Fast Moving Consumer Goods Industry Marketing Channel Conflict Management

Fast Moving Consumer Goods(FMCG) is one of the most frequently used commodity variety. During recent years, this industry gains great momentum in China. With the rapid growth, the marketing channel conflict is always an issue. Distribution channel members and products suppliers exist within the same"value chain", but they rarely share identical targets. Meanwhile, different channel members compete with each other on the very scarce resources. It seems that the marketing channel conflict is inevitable. In addition, this kind of conflict is likely to cause tremendously negative effects. It usually influences entities'profit or cash flow. Sometimes it can generate even more destructive effects on both suppliers and distributors.In such a booming industry, is destructive conflict inevitable between different members? Can different members solve the conflict by adopting an effective management mechanism? Can different channel members build a long term trust and form a"non-zero sum"partnership?By answering the given questions, this article presented the guidelines to manage distribution channel conflict in FMCG industry. Firstly, we introduced some basic concepts and analyzed the characteristics of FMCG industry. Then, we gave some of the principles in channel design to prevent the channel conflict from happening. The key part of this article is the analysis of FMCG industry channel conflict and the corresponding conflict managing tool's usage. Channel power and the establishment of mutual partnership are two primary tools discussed in this article. In the end, we supported and complemented article's arguments by some case study of FMCG industry. How to manage marketing channel is a long-term and arduous task. How to control the marketing channel conflict is one of the most important issues in it. We hope that this article can be of help to practitioners to some extent.