How to deal with the promotion of competitors?

Because if you follow up, you will die. If you don't follow up, you're dead. It is better to treat it positively, and maybe we can turn passivity into initiative. After more than ten years of marketing career, I have indeed seen competitors selling. Enterprises calmly respond, do not take any response or counterattack promotion, but take other ways to ensure that sales are not lost. For example, when the queer of Coca-Cola Company dominates the market share of competitors, it does not reduce prices or promote sales, but adopts the method of "role marketing" to approach consumers and buyers as soon as possible (queer consumers and buyers are sometimes inconsistent), so that consumers can continue to buy "queer" drinks; When Uni-President enterprises faced a large number of promotion policies from competitors, due to its long product line, they originally introduced some new products (series), such as a bucket of noodles, Uni-President 100 instant noodles and Maixiang tea series. , interfere with consumers' sight and disrupt competitors' promotion activities; Due to the scarcity of foreign beer brands at that time, Blue Ribbon beer cooperated with dealers to raise prices when competitors lowered prices, so that consumers could fight back against competitors with their strong understanding of brands ... But these are only some cases, and there are some special situations that not every enterprise can learn or use, and there is no universal significance. From trout's point of view that "marketing is a war", when competitors promote sales, we should be psychologically prepared, accept this fact very frankly, and welcome our competitors to adopt better promotion methods. It's just that corporate promotion at this time should be more "selling" than competitors, rather than blindly following up, not making hasty decisions, and not implementing without ideas. We don't do promotion by competitors, but we need to study the promotion policies of competitors in depth, so as to adopt a set of rational, orderly and superb countermeasures. These methods can be summarized as follows: first, determine the position of popularizing countermeasures, and then adopt the "three shifts" policy of higher-higher interest attraction, faster-faster action and stronger-stronger execution ability. Fight a happy promotion war through this "three-turn" policy (or one of the "three-turn" policies)! First, it is quite difficult to position yourself as a latecomer. As a latecomer, if you want to succeed, you have to find your opponent's weakness. The same is true of promotion. The first positioning here is to find the promotion methods and policies that the market really needs, and to grab the position of opponents among consumers and channel members through their own late promotion, or to be more eye-catching and attractive than the positioning of opponents; First, you can find an opponent's gap to play, so that you can find your own unique position, but also knock down and miss the opponent's position. Many enterprises like to do promotional activities in supermarkets, recruit a large number of promoters and shopping guides, make a large number of vivid products, spend a lot of money to make some beautiful piles, and sometimes implement "buy a few and get one free" or price concessions. It can be said that this is a common promotion practice of enterprises. However, after all, enterprises can only do things with one focus. When competitors promote sales in supermarkets, the promotion efforts of street retail stores may be weakened or not considered at all. At this time, enterprises can work hard in these places. Of course, we can also adopt the way that competitors do big packaging and we do small packaging, and so on. However, it must be able to give channels or consumers a greater shock or seize the gap of opponents. Second, higher interests attract this is the usual trick of many enterprises. Although it is nothing new, it is still necessary to mention it here. Why? The product itself is the embodiment of value. To promote products, we should not only recognize the value of products, but also let channel members and consumers get or feel higher value in a short time. Therefore, attracting with higher interests is definitely "welcome". This is also in line with the viewpoint of the channel value chain: all levels of the channel and consumers are members of the value-added products, and they can benefit and promote the circulation of products, which is the connotation of "promotion"! Our current misunderstanding, or the reason why some enterprises oppose this view, is that we only stay in the superficial understanding of higher interests and only use "deal with a man as he deals with you" to solve the problem. In fact, in order to avoid vicious competition, it is suggested to use higher interests, but it is more popular to use some unique ways or slightly staggered ways. If the opponent works hard on channel members and attracts channel providers with gifts, discounts, high rebates and subsidies, we can carry out more powerful one-on-one promotion on the terminal, such as freezing+display+single product reward+cumulative reward and so on. If my opponent buys ten and gets one free, I will not hesitate to buy eight and get one free, which confuses the rules and is not advisable. This is a lose-lose approach. If you notice this, it is that the channel is a chain. As long as the products have more added value on the whole, or reflect more value or value for money, it is to adopt good promotion policies and avoid "promotion wars" as much as possible. Third, the faster action is not the big fish eat small fish, but the era when the fast fish eat the slow fish, which is easier to prove in the implementation of promotion. Promotion is a short-term promotion! I have heard of such a real case. An enterprise secretly discussed the promotion of instant noodles at the station during a festival, and prepared to act three days later. As a result, this promotional message was immediately intercepted by the opponent, and the opponent was in full swing. The next day, we adopted a promotion similar to the promotion policy that was not implemented, which won a great victory. The promotion plan of the enterprise was stillborn and suffered heavy losses. The competitors fought a beautiful promotion war with time. As the saying goes, "mantis catches cicada, yellowbird is behind". In an era when the market changes so fast that consumers' needs can be met at any time, this is becoming more and more unsuitable. When the promotional products have occupied the warehouse of channel providers and consumers have enjoyed the promotional products, the new promotion has lost interest for them. At that time, the "one more bottle" in the beverage market was a smash hit, and companies rushed to follow suit, but only the initiators really benefited. I visited the market recently and saw that the competition in many industries has become extremely market-oriented. A company is implementing a promotion, and competitors can launch it the next day. This "fast" method is not promoting sales, but in anger, betting on the fate of the market and enterprises. It is not the concept of promoting sales at all. I believe that they are not the beneficiaries of promotion, but the biggest victims of promotion. Fourth, competitive products with stronger execution adopt promotion policies. In addition to finding ways to attract and act faster with better positioning and higher interests, many enterprises ignore more out-and-out execution. Many times, our promotion depends on dealers, hoping that dealers can help us promote sales after being attracted by higher interests. Strangely, we often believe what our dealers do! Dealers will help us solve the problem of promotion and implementation. More often, we feel that the channel efficiency is improved, and the dealers will use 100% to promote it! An important reason for the failure of promotion in many enterprises is that the promotion policies are not completely implemented, the promotion resources are intercepted, the promotion products are not used in the right place, and the promotion is not implemented in the right place or level. Sometimes business leaders think that the front line of business is in full swing to promote sales, and a large number of promotional posters that can be printed at a high price in advance may not be posted. Sometimes it takes a day to get access to all the information of dealers and terminals, but it takes nearly half a month! Sometimes the promotion contract and promotion stake will be signed within a week, and the promotion period is almost over, but they can't sign it back. It's really difficult to say. Sometimes ... reaching a plan means 5% of the plan and 95% of the implementation. If we want to promote the sales of our competitors, we may do better than our competitors in the 5% plan, and the most important thing is to work hard at this 95% success rate. And we often put the cart before the horse! How to deal with the promotion of competitors is an eternal topic, because first of all, this is a life-and-death competition, a bloody battle. As marketers, we can only use the Olympic spirit of "higher, faster and stronger" to encourage enterprises to win in the promotion competition, and ultimately they are successful. This is a game that will never end. I can only hope that our colleagues will show their own housekeeping skills as they did in the Olympic Games and push this high-level competition to a new height! Tan Changchun, sales and management, has more than ten years of experience in marketing and management. Has been honed in the four major foreign brands of fast-moving consumer goods. Professional marketing consultants, management consultants and trainers from many enterprises, as well as in-depth practitioners and researchers in the field of marketing and management.