---
title: "This Stop: Consumer Marketing Reigns Supreme!"
description: "Views like 'terminal is king' and 'channel is king' have been popular in the business world for over a decade. The author, who once advocated such ideas, now argues that the push of channels is giving way to the penetration of consumer marketing, ushering in a new era where consumer marketing capabilities determine a company's future."
author: "李政权"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2015-11-25"
language: "en"
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# This Stop: Consumer Marketing Reigns Supreme!

> Views like 'terminal is king' and 'channel is king' have been popular in the business world for over a decade. The author, who once advocated such ideas, now argues that the push of channels is giving way to the penetration of consumer marketing, ushering in a new era where consumer marketing capabilities determine a company's future.

"Terminal is king," "channel is king"—views like these have been popular in the business world for over a decade. As the author, I was no exception. In the early years after 2001, I published many related viewpoints in publications such as *Sales and Marketing*, to the extent that by 2004, Professor Niu Yongge from Sichuan University Business School and others, in their article "Research on the Growth Path of Weak Brands," directly stated, "Domestic scholars represented by Li Zhengquan have proposed the idea of 'channel is king, decisive terminal,'" attributing the origin of "channel is king" to me.

To this day, the aforementioned views are still regarded as guidelines by numerous enterprises. However, in the past year or two, I have begun to sing a different tune, because the push of channels is increasingly giving way to the penetration of consumer marketing. To put it more bluntly, the push of channels is becoming less and less important compared to the previous decade, and a new era of marketing dominated by the penetration of consumer marketing is coming.

I say this because when the sky changes, the path changes too.

**When the Sky Changes, the Path Changes**

The so-called "sky change" means that the macro environment for corporate marketing has changed.

In the past, consumers had to watch TV or read newspapers to learn about a product's information. Now, the TV turn-on rate in some large and medium-sized cities has dropped to 30%, and traditional print media in city after city have ceased publication or closed. In the past, consumers had to go out, go to the street, and visit stores to shop. Now, consumers can complete their shopping while sitting at home... The change in consumer behavior is the main factor driving the major changes in the marketing environment. Influenced by the fact that consumers are the source and living water of all business and marketing, everything from terminals to distributors, marketing teams, and all corporate marketing and marketing management behaviors are being restructured under the new environment of internet-based consumption, fragmented mobility, and decentralization.

That is to say, the "path" of marketing must and is also changing accordingly.

In the past, when we talked about corporate marketing, we often mentioned two terms: one is "push"—by giving distributors, secondary wholesalers, and terminal merchants more gross profit and expense support, or by providing more interest incentives to the corresponding staff of these channel merchants, encouraging them to proactively promote products to downstream customers and consumers; the other is "pull"—through various brand promotions and consumer promotions, pulling opportunities for our products to be recognized, accepted, and chosen in the consumer market.

Now, the push of channels is being weakened irresistibly. Because "push" is more based on "information asymmetry." For downstream customers and consumers, what you push to me is what I know and what I might choose. The increasingly evolving internet is making this phenomenon a thing of the past—in the vast sea of network data on PC and mobile ends, we can find corresponding suppliers and merchants for any product we want. That is to say, under the new internet environment of information symmetry, upstream manufacturers can reach terminal customers and consumers directly through online and offline marketing penetration, while downstream terminal customers and consumers can learn about more, better, and more cost-effective products through their own initiative.

Terminal merchants and consumers increasingly do not need upstream channel merchants, especially those distributors and wholesalers who act as intermediaries. However, compared to the already mature Taobao and JD.com, a distribution and delivery platform for terminal merchants, along with corresponding commercial supporting forces, is far from as mature as the consumer internet.

Following such changes, we also face challenges in adapting to trends in consumer marketing strategies, marketing organizational structures, channel construction, marketing team management, and market control.

**The Era of Consumer Refinement Has Arrived**

The situation described above is gradually becoming reality. In this great transformation, enterprises with keen awareness and the ability to combine business ideas and strategies with new business technologies to implement consumer marketing will be the first to benefit.

At the beginning of 2015, a large health enterprise in Jiangsu brought us a very specific need: they wanted to plan and design a mobile-based online consumer closed-loop marketing system—guiding their thousands of offline consumers to an online platform, and around the diversified needs of these consumers, customizing development, targeted promotions, precise communication, and combining online and offline sales of corresponding diversified product categories. The chairman of the enterprise once told Li Zhengquan the reason for launching this project. In the Henan market, merely by combining the secondary development of WeChat official accounts and requiring agents to collect consumer data, and by focusing on consumer data, they achieved a sales increase of over 50% in just two to three months.

Although this growth cannot be separated from the foundation of agents cooperating in data collection, the 50% growth was not due to traditional channel push, but mainly benefited from consumer marketing based on consumer data information.

Similar examples will become more and more common. Because when we grasp the cities, streets, and even communities where consumers are located, their communication numbers or other instant contact information like WeChat, and their consumption preferences, frequency, and other data, we can achieve more "zero distance" between enterprises and consumers, allowing them to participate in co-creation and sharing in product development, packaging design, spokesperson selection, etc., making enterprise products become products co-developed with consumer participation, and turning enterprise-active, consumer-passive marketing behaviors into marketing behaviors where both consumers and enterprises exert subjective initiative. In Li Zhengquan's new book *From Trend to Action: The New Business Ecosystem for the Next Decade + The Road to Enterprise Transformation and Change* (CITIC Press), many similar trends and actions are discussed.

This is a subversion of traditional marketing. Under this subversion, the past "wasted 50% of advertising fees" will be minimized, and the penetration of targeted and precise marketing to consumers will upgrade traditional enterprises' traditional "regional deep cultivation" and "channel refinement" to consumer deep cultivation and consumer refinement. Moreover, the possibility of innovative cooperation models with new and old retail channels, the maturity of commercial supporting forces and models for home delivery or self-pickup, and the formation of an open closed-loop ecosystem integrating online and offline will make traditional channel merchants and channel push increasingly unimportant.

That is to say, marketing aimed at the source of business and marketing—consumers—is not only the trend and direction of our marketing progress, but also, all changes initiated from this will bring earth-shaking changes to traditional business order and channel ethics.

The capability of consumer marketing will determine our future prosperity and survival! Now, let us innovate and adjust our models, cultivate our abilities, and optimize our resource allocation around consumers and the penetration of consumer marketing!


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