Wen 丨 賴夕
Three years after being "bought out" by Hungry Mo, Starbucks appeared on the list of Merchants of Meituan Takeaway.
At the same time, there is also starbucks' high-end coffee brand reserve series, which is also the first time that the reserve has landed on the takeaway platform.
For Starbucks, the rules of the game in the Chinese market have changed again.
In 2008, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz was commissioned to return to the company in an attempt to solve the complex transformation that loomed over the global chain giant: digitalization.
Previously, Starbucks was a successful sample of the so-called "third place", and its stores played a unique buffer role as a third scene independent of the family home and office.
Therefore, Starbucks does not pursue the turnover rate like its peers, and those urban white-collar workers who drink coffee and knock on notebooks at Starbucks have become the material that highlights Starbucks' commercial culture.
In the United States, Starbucks also has a tradition of displaying reading shelves in the store, encouraging customers to grab a copy of the "New York Times" and slowly pass the morning in a soft chair.
To paraphrase, it will certainly not be the second Starbucks that defeats — or threatens — Starbucks, and after years of shrugging off all competitors, Starbucks and its "third space" culture have been pried open by smartphones.
The biggest breakthrough of the mobile Internet lies in the scene, the mobile phone is not like a computer, it can be used in any environment, even the time to wait for the elevator can be brushed on several short videos, then specially to the coffee shop to enjoy the rest of the idle, there is no as irreplaceable as before.
More importantly, smart phones can meet the needs of users, in addition to content consumption, but also increasingly take over life, Luckin although it has long been reduced to a joke, but it has indeed grown under the eyes of Starbucks.
Therefore, one of the most important tasks of Howard Schultz's second tenure at the helm of Starbucks was to transform Starbucks' proud corporate culture and upgrade the "third space" into the "fourth space".
The concept of "fourth space" comes from the extension of "third space", when consumers' lives are full of digital products, then Starbucks can not be willing to only serve customers in stores.
As a result, Starbucks' digital marketing budget has grown, it has made a lot of achievements on almost all of the mainstream social media, even the app has hundreds of resident teams to develop and operate, and finally, in China, the world's second largest market, Starbucks has made the choice it once firmly resisted: let the consumption and delivery of coffee happen outside the store.
To this day, it may only be those who signed the confidentiality agreement at the time to know what conditions Hungry mo prescribed to get the exclusive delivery rights of Starbucks on the takeaway platform, but this scene has also turned over in just a few years.
Whether it's the fabled exclusive agreement that finally expired, or China's market regulators have called off the "either-or" convention, since the moment Starbucks hit the shelves of Meituan, its takeaway anxiety may have been less.
And the end of the era of exclusivity has actually benefited the entire industry.
There is no need to say more about the merchant's side, one more platform to choose from, which means one more traffic entrance, and consumers can also place orders in their commonly used apps, without being forced to download another App in order to click to the exclusive business.
As for the takeaway platform, it seems to be the party that has been rectified, but it also has the opportunity to rebuild the equal competitive relationship and win the market through service capabilities rather than the ability to spend money.
The US group will definitely agree with this conclusion.
In the same year that Ele.me signed a contract with Starbucks, Meituan rang the listing bell on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, perhaps not expecting that dealing with policy and supervision would become the main theme of the entire industry in the next few years.
But while experiencing pain, the return of change has also arrived as scheduled, and Meituan is not the only option for Starbucks in the process of expanding its takeaway channels, but in the rules of fair bidding, it has always been a service win.
Meituan's customized delivery plan for Starbucks is almost tailor-made, and in the place where Starbucks cares most - whether the packaging and transportation of fresh coffee will affect the taste of consumers in the end - the input cost of Meituan and Starbucks is huge, from the cup lid of the self-returning room to the storage box isolated from hot and cold, which is different from ordinary distribution equipment.
For meituan, taking down Starbucks means laying a bridgehead for multinational brands, not so much that they are not aware of the takeaway channel, but rather that the delivery standards of takeaway always emphasize efficiency, and the pursuit is timely delivery, as for whether the drink will be spilled out and whether the bag is marked with a dead knot, it is not within the maximum common denominator of platform performance.
Therefore, the knot must also be tied to the knot.
In 2019, Meituan Distribution officially established the brand and took the same-city logistics solution as one of the strategic directions, of which the galaxy model is to customize the service module for the traditional supermarkets, so that the distribution network can be like cloud computing, that is, on-demand, elastic and controllable.
Specific to the current Starbucks project, it is the resident rider, co-branded uniform, exclusive equipment and the copywriting accurately said when the coffee is delivered to the customer's hand, which is equivalent to taking over the Starbucks takeaway order business in the form of outsourcing.
In the meituan takeaway application, users can customize the order from all options such as cup type, temperature, extraction method and milk type according to their own taste, and Starbucks also opens the membership data to the Meituan, so that users can directly inherit the rights and interests of the member, and still accumulate points when placing orders in the Meituan.
In short, Starbucks' entry into Meituan is not just to move the store to the platform, but the starbucks user attribute rights, delivery speed density, and even product taste are all synchronized.
This is obviously an extremely harsh test of the platform's service capabilities, and perhaps the only thing that can complete these at the same time now is the Meituan, which relies on its own advantages as a mature platform to finally make this cooperation successfully surface.
The ambition of comparing the distribution network to cloud computing also makes it difficult not to think of how Amazon made AWS into a second curve, which was originally just a technology product that served Amazon's own business, and after opening up the remaining computing power, it found that the space for monetization was amazing, and eventually changed the server industry.
Needless to say, the reason why Starbucks chose Meituan is that it has never lacked a die-hard customer base, and the anxiety of the takeaway business in the past is mostly due to the dilemma that product migration is easy, but the culture is difficult to copy. How to open up the market while maintaining its own style, Meituan Takeaway uses an open privileged interface to meet the two demands of Starbucks.
What is more valuable for discussion is the reason why the US group has done so much in order to win starbucks.
Takeaway has long been regarded as a hasty choice to fill up the stomach, so whether in the choice of meals or drinks, the fast food category has long occupied the top position in the sales volume of Meituan's takeaway orders.
This is also why milk tea can be loved by young people today, in a more life-oriented scene, with a cup of FMCG products that they can fully afford to alleviate the pressure of life, although it is not too high quality, but it is enough to achieve a soothing effect.
In any case, after a busy week, most users will not choose to use takeaways to spend a weekend night that wants to improve their quality of life.
And not willing to accept the status quo, Meituan naturally wants to provide users with another quality upgraded life path. The types of takeaway are dazzling, and the culture behind its products is also very different, meituan relies on its own advantages to deeply empower merchants, so as to retain the most attractive side of merchant goods and culture, which is the answer given by Meituan's intention to improve the quality of life of users.
In other words, becoming a platform to show products to users is no longer the only option for Meituan takeaway.
Michelin ratings and black pearls on the list can make contemporary young people flock to it, go to Haidilao to see chef ramen, punch in a certain internet red restaurant These behaviors are also loved by consumers, in the final analysis, these are easy to let users accept the way of life, and Meituan is turning these lifestyles into a reality in the field of takeaway.
There is no difference with the logic of Starbucks entering the Meituan, a young Chinese who has not yet been consumed by amway to coffee, his mobile phone must not be equipped with Starbucks App, but there is a high probability that there will be a Meituan, and it is this space for cultural dissemination that gives the Meituan and every catering brand a sufficient reason to cooperate.
More importantly, this means that the cooperation model between merchants and takeaway platforms has been further innovated and upgraded, so that the platform can empower merchants in the future to provide a new idea, so that more catering brands have the possibility of embracing the "fourth space".
At this point in the story, Meituan is no longer limited to the role of the merchant as a traffic entrance, it provides every user with a more participatory space - such as the terrier that tangled the cup name in Starbucks and was dissuaded by the face - and also officially withdrew from history.
While this change is driven by external factors – namely, tighter regulations – its impact is enough to rewrite the rules of the game on a local scale.
Diet can be enough to reach the "people-oriented food- oriented" in the ancient population, and it can also be said that small can also be "caring about every little thing around you" advocated by Ernest Timnit, and in the near future, takeaway will no longer be the only option of "will be", but can also become a kind of exquisite life with coffee in the palm of the hand.