---
title: "Under Stock Competition, Where Is the Next Opportunity for FMCG Companies to 'Overtake on Curves'?"
description: "With the disappearance of demographic dividends, all industries have shifted from tapping incremental markets to competing for existing market share, and the FMCG market is no exception. Besides competing on existing market share, FMCG companies can also overtake on curves by empathizing with consumers, identifying new demands, and satisfying them in differentiated ways, avoiding resource-draining wars. This article explores the concept of 'small demands' and how a metal packaging giant, Baosteel Packaging, offers a solution through its 'IPrinting 听你' platform."
author: "袁来"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2019-11-28"
categories: "Brand Marketing"
language: "en"
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markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/under-stock-competition-where-is-the-next-opportunity-for-fmcg-companies-728f5ba7.md"
original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/s1z5HTkPeXolKkRKycEGjQ"
translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E5%AD%98%E9%87%8F%E7%AB%9E%E4%BA%89%E4%B8%8B-%E5%BF%AB%E6%B6%88%E4%BC%81%E4%B8%9A-%E5%BC%AF%E9%81%93%E8%B6%85%E8%BD%A6-%E7%9A%84%E4%B8%8B%E4%B8%80%E4%B8%AA%E6%9C%BA%E4%BC%9A%E5%9C%A8%E5%93%AA%E9%87%8C-728f5ba7.md"
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citation: "袁来. “Under Stock Competition, Where Is the Next Opportunity for FMCG Companies to 'Overtake on Curves'?.” New Distribution, 2019-11-28. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/under-stock-competition-where-is-the-next-opportunity-for-fmcg-companies-728f5ba7/"
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---

# Under Stock Competition, Where Is the Next Opportunity for FMCG Companies to 'Overtake on Curves'?

> With the disappearance of demographic dividends, all industries have shifted from tapping incremental markets to competing for existing market share, and the FMCG market is no exception. Besides competing on existing market share, FMCG companies can also overtake on curves by empathizing with consumers, identifying new demands, and satisfying them in differentiated ways, avoiding resource-draining wars. This article explores the concept of 'small demands' and how a metal packaging giant, Baosteel Packaging, offers a solution through its 'IPrinting 听你' platform.

**-01-
**From Big Demands to Small Demands**
**With the disappearance of demographic dividends, any industry has shifted from tapping incremental markets to competing for existing market share.** The FMCG market is no exception. Competition in the existing market tests the competitive strategies in frontline markets and the execution capabilities of sales teams.
Of course, besides this, **what FMCG companies can also do is skip the existing market competition, put themselves in consumers' shoes, identify new consumer demands, and satisfy them in differentiated ways, potentially achieving an overtake on curves and avoiding falling into resource-draining wars.**
Since it's about 'identifying new consumer demands,' what exactly are new demands? On this point, many industry experts have given answers: diversified, niche, and fragmented consumer demands.
Reading this, you might still be confused: What are diversified, niche, and fragmented demands? Do they mean the demands of a small group of people?
**In fact, the key to diversified and niche consumer demands is not about the number of people, but about emphasizing people's small demands. People are still the same, but everyone has countless 'small demands' in their hearts. What does that mean?**
Take drinking beer as an example. In the past, beer brands' appeals were nothing more than refreshing, pure draft, passion, crisp taste, original pulp, etc., either at the quality level or the taste level, or perhaps appeals like 'Brave the World,' at the level of values and emotions.
But regardless of the level mentioned above, they were all aimed at consumers' 'big demands'—the common denominator of the greatest common divisor. Unlike big demands, small demands start from integrating into consumers' actual consumption scenarios.
The scenario of one person drinking beer is different from five people drinking beer; staying up late to watch the World Cup and drinking beer is different from drinking beer after a failed romance; drinking with friends is different from drinking with a boss... These are simple examples. The ultimate point is that in each scenario, consumers' demands and emotions are different.
Consumption upgrade, for business owners, means not only upgrading product quality but also upgrading insights into consumption scenarios, and designing the content expressed by products based on consumers' consumption scenarios.
Product quality upgrade is the core, and the content expressed by the product is the extension. Both must be grasped, and both must be strong. Following the extension of product expression content, we continue to dig deeper. For FMCG products, the most direct carrier of content expression is packaging.
For brand owners, the importance of packaging is self-evident, but how to transmit the front-end insights into 'small demands' to the back-end packaging manufacturing has always troubled brand owners. **Because small demands conflict with the past industrialized mass production. In fact, behind small demands are phased, even flexible, needs—a themed activity, a test of a small scenario, or a cross-border IP co-branding.**
Facing such difficulties, in today's market environment, is there a better solution without changing the back-end supply chain?
**-02-**
**A Metal Packaging Solution That Directly Reaches Consumers**
In recent years, a kind of Coke engraved can once became popular on social platforms. Many e-commerce sellers used simple equipment to engrave on finished Coke cans, and it became a hit for a while. Although there are hidden infringement risks behind this, and more and more Taobao merchants of varying quality are providing services, with significant demand growth, they have not been authorized by brand owners. But at least this indirectly expresses market demands—consumers' value proposition for ritual or emotional needs.
Based on such a demand, an innovation-driven metal packaging giant provides a more comprehensive solution.
Baosteel Packaging's relevant person in charge told New Distribution that in the past, Baosteel Packaging was a metal packaging provider mainly serving large B-end clients, providing printed iron and two-piece can manufacturing services for FMCG companies. In recent years, during business operations, more and more personalized small demands have emerged. Whether it's small can quantities or customization needs, this has given Baosteel Packaging inspiration: small-scale customization may be the trend in the FMCG market under the new retail background.
Two years ago, Baosteel Packaging's first two-piece can digital printing equipment was officially launched. Coinciding with Baosteel Packaging's insight into industry changes and market opportunities, combined with the emergence of new technologies, Baosteel began exploring metal personalized customization business and trying to break the logic of traditional manufacturing.
With printing precision up to 1200 dpi and flexible equipment with no MOQ, it truly enables unlimited creative space with one can, one vision.
Baosteel Packaging stands at a higher and more reasonable angle, providing brand owners with the possibility to meet consumers' growing customized consumption needs.
**-03-**
**Not Just a Can Maker, But a Service Platform**
Although Baosteel Packaging has introduced personalized customization equipment, in Baosteel Packaging's view, having equipment alone is not enough; it also requires the participation of various roles in the industry to jointly meet consumers' customized and personalized needs.
For example, the participation of content brand owners, creativity in can body cultural and creative designs and IPs, and virtual reality applications from tech companies. Only by letting more people in—those who make products, build brands, do creativity, and handle IPs—can consumers' personalized needs truly be met. To this end, Baosteel Packaging recently launched the 'IPrinting 听你' platform.
Baosteel Packaging hopes to become a pioneer explorer, inviting roles from the entire industry through a platform model. For example, inviting large B and small b brand owners, based on Baosteel Packaging's world-class manufacturing capabilities, to provide high-precision, low-MOQ metal packaging, empowering brand owners to create hit products and meet consumers' small demands.
**For cultural and creative and IP service providers, the platform will provide more channel promotion and product implementation measures, ultimately helping service providers achieve commercial monetization;**
Furthermore, 'IPrinting 听你' also provides more entry points for tech companies' virtual reality technologies, breaking down information walls between industries, allowing more partners to exchange resources and share benefits on the platform.
Of course, 'IPrinting 听你' can do more than just this. The relevant person in charge told New Distribution that after launching 'IPrinting 听你' as a service platform, through small-scale validation, user research, and co-creation exploration, new insights have emerged, leading to new gameplay.
For example, using personalized cans in specific scenarios such as corporate culture, brand activities, conferences, and exhibitions, providing specific products to users or partners in specific scenarios, adding QR codes to packaging, and using the product as an entry point to allow more users and partners to easily access more detailed information.
Another example is at the small c user level, lowering the customization threshold through themed templates and increasing scenario attributes, especially for scenarios that particularly require a sense of ritual, such as weddings, anniversaries, and travel.
The person in charge told New Distribution that while building the platform, Baosteel Packaging stays rooted in its core, continuously honing its flexible supply chain capabilities through digitalization. Although only cans are currently launched, in the future, IPrinting 听你 product 2.0/3.0 will also be released successively. **Baosteel Packaging deeply understands that the can is just a carrier; the content inside needs input from brand owners, the can body needs joint creation from all parties, and the gameplay needs everyone's co-innovation.**
**-04-**
**Conclusion**
**Products are social, and marketing is interaction.** In the current era of information equality, consumer demands are diversified and personalized, and circles are increasingly distinct. At the same time, under the current competitive situation of existing market share, brand owners can only truly stand firm and take root in market competition by skipping 'excessive competition' and achieving consumer-centric innovation.
Demand changes and evolution are already very clear. At this point, brand owners should mainly embrace more professional partners from various fields, make sufficient preparations in advance for the explosion of new consumer demands, and through co-creation with platforms like IPrinting 听你, continuously test, iterate, and optimize, exploring a true path of product innovation and marketing innovation oriented by diversified demands.


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 袁来
- Published: 2019-11-28
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/under-stock-competition-where-is-the-next-opportunity-for-fmcg-companies-728f5ba7/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/s1z5HTkPeXolKkRKycEGjQ

## Copyright and AI use

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