During the first two days of the Famous Furniture Fair exhibitors devoted relentless efforts to allure distributors, offering various incentives that make interest concessions to dealers and franchisers.
Slogans such as "50% off for Reworking", "Free Sea Tour on Luxury-Yacht for Orders Exceeding 5,000 RMB" and "Overall Planning Support for New Outlets" appeared on promotion placards of exhibitors. Opening a 180-square-meter outlet entails no more than 30,000 RMB! In front of an exhibitor's booth there is even a poster conveying passionate hospitality: Welcome Home, Distributors Nationwide!
The multiple schemes employed by to grab dealer attention indicate that furniture manufacturers now have come to better apprehend the importance of forming firm connections with distributors, which represents a progress in the industry and holds significant implications.
Of greater importance would be the exhibitors' ability to deliver their promises and guarantee high-quality follow-up services to their distributors. That would put an enterprise's comprehensive strength and strategic vision to test .
Some exhibitors explicitly propose their own perspective: the quality of products and service should be given priority. An exhibitor dealing in overall household furniture comments: "We focus on the product itself, enhance our products' performance-price ratio via imbuing our products with fundamental elements such as environmental protection and safety and choosing the proper materials for decoration, and eventually earn consumer loyalty. Therefore, we are able to forge solid alliances with our dealers by generating continuous and growing profits for them."
The general manager of a Zhejiang exhibitor echoes this : "We place much weight on long term cooperation and make more interest concessions to our dealers. Distributors nowadays are quite shrewd. In addition to low prices, they call for high product quality and superb service. On one hand we intensifies internal training of our employees to guarantee the quality of order handling and foster our ability to solve practical problems. For instance, transportation is an important component of our service for dealers. We maintain stable long-term cooperation with trustworthy forwarders to gain good freight rates and ensure the quality of transportation service. Thus, we have a pretty low percentage of product corruption and wreckage during transportation, which virtually enhances our service quality for dealers. One the other hand, trainings for dealers involve not only sales skills, but also analysis of the macro economic situation and professional knowledge like structures of furniture. These contents are instrumental for the dealers to improve their own service quality. The moves I mentioned have earned excellent comments and feedbacks from our dealers. Actually many clients who came to us in the first two days of the fair were introduced by our old clients."Probably because of humility, the manager did not mention his company's emphasis R&D. They frequently reap honors in product design competitions, and good designs boost their competitive edge, generating substantive benefits.
The reporters of 3F learned from their conversations with exhibitors that a great portion of the exhibitors embrace the importance of product and service quality, a indicator of the industry's maturity as a whole. It has been a consensus that the union of every single force accelerates the development of the furniture industry.
At the 3F held in March this year, the organizing committee launched a competition named "The Gold Medal List of the Chinese Furniture Industry" that captured enormous attention within the industry in its duration of several months. The competition reached a crescendo when the award ceremony was held on Sep. 3rd. The activity's slogan-Establish Harmonious manufacturer-dealer relationship, Construct an Interest Chain That Facilitates the Healthy and Sustainable Development of the Chinese Furniture Industry-received industry-wide accolades.
