Chapter 3 3. Marketing dilemma

The Chinese market is a dreamlike "plump pasture" full of longing, but also a daunting and elusive swamp. The consumer market with a population of 1.3 billion creates an attractive space for marketing innovation.The colorful and different consumption habits and market characteristics determine that the sales models must have corresponding differences.It is hard to imagine that a Shanghai girl who is eating Haagen-Dazs leisurely under the green shade of Huaihai West Road and a village boy in the Inner Mongolia grassland can accept the same kind of fashion temptation. The following six dilemmas are deeply troubled by many people engaged in marketing in China:

Almost all operators are already aware of the marketing network (at present, the domestic media has a variety of titles for the marketing network, such as "network", or "channel" or "channel", which should be some similar concepts ) importance.In the past nearly ten years, all successful companies have unique experience in the construction of marketing networks.However, there are also many people who are overwhelmed by the cost of network operation. There is a large home appliance company that is recognized as a master of marketing in China. Its annual sales are as high as 20 billion yuan, its corporate profit is about 300 million yuan, and its annual network operating costs are as high as 900 million yuan.As the profits of home appliances are getting thinner, it is becoming more and more difficult for enterprises to support this huge and costly network.However, this is another "chicken rib" that cannot be given up. Although it is miserable, the company still has to fight to the end.For a while, this company proposed a transformation concept of "home appliance distributor", that is, to share the existing sales terminals and sell products of other brands at the same time, but after trying for a period of time, it failed due to poor results Let it go.

Forming an invincible marketing iron army is the ideal of all marketers.However, we have seen such cases from time to time: companies apply crowd tactics to marketing promotions, but after achieving rapid success, they either fall into the quagmire of management, or the marketing personnel split.Sanzhu Group once relied on a marketing force of 150,000 people to become a giant in the health care product industry in just three years. However, later on, the hidden dangers of the large number of marketing personnel, complex composition, and uneven quality soon became apparent, and the decision-making layer lost control of the marketing channels, eventually causing the entire marketing system to collapse overnight.

In addition to direct sales in some big cities, most urban markets need to complete the "last mile" sales through dealers.Control and anti-control between manufacturers and distributors has become an "eternal theme" in marketing.Of course, a weak distributor cannot achieve the goal expected by the manufacturer, while a strong distributor may make the manufacturer a "slave of the terminal".When Changhong color TV started, it adopted the model of exclusive sales by large households. Large distributors all over the country played a role that cannot be underestimated in making Changhong the leader of the color TV industry.However, when the big players monopolize the channels and become big overnight, the contradiction of "big shop bullying customers" surfaced.Distributors change the way manufacturers lower prices, default on payment, and even interfere with distribution policies and market development ideas, etc., from time to time. Feet, and eventually become a trend that cannot be lost.

For every enterprise that aspires to become a "century-old brand", the vicious competition of countless local miscellaneous brands and low-priced products seems to be an unsolvable problem so far. "When we cultivate the market, countless small businesses will take the opportunity to enter. Their materials are inferior, the quality is rough, and the cost is so low that you can't imagine. They roar like locusts from the fields we have cultivated and harvested. When they left, this was a piece of land that could not be cultivated.” This kind of feeling is probably shared by many companies that have experienced pain.

What kind of market is the Chinese market today?This is a market where rules give way to interests, this is a market where impulse is greater than rationality, this is a market that is being reshuffled, this is a market that combines violence and tenderness, this is a market where cognitive ability is considered to be the only The "fourth grade level" market, a market where credit is a luxury... Song Zhiming, China President of Ogilvy & Mather, a global advertising giant, observed that when many multinational brands enter the Chinese market and first sell in first-tier cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, they tend to achieve good results. In the secondary and tertiary markets, access problems arise.Today, all brand companies including Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola have encountered such troubles in the Chinese market: the experience you have gained in the urban market is almost ineffective in the rural and urban markets.They seem to be two spaces with completely different network characteristics, consumption habits, and advertising cognition.

The existence of these six dilemmas makes today's Chinese market full of psychedelic colors, and those who are good at resolving these dilemmas can often become "marketing dreamers" who rule the roost for a while (Kotler's term, he Call entrepreneurs who profit by inventing new ways to create, communicate, and deliver value to target markets "marketing visionaries"). We will describe how Wahaha faced these six difficulties in the following chapters.Perhaps its concept may not be suitable for all industries and enterprises, however, you can definitely find your own inspiration from this vivid case.