Author丨Hu Yang
Is there still a way out for tablets? Four years ago, the answer seemed to be no.
At that time, tablet computers seemed to be a thin category: mobile phone screens were getting bigger and bigger, laptops were getting thinner and thinner, and tablets that could only be used to brush dramas were bought back, and the market space was squeezed smaller and smaller. Since 2015, tablet shipments in the Chinese market have declined from 25.92 million units to 22.41 million units in 2019.
The person in charge of Jingdong 3C digital tablet business recalled:
"At that time, the iPad accounted for two-thirds of the market, many manufacturers pulled out of the track, and only three or four players remained. The market is declining, and both brands and practitioners lack confidence. ”
Is there no chance for industry downside representatives? JD doesn't see it that way.
Jingdong procurement and sales, the basic work is to be the spokesperson of users, select high-quality goods that meet the needs of different users and provide good services. When there is no suitable product, the procurement and sales must have insight into the potential demand and connect the brand side and the upstream supply chain to develop the product through reverse customization.
Through market research and analysis, JD.com found that users' demand for tablets is far from being met.
"In the past, when talking about tablets, everyone thought that they could only use them after buying them back, but in fact, there are still many needs for tablets: office, learning, games. At that time, we proposed the 'Spark Plan' and set up a team composed of colleagues in procurement and sales, product planning, data and supply chain. We took the initiative to find potential brands, persuade them to enter the market, and tell them that there is still demand in the tablet market. ”
Strive for brand trust, provide market segment insights, product research and development and marketing support, starting with the "Spark Plan", after three years of sharpening, the tablet computer ecology is finally no longer a pool of stagnant water.
In 2022, JD.com and Lenovo launched the Savior Gaming Tablet, which sold hot after listing and became a footnote to the recovery of the tablet market - and according to IDC data, China's tablet market shipments in 2022 increased by 5.2% year-on-year, maintaining growth for four consecutive years since 2019. Overall, the planning forecast for tablet computers from the upstream supply chain to downstream manufacturers in 2023 is relatively cautiously optimistic.
Source: Official IDC Consulting
The tablet market has come to life, which is the representative of JD.com catching the trend and expanding the market, and this is far from all.
New categories create new increments
At the end of April this year, the former online education unicorn homework gang released its own hardware product, a learning machine priced in the price range of 2,000 yuan to 3,000 yuan. Learning hardware, which was once dominated by brands such as BBK, Little Genius, and Wenquxing, is ushering in more and more players like homework gangs.
Jingdong 618 opening red data shows that as of 24 o'clock on June 1, the turnover of electronic education categories increased by 100% year-on-year, and the transaction volume of student machines exceeded last year's whole day in 1 hour.
Learning hardware is on fire, but the opportunity doesn't come suddenly.
After 2020, the demand for tablets increased sharply in a short period of time, and JD.com found that more than 40% of users bought tablets as motivation to learn, and there were no learning tablet products with good price, content, and performance in the market at that time. Brands also want to seize the opportunity, but for new players who are either good at technology or content, it is difficult to define the product and how to price it.
As a channel that naturally has a close connection with consumers, JD.com has built a bridge between 3C digital manufacturers and consumers.
How smart should learning tablets be? What are the main parental needs for screens? For the most concentrated confusion of brands, JD.com can feedback the precipitated insights to the brand based on the analysis of consumer feedback, word of mouth, and purchase behavior.
In the first half of 2022, the JD.com 3C digital team observed that the mainstream products on the market are 10-inch to 12-inch tablets, and there are not many vertical large-screen products above 15 inches. Young children are more active, hand-held tablets are not easy for them, and it is easy to bump into the machine, and the distance is uncontrollable. If you can develop a vertical large screen similar to a computer all-in-one, it will be more practical for preschoolers.
When JD.com shared this trend insight with the brand side, the product line of vertical learning large screen was quickly enriched, and Xiwo W3 series, Xiaodu P20 series, BOE E3 series, BBK M3 series, etc. were successively listed.
After the learning machine turned on the screen off function to ensure that the children would not be too close to the screen to synchronize the user demand points to iFLYTEK, the new products developed by the brand received good market feedback. At 8 p.m. on May 23, within 28 hours of the opening of the pre-sale of JD 618, iFLYTEK's pre-sale orders increased by 5 times year-on-year.
During the 618 period, JD.com, together with the China Electronic Video Industry Association and iFLYTEK, led the formulation of the standard for the learning machine eye protection group, and there will be more standardized purchase standards for the eye protection function that parents are most concerned about in the future to avoid consumers being misled by false labels, exaggerations and even inferior products.
Users have more choices, segmentation needs have been more fully satisfied, and the market will naturally be expanded.
According to the statistics of iResearch and Multiwhale Education Research Institute, the scale of the mainland education intelligent hardware market is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 26%.
Frost & Sullivan's data also shows that by 2026, the total market size of China's intelligent learning devices will reach 145 billion yuan, and the future development space is considerable.
Source: Frost & Sullivan
Represented by learning machines, game tablets, office tablets and other categories have also achieved significant growth on JD.com.
According to the person in charge of Jingdong's 3C digital tablet business:
"Taking the game scenario as an example, if you want to play large-scale mobile games before, users have to buy high-end mobile phones of more than 4,000 yuan, which is tantamount to suppressing the demand of many users. To this end, we found Lenovo and other manufacturers to develop a 2,000 yuan game tablet, which was also sold out as soon as it was launched, and the typical product is Lenovo's savior game tablet. ”
After mining in multiple segmentation trends, JD.com has helped more manufacturers return to the tablet track. In 2021, the number of tablet manufacturers with annual sales of more than 100 million yuan in cooperation with JD.com reached more than a dozen, and the growth rate of the category also returned to double digits. More importantly, the ecology of the entire tablet boosted by JD.com has become rich.
The growth point of the tablet market has been created by JD.com.
Similar stories are repeated in other categories.
In 2019, with the release of the first generation of folding screen mobile phones by Samsung and Huawei, the folding screen market kicked off, and due to the high price, this new species can only initially become a small number of people's early choice. Now, things are very different.
According to the "2023 China Folding Screen Mobile Phone Market Insight Report" released by iResearch, folding screens have become a new opportunity point for the development of the smartphone industry, with about 3.6 million folding screen mobile phones shipped in China in 2022, a growth rate of 154.4%, and its shipments are expected to exceed 5.5 million units in 2023.
In just a few years, from a niche new product to the hope of the whole village, behind the leapfrog development of the folding screen mobile phone category, there is also a credit to JD.com.
To expand the market scale, we must first enrich the supply of products.
With a large and high-quality user base and a grasp of market trends, JD.com timely fed back consumers' demand for folding screens to the brand side through in-depth cooperation with Samsung in 2019, launched folding screen products, and sold them in China's e-commerce market, becoming the first batch of channels for folding screen mobile phones.
Among them, the deep co-construction with OPPO is a key step to promote folding screen mobile phones to the mass market.
In 2021, OPPO launched the first folding flagship OPPO Find N, choosing a price of 7699 yuan. The two parties jointly launched differentiated products, after the launch, the customized version was sold out in 3 minutes, and the ordinary version was sold out in half an hour, and the market clearly perceived the enthusiasm of users for folding screens for the first time.
As a pioneer, two years ago, JD.com joined hands with manufacturers to capture the trend and even accelerate the price of folding screen mobile phones, so that the light spread to the open land, but also laid the foundation for today's folding screen industry to take off.
It is in such a promotion that these 3C trend categories are no longer niche and non-mainstream, and the incremental space of the 3C market has also been opened. Turning stones into gold happens again and again in JD.com, how is "magic" refined?
The explosion of new products drives the growth of the category
Whether it is pulling the declining tablet back to the high-speed growth track, or accelerating the niche folding screen to the mainstream market, one of the magic of JD.com is to be able to deeply bind and co-innovate products based on effective user insights, gather multi-dimensional capabilities to detonate and provide long-term sustainable operation support.
Technical iteration and product iteration are fundamentally to serve users, and upstream brands and users seem to be close, but they are actually very separated. Users have needs, upstream does not necessarily know, the value of JD.com is to be able to connect the two ends.
In the view of the person in charge of Jingdong 3C digital Android business:
"Because we are close to users, we will dig out the explicit or hidden demands of users based on user needs and insights, translate them into understandable languages, and then serve the brand side."
In the in-depth co-construction with OPPO, JD.com provided detailed market insights for OPPO's new product definition after conducting user research on price, market share, sales volume, user characteristics of buying over-valued mobile phones, user purchase demand, purchase psychology, purchase channels and other dimensions.
Users who are willing to spend thousands more to buy a mobile phone usually have high spending power, are willing to try new things, and pay attention to the expression of product connotation and extension. Therefore, JD.com customized a marketing plan for OPPO Find N from three aspects: crowd reach, marketing events and service support.
On the basis of highly competitive product power and unprecedented pricing, in order to meet the dual needs of high-end users for products and product connotations, JD.com has made two plans. First, a limited-edition NFT giveaway was developed, and users can share it to friends with one click after purchasing a gift box on JD.com. Second, the famous architectural designer Shuhei Aoyama was invited to carry out cross-border marketing with the theme of "folding", and through the theme of life and art, the target users could have emotional identification and connection with OPPO Find N.
At the service level, JD.com has customized the "New Product Experience Officer" activity, where users can enjoy a 30-day trial without reason as long as they share their experience and feelings, and receive 200 yuan of "God Coupons" every month. This not only reduces the user's choice cost, but also realizes word-of-mouth communication, and binds discounts to further drive the sales of related products.
Differentiated product positioning and accurate grasp of user psychology have achieved results beyond expectations: the limited edition gift box was sold out in 1 second, which accumulated valuable user assets for OPPO's subsequent folding screen products and laid its market competitiveness.
This set of play verified on OPPO Find N has been precipitated as one of JD.com's methodologies for incubating many 3C digital subcategories.
For different brands of 3C digital products, JD.com can also provide personalized solutions to achieve full sales strategy support from product positioning, competitiveness analysis to sales planning, help brands find cold start core users, seize momentum and intercept users during the appointment period, continue to plant grass during the press conference and pre-sale period, achieve word-of-mouth fermentation, and finally achieve conversion in the sales stage. From point to surface, to achieve market feedback from single product detonation to category growth.
Detonating a single product is not the end, in the back end, JD.com has also invested a lot of resources to establish a perfect service system to provide long-term support for users and brands.
Taking service as an example, JD.com has iterated the ultimate services for 3C digital, including 30-day price guarantee, 30-day worry-free test for new products, 180-day replacement without repair, unlimited broken screen insurance for mobile phones, and cross-category trade-in.
In view of the experience slots that may be caused by the immaturity of the market, JD.com is also constantly working with partners to build solid infrastructure to make connections more efficient.
For example, in the display category, JD.com and BOE established the "Technology Innovation Research Institute" to promote the "S+ certification standard" in JD.com, simplifying the difficulty of consumers choosing displays and improving the user's purchase experience.
In the field of whole-home Wi-Fi, JD.com and Huawei launched the "Full Grid Plan" to jointly launch the Q6E and Q6 JD.com 20th anniversary customized models, and will continue to promote the cooperation and customization of whole-home Wi-Fi products, promote the market popularization and industrial development of whole-home Wi-Fi, and jointly solve the problem of "signal coverage" of users.
At this stage, the younger e-sports market and the diversification of video game demand have become new consumer trends. JD.com has a deep understanding of the trend demands of gamers, and has launched strategic cooperation with ROG on benchmark-level game handheld products, opening up new ideas for win-win development in brand innovation and new product co-creation.
In addition, the sudden rise of consumer entities in the field of intelligent audio and the consumption upgrade of the "back wave" have ushered in a blowout period for the high-end market of audio. Represented by the two flagship new products launched by HARMAN on JD.com, the two sides continue to expand the depth of cooperation in user operation, product innovation, marketing, omni-channel, etc., and jointly create a new benchmark for industry cooperation.
Relying on the deep binding of manufacturers in the supply chain, insight into trends based on user needs, and single-product explosion to promote the popularity of categories, JD.com helps brands find the key to open the door to the market. The continuous emergence of explosive products is a "rock point" where categories can continue to climb and become a trend.
This is also common in subdivided categories such as learning mobile phones, whole house WiFi, gaming displays, and mini hosts. Multi-pronged, separate exploration, the potential of 3C trend categories was completely stimulated by JD.com.
Make the 3Cs sexy again
For a long time, the 3C market was shrouded in a cloud of slowing growth and saturated capacity. How to explore more new opportunities and make 3C digital gain greater growth space has become a topic that the industry has been exploring all the time.
3C used to be just the abbreviation of computers, mobile phones, and cameras, and now the continuous emergence of subdivided categories is not only the result of technological progress, but also the solution to crack the growth ceiling of the industry.
How valuable is a new category? Apple products and the markets they open up speak volumes. Steve Jobs famously said, "Consumers don't know what they need until we come up with their products and they realize, this is what I want." "The iPhone 4, a cross-era new category launched in 2010, is the best interpretation of this sentence - the new category can not only bring visible market increments, but also leverage a series of industrial opportunities and promote the leapfrog upgrade of user experience."
Making new products is "creating wind", and this year's 618 has already felt its power.
Jingdong 618 opening red data shows that as of 24 o'clock on June 1, Jingdong and 18 tens of millions of 3C digital brands jointly created a year-on-year increase of more than 100%, of which folding screen mobile phone sales increased by 200% year-on-year, electronic education category turnover increased by 100% year-on-year, and student machine category turnover exceeded last year's whole day in 1 hour. As of June 12, the 618 battle report data shows that the number of high-performance notebook orders increased by 3 times year-on-year, and the transaction volume of the whole house WiFi increased by 30% year-on-year.
The wind can also be "made wind" without wind, which is inseparable from the deep supply chain capabilities that JD.com has precipitated in 20 years of development.
In the past 20 years, Jingdong's efforts in products, prices and services have made 3C digital, a highly professional market, and consumers are easy to "step on the pit", which has been reshaped very early and won the firm trust of users.
3C digital is JD.com's advantageous category, and the long-term trust of consumers has cultivated consumers who are willing to try early in new categories, and has also accumulated a group of high-value users with high loyalty, providing a good user base for brand innovation.
At the same time, self-operation allows JD.com to precipitate platform-level marketing data and consumer demand information for category planning, and has more motivation and ability to penetrate into the upstream industry chain. Only in this way can we innovate in the operation of new categories - in other words, it is too difficult for competing brands to operate a category, but JD.com can.
The supply chain capabilities precipitated in the process of 20 years of development are the value that JD.com is difficult to replace.
Last year, AOC introduced the G2 Gaming Cannon Pro monitor featuring the world's first 23.8-inch 2K resolution IPS panel. What is less known is that the 23.8-inch high-resolution gaming panel was previously a gap in the market, and JD.com filled that gap.
In previous consumer market insights, JD.com found that e-sports consumers are demanding monitors of different sizes, and monitor brands do not have such panel supply. To this end, JD.com found the most upstream panel manufacturer BOE. Since last year, JD.com and BOE joined hands with AOC to launch products and open up a new market segment in the field of 23.8-inch small-size, high-resolution e-sports, and now the participating brands have gradually expanded to more than ten. This year, 618 once again cooperated to develop a 24.5-inch high-resolution gaming panel to meet consumers' demand for a more extreme gaming experience.
The diversified cooperation between the two parties in the field of C2M has enriched the product supply of terminal brands, and the link between consumer experience from demand to manufacturing transformation has been greatly shortened. More importantly, by integrating the industrial chain, based on the panel, relying on the advantages of Jingdong channels and the influence of terminal brands, the two parties will expand into categories including displays, notebooks, mobile phones, tablets, TVs and other categories in the future, with huge imagination.
Not only that, including the emergence of new categories such as halterneck air conditioners and trendy 3C accessories represented by 65W chargers, as well as the support of JD.com's C2M supply chain.
Without sufficient user insights and supply chain capabilities, it is difficult to achieve the results of the continuous emergence of trendy cool products, because this is the key to controlling costs and improving efficiency.
As a retail enterprise, JD.com's current inventory turnover rate of self-operated goods is also about 30 days, but the SKUs managed have reached tens of millions, and the digital management of its supply chain has been the world's leading level. With the help of JD.com's supply chain, upstream brands can open up manufacturing, circulation, and service links and find a new growth curve in the market. This is particularly critical for asset-heavy 3C manufacturers with tens of billions of investments.
According to JD.com's 2022 Q3 earnings call information, JD.com's deep participation in the R&D and design of electrical products through C2M reverse customization can help manufacturing plants save an average of 75% of product demand research time and shorten the new product launch cycle by 67%.
The shortened time increases the efficiency of the brand, and the increase in efficiency will be accompanied by the expansion of the pricing space, resulting in a decrease in the terminal price. This is a magic weapon for JD.com's supply chain to leverage upstream high-quality resources and C-end user cognition.
The number of JD Home stores nationwide has exceeded 1,000 since 2016, and it has formed a rich 3C digital offline channel network with JD Mall, Jingdong Electric Super Experience Store and JD Computer Digital Specialty Store. This provides valuable assistance for trending categories to quickly reach users, provide real machine experience at the first moment of new product launch, expand market awareness, and accelerate category development.
With its understanding and connection with the market and brand, JD.com has set off a storm in the seemingly calm track, and JD.com's 3C digital trend category interprets "opportunities are always left to those who are prepared" to the extreme. 3C digital manufacturers in the new track are riding the wind and harvesting growth, and consumers are renewing their scientific and technological wisdom life with the blessing of rich and high-quality products.
Connecting supply and demand, making the cake bigger, as a bridge between supply and demand, JD.com, which celebrated its 20th anniversary, handed over an answer that exceeded expectations. And these, I believe are just the beginning.