---
title: "What Is the Future Value of Distributors?"
description: "The role of distributors has changed significantly due to industry and social shifts. To define their future value, distributors must understand the value chain and rebuild it by leveraging platforms, the internet, and consumer-centric approaches."
author: "刘圣松"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2016-08-02"
language: "en"
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---

# What Is the Future Value of Distributors?

> The role of distributors has changed significantly due to industry and social shifts. To define their future value, distributors must understand the value chain and rebuild it by leveraging platforms, the internet, and consumer-centric approaches.

Regardless of the industry or social environment, the role of distributors has undergone significant changes.
How should distributors position themselves in the future? As delivery agents or operators?
What exactly is the future value of distributors?
How can distributor value be unlocked?
First, clarify a concept: the value chain. Its strict definition is: for a company to survive and develop, it must create value for its shareholders and other stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, and the local community and related industries. We can break down the process of value creation into a series of distinct yet interrelated economic activities, or "value-added activities," whose sum constitutes the company's "value chain."
The significance of reshaping the distributor value chain lies in the process by which distributors in different eras and stages continuously establish and reconstruct value-added activity nodes through relevant means.
1. Background for Reshaping the Distributor Value Chain
Background 1: The Internet Era
In the internet era, especially with the impact of mobile internet, the call for "de-distributorization" has grown louder, whether right or wrong. However, the impact of e-commerce platforms on traditional channels is evident and intensifying. Whether to embrace the internet or resist it firmly is a key consideration for distributor value transformation.
Background 2: The Consumer Era
With social supply experiencing product surplus, companies are placing more emphasis on brand service, and consumer demand for high-tech, high-quality, and personalized products is rapidly increasing. It is an indisputable fact that China has entered a new "consumer era." Value chain transformation around the consumer era presents both opportunities and challenges for distributors.
As value chain nodes continue to extend, a single trading company's capital and operational capabilities can no longer meet the development needs of these nodes. Only platform-based approaches can achieve systematic value addition.
2. Directions for Reshaping the Distributor Value Chain
The prerequisite for reshaping distributor value is having one's own platform. The platform is fundamental; value addition is key. Without a platform, survival is difficult. Without value addition, development is difficult.
Direction 1: Deepen Platform Value and Become a Platform Operator
Distributors can build platforms around the upstream of the industry chain and become brand operators. This is achieved by transitioning from a channel-segmented organizational structure to a brand-segmented one, integrating existing channel customer resources, and establishing a platform.
Conversely, distributors can also build platforms around the downstream of the industry chain by forming business alliances and creating financial and service platforms. This approach enables distributors to collaborate for mutual benefit, and through business alliances, crowdfunding, warehousing services, and logistics services, maximize resource efficiency and establish platforms.
If not extending upstream or downstream, distributors need to strengthen their own capabilities to build platforms. The strategy is to enhance their management level in trade operations and their ability to formulate and execute strategies, thereby establishing platforms by providing management and strategy services to platform customers.
It should be noted that building a platform for the sake of building a platform has no practical significance. The premise for establishing a platform is also to create a new value chain system by reintegrating the value chains of platform customers.
Direction 2: Value Reshaping Around the Internet
By self-building or integrating terminals, connect online and offline, with online ordering and offline experience plus delivery. Reduce intermediate links to meet consumers' expectations of value-for-money pricing, thereby achieving value chain reconstruction and value addition. Value reconstruction can be led by resource integration, using information (online APP) tools to integrate existing channel customer resources and improve the operational efficiency of customer vehicles, warehousing, and personnel, thus achieving value chain reconstruction and value addition.
A successful case in this regard is Eternal Asia. The company actively promotes the transformation and upgrading of small and medium-sized retailers by building an O2O alliance of small and medium-sized retailers, creating China's strongest ground distribution network, connecting online and offline O2O full-channel operations, promoting an ecological profit model for retailers, helping small and medium-sized retailers grow stronger, thereby building a sound supply chain ecosystem for China's circulation industry and promoting its transformation and upgrading.
Direction 3: Consumer-Centric Value Chain Reconstruction
In the future, distributors must achieve the extension and balance of the industry value chain based on "terminal is king" and "consumer is king."
Method 1: Meet consumer needs for personalized products or scenarios.
Method 2: Provide consumers with value-added services beyond the product.
Method 3: Build community marketing capabilities to meet consumers' needs for in-depth experiences.
Value chain transformation and value-added activities are a systematic project. Each key point and each method is not completely isolated but mutually integrated and interdependent. Therefore, in the process of reshaping the value chain, distributors must not only identify their own value-added direction but also think systematically.
(Author: General Manager of Anhui Jianche Marketing Management Consulting Co., Ltd.)
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