---
title: "With 90% Distribution Coverage, Why Is the Market Still Lukewarm?"
description: "During a Spring Festival gathering, a friend's client mentioned a market bottleneck: despite achieving 90% distribution coverage, the market remained sluggish. The article explores why high coverage is often pursued, the dangers of improper high coverage, and how to approach coverage based on product attributes and market stages."
author: "朱朝阳"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2017-02-13"
language: "en"
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# With 90% Distribution Coverage, Why Is the Market Still Lukewarm?

> During a Spring Festival gathering, a friend's client mentioned a market bottleneck: despite achieving 90% distribution coverage, the market remained sluggish. The article explores why high coverage is often pursued, the dangers of improper high coverage, and how to approach coverage based on product attributes and market stages.

**Click the image for details**
During the Spring Festival, I gathered with friends, and due to professional habits, we inevitably exchanged insights on market operations. One friend's client mentioned a bottleneck encountered in the market: distribution coverage had reached 90%, yet the market was still lukewarm. Why?
Speaking of high coverage, I recalled several cases I had seen and resolved before:
> **Case 1: A beer brand, priced at over 200 yuan per case, its first move was high distribution coverage.**
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> **Case 2: A well-known brand—Evergrande Spring Water—at that time, required distribution coverage of 90% for its 350ml bottles priced at 4 yuan each.**
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> **Case 3: A baijiu brand I previously served, with a retail price of 40 yuan per bottle for its unboxed baijiu, managed to place 20 cases even in village-level outlets, achieving county-level coverage of over 85%.**
What were the results of these three cases? The answer doesn't need to be repeated.
**Why are people obsessed with high distribution coverage?**
**1. Quick payment collection, creating a false market prosperity.**
For new products, from the manufacturer's perspective, high coverage can quickly achieve inventory transfer, solve the distributor's inventory pressure, and facilitate secondary ordering. For the manufacturer's marketing personnel, there is another reason: it helps display a false market prosperity, making it easier to report to superiors.
**2. Incomplete learning, mechanical application.**
Influenced by Coca-Cola's "4A" (available, affordable, acceptable, awareness) and the terminal sales formula: terminal outlets × average purchase quantity per time, as well as the convenience factor in the 4C marketing (consumer needs, cost to the consumer, convenience, and communication), they blindly pursue high coverage.
**3. Manufacturers or distributors are eager for quick success, like to boast, pursue short-term gains, and are unwilling to cultivate the market.**
**What are the harms of incorrect high coverage?**
1. Price confusion, collapse of the price system, transparent prices, no profit for terminals, weak push from terminal owners, and the product's performance at the terminal becomes increasingly weak.
2. Products become unsalable at the terminal and slowly die.
3. Products die before they even gain traction.
**How to approach coverage? Is high or low coverage correct?**
High or low coverage is a false proposition. When entering the market, one must combine the product's inherent attributes, find matching channels, and analyze specific problems based on the market's development stage (introduction, growth, maturity, decline) and different market types, adapting to circumstances.
**1. For new products, new customers, and new markets, use point-based breakthroughs and capture the commanding heights.**
During the introduction of a new product, the early stage usually focuses on core terminal outlets, not comprehensive distribution. Through the "terminal plate within plate" strategy, capturing core commanding-height terminals has a significant influence and radiation effect. Typically, mid-to-high-end baijiu brands adopt the "core store + joint sales" approach. For mid-to-high-end baijiu, terminal sales tend to follow the 80/20 principle. Luzhou Laojiao's mid-range product, Jingcai Tequ, did not support any channel promotions in the early stage, only focusing on consumer building and 3A terminals.
Benefits: By igniting core terminals, stabilizing the price system, and avoiding price chaos, it lays the foundation for later volume growth.
**2. Based on the product's inherent attributes, match channels and choose different strategies.**
For example, in Case 1, a high-end beer at over 200 yuan per case, using increased promotions to push distribution through terminal channels severely violates the product's original positioning. If they had borrowed from baijiu's approach of using group-buying channels as a breakthrough or used community methods, it would have been a hundred times better than directly pushing for coverage.
Typically, the traditional coverage strategy involves setting policies, opening outlets, setting coverage targets, and later filtering quality terminals based on early sales performance. Before entering the market, analyze the product's target positioning. For instance, Evergrande Spring Water's benchmark was the terminal outlets in various regional markets that sold competing products at the 4-yuan price point, because the industry leader had already paved the way. Benchmarking against the industry leader avoids unnecessary detours. Otherwise, these are ineffective outlets. You can observe that Wanglaoji and JDB, Lulu and Six Walnuts, Mosilian and Mengniu Pure Zhen, their floor displays are usually always adjacent.
A friend of mine does Queyou mahjong machines. Queyou is the absolute leader in the mahjong machine industry, but its subsidiary Songyan massage chairs are rarely known, and in the massage chair industry, they are a small player. However, from product launch, they abandoned the traditional massage chair channels and directly cooperated with high-end automobile brands, entering through car 4S store channels, and later developed very well.
**3. For mature products, high coverage equals high sales.**
For mature products, typically, profits are low, terminal owners have weak push, and it's more about terminal owners hiding the product and selling it when consumers ask. Terminal owners are forced to sell. As long as the product is in the store with display, it can be sold. Usually, we see Six Walnuts, JDB's "tyrant" displays, and Yanghe's super large displays. The purpose is for manufacturers to use displays to compensate for terminal owners' profit margins, increase product visibility, and increase purchase probability.
**4. Product coverage is dynamic; different market development stages have different targets.**
Market development always goes from point to line to surface, and market coverage gradually increases, from addition to subtraction, ultimately maintaining the activity of high-quality terminals, from offense to defense.
In the marketing world, routines are easy to learn, but the essence is hard to grasp. Every market strategy is born from practical experience in specific environments. All routines and methodologies are relative; analyze specific problems in specific contexts. Otherwise, you might either go astray or imitate blindly.
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