The year-end is a prime opportunity for FMCG companies to turn around their annual sales performance. Well-executed promotions can not only effectively boost sales and achieve a strong start, enhancing the confidence of the company and its team, but also lay a solid foundation for the coming year's marketing efforts and better guide the formulation of the new year's marketing strategy. How should promotional plans be designed to help improve year-end performance? Let's discuss this with specific cases. The Purpose and Goals of Promotions Are You Clear? The purpose of year-end promotions is, of course, to find ways to boost sales. To achieve this, the goals of the promotion must be clear, specific, quantified, and detailed. This is the key and prerequisite for designing a promotional plan. The purposes of promotions generally fall into the following categories: First, to shape and strengthen brand image. At the year-end, according to traditional Chinese customs, people return to their hometowns from all directions, making this the period with the highest concentration of foot traffic and customer flow in the year. This is an opportune time for companies to promote their brands. Companies can focus on brand publicity during promotions, preparing advertisements, ground promotions, VI visuals, and other materials. Second, to boost sales through promotions. This is the most basic goal of year-end promotions. To achieve this, companies need to prepare in advance—planning products or combinations, or even launching high-value-for-money products or combinations specifically for year-end promotions. For example, some companies launch gift-pack products, some focus on the group-buying market, and others use product combinations to collaborate with community convenience stores or fresh food stores for community group buying. Third, to clear inventory and monetize materials. Some companies have accumulated large amounts of inventory or packaging materials, and the year-end is a good time to process and monetize them. Companies can quickly clear products and revitalize cash flow through promotions that pair new and old products, special packaging, deep discounts, or exclusive supply to special channels. Fourth, to launch new products and leverage the opportunity for rapid growth. The year-end is also a great time to introduce new products and quickly connect with consumers. As long as the products meet consumer needs, combined with promotional methods such as free trials and buy-one-get-one offers for novel items, they can stimulate consumers' willingness to try, achieve sell-through, and even lead to explosive sales. Of course, the purposes of promotions are not limited to the above; they also include changing the sales landscape—by surpassing competitors through year-end promotions, or launching new brands to make a stunning debut with the help of the year-end "spring breeze"... Regardless of the purpose of the promotion, the goals must be quantified and detailed. Whether it's sales volume or sales revenue, they should be digitized as much as possible, broken down into months, weeks, or even days. The aim is to facilitate post-event assessment and rewards, ensuring everyone has clear direction, clear goals, and strong action. Take Wei Fan Wu Sour Soup Noodle Leaves as an example. Before the 2023 Spring Festival, the company vigorously launched large red packaging and hand-carry gift box products. Due to diverse flavors, authentic taste, reasonable prices, and effective channel activation, it sparked a "red whirlwind" at many market terminals. This promotion not only significantly increased product sales but also, through multiple free tasting events in stores, supermarkets, and public places, Wei Fan Wu "redefined instant noodles," laying a perfect foundation for product development, market recruitment, and the sales explosion in the Northwest market in 2024. Timing and Location Are You Seizing Them? The year-end is a sales hotspot that all major FMCG manufacturers focus on. To seize the opportunity, you need to set the timing and location of promotions in advance. Promotion timing should be front-loaded. Although the week before the Spring Festival and the week after New Year's Eve are the peak sales periods, these are the tail end of the promotional process. Truly effective promotions require attention to the process and advance planning. How far in advance should planning start? Normally, it should be at least one month in advance, or even earlier. That is, one month before the Spring Festival, the promotional plan should be formulated, approved, and officially implemented step by step. You cannot wait until a few days before the year-end to start planning and acting; this will inevitably miss the opportunity. To truly achieve incremental results from year-end promotions, it is also necessary to define the promotional process and implementation stages. Not only should you clarify steps, detail tasks, assign responsibilities to specific people, and prepare a material list in advance, but you should also have time nodes for completing stage tasks and assessment methods to avoid failures at critical moments. The ancients emphasized the right time, the right place, and the right people. For year-end promotions, the right place is also very important, as it determines foot traffic and the resulting market performance. That is, the promotion location should be surveyed as early as possible. Hypermarkets are the first choice for many large FMCG brands for promotions, as one-stop shopping can meet various consumer needs. Promotions in hypermarkets require manufacturers to communicate and negotiate with store buyers in advance. For small and medium-sized FMCG manufacturers, community convenience stores, B and C class stores with low entry barriers, and even mom-and-pop stores with good customer relationships are also good choices. Through maximizing displays and sales support activities, you can achieve terminal interception, even "leveraging a small force to move a heavy weight." For township markets, you can choose popular township supermarkets or wholesale-retail outlets for cooperation. Some companies, such as those in prepared dishes, beverages, and seasonings, can also target farmers' markets with high foot traffic. By setting up points or cooperating with related stores, adding sales promoters, and selling on-site, if the promotional strategy is appropriate, you can achieve significant sales. A beverage brand, whose main products are large-barrel water and carbonated drinks, after establishing direct-sale stations, water stations, and a certain number of wholesale outlets in the local market, recruited a large number of temporary promoters from universities during the Spring Festival. After brief training, they were deployed to residential areas and farmers' markets with purchasing power across the city, jointly conducting free tasting and buy-one-get-one-free activities with sales outlets. Although the promotion period was short, the products were in short supply. Through this promotion, the brand not only set sales records but also developed many sales channels and accumulated valuable year-end sales experience. Product Sell-Through What Is the Most Critical? Although the year-end is a great opportunity for rapid growth, time is limited. To achieve a leap in performance, you must not only race against time but also think of more strategies. Promotions are essentially an incentive—incentivizing the sales team, channel partners, and consumers. For channel partners, companies need to make those who haven't sold start selling, and those who are already selling sell more. For consumers, companies need to make those who haven't bought start buying, and those who have bought buy more. So, how can companies achieve these goals? To encourage channel partners to better accept or order more products, companies should design incentive-rich promotional policies. For example, for distributors and sub-distributors, policies can include exclusive sales incentives, category buyout incentives, product bundle incentives, new product first-sale incentives, tiered incentives, sales competition incentives, and credit incentives; for terminal stores, policies can include distribution incentives, gift incentives, display incentives, and points redemption. A instant noodle company, to seize the rare opportunity to increase volume during the Spring Festival, successfully held a grand ordering conference one month before the festival, after one-on-one communication and invitations between regional sales staff and distributors. Due to the strong incentive policies at this ordering conference, such as issuing lottery tickets based on order amounts, rewarding the top 30 orderers with a mobile phone, and tiered rebates based on order amounts, customer ordering enthusiasm was unprecedented. In response to some distributors' concerns about insufficient warehouse space at the year-end, the company added a warehouse occupation incentive policy: if distributors met the order quantity standard, the company would pay for warehouse rental, encouraging distributors to stock up in large quantities at the year-end, achieving a win-win situation. For consumers, growth relies on stimulation. What to stimulate? Stimulate consumers' purchase desire; once the desire is there, the end becomes active, and the entire supply chain becomes active. Companies can adopt activities such as free tasting, special prices, buy-one-get-one, scratch cards, lucky draws, spinning wheels, and gold egg smashing, as well as blind box promotions that satisfy consumer curiosity, and hard discount promotions with combined purchase discounts, achieving profit through volume while consumers feel they are getting a bargain or benefit. A liquor company launched a "Red and Prosperous New Year" scan-to-win activity at the year-end. The company widely publicized the activity through various terminals, such as scanning codes to win big prizes, including another bottle, cash rewards of varying amounts, and new phones from a famous brand. Consumers could scan the code by opening the company's mini-program. The first scan guaranteed a large red envelope reward, but the cash could only be used to purchase products, effectively increasing the repurchase rate; and the N-bottles-half-price activity made consumers buy "non-stop." "Cash red envelopes + another bottle of fine wine + new phone" drove sales to soar. In the year-end market characterized by internal competition, consumption downgrading, and customers "holding their money" and waiting, companies must, while fully considering internal and external resources, market environment, and consumer needs, launch promotional plans or activities that are both popular and attractive. Diversified, differentiated, interesting, people-friendly, interactive, and iterative promotions can move channel partners and consumers. The key is to open up the channel. Once the channel is activated, sell-through will come naturally. Process Inspection Patch Up and Turn Around For year-end promotions, process management can enhance results. Companies should not only pay attention to market research before designing promotional activities, soliciting opinions and forming plans, ensuring promotional investment is in place, and executing steps and activities, but also observe and benchmark throughout the entire process, promptly correcting or adjusting any anomalies, or supplementing with better promotional methods, not giving up any opportunity for growth. This requires marketing department personnel to go to the front lines, work with sales staff and channel partners, promptly summarize the operation of promotional activities, identify shortcomings, quickly correct them, ensure the promotion proceeds smoothly along the theme, and guide channel partners and consumers to pay attention to, perceive, experience, and purchase products in a targeted manner. A dairy brand newly launched a mid-to-high-end low-temperature product, originally thinking that just getting into stores and onto shelves before the Spring Festival would be enough. However, a few days after the plan was executed, the store supervisor found during a walkthrough that sales had not improved significantly. After receiving the report, the company decided to add 2 temporary promoters at each high-traffic store to actively recommend, offer free tasting, and use a buy-one-get-one-free candy dish to stimulate purchases. After the activity, sales quickly improved. In fact, as long as the year-end is not over, companies need to maintain confidence in promotions and the market. After all, as long as you work hard, there is always an opportunity.