After several years of brand accumulation, many domestic manufacturers have won honorary titles such as "China Flat Brand" and "China Famous Brand", but this does not mean anything. These laurels are obviously fragile in the face of modern retail channels. No matter how good the brand is, the product development ability is not good, and the retail channel will also overdraw the added value of your brand and become negative gross profit. Why don't you withdraw from the cabinet? Besides, your brand can't reach the brand power of Coca-Cola at all. On the other hand, if the brand is not good, but the product development ability is strong, and the retailer gives more promotional resources to support it, she will also become a brand-name product and her reputation will rise. Can you believe it?
Therefore, the "brand-centric" marketing model that manufacturers have always adhered to needs to be transformed into a "product-centric" marketing model.
1, study the needs of customers and retailers, and speed up product upgrading.
No matter how popular the old product is, it also has its life cycle, and the appeal point of the product will gradually weaken. Therefore, there is no winning general for this product. Furthermore, when the goods are put on the shelves, the purchasing agency will ask you to make endless promotions, and the retail price will continue to decrease, which is contrary to the added value of the brand. The gross profit margin of the products will decrease, and without the support of retailers, the goods will eventually be eliminated.
From the above two perspectives, manufacturers must constantly improve their product mix and launch new products. New products that meet the needs of customers and retailers have strong vitality, which can provide high gross profit space for both suppliers and retailers, make up for the imbalance of added value of old products, and improve product classification and combination.
2. Attach importance to classified products and establish their own advantages in classified products.
After the previous brand accumulation, many manufacturers began to test the diversified development of water and wanted to do everything, but none of them were professional. For example, "Dali Garden" brand, egg yolk pie, tea, bread, water, everything, but can not leave customers with specific brand complaints; "Sanquan" food can do anything, Sanquan jiaozi can, but "Sanquan" fish balls are not necessarily. The customer recognized her flour and rice products, but the fish ball products could not form vibration.
With the intensification of product competition, there are more and more manufacturers of a certain kind of products. Obviously, the retailer's shelf resources are limited, which intensifies the competition for shelf resources. As retailers who control shelf resources, how will they choose? Whoever has high gross profit, large sales volume and good brand will occupy more and better shelf resources; A brand's products cannot be the best in all product categories. Customers or retailers can only recognize your products in a certain category. Therefore, buyers will choose to display your superior products on better shelves, reduce the categories with insignificant advantages, and even withdraw the cabinets.
Therefore, manufacturers should pay attention to and strengthen strong classification, reduce classified products with no obvious advantages, optimize product lines, concentrate company resources, better cope with competition in various classifications, and provide retailers with higher gross profit, so as to obtain long-term effective support from retailers.
3. Pay attention to product structure and realize a reasonable profit ratio.
Product classification should also consider that the product price band involves three grades: high, medium and low. Obviously, the high price of high-end products and high brand premium rate are mainly to establish the brand image of one of the classified products of manufacturers, and should do less promotion to create high gross profit for retailers; Mid-range products mainly win by quantity, and strive for more promotional resources to get gross profit by quantity; Low-grade products are mainly tactical products with low or no gross profit to cope with the competition of competing products. Mainly used for store celebrations or festivals to explode goods and attract more popularity.
4. Provide more personalized services for retailers, and provide packaging customization or self-owned brand customization.
Large retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour, have their own brands. Due to the high gross profit margin, stores pay more attention to the development of their own brands. If manufacturers and retailers work together to make a joint business plan and customize unique products or packaging and specifications for retailers, there is no doubt that stores can support more promotional resources.
With the maturity of modern retail channels and fierce competition among retailers, retailers pay more and more attention to the construction of their own management system, reduce operating costs and enhance their soft core competitiveness. For example, in recent years, various retail giants have established their own logistics systems to support the circulation of goods to the maximum extent, reduce the shortage of goods and improve the operating gross profit. However, improving the logistics system requires extensive support from manufacturers. For example, can manufacturers tailor the appropriate packaging specifications for Wal-Mart Logistics to improve the receiving efficiency, shorten the product replenishment cycle and achieve a win-win situation for suppliers and retailers? For example, a brand of fish balls, the original packaging specification is 1 * 6 bags, but the retail store can't replenish so much at a time, and the receiving department needs to unpack and count the goods, which greatly affects the receiving time. In order to cooperate with the retail system, the manufacturer changed the specification to 1 * 4 bags, which reduced the receiving time, greatly improved the receiving efficiency and reduced the shortage of manufacturers. The manufacturer only wasted a little packaging fee, but through the promotion of sales, the gross profit was far greater than the packaging fee, achieving a win-win situation of zero supply.
With the improvement of modern retail channels, it has become the focus of manufacturers to get the support of retailers and seize more shelves and promotional resources. The obtained supermarket resources determine the key to the success or failure of managing modern retail channels. Manufacturers must change the original marketing model from the strategic model of "brand management as the core" to the strategic model of "product development as the core".