Distributors or Farmers: Who Is the Enterprise's Core Resource?

In the field of marketing there is a professional term called customer positioning. Its significance lies in the fact that whom we position as the customer and the end point will, to a large extent, determine the enterprise's business philosophy and sales model. Applying this theory to the field of animal husbandry marketing, we will find that there are two types of customers in the animal husbandry circulation chain: one is distributors, and the other is farmers. How to choose between these two and accurately define our target group is crucial for many veterinary drug and feed enterprises.

In practice, conflicts often exist between these two. One type of enterprise focuses on distributors as end customers, and through channel maintenance and expansion, improves the company's product sales while enhancing distributors' sales capabilities; another type of enterprise focuses on farmers as the end target, bypassing intermediate channels, with all business promotion work carried out directly around consumers. In fact, in the field of animal husbandry circulation, many enterprises feel torn and confused when choosing between the above two models, and the animal husbandry industry has indeed not yet formed a mature promotion model. So in the animal husbandry industry, is the distributor the end point, or is the farmer the end point?

The affirmative view: distributors are key

Although the end consumers of veterinary drug and feed products are farmers, given the current state of animal husbandry circulation and development, it is a relatively reasonable model for animal husbandry enterprises to position distributors as target customers and carry out publicity and promotion around distributors.

First, the degree of large-scale farming in our country is not yet high, and the future development trend is also moderate-scale farming. If animal husbandry enterprises want to carry out point-to-surface publicity and promotion to them, the financial and human resources consumed will be enormous, and the enterprise's sales costs will be very high. For the veterinary drug and feed industry with thin profits, such a promotion model achieves twice the result with half the effort, has extremely low cost-effectiveness, and the pace of enterprise growth and development will be very slow.

Second, given that our country's farming efficiency is relatively low, and combined with the fact that farmers' overall scientific and technological quality is not high, under such a background, farmers generally lack interest in new products and their enthusiasm is not high, so enterprises face great resistance when promoting new products. By contrast, because distributors possess a certain amount of professional knowledge in farming management and promotion ability, as long as enterprises concede a certain amount of profit, their enthusiasm for promoting new products will be stimulated, and they will become an important force in new product promotion. In fact, due to the absence of a public-welfare farming management promotion system, animal husbandry distributors have, to a large extent, dominated the direction of animal husbandry product consumption.

In summary, strengthening publicity and training for distributors, forming a community of interests with distributors, and relying on them to promote new concepts and products is, for animal husbandry enterprises, the optimal choice under the current circumstances.

The opposing view: farmers are the end point

At present, the biggest problem in distributors' product promotion is that they are too utilitarian: they sell whatever product makes money, and quality, effects and brand are sometimes instead not their first consideration when choosing products. The problem is that products with guaranteed quality, brand advantages and technical features generally do not have high sales profits. Even if these products are favored by farmers, distributors are unwilling to make them the main promoted products, causing truly good products to find it difficult to enter farms.

In addition, the current animal husbandry circulation industry has too many links. From production enterprises to first-level distributors and township-level distributors, each link takes away a certain amount of profit. For enterprises, this ultimately leads to two results: first, because of too much markup, products lose their price advantage; second, the enterprise's profit margin drops sharply, making operations difficult. Therefore, compressing intermediate links, using this portion of profit as sales expenses, directly conducting publicity and promotion to end farmers, advancing steadily, and by establishing and consolidating one base after another, using points to drive areas and using time to exchange for space, is not necessarily a bad choice.