On September 5, 2014, “Online to Offline Marketing Salon of the Consumer Products Industry 2014” sponsored by Hypering (www.hypering.com.cn) was held at Hyatt on the Bund of Shanghai. The guests included the representatives from Shanghai Jahwa, Unilever, Inoherb, L'Oreal, Mondelez, Vitasoy, Wall’s, Johnson & Johnso China, Schneider Electric, Stanley Black & Decker, and other representatives from the consumer products enterprises.

Hypering invited JIMMY ZHAO, who has 20 years’ management experience in FMCG industry and used to serve as the sales director of Coca-Cola, made a speech on “how to use the dynamic competitive strategies to achieve marketing advantage”.

Brazil World Cup provides the marketing opportunities for many beer companies: Tsingtao Beer launched “gathering for this cup” promotion activities and World Cup commemorative packaging, and introduced the joint promotions with electricity suppliers to inject fashionable and young elements into the century-old brand. Snowflake Beer implanted football and opera characters in advertisements, added Chinese elements and organized online and offline World Cup Beer Festival activities. As sponsor, InBev Budweiser made the brand-classified advertising strategy tailored for the World Cup. The main brand Budweiser (Rise As One) highlighted its grandness, shocking and magnificence, whereas the sub-brand Harbin Brewery introduced the “Enjoy the World Cup” activities. In the passion of carnival, the fans and consumers may not feel the fierce competition in the market, but all beer companies, faced with the complex and competitive pattern, hope to use this opportunity to build their competitive advantage. Every move will cause a chain reaction in the market. Therefore, the beer companies have to think strategically: who is their real competitors?

From the production scale, Snowflake Beer takes the lead in producing millions of liters of beer. The competitor of Tsingtao Beer, the industry’s leading brand, should be Snowflake Beer, whose marketing initiatives have to be focused on by Tsingtao Beer. Of course, Tsingtao Beer dominates the high-end market, which is clearly unattainable for Snowflake Beer currently. InBev acquires Budweiser which acquires Harbin Brewery. The recent consecutive mergers and acquisitions by InBev of Ginsber Beer, Big Boss Beer, etc. make InBev increasingly closer to and similar with Tsingtao Beer in many aspects, such as the high-end beer scale, market commonality and resource similarity. It is foreseeable that in the future Tsingtao Beer and InBev will be in close combat with each other. From the perspective of dynamic competitive strategy, enterprises with closer market commonality and resource similarity are real competitors against each other. InBev’s market layout makes the competition pressure of Tsingtao Beer no longer just from Snowflake’s production scale of millions of liters of beer.

There is a similar case in the Chinese beverage market. In 2011, through equity transaction, Master became the franchised bottler for Pepsi (International) in the Chinese market, to take over Pepsi (China) business. Now, after the merger, the output of Master and Pepsi exceeds Coca-Cola. The future competition in the beverage industry is filled with more variables with more complicated competitions. The competitive antagonistic relationship between Coca-Cola’s main business (carbonated drinks) and Pepsi now evolves to that between Coca-Cola and Master-Pepsi; the former competition between President drinks and Master also ceases to exist. President drinks will no longer be deemed as the direct competitor for Master (Master-Pepsi).

As can be seen from the above cases, dynamicity and relativity is the essence of dynamic competition. Market commonality and resource similarity are the core factors to identify the main competitive relationship.

Strategic thinking of dynamic competition
Compared with the traditional static strategic model, the dynamic competition theory and model put forward by Professor Chen Mingzhet can help companies improve the effectiveness of competitive strategy and the effectiveness of financial investment and the business management level, so as to win in the dynamic market environment. The strategy thinking and policy management tool of dynamic competition is more like a “private strategy”, through which enterprises, through their own activities in market competition, during the process of analyzing competitors and through the continuous tracking of competitive actions or responses, can find out the approaches to reduce the competitive responses to avoid the life-or-death struggle caused by intense conflicts. Therefore, it is a more “rational” competitive strategy as well as the exclusive tacit knowledge accumulated by enterprises through practices. This kind of “private strategy” cannot be simply defined and described by outsiders. It is also what constitutes the biggest difference between the dynamic competition theory and the traditional static competition theory.

“Online to Offline Marketing Salon of the Consumer Products Industry” is the small meeting and salon activity introduced by Hypering, designed to build the communication and exchange platform for enterprises, timely and objectively investigate the new changes and new ideas of FMCG industry through short and relaxing salons, and probe into the questions of how to utilize these new products and services to innovate marketing and improve its effect.

Hypering is dedicated to creating “one-stop service of online to offline platform” and providing consultation, solutions, products and services for marketing management and channel management.

“Trade promotion management (TPM)”, “Sales force automation (SFA)”, “CRM POS solutions (CRM)”, “Distributor management system (DMS)”, “Data integrated management (DIS)” and “Online to Offline (O2O)” are the best marketing expenses control solutions in the FMCG industry.