NEW DISTRIBUTION RESEARCH TOPIC
How can distributors keep growing across fragmented channels?
Front-line analysis of product selection, organization, channel strategy, profit models, and business transformation for FMCG distributors.
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4620 articles · Page 41 of 193
How a Financial Elite Crossed into FMCG and Became a Leading Regional Dairy Distributor in Four Years
Even the strongest companies will struggle if they don't take action for the future. 2022 was tough, but no one expected it to be this tough. The recurring pandemic has lasted three years, impacting all industries to varying degrees. Facing this uncertain future, what should distributors do? There's no standard answer. For distributors, the core is to focus on the present, deeply cultivate regional markets, monitor competitors, and stay 'half a step' ahead. This 'half step' lead was mentioned by Mr. Liu Wanqing of Shenyang City Dairy Co., Ltd. during an interview.
周群Ten Suggestions for FMCG Manufacturers Amid the Lingering Pandemic
The recent COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai has deeply affected the nation, with daily confirmed cases in the thousands and asymptomatic cases in the tens of thousands, prompting many regions to adopt full or partial lockdowns. Logistics disruptions, consumer restrictions, and declining purchasing power are impacting all industries. GDP growth in Q1 2022 is expected to remain below 5% due to the pandemic and geopolitical tensions, and this article offers ten practical suggestions for FMCG manufacturers to navigate these challenges.
高级研究员 海游Going Offline: The Urgent Task for Brand Owners is Dealer Sorting
In late 2013, Nongfu Spring's annual sales had just exceeded 10 billion yuan, but growth hit a bottleneck, prompting the company to reform its dealer network. As an assistant to the operations director, I developed five evaluation indicators for dealers—supply chain capability, financial strength, channel coverage, operational efficiency, and organizational strength—and successfully adjusted several dealers. This reform proved crucial for future growth. The article emphasizes that brand-dealer cooperation success depends on matching, and provides frameworks for evaluating dealers, including six key capability indicators and three critical points for adjustment.
高级研究员 海游Frequent Occurrence of Large-Age Inventory: How to Resolve This "Brand Red Flag"?
With the recurring pandemic, the issue of large-age inventory has become one of the more prominent problems for manufacturers and distributors. How to effectively avoid the generation of large-age inventory and minimize losses across the supply chain? Based on past experience, the author offers suggestions and digital application cases to inspire manufacturers and distributors. At its core, large-age inventory arises when the quantity of goods purchased exceeds the speed of sales, leading to slow-moving stock—a dynamic process. Causes include inaccurate distribution, overstocking, channel disruptions due to unexpected events, and poor customer inventory management. Solutions require both preventive measures and post-event handling.
邢仁宝Spring Plowing Has Arrived: How Distributors Can Choose Products to Seize the Wind and Make Big Money
As spring begins, distributors are adjusting their product portfolios. In today's market of overcapacity and stock competition, there is no shortage of products, but choosing products with strong sell-through is half the battle. Distributors focus on four key factors: brand strength, product strength, precise market timing, and consumer reach assurance. This article uses the new product logic of leading company Labixiaoxin to address these pain points.
张宇Cross-regional Selling: Why Does It Persist?
A market survey in Henan and Hebei reveals that cross-regional selling remains rampant, undermining price systems and dealer confidence. The article analyzes the causes from channel differentiation and logistics evolution perspectives, and proposes solutions including technology, pricing strategy, and management.
周群Opinion on Accelerating the Construction of a Unified National Market: A Boon for Distributors and the B2B Industry
On April 10, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the "Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of a Unified National Market," proposing to build a unified national market from aspects such as basic institutional construction and market facility construction. The Opinions specify key tasks from six aspects, including the "five unifications" from the perspective of "establishment," such as unifying market basic institutional rules and promoting high-standard connectivity of market facilities.
赵波Analysis: Why Are There Fewer and Fewer Post-90s Salespeople in FMCG?
FMCG companies are recruiting every day but still face shortages, with a common phenomenon of grassroots staff job-hopping among themselves, yet fewer post-90s are joining FMCG teams. Many post-90s, even those with bachelor's degrees or above, prefer delivering packages, food delivery, or ride-hailing over joining the FMCG workforce. This article explores the reasons and remedies for attracting post-90s to the industry.
高级研究员 海游Haitian Distributors' 'Three Axes': Can They Still Cut Through Today's Market?
During the bonus period, business was easy; after it ends, business becomes hard. Twenty-five years ago, condiment distributors could make money by simply shipping goods for any brand. Five years later, a Haitian salesperson convinced a Hengshui distributor to take on the brand, promising regional dominance. Now, as the market shifts to a zero-sum game and pandemic disruptions persist, can Haitian distributors' traditional tactics—pull, push, and gamble—still work?
调料人都在关注的Returning Offline: What Is the Channel Lever?
The marketing lever has evolved from wholesalers to retail stores to platform traffic, and now, in the bC integration era, the lever is the 'single-store community.' This article explains why the smallest channel unit is crucial for effective marketing and how to replicate it for success.
刘春雄From Frontline Salesman to Founder of a Trading Company: How Did He Achieve Over 100 Million in Sales in Just Seven Years?
“Business is tough, hard to do,” this is the current situation of some distributors seen during market research in Henan and Hebei provinces in the past two weeks. Indeed, the industry has changed significantly in recent years, with new business formats, models, and products emerging one after another. “Online intrusion, offline involution” has led to shrinking business year after year. Undeniably, the difficulty in doing business is partly due to market changes, but more so because the right direction has not been found in the face of change. We have seen some distributors actively trying to explore transformation in such an environment, and they have achieved good results...
周群What Is the Essence of Channels?
A channel partner worries about brand owners going direct or switching partners. The article argues that the essence of channels is low-cost, scalable reach to potential consumers, and advises channel partners to accurately assess their core competency and innovate by aggregating offline traffic into private traffic pools or grouping people in online public traffic based on common interests.
刘润Oat Milk Market Heats Up: Should Distributors Enter?
The plant-based milk track is getting increasingly crowded, especially with oat milk. Recently, global oat-based brand OATLY announced its Q4 and full-year 2021 financial results, showing full-year revenue of $643.2 million, up 52.6% year-over-year, with Asia revenue of $126.9 million, up 136.5%, indicating the strongest growth momentum. Meanwhile, in China, the oat milk and plant-based milk market has entered an acceleration phase, with forecasts suggesting the plant milk market will exceed 300 billion yuan by 2025.
田静Interview with Luoyang Rongcheng Yigou: What Has Digitalization Brought to Distributors?
“All business trends favor the leaders, and digitalization is no exception.” China's commercial circulation business has experienced several major dividends since the 1990s. The first was the product dividend, when goods were scarce and anything sold. The second was the channel dividend, as supply and marketing cooperatives gave way to private businesses. The third was the hypermarket dividend, with giants like Carrefour and Walmart showing the potential of single-store output. The fourth was the e-commerce dividend, which early adopters on Taobao and JD.com profited from. Now these are past, and the next 5-10 years will see digitalization become increasingly important, with distributors facing survival of the fittest. So how should distributors adapt? This article explores this through an interview with Luo Kai, general manager of Luoyang Rongcheng Yigou, a digitalization benchmark distributor in the PepsiCo 'Ru Hu Tian E' project.
周群Why Are New Consumer Brands Struggling to Enter Traditional KA Channels?
In recent years, many new brands have emerged in the FMCG market, including innovative brands that created new subcategories and internet-famous products favored by young consumers. However, these brands primarily operate through online channels like Taobao, JD.com, and Douyin e-commerce, making them hard to find in physical retail stores. This situation poses two challenges for brick-and-mortar retailers: difficulty in enhancing category differentiation and segmentation offline, and aging product portfolios that fail to attract younger shoppers.
张思遥Returning Offline: The New Street Battle
From the human-wave tactics of traditional deep distribution to the traffic tactics of e-commerce, and now back to offline—this is a process of negation of negation, spiraling upward. The boundary between online and offline is roughly clear: large items, high-value-added products, and long-tail products are online battlegrounds, while FMCG, high-experience products, and instant-consumption goods are offline's stronghold. The future split is roughly 70% offline, 30% online. This is the opening article of the 'Returning Offline' series.
方刚Qingshan Capital: Dear Consumer Entrepreneurs, Please Face Reality
Products suddenly stop selling, capital retreats, and supply chains break. Qingshan Capital urges consumer entrepreneurs to abandon illusions, accept reality, and refocus on fundamentals, as short-term traffic and capital dividends are gone, but long-term consumption-driven growth, tech commercialization, and brand-building remain unchanged.
与创业者同行的E-cigarettes: Finally Settled
With the countdown to the ban on fruit-flavored e-cigarettes, the industry is in turmoil. The new regulations will ban all flavored e-cigarettes except tobacco flavor, reshape sales channels, and trigger a major industry shakeout, favoring large players with capital and technical strength.
郑一鸣Returning to Offline: Channel Coverage Model Layout Strategy for FMCG Enterprises
Returning to offline and the fundamentals are highly popular terms in the FMCG industry this year. Previously, 2C e-commerce optimized the supply chain from brand to consumer; later, B2B optimized it from brand to terminal outlets; and in the past two years, community group buying optimized it from distributor to consumer. Within the entire F2B2b2C supply chain, driven by capital and internet tools, these innovations captured nearly 30% of market sales, prompting a renewed focus on the 70% offline operations.
高级研究员 海游Selection and Tiered Management of Key Accounts (KA)
This article discusses the selection and tiered management of key accounts (KA) in the FMCG industry, emphasizing the importance of channel definition and resource allocation. It provides a practical guide through a case study, covering criteria for selecting KA clients and methods for classifying them by geography and cooperation level.
曹扬Coke Gets Angry Again: A 28-Year Siege
The production of carbonated drinks is simple: inject carbon dioxide under pressure into sugar water. Interestingly, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the two giants of global carbonated drinks, are like a bottle of cola—they fizz over if anyone loosens their cap. According to media reports, at the start of 2022, the two cola giants issued a threat: "This year, we are determined to bring down Genki Forest." "By 2022, there will be no more Genki Forest sparkling water in the market." A downstream distributor of Coca-Cola told The FunTalk that they had heard the rumors, but so far, Coca-Cola has not taken any specific targeted actions.
最话团队How Can Brand Owners Efficiently Connect with Retail Outlets? Two Key Tools Are Indispensable
In the FMCG industry, sales representatives are the crucial, often sole, link between brand owners and retail outlets, but this single-line connection carries risks such as information loss and limited interaction time. To address this, brand owners can leverage enterprise WeChat and B2b platforms to directly engage store owners, enabling efficient communication, personalized promotions, and seamless ordering, thereby building a robust customer operations system.
助力客户成功的As the Pandemic Rages, the Market Is Even Slower Than the Off-Season. What Should Distributors Do?
The pandemic is once again spreading across nearly 30 provinces. Compared to the sudden outbreak in early 2020, although there is still concern and inconvenience from lockdowns, past experience has made prevention and control more composed. This round is likely the final battle against the pandemic. The resurgence has impacted distributors' businesses, especially in logistics, personnel visits, and sales turnover. In this context, distributors should use this short period, which is even slower than the off-season, to make business plans—not just annual plans, but 3-5 year strategic plans to explore the direction and model of their trade.
袁来In the 40 Billion Yuan Chili Sauce Market, Neither Laoganma nor Hubang Can Save It
Laoganma, which is appearing less frequently, has raised prices, breaking the price benchmark in the chili sauce market. As new brands like Hubang enter, the market may expand, but Laoganma's dominance is challenged by changing consumer tastes and increased competition.
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