---
title: "Traditional Tactics Fail: How Should New Products Enter the Market?"
description: "Many FMCG distributors complain about fierce competition and increasingly difficult business. This is partly due to the release of consumers' personalized demands in the context of consumption upgrading, and partly because hot categories imitate each other in new product development and market competition strategies, competing for distribution, investment, shelf space, and inventory. This article explains how to adapt by focusing on precise product positioning, consumer lifestyle insights, sensory marketing, and a healthy supply chain profit distribution system."
author: "邢仁宝"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-08-18"
language: "en"
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# Traditional Tactics Fail: How Should New Products Enter the Market?

> Many FMCG distributors complain about fierce competition and increasingly difficult business. This is partly due to the release of consumers' personalized demands in the context of consumption upgrading, and partly because hot categories imitate each other in new product development and market competition strategies, competing for distribution, investment, shelf space, and inventory. This article explains how to adapt by focusing on precise product positioning, consumer lifestyle insights, sensory marketing, and a healthy supply chain profit distribution system.

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Many FMCG distributors complain about fierce industry competition and increasingly difficult business. On one hand, consumers' personalized demands have been greatly released under the consumption upgrading environment; on the other hand, in response to new product development and market competition strategies, hot categories imitate each other, competing for distribution, investment, shelf space, and inventory.
While product marketing costs remain high, various complaints emerge endlessly: distributors complain about high inventory and high advance payments, manufacturers complain about distributors' poor cooperation and lack of initiative, terminal salespeople complain about low terminal investment and poor sell-through, and consumers cannot perceive any differentiation in brands.
In the era of social media, traditional tactics must change. Communication between brands and consumers has become more convenient and in-depth. Consumers not only value price and functional benefits but also pay more attention to emotional value and personalized experience satisfaction.
Against this backdrop, traditional brand marketing methods must also transform. How to build a smooth communication bridge between brands and consumers, step by step making the brand truly enter consumers' minds, the author elaborates from the following four aspects based on personal experience.
**Precise product positioning and reasonable distribution targets replace blind distribution pursuing short-term benefits**
Distribution rate is often the first indicator considered when a product enters the market, and senior management often uses it as a core measure of the sales team's execution. However, impulsive distribution that ignores product positioning and fails to set quantity and quality requirements often backfires.
Take Hengda Ice Spring as an example. Initially positioned as a mid-to-high-end brand benchmarking Kunlun Mountain, its early launch was driven by distribution quantity, with big incentives and rankings for distribution numbers across national markets. This turned a high-end brand with a real estate tycoon background into an awkward brand discussed in every street and alley.
It was like a person in a suit watching a play in a village, seemingly out of place with the surroundings. Helplessly, it had to lower its price and benchmark against Nongfu Spring. Only after taking off the suit and putting on a T-shirt did it gradually gain consumer recognition. Now, after several packaging optimizations, it still yearns for the once-admired Kunlun Mountain, but its price remains as affordable as ever, truly giving consumers express hotel prices with star hotel service.
Looking back at the whole process, this detour should serve as a warning. **The goal of product distribution must align with product positioning. A one-size-fits-all approach only looks good on paper and cannot create resonance among product, channel, and consumer.**
Many distributors or salespeople still make this mistake frequently. When performance is poor and sales pressure increases, they blindly push for horizontal growth, often losing product positioning and causing channel aging inventory issues.
**Insights into consumer lifestyle trajectories replace over-reliance on scattered volume channels**
In the process of precise distribution matching product positioning, the traditional approach was to prioritize traditional mom-and-pop stores, influential local small and medium supermarkets, or large hypermarkets that generate the most sales. However, making your product stand out in these battlegrounds comes at a high cost.
In today's fiercely competitive product environment, how should we focus our channels and balance efficiency with consumer mind penetration? This is a problem many brand owners and distributors overlook.
With current economic development, consumer demands have been released, and product homogenization is increasingly severe. Consumers have become picky; only products that truly enter consumers' hearts can generate repeat purchases in more occasions. **Simply placing products in stores that can sell them, without high-frequency interaction with consumers, means such channel choices need optimization.**
Products should fully revolve around consumers' daily behavioral trajectories and provide timely scenario-based purchase reminders. This is an important principle for channel selection in the social media era.
In fact, the internet industry uses this principle more widely. The following chart is WeChat's analysis of user behavior habits, based on which it continuously optimizes its products to seize users' limited time and attention, ultimately achieving high conversion rates and brand loyalty.
Take beverages as an example. Consumers have the following daily behavioral trajectories:
In the morning, they go to the community convenience store to buy cigarettes or breakfast, then drive to work, stop at a gas station to refuel, arrive at the office building, think about the morning meeting, want to buy an energy drink, go to the first-floor vending machine to grab a can of Red Bull, then at the office, suddenly remember the weekend trip with the kids, open the JD or Tmall app, quickly buy drinks and other travel essentials, then attend the company meeting. The meeting is long, everyone is sleepy, and the company's administrative department provides employee benefits, offering coffee, drinks, and snacks during breaks.
After the meeting, they go to a restaurant for lunch with colleagues. The restaurant also has a vending machine where they can pay by face recognition to buy their favorite drinks... After work in the evening, they go to an internet cafe to play online games with friends, see the ice-cold drinks neatly placed in the cooler next to the counter, and the hot weather makes it impossible to resist the need for a drink. They open the cooler and pick a can with a "One Yuan Joy" promotion... On the weekend, they take the kids to an amusement park or scenic spot...
**These consumer behavioral trajectories run through the channels that can best resonate with the product. If, in these channels, when consumers spontaneously want to do something, the product happens to show them what they need, your product has truly found the window to enter consumers' hearts.**
**Heartfelt sensory marketing replaces the inefficient practice of throwing money at large display spaces**
The concept of "sensory marketing" was proposed a few years ago. It refers to **a marketing approach in which business operators use human senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—to carry out experiential scenario sales that please with "color," move with "sound," entice with "taste," and touch with "emotion," closely connecting with consumers' senses and influencing their decisions.**
For example, when passing a cake shop, you can always smell the rich aroma of cream; M&M's cute and interesting cartoon packaging always attracts your attention; the melodious music in a restaurant always makes you want a glass of red wine...
**A static product should not stand coldly on the shelf waiting for customers to discover it, but should self-promote through sensory stimulation of the target audience. This is actually a very important point in current product marketing.**
The traditional way of spending heavily to buy display space in channels is gradually becoming inefficient. It's not that buying display space is bad, but overemphasizing its importance is wrong.
Because among the reasons that attract consumers to buy, how many truly choose your product because of its large display? A large display can certainly make your product stand out to consumers.
**But the feeling that a product instantly conveys to consumers, which fully induces purchase desire, is truly driven by sensory marketing.**
For example, how does a new functional drink attract consumers through sensory marketing?
Take canned drinks: the first step is a white, elegant, slim design to ensure consumers don't immediately reject it when they see it.
The second step is location selection. In a store, consumers often take only 3 seconds to choose a drink. These 3 seconds are usually divided among the checkout counter, the cooler, and the end cap near the door. In summer, choose the cooler position. Within the cooler, more consumers tend to choose drinks near the door handle, so we can invest resources in that position, selecting 3-5 facings when resources are limited.
The third step is conveying scenario-based purchase reasons. First, there must be basic price information, a price tag, and if there's a promotion, it must be reflected. Then, on the cooler door or nearby visible wall, post purchase reasons, such as "Energy at a touch." Additionally, the communication method should be heartfelt, such as transparent cooler stickers or 3D cards on the can, with images of opening and drinking, not just a few words.
The fourth step is the feel of the product in hand. On a hot summer day, the frosted texture of the can plus the cool touch makes consumers reluctant to put it down.
The fifth step is the emotional push from the store owner. When consumers' eyes linger on the product in hesitation, the owner's words, "This is pretty good, many people buy it," will make most consumers go to checkout without hesitation. This requires distributors or manufacturers to give store owners certain incentive policies to fully mobilize their sales enthusiasm, as well as free tasting samples.
Beverage purchases are often impulsive choices. By centering on the concept of "sensory marketing," broadening thinking, and grasping the consumption habits of the new generation, products can generate more repeat purchases.
**Building a healthy product supply chain profit distribution system replaces excessive focus on one's own sales and profits**
The rapid growth of a brand's scale depends not only on accurate product positioning but also on the entire supply chain forming a combined force of push and pull, from consumers to channels, to distributors, to manufacturers, building a healthy ecological chain.
The front-end pull from consumers is as described above, including online and offline media promotion, which I won't repeat here. Next, I'll discuss the "price system," known as the product lifeline in the industry. Different development stages should match differentiated system structures.
During the new product launch stage, channels should be flattened, ensuring relatively high profits for distributors, with assessments focusing on distribution targets, activity rates, and terminal execution.
When the product gains awareness and enters the rapid volume growth stage, it's appropriate to encourage second-tier wholesale customers to intervene, segment market operations, and allocate a portion of distributor profits to second-tier customers. If second-tier customers can provide higher-quality delivery services to terminals and leverage their advantages to penetrate special channels with potential, they can also receive higher profits.
The general principle is that profit distribution should align with the contribution of each supply chain link to brand value.
Additionally, personnel involved in product operations and sales, including manufacturer teams, should also have differentiated incentives and division of labor based on different brand development market stages.
Finally, it's essential to build a favorable external environment for brand development, requiring joint efforts from distributors and manufacturers. From terminal services to industry reputation to corporate social responsibility, the brand should continuously gain support and be recommended by consumers.
Nobel laureate Tu Youyou said, "Don't chase a horse; use the time to plant grass. When spring comes, a herd of fine horses will be yours to choose." Similarly, whether for distributors or enterprises, if they cannot continuously innovate their marketing thinking and only try to change their sales predicament by selecting products or launching new products, it will be futile.


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