---
title: "Practical Strategies to Crack the FMCG Off-Season Puzzle"
description: "The off-season is an eternal pain for salespeople. If marketing methods are wrong during the off-season, even great efforts won't help. Many companies respond by giving holidays, training, or launching new products, but by deeply analyzing the specific causes and innovating appropriately, we can truly eliminate the off-season and achieve strong sales. Drawing on years of market experience and observations of excellent companies, I summarize practical methods to crack the off-season puzzle."
author: "New Distribution"
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published: "2015-06-05"
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# Practical Strategies to Crack the FMCG Off-Season Puzzle

> The off-season is an eternal pain for salespeople. If marketing methods are wrong during the off-season, even great efforts won't help. Many companies respond by giving holidays, training, or launching new products, but by deeply analyzing the specific causes and innovating appropriately, we can truly eliminate the off-season and achieve strong sales. Drawing on years of market experience and observations of excellent companies, I summarize practical methods to crack the off-season puzzle.

The off-season is an eternal pain for salespeople. In the market off-season, if marketing methods are wrong, even great efforts won't help. So most companies, when the off-season arrives, either give holidays, conduct marketing training, or launch new products for shelf display, and so on. In fact, if we thoroughly analyze the specific reasons affecting sales and add appropriate innovation, we can truly eliminate the off-season and achieve strong sales even in the off-season. Here, combining my years of market experience and observations of some excellent companies, I summarize some practical methods to crack the off-season puzzle for the benefit of readers.

1. Understanding the Formation of the Off-Season
From a marketer's perspective, only by identifying the causes of sales decline can we prescribe the right remedy and effectively boost overall sales. But in reality, most marketing or sales personnel either "don't know how to find, won't find, can't find, or can't pinpoint" the factors behind the so-called off-season, or even if they find and pinpoint them, they don't know where to start. Thus, the off-season remains the same year after year, day after day. Until one day, when they suddenly wake up, they have been left far behind.

1.1 Not Knowing How to Find: Mainly a Thinking Problem
The above diagram is a traditional off-season thinking map based on traditional thinking methods. The peak is the so-called peak season, formed because the market was stimulated by certain sales-promoting factors. The trough is the off-season, formed because the market was affected by certain sales-inhibiting factors.
Traditional theory holds that both off-season and peak season are caused by certain market factors. Influenced by this theory, the marketing community has the saying: "In the off-season, build the market; in the peak season, build sales." When the off-season arrives, marketing personnel don't innovate sales methods but instead do basic work like strengthening basic management and market training. This thinking presupposes that the off-season market cannot have significant improvement, and this theory stems from past failures to activate the market in the off-season despite many efforts, and from the hype of some so-called experts in the marketing community.
Ultimately, marketers use this precious time in the sales trough for basic management strengthening, training, etc., calling it "laying the foundation for peak-season volume." At first glance, it sounds reasonable and makes sense; the concept "thought determines action" is well interpreted here. But the reality is that as China's marketization accelerates, market mechanisms improve, and corporate competition intensifies, if we cannot achieve a sales breakthrough in the off-season, not only will it be harder to complete target tasks, but it will also directly weaken the company's core market competitiveness!

1.2 Not Knowing How to Find, Can't Find, Can't Pinpoint, or Finding but Not Knowing Where to Start: Mainly Cognitive and Methodological Problems
When I was on the front line doing business, I communicated with many manufacturers' marketing or sales personnel. Most people didn't have a deep understanding of the reasons for poor sales. For example, when asked why the off-season occurs, they would answer: it's the law of off-peak seasons, no specific reason; the off-season is caused by weather; the off-season is caused by consumer habits; it's caused by students on vacation, and so on. They couldn't find or pinpoint the essence of the problem. Or they pinpointed the cause but had no way to crack it. For instance, in the beverage industry, when sales drop in winter, marketers recognize it's due to cold weather, but they have no way to crack it, thinking these are weather or market laws. Thus, laws imprison their minds, and how can innovative methods emerge?

2. Cracking the Off-Season Puzzle
Action is governed by thought. Those who can control their thoughts can surpass themselves and create miracles. Therefore, to crack the marketing off-season, we must first solve it from the source of thought:

2.1 Viewing Sales Fluctuations from Another Angle
In the chart above, I have placed the traditional off-season at the normal seasonal position, i.e., treating the traditional off-season as the normal season. I'm not being pretentious or sensational, nor denying the existence of the off-season, but trying to get everyone to change their view of the off-season, change our thinking methods, and break free from the so-called traditional laws.
As seen from the chart, the peak is the sales peak season, and the trough is the normal season. In the normal season, influenced by certain factors, a peak season forms. These factors, whether weather or habits, once they disappear, we return to the normal sales season.
Therefore, if we want to increase sales in the normal season, we must innovate and create these sales-promoting factors, whether product, channel, temperature, or promotion. Only then can we stimulate consumption, drive market sales, and achieve a market boom.

2.2 Identifying the Causes of Strong Sales, Which Are Actually the Factors Behind the So-Called Sales Decline
Here, combining methods I have used, I offer two approaches to quickly and effectively identify the factors affecting sales:
Method 1: Divide the product into several channels (or regions), then design a table (sample below), requiring each salesperson or customer to fill it monthly for a year. Clarify which channel (or region) the product goes to, and analyze the reasons for monthly sales increases or decreases in each channel (or region). At year-end, categorize and organize this data, remove special causes, and derive the specific reasons for sales rises or falls in each season.
Method 2: A quicker method is to conduct market research. Survey subjects are typically front-line sales personnel, terminal customers, or end consumers. Surveying people who frequently contact consumers often yields conclusions closer to market reality.

2.3 Cracking the Marketing Off-Season
(1) Product Innovation: Develop Counter-Seasonal Best-Sellers
Conduct market research based on seasonal changes, then develop products that sell well in the off-season. An extreme example: in the apparel industry, summer clothes sell in summer; when it cools, autumn clothes come out; when temperatures drop further, winter clothes. If we sold summer clothes in winter, sales would be poor. That is, we must continuously develop new products that meet consumer needs and market environments to create new sales booms.
In fact, FMCG is similar to apparel. If we develop products with the apparel mindset, we can easily make our product lines complementary. Then our sales won't drift with traditional seasonal changes.
Success Case 1: Mooncakes have obvious seasonality, with a peak of just over 10 days a year; other times, equipment is mostly idle. Holiland, while making mooncakes, fully utilizes existing human, material, and equipment resources to develop a variety of foods, forming a complementary product line with two peaks in different seasons, and sells through its self-built Holiland stores, achieving annual sales of hundreds of millions of yuan.
Success Case 2: The beverage industry also has obvious seasonal sales. Large food groups like Master Kong and Uni-President develop large production lines for beverages and instant noodles, creating good complementarity between the two industries.

(2) Innovate Product Quality, Blur Product Boundaries, and Segment Related Markets
Wahaha has done exceptionally well here. By combining beverages with liquid milk, they developed Nutrition Express, which not only segmented the beverage market but also the dairy market, achieving great success.

(3) Create Sales-Boosting Factors to Increase Product Sales
For example, in winter, some small stalls set up barbecue grills to heat sugarcane before selling, leading to astonishing sales growth. Some breweries develop high-alcohol beer in winter, and Lulu guides terminals to heat Lulu before selling.

(4) Innovate Product Channels and Shift Sales Regions
If the factors driving strong sales disappear, normal sales channels shrink, but other channels become new opportunities. So we must follow consumer shifts and transfer channels. For example, when schools are on vacation, the school channel's sales-boosting factors disappear, but the overall consumer base hasn't vanished; students move to communities, large supermarkets, and other channels. We follow consumers, strengthen development of large supermarkets, community stores, and mobile stalls, fully exploit sales opportunities, and ensure consumers can still buy our products.

(5) New Products Have Less Obvious Seasonality
Since new products have introduction, growth, maturity, and decline stages, we can launch new products in the normal season and use various marketing mixes to promote their growth, thereby increasing overall sales. This conclusion has been confirmed by many companies' new product promotion results.

(6) Change Consumption Methods and Guide Consumer Habits
In most northern cities, hotpot restaurants close in summer. But in a few cities, a unique scene of eating hotpot bare-chested appeared. Later, investigation revealed that after hotpot entered these cities, it developed rapidly, but summer business was poor. Later, some hotpot restaurants innovated in summer by installing air conditioning, developing night markets, and using "butuo" (inviting friends and relatives to support), which actually formed a unique culture of eating hotpot in summer in some cities.

In summary, I believe: to do marketing well, you must observe life carefully. A person who is meticulous about life and pays attention to details can become an excellent marketer. Of course, implementing marketing innovation requires a lot of work. For example, what is the sales ratio between peak and normal seasons? What is the approximate proportion of product characteristics to sales-influencing factors? What products or channels should be developed? How to ensure successful product and channel promotion? These are not discussed in this article. The purpose of this article is to change everyone's previous off-season market operation thinking, establish new marketing ideas, and then find balance in fluctuation, find breakthroughs in balance, and actively participate in market competition.

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