「Core Tips」
Meituan launched Starbucks, which starbucks and Ele.me exclusively cooperated for three years. Nowadays, openness is the main theme of the Internet, merchants can more freely choose the takeaway platform to settle in, consumers can vote with their feet at any time, for all platforms, this is an opportunity and a challenge, because the elimination occurs all the time.
Author | Chen Yangyuan
Edit | Xing Yun
In the game of China's Internet giants, "grabbing Starbucks" was once regarded as an important achievement.
When the "payment campaign" was under fire, on December 8, 2016, Tencent announced a strategic cooperation with Starbucks to access WeChat Pay in 2,500 stores in Starbucks China, and WeChat occupied Starbucks' exclusive payment portal for nine months, preemptively attacking. For this cooperation, the Tencent team flew to Starbucks' Seattle headquarters several times a year to negotiate with Hong Kong, opening the WeChat entrance to a company that had no capital relationship with itself for the first time.
In the following two years, Hungry Mo did everything in its power to attract Starbucks, and the top level also interacted. On August 2, 2018, Starbucks announced a full cooperation with Ali, in which takeaway delivery reached a 3-year exclusive cooperation with Ele.me. There are 2,000 Starbucks stores in more than 30 cities across the country, equipped with exclusive Starbucks Hungry Food Delivery Riders.
After 3 years, the re-selected Starbucks is going in a different direction. Entering the 23rd year of Chinese mainland, Starbucks needs a wider range of partners and deeper service capabilities. What lies ahead of China's Internet companies is a whole new issue.
On January 18, Starbucks reached a cooperation with Meituan, and the special star delivery service will be further expanded in Meituan. Consumers who place an order for Starbucks through the Meituan Takeaway App can enjoy exclusive discounted goods, membership rights and interests, exclusive delivery services, and customized order experiences.
What kind of signal is released behind this?
1. Why choose Meituan?
Starbucks officially joined hands with Meituan to find partners with a more open attitude.
On January 18, Starbucks China announced that it has reached a cooperation with Meituan on digital space. The cooperation will leverage the comprehensive service of the online platform to reach the advantages of providing services to consumers. In addition to the above-mentioned multiple exclusive rights and interests release, the "Starbucks Reserve" series of coffee products will also land on Meituan Takeaway for the first time.
At the same time, Meituan Takeaway has been fully connected with the "My Starbucks Rewards Club" membership system, and the purchase of Starbucks Special Starbucks Special Star Delivery on Meituan Takeaway can also accumulate Starbucks membership points, ensuring that Starbucks member users can enjoy the same rights and interests when placing orders on different platforms.
In the face of the growing competitive pressure of the Chinese coffee market, Starbucks, as an established coffee chain, is seeking more new strength support in the online field.
Starbucks has a long history of valuing the Chinese market. As the fastest growing and second largest overall market, the China region is critical to Starbucks' profits and growth.
But emerging competitors are putting pressure on Starbucks. The new local coffee forces in China, represented by Luckin, are expanding rapidly, and Tims, who are also foreign competitors, are also eyeing the tiger; on the other hand, convenience stores such as convenience bees and familymarts are self-operated coffee, and boutique instant solutions such as Santo and Yongpu are also seizing the coffee cups of young people.
At the same time, the epidemic has repeatedly increased the uncertainty of offline store operations, and the flow of customers to the store has been affected to a certain extent. According to the financial report data, Starbucks's same-store sales growth in China in the third fiscal quarter of 2021 was less than expected.
Changes in the general environment, the takeaway market, and digital business have become an important breakthrough for Starbucks to tap the increment of China's coffee market. As of Starbucks' fiscal third quarter of 2021, mobile orders in the Chinese market accounted for 34% of overall sales.
In this context, how to bring more increments to the brand and how to provide customized services that are more in line with the needs of the brand to ensure the brand's experience have undoubtedly become the criteria for Starbucks to choose partners.
As of September 30, 2021, the number of meituan's annual trading users reached 667 million, a record high; the frequency of users' consumption on Meituan also continued to increase, with an average annual number of transactions of 34.4 transactions, an increase of 29% year-on-year. Starbucks's choice of Meituan means that it has entered a larger pool of user traffic.
From the perspective of the more segmented takeaway market, the high-stick customer base of takeaway services is highly overlapping with the target users of the coffee market. This is also the advantage area of meituan.
On the other hand, from the details of the cooperation, Meituan's sincerity in ensuring the brand and customer experience may be the core of Impress Starbucks.
In order to ensure that the taste of the coffee delivered is consistent with the coffee enjoyed in the store, Meituan Takeaway provides a customized delivery solution for Starbucks": equipped with an exclusive enterprise and customer delivery team, providing more efficient on-site delivery services and a variety of different capacity modes to ensure delivery time. In addition, Meituan will also distribute exclusive overalls for riders, use hot and cold separation delivery boxes, and set up exclusive delivery greetings to reflect Starbucks' brand characteristics and enhance user experience.
Starbucks Starbucks Starbucks Rewards Club more than 15 million active members and their spending power also stirred the heart of the Meituan, with the completion of the "official announcement" of the cooperation, Starbucks officially on the "shelf" of the Meituan. Whether the effect of 1+1>2 in the theory can be achieved still needs to be verified over a long period of time.
2, the basic skill of the platform is no longer "enough is good"
In fact, as early as December 2021, before the expiration of the 3-year exclusive cooperation between Starbucks and Ele.me, some insiders pointed out that Starbucks was seeking new partners in the Chinese market, and SF, Meituan, Sam's Club, etc. had all discussed cooperation with Starbucks. Tech Planet also quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Hungry completed the renewal with Starbucks in December, and the new cooperation is no longer an exclusive agreement.
This also shows that Starbucks has moved from a more "open" strategy.
With the opening of the era of strong supervision of the domestic Internet, fairness and openness have become the main themes. Merchants can freely "vote with their feet", which is both an opportunity and a challenge for Internet platforms.
Whether it is Starbucks or other brand merchants, they will begin to "shop around" in the new environment of free choice of platforms, find platforms that are more suitable for their own needs and can provide more high-quality services for cooperation, which also means that the competition of platforms will no longer be limited to channels, but will move towards personalization, diversification and refinement.
The basic skill of the platform is no longer "enough is good". Where there is a wider consumer coverage and a deeper service capability, it has become a key consideration for merchants to choose a platform.
The "delivery" link that most affects the taste and user experience of food in the takeaway industry is led by the logistics team of the platform at one end, and the intelligent services and data processing levels on the platform online are also linked to the other end. Whether the best merchants can match the best experience for users in the first time is not only a simple ranking of the nearest distance, but also may be related to the number of stores, waiting time, etc.
Coffee is a type of goods with extremely high requirements in takeaway delivery, consumer groups are mostly service-sensitive, price-insensitive, Starbucks such businesses have more quality requirements, so the temperature, taste, freshness, spillover problems of coffee put forward a full line of tests for all aspects of takeaway.
For the US group, whether it can seize the opportunity of Starbucks' opening up also needs to show hard power.
The customized delivery solution provided by Meituan for Starbucks this time is to ensure the delivery experience. Behind this is the accumulation of meituan over the past many years. Since 2019, from McDonald's, KFC, Wal-Mart, Wumart, Naisher's tea, to today's Starbucks, cooperation with many merchants has honed meituan's ability to solve problems through customized distribution.
In this cooperation, Meituan Takeaway launched an intelligent sell-out guidance service, and the system will automatically transfer orders for consumers to a nearby store when the purchased products are temporarily out of stock, and synchronize the shopping cart items. In addition to the high-scale and efficient distribution team, the digital intelligence and system advantages of the platform must fall into the details.
The service value and individual needs of the brand also need to enter the system interface.
Recently, some users searching for Starbucks in Meituan may find that a brand professional page has quietly been launched. When the user has more Starbucks stores around, the system will give priority to entering the brand area page and quickly recommend stores with "sufficient goods", "fastest delivery" and "selection series". In the user ordering link, Meituan Takeaway also provides a variety of customized choices such as different cup types, temperature, extraction methods, and milk types to achieve accurate matching of personalized needs.
Listening to needs is a kind of sincerity, and solving and realizing is a kind of ability. Under the more free and open competition pattern, brand merchants have more space to choose patient and professional platforms.
3. Elimination occurs all the time
In a more fair and open competitive environment, "hard work" will become a long-term topic in the industry.
Because those who "vote with their feet" before merchants may be picky consumers.
In the past, the platform could compete with consumers who liked this brand by binding merchants, and even if the service experience of consumers on the platform was not good, it was difficult to easily make another choice.
Nowadays, consumers can order Starbucks takeaways on different platforms at the same time, which means that "elimination happens all the time", and small flaws in platform services and a mistake may lead to the loss of consumers.
More free and equal competition means that choice and change come more rapidly, and the platform needs to forge solid "basic skills" in advance. Meituan guarantees the efficient delivery of Starbucks from its "Meituan Distribution" brand launched since 2019, and has formed a team for many big brands or featured merchants to polish and improve the distribution system along the way.
The importance that brand merchants attach to customer experience will also bring the platform to the next stage of the service capability competition. The accurate delivery of preferential treatment, the convenience and speed of platform purchase, and the after-sales level that affect the image of the platform require the platform to make more active thinking and intimate services, and do a good job in refined operation.
The strengths and weaknesses of each platform may continue to expand. Taking the e-commerce platform as an example, JD.com, which holds efficient logistics, may further expand its advantages in high-priced and difficult to transport goods such as electronic products, while Taobao Tmall, which has a more perfect customer service system, is more popular in the beauty and personal care and apparel industries, and low-cost goods are more concentrated in Pinduoduo.
The demarcation of wired is disappearing, but when merchants choose a platform, they will still consider the matching degree of commodity positioning and platform customer groups, so as to allocate the operating resources of different platforms, and the traditional and strong areas of the platform often have a more complete service merchant system to form an adaptation.
Especially in the initial stage of multi-line operation, merchants need to explore the best strategy, including personnel allocation and cost delivery, and the run-in with the platform has become a major test.
Competition in the industry and platform is entering a long-term track, and the battle will not end when the merchants settle in, but just begin.
For the platform of nesting and attracting phoenixes, everything has to return to the "service", the fierce war of the Internet "horse racing" has quietly cooled down, and the story of once and for all is no longer there. The attraction of merchants through quality services is the key to the development of the platform.