Research On The Marketing Strategy Of China’s International Freight Forwarding Enterprises

Along with the high-speed growth of international trade since the reform and opening to the outside world, China’s international freight forwarding industry has also realized high-speed development, and grown into an emerging modern service industry with a certain scale. However, the American financial crisis bursting out in 2008 and the European debt crisis occurring later have devastated the world economy. The economic downturn of the USA and EU, as two major export destinations of China, has brought negative influences to the world economy. China has seen the slowdown in growth and even negative growth of import and export trade, and the drop in the number of containers and the cargo throughput at ports. This has brought great pressure to China’s international trade and logistics. Under such austere situations, China’s international freight forwarding industry has a non-optimistic development prospect, and especially, plentiful small- and medium-sized international freight forwarding enterprises are hardly able to lift each foot. Generally speaking, at present, China’s international freight forwarding industry is featured by small business scale and asset scale, few service functions, shortage of professional talents, low degree of professionalization, weak competitiveness and financing ability, uneven service quality, irregular business order, shortage of network, or network decentralization, and low degree of informatization. After more than 20 years of development, China has more than 6,000 international freight forwarding enterprises lawfully registered at present, and coupled with plentiful non-registered affiliated enterprises and foreign companies’offices, etc., it’s estimated that, nearly 10,000 enterprises deal with logistics operation activities in the market, and the market competition is very vehement.Under such austere situation, it seems to be especially important that how freight forwarding enterprises shall do a good job in marketing. By analyzing the industrial state, characteristics, and marketing strategy, etc. of international freight forwarding enterprises at present, the paper just aims to further research the application of modern marketing strategy to international freight forwarding industry. It’s expected to apply modern marketing strategy to the operating activities of international freight forwarding enterprises, in order to provide some assistance to the international freight forwarding enterprises in difficult position.Taking Hengyang International Freight Forwarder Co., Ltd., a representative small-and medium-sized international freight forwarding enterprise, as example, this paper discusses the marketing strategy of freight forwarding enterprises under economic crisis by fanning out from points to areas. According to the concrete case, we may look into the characteristics and dilemma of the whole industry, the function of enterprises’ internal factors for marketing, and the market environment confronted by the industry, etc. Hengyang International Freight Forwarder Co., Ltd. is a typical small- and medium-sized regional company in China. It has limited capital, scale and network, etc., and faces very great operating pressure in the difficult economic environment at present. Its marketing follows traditional 4P strategy (price strategy, product strategy, promotion strategy, and place strategy), which is also adopted by most freight forwarding enterprises. However, it’s very difficult for this traditional marketing strategy to make enterprises win in economic crisis.In the special market environment full of cut-throat competition and homogenized operation at present, it’s very difficult for international freight forwarding industry to achieve development only by dint of traditional strategy, and overall marketing is required for further market development. Modern marketing is broader, more complicated and more abundant, and traditional 4P strategy cannot reflect all marketing activities correctly. In order to update the 4P strategy and reflect overall marketing concept, the following group of new 4P marketing concepts which are representative and reflect modern marketing shall be included, namely people, process, program and performance.In order to further develop the market, modern small- and medium-sized international freight forwarding enterprises must strengthen the construction of sales team, raise personnel’s quality, intensify the awareness of service, perfect enterprises’ service network, normalize companies’ operating flow, deepen services comprehensively, transform traditional market sale into enterprises’ platform sale, carry out information technology construction, and subdivide the market, etc. This includes the elements of modern marketing concepts. For international freight forwarding enterprises facing drastic competition and market deterioration, traditional marketing strategy cannot comprehensively meet the development demand of modern enterprises. It’s necessary to introduce new modern marketing concepts, dig up potentials from inside enterprises, and carry out overall marketing by combining with external environment.