxiong, founder of New Marketing, proposed: BC integration is not only an emergency measure during the pandemic, but also a marketing trend. Social groups as a marketing tool are an extension of deep distribution from 2B to 2C, which we call BC integration.
I also agree with Teacher Liu's BC integration. For brand owners in traditional industries, the biggest advantage is offline channel terminal resources, not online. For companies that are not purely original social group model operators, blindly going 'electric' (online) is not only risky but also weakens offline attention, which may not be worth the loss.
My understanding of BC integration is that the C-end does traffic generation, communication, promotion, and amplification, which is 'ying' (marketing); the B-end does sales, carrying the landing sales volume. The B-end has the ability to stock up. BC integration is not fragmented, not 'self-destructive', but fusion and symbiosis, maximizing the efficiency of each connection point in the channel chain.
BC integration makes up for the poor landing experience and unstable purchase stability of the C-end, while solving the B-end's customer flow and sell-through problems, improving terminal satisfaction and loyalty to the manufacturer.
Example: For B-end (circulation terminals) around the community, recruited community group leaders do traffic generation, new customer acquisition, interaction, increase activity, participation, and promotion activities. Transactions occur at the B-end, and the B-end will definitely be willing to stock more.
First, terminal owners don't have to worry about product sell-through; second, it helps store owners attract customers, increase customer sources, and invisibly increase the sell-through of other products in the store, achieving compound interest for the store owner.
-06- Key Point 6: Enterprises need to establish an independent department
Before provisions, organization comes first. Organization is the carrier of execution. Now is a special period; sales personnel have abundant online time and energy. Once the pandemic is over, because the early sales volume of the community group buying channel is small, they will all go back to traditional channels to capture main sales.
Without dedicated personnel responsible, it will eventually fizzle out due to time, energy, skills, professionalism, and other reasons. At the same time, the tactics for community group buying are different, and it is indeed difficult to have one team capable of all-round operations.
Generally, the community and social group department needs to set up three sub-departments: a business school, an operations department, and a business development department. The business development department is responsible for recruiting group leaders and quickly completing the layout.
The business school should empower group leaders (how to generate traffic, how to do social groups, how to build personal IP, how to achieve conversion and fission, how to post on Moments, etc.). The operations department provides material libraries such as images, texts, videos, and scripts for posting in groups and Moments, and designs activity plans for various nodes.
If you want to achieve results in the community and social group channel, it is really not as simple as pulling a person, building a group, and posting a circle. The effort is no less than traditional offline channel tactics.
Hit the snake at its vital spot; seize the key points to succeed. Otherwise, blind shooting wastes bullets and creates noise. Finally, four sentences: Not knowing how to 'electric' (online) is stupid; all 'electric' is nonsense. Only offline is stupid; completely offline is reckless. (Note: This article is written from the perspective of the brand owner.)
Source: Marketing Perspective Mirror (ID: yxtsj518)