Author: He Danlin (original)
This year's New Year sales season, Wal-Mart has played a lot of new tricks.
Xiaoshidai noticed that in the area with the theme of "New Year Goods Street", focusing on consumption scenarios such as Chinese New Year's Eve rice, gift-giving, travel, and festival renewal, the retailer selected 400 innovative and valuable Spring Festival seasonal products, including providing "whole meal Chinese New Year's Eve solution", which successfully attracted the favor of many customers. Recently, hundreds of Wal-Mart hypermarkets across the country have ushered in a new peak in customer flow.
Not only that, Walmart recently released a video to share its insights in a warm way - "People who have visited the supermarket together are the ones who really walk into each other's lives." This Spring Festival, many people who have pushed shopping carts together for a long time will reunite again. When "Let's Visit Wal-Mart" carries good memories, Wal-Mart is not just a supermarket for consumers, but a temperature full of human fireworks, which is enough to trigger emotional resonance in the bits and pieces of life.
In fact, this year's New Year Battle is also a concentrated presentation of Walmart China's latest transformation results.
In recent years, focusing on "commodity power" and "price competitiveness", this chain retail giant is accelerating its transformation in the Chinese market, and even more and more beyond the role of a single retailer, more and more in product co-creation with upstream brands and suppliers, empowering their new product research and development, providing differentiated and cost-effective products that can create surprises for consumers, and achieving a win-win situation - Wal-Mart is favored by consumers, consumers get a better quality of life, and suppliers have achieved long-term and sustainable development.
Co-create product power
Walmart's launch this year of its prepared menu line that puts on a hearty Chinese New Year's Eve table is the latest example of its continued improvement in its product power.
At the end of last month, the retailer released the "North-South Famous Restaurant Signature Dishes" solution and joined hands with 18 North-South restaurants across the country to launch more than 70 "authentic, delicious and inexpensive" pre-made dishes, covering hors with hors d'oeuvres, soups, hot dishes, staples and desserts, and including the "eight major cuisines" of Chinese and foreign local characteristics - Beijing, Cantonese, Sichuan, Benbang Subang, Fujian, Lu, Huaiyang and Korean.
In order to make the purchase of Chinese New Year's Eve rice more convenient and worry-free, Wal-Mart also provides lazy matching ideas and launches a variety of combination packages, including Fortune First Meal for 4 people, Six Six Dashun Package, Reunion Long Time Package, etc. At the same time, in addition to offline purchases, customers can also achieve one-hour home delivery through the Extreme Express service.
Behind the refreshing product power is the embodiment of the retail giant's "customer first" strategy. From the perspective of customer needs, Walmart proposed the industry's first pre-made dish whole table solution, opening up a new track in the category, and thus stood out in this year's "Chinese New Year's Eve rice" competition.
"Many families are especially looking forward to this year's Spring Festival, hoping to return to the 'original taste of the New Year'. As a community-based retailer, Wal-Mart Hypermarket continues to improve its product strength, so that customers can feel the beauty of life in their products and start a new year. Zhu Xiaojing, president and CEO of Walmart China, said.
Empower upstream
It's worth noting that the retailer isn't just playing the role of selling goods through channels.
According to reports, more than half of the cooperative catering brands of Wal-Mart pre-made dishes are "testing the waters" of supermarket retail channels for the first time. Wangxiangyuan, which has 55 stores across the country, is the first time to set foot in the pre-made vegetable track, and Wal-Mart has worked with it to co-create products, while also empowering packaging design, high-standard systematic production, and open supplier resources.
"For example, when a freshly made dish becomes frozen, some of the seasonings and side dishes will deteriorate, so we will tell Wangxiang Garden what kind of chili, green pepper and red pepper to choose to ensure that the final pre-made dish is full of color and flavor." Zhu Jun, senior vice president and chief purchasing officer of Hypermarket at Walmart China, once told Xiaoshidai.
While "going deep upstream" in the process of polishing its commodity strength, Wal-Mart has also promoted regional catering brands to go nationwide with its transparent and simple cooperation model, mature retail experience empowerment, and efficient supply chain.
Walmart Supermarket
Taking the well-known northwestern cuisine brand Xibei as an example, before reaching a cooperation with Walmart, it was worried about the high cost and complicated routines of entering supermarkets. With a simple and transparent cooperation model, respect for professionalism and retail experience, Walmart has finally made Xibei take "this step" with confidence, and its signature dishes spicy sheep scorpion and Mongolian beef bones are already available for sale on Walmart channels.
In addition, East China catering brand Little Chef, which only has regional distribution capabilities, is also able to leverage the national market with the blessing of Wal-Mart's supply chain, and it only needs to focus on the taste, quality and supply of goods. Through the partnership with Walmart, F&B brands are expected to quickly build a second curve of growth with less effort and investment.
With a transparent and simple cooperation model, mature retail experience empowerment, and efficient supply chain, Wal-Mart has "gone deep" in the process of polishing its commodity power, and has also boosted regional catering brands to go global, which is expected to quickly establish a second curve of growth with less energy and investment.
Leading the way in smart spending
In addition to creating a differentiated product portfolio, another major drainage tool for this retailer is to provide a high price-performance ratio.
Retail is an economy of scale, but also an economy of efficiency. It is not difficult to provide low prices in the short term, but it is not easy to maintain price competitiveness on a sustainable basis. To achieve this, Walmart relies on "internal strength cultivation", and its two major paths include streamlining commodity SKUs and improving the end-to-end efficiency of the supply chain.
This year's New Year sales are a good example of this.
Trade-offs require decision-making and execution throughout. In terms of streamlining SKUs, Xiaoshidai learned that taking Spring Festival fruit stocking as an example, Walmart mainly focuses on gift giving and health needs, of which only two types of orange New Year gift boxes are selected. In addition, for the Spring Festival decorative rabbit zodiac stool, Wal-Mart also decisively abandoned a variety of color specification choices, leaving only the burgundy version with a strong festive atmosphere, so as to achieve a relatively low price on the basis of volume.
Improving supply chain efficiency is another important means to bring a sense of value. Taking Nongfu Spring 17.5° orange gift box as an example, Wal-Mart has achieved outstanding price advantages by locking the volume throughout the season to stabilize the supply and ensure cost advantages, and it is reported that sales have doubled year-on-year this year.
In the retailer's Spring Festival fruit stocks, imported goods accounted for as much as 65%. Taking imported cherries as an example, in order to ensure price advantages, Wal-Mart has strengthened direct sourcing from the place of origin, locked in the source of goods and limited brands and varieties in Chilean origin in advance, and focused on 2J, 3J and 4J large fruit diameter specifications. As of last week, during this year's annual sales, Walmart's Big Fruit Path cherry gift box has achieved double-digit year-on-year growth.
Xiaoshidai noticed that in order to make the sense of value more intuitive, Wal-Mart's "New Year Shopping Street" promotion strategy is not complicated at all, and most products use a simple "two pieces and nine discounts" method to allow customers to have a smoother and time-saving shopping experience.
In fact, "sense of value" is also one of the keywords of Walmart China's transformation strategy in the past two years.
In May 2022, Walmart carried out a major upgrade to its own brands in terms of product selection, quality and cost performance. Some existing commodities have achieved better cost after improving the efficiency of the whole chain, thus having a greater price advantage, including Huiyi's Northeast rice series.
The company once explained to Xiaoshi that as a heavy cargo, the transportation cost of rice has a great impact on the cost. "Through the optimization of logistics, we have reduced the number of links from the production area through the distribution center to the store, and it only takes 10 days for each rice hulling to reach the store. As a result, by optimizing supply chain efficiency, we can benchmark the mainstream regular rice on the market by more than 20%. This kind of people's livelihood products achieve guaranteed quality and affordable prices, fulfilling our mission of allowing customers to 'spend less and live well'."
Walmart's competitive strategy of bringing differentiated products with a sense of value to customers requires the blessing of core strength. The retailer's newly upgraded "Global Shopping" business in 2022 is the latest example. Relying on Walmart's global supply chain advantages, the business focuses on "global big-name direct procurement, fidelity and low prices".
On the occasion of this year's Spring Festival, Walmart Global continues to leverage global sourcing resources to achieve "low-price for big brands", covering popular international brand products such as Hennessy VSOP cognac, Estée Lauder small brown bottle, Lego toys, Zhengguan Zhuang supplement gift box and so on. Taking advantage of the current "vitamin C fever", Wal-Mart also airlifted the first batch of more than 20,000 vitamin C chewable tablets and Childlife baby liquid vitamin C and other products from Australia, the United States and other places.
Amplify omnichannel experiences
In response to changes in consumer behavior, Wal-Mart has become more and more diversified in channel layout.
In recent years, the retailer has continued to increase its e-commerce business with great success. Taking its home business data as an example, data from the O2OMind platform's "Retail Brand 020 Performance Analysis Report for the First Quarter of 2022" shows that in the first quarter of 2022, Walmart's revenue ranked first in China, with a total revenue of more than 2.353 billion in the first quarter, a year-on-year increase of 21.5%. This shows that Walmart's home business has penetrated the minds of consumers.
During 618 and 88 last year, Walmart's hypermarket O2O sales reached a record high, recording double-digit rapid growth, indicating that hypermarkets' strategy of omni-channel development and online and offline all-scenario integration has achieved remarkable results. Data show that Walmart's sales on August 6 were 1.6 times that of last year; in the four days from August 5 to 8, 97% of hypermarket stores broke the record of the same period last year, and the average daily order volume of stores increased by more than 70%.
As of press time today, Walmart has released an updated report card. Xiaoshidai noticed that Wal-Mart won the sales champion of Jingdong New Year Festival supermarket merchants, twice refreshing the historical peak of single-day sales of a single merchant on the platform.
Differentiated commodity power, obvious sense of value, more convenient shopping experience, Wal-Mart's three engines at the same time, the retail giant ran fast and stable this Spring Festival, and is expected to usher in a "good start" in 2023.