Text | Finance And Economics Pro, author | Camphor rice, ed. | Yi page
On the morning of January 18, "Starbucks China" announced on the WeChat public account that Starbucks launched the exclusive space service and "special star delivery" function of "1971 Living Room" on Meituan today. It is understood that customers can obtain Starbucks services through meituan's Meituan App and Dianping App.
Among the many functions, what has attracted much attention is the "special star delivery" service launched by Starbucks and Ele.me, which began to be launched on Meituan after three years of operation. Earlier, at the end of 2021, according to Sina Technology, some market sources revealed that Starbucks' original 3-year exclusive cooperation with Ele.me would expire on December 31.
Starbucks is looking for new partners in the Chinese market. It is reported that potential targets include SF, Meituan, Sam's Club, etc., which have delivery capabilities and are negotiating cooperation with Starbucks. The above views have basically been confirmed, in early January, in Jinan, Shenzhen and other cities, Starbucks has been on a small scale on the Meituan online test access to the special star delivery, in addition, in the Meituan takeaway search for Starbucks, you can see that there is a special star delivery service before the purchase store.
This update means that the "special star delivery" service has begun to gradually launch the Meituan takeaway. Now, with the expiration of Starbucks' originally scheduled 3-year exclusive cooperation with Ele.me, it can be expected that a battle for takeaway suppliers will be inevitable. However, with hungry Mo Zhuyu in front, how the US group can give the latest solution is a rather imaginative topic.
At present, the answers given by the METUAN do not seem to be new, from the content of the cooperation between Starbucks and the US group, Starbucks's innovation space in the takeaway service has basically exhausted on Ele.me.
01 The "Honeymoon Period" with Hungry
Regarding Starbucks' takeover rights, there was once a competition.
In the first half of 2018, there were rumors that Starbucks would cooperate with Meituan to launch online takeaway. At that time, according to relevant sources close to the Takeaway of the Us group, Starbucks negotiated with the Us Group for a long time, and commented that Starbucks was "quite cautious" in the matter of takeaway.
Later, at that year's Starbucks Global Investor Conference, Starbucks China CEO Wang Jingying denied the news in an interview with China Entrepreneur, "I said I was interested in doing it, but I never said who I would work with. ”
At that time, however, the balance of the battle for victory had shifted to Hungry. In 2018, according to Caijing, Ele.me's official contact with Starbucks began at the end of 2017, and it was finally confirmed that it was in the middle of 2018, and Ali played a key role in it.
In August of the same year, Starbucks and Alibaba announced that they would reach a comprehensive cooperation in the new retail strategy, and the membership system would be fully opened.
In the high-profile Starbucks takeaway right to undertake, the press conference information shows that Starbucks will rely on Ele.me's mature distribution system to start a takeaway pilot in the main stores in Shanghai and Beijing in September, covering more than 2,000 stores in 30 cities by the end of the year.
More than a month later, Starbucks' takeaway service was officially launched. Starbucks specifically named the takeaway service " " Special Star Delivery " . On the Ele.me platform, users place orders to send special stars and get goods within half an hour within the scope of service.
Hungry Mo and Starbucks are quite concerned about special star delivery, in order to solve the problem of beverage spillage in the delivery service, Starbucks designed a special hot and cold drink cup lid for delivery.
And Hungry Mo has a special treatment for the special star takeaway box, the brother uses the TPU material to deliver the ice pack, without opening the lid, the temperature in the box is maintained below 5 degrees for up to 6 hours, ensuring the best temperature for cold drink delivery.
In addition, before the official launch of the special star delivery, in order to ensure the smooth operation of each joint, the 20-person test distribution team composed of Ele.me and Starbucks conducted a three-month intensive test.
In order to simulate the real delivery link, Ele.me delivery testers traveled back and forth between the Starbucks laboratory and the test site, with a test time of more than 2,000 hours and a cumulative test distance of up to 12,000 kilometers.
In 2019, after the first anniversary of the cooperation between Starbucks and Ele.me, Special Star Delivery once announced an answer sheet: meals within 8 minutes, an average delivery time of no more than 18 minutes, 99.99% consumer satisfaction and so on.
From starbucks perspective, the cooperation between the two sides is based on Starbucks' embrace of digital transformation, on this basis, on July 18, 2019, Starbucks and Ele.me opened up the membership system, and Ele.me users can also accumulate Starbucks membership points by purchasing Starbucks on the platform.
On July 29 of the following year, the Starbucks "Brown Express" service logged on to the Hungry Mo Express self-pickup channel. Coupled with the "special star delivery", since then, Starbucks' two online innovative services have all been collected on the Ele.me platform.
The earnings data supports the need for Starbucks to embrace Ele.me, starbucks fiscal fourth quarter 2019 financial report shows that "special star delivery" takeaway accounted for 7% of China's total sales, is the main reason for the growth, the "brown fast" launched in May of that year, also contributed 3% of sales in the fourth quarter.
In general, by holding hands with Hungry, it has helped Starbucks create more new value, cover more scenes that the original "third space" cannot cover, and achieve new circle expansion.
02 Starbucks bids farewell to the era of exclusivity
On December 31, 2021, with the expiration of the 3-year exclusive cooperation, a scramble is inevitable.
According to people familiar with the matter, Ele.me has completed the renewal of the contract with Starbucks, and the new cooperation will no longer be an exclusive agreement. This also means that Starbucks has begun to open up cooperation to more subjects.
The above views have basically been confirmed, search for Starbucks on the Meituan takeaway, you can see that there are special star delivery services ranked ahead of the purchasing store. At the same time, Starbucks' special star delivery service on Hungry Mo has no impact.
On October 8, 2020, with the landing of meituan's "two choice one" boots, Meituan was fined 3.442 billion yuan, and suspected monopolistic behaviors such as "two choice one" can be described as "street rats". Starbucks' embrace of multi-platform delivery at this time is undoubtedly the most appropriate approach.
On the other hand, Ai Media Consulting data shows that in 2021, the size of China's coffee market is about 381.7 billion yuan, coffee is gradually popularized in the lives of Chinese consumers, the market has entered a stage of rapid development, it is expected that the industry will maintain a growth rate of 27.2%, and the size of the coffee market will reach 1,000 billion yuan in 2025.
The huge market potential attracts many players. Recently, Starbucks has been on the hot search many times, which can be described as on the cusp of the storm. In addition to public opinion, from the perspective of the industry, in the past year, the coffee market has been emerging upstarts, taking MANNER and Tims China as an example, which are aggressively attacking the market.
Despite this, Starbucks still sits firmly on the Diaoyutai. According to Starbucks' fiscal 2021 annual report, the Chinese market contributed 12.7% of Starbucks' global revenue. In fiscal 2022, Starbucks China will continue to expand, with a planned total of 6,000 stores.
Behind this, in addition to Starbucks's strong brand bargaining power and supply chain and store management system, it can be found that Starbucks is also constantly adapting to the changing market environment.
In 2018, Starbucks cooperated with Ele.me to launch the "special star delivery" takeaway service, which is based on the background of the increasing proportion of consumers' "quick pick" coffee consumption scenarios. Judging from the revenue of the digital business, this strategy has achieved good results.
Nowadays, many coffee brands on the market, including Tims Coffee and Costa Coffee, have adopted a multi-platform cooperation strategy to provide consumers with coffee delivery services through multiple platforms such as Ele.me, Meituan, and SF.
In the face of many "latecomers" to adopt differentiated positioning, as well as the way to enter the market in terms of taste, cost performance, store style and other dimensions, for Starbucks, in addition to absolute market share and user mentality, following up the multi-platform cooperation strategy is also a "uncrowned king" approach.
03 How does the platform give new answers?
Looking back at the previous years of "special star delivery" wading water, Ele.me and Starbucks still solved a series of problems such as the establishment of service standards, service link opening, brand mental shaping and so on, which can be said to be a system-level project.
For other platforms, how to ensure good service standards undoubtedly requires a new "run-in period". Taking Meituan as an example, to create a special delivery system for Starbucks, it needs to bet resources on it, and the shortcut in front of it is: apply the standard system established by Hungry.
Meituan seems to be doing just that. It can be found that the Starbucks takeaway delivery service accessed by Meituan this time does not use a new set of brands and systems, and still uses the previous name "Special Star Delivery".
In addition, in terms of delivery time, each store is within 30 minutes, which is the standard set by Starbucks when cooperating with Hungry. After receiving the membership card on the Meituan takeaway, the Starbucks star data will automatically synchronize, which means that the two member data are exchanged.
The above service system is the same as the standard previously formulated by Ele.me. Coincidentally, this is in line with the way the US group plays.
In September 2020, Wang Huiwen, the former second person of the Ustuan, opened a course called "Internet Product Management" in Tsinghua, which attracted the attention and discussion of many Internet people. In this course, one of meituan's experiences was mentioned: the latecomer advantage.
The first-mover advantage is well understood, that is, the first-mover has obtained the label of an innovator, attracted leading talents, and knew in advance what kind of pits there are, which may have accumulated unequal strategic resources. In the business world, the first-mover advantage is very important.
However, Wang Huiwen believes that the latecomers also have advantages - the first mover has educated capital and the market, and the late-movers do not need to do painful persuasion work: there are predecessors who travel the road, and the latecomers are convinced that this matter is feasible, and the rest is just to find a feasible way.
It can be found that the use of the advantage of latecomers to "pick peaches" play, from the store group purchase to the community group purchase, from the charging treasure to the network taxi to the shared bicycle... The development of Meituan's business is accompanied by this path dependence, and starbucks is no exception.
Take Ele.me, for example, with a high standard, high-demand industry leader customer, together with a new set of business models, it is necessary to pour a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources. After tens of millions of polishing, Ele.me and Starbucks made a special star delivery, realizing from 0 to 1, this process must be accompanied by painful run-in and investment in market education.
However, for the US group, using the advantage of being a latecomer to access, eliminating the process of repeated polishing of these wading waters, it is undoubtedly a shortcut.
In the book "Innovation Market Theory", the author talks about the cultivation and formation of the American innovation market represented by Silicon Valley, and mentions:
"Silicon Valley innovation in the United States leads the world, and the fundamental reason for its rise and success is that with first-class universities (Stanford University), first-class researchers and start-ups as the core subjects, and based on a free, open, innovative culture that encourages innovation and tolerates failure, it has built an ecosystem of close cooperation and mutual promotion between various subjects, forming an innovation market that attracts the world's attention."
In this matter, from the perspective of business behavior, "taking shortcuts" is understandable, but how to bring new innovative services and values to Starbucks is a proposition that "Meituans" will solve and face sooner or later.