Author | Shi Hangqian Pan Qingqing Editor | Shi Wanjia Dacheng
[Ebang Power News] "We dismantled the system! This sentence means a lot!
The heartfelt words of a brand owner revealed a wave of helplessness and anxiety.
Why disassemble the system?
He said: "The store wants to buy goods and sends demand to the headquarters, and the headquarters can't meet it, because the real 'decision' is the warehouse!" ”
"What's the problem?" That's a little bit of digital storytelling.
At present, the general environment facing enterprises is - "Ice and fire double heaven!" "On the one hand, the sudden outbreak of the new crown epidemic has exposed the shortcomings of the inherent model of the retail industry. The offline store is closed, and the business is closed? The company can't work, and the business has to stop? ......
A considerable number of enterprises have suddenly woken up at this moment that digitalization is not only a slogan, but also a weapon that can "save their lives" in critical moments!
On the other hand, capital is surging in, forcing brand operation service providers to concentrate on listing. According to the incomplete statistics of Ebang Power, since 2020, there are at least 8 digital operation service providers that have been listed or are on the way to listing.
People attribute the rapid rise of digital service providers to the front-end digital demand caused by the impact of the epidemic!
"Compared with the search for a way to digitize yourself, it is faster to go digital with the help of SaaS service providers." A person in charge of a clothing brand in Changshu, Jiangsu Province, told Ebang Power.
According to iiMedia Research, as of the end of July 2020, there were 95 investment cases in the data service field; from January to September 2020, there were 13 financing incidents in the intelligent customer service track, with a total amount of about 3 billion yuan.
Since 2019, the SCRM field, including Qunmai, Tanma and Bancheng Cloud, has successively obtained financing.
What is worrying is that the boom in the service provider market has not driven the process of digitization of the retail industry.
The "water sellers" are full of pots and bowls, and the "water eaters" are struggling. What happened in between?
01 The collective "fall" of the supermarket! Why did the transformation lose to the Internet?
"We took the system apart." A brand owner with early awareness of digital transformation told Ebang Power.
He said that he initially knew very clearly to do digitalization, but later found that the cost of trial and error as a brand owner's self-built system is far greater than imagined, and he spent tens of millions of dollars just to make detours, so it is better to use the tools of the e-commerce platform to do a good job in consumer marketing first.
"We have set up a new front-end channel, and all businesses have been digitized. But you will find that the store wants a certain amount of goods, sending demand to the headquarters, the headquarters can not meet, because the real 'decision' is the warehouse. They said no, and there was nothing headquarters could do. Another clothing brand with more than 10 years of seniority told Ebang Power that the construction of digitalization can rely on investment, but it is not easy to practice.
On the road of digital transformation, the first to feel the pressure and put it into action are the physical "giants".
On July 7, Yonghui Supermarket issued an announcement that Zhang Jingyi, the secretary of the board of directors, applied to resign as secretary of the board of directors. As of the close of trading on July 7, Yonghui was 4.82 yuan per share, with a market value of 45.868 billion yuan, compared with the market value of 100 billion yuan in December 2018.
On July 12, after six consecutive years of losses in the main business, Suning Tesco announced that Zhang Jindong resigned as chairman of Suning Tesco. His resignation this time has been described as "letting go.".
Event review: Zhang Jindong stepped down as chairman of Suning Tesco: Today I chose to let go of support
In fact, the entire supermarket industry has experienced huge shocks in 2020. Judging from the 2020 performance of 15 supermarket listed companies, only 6 have a year-on-year increase in revenue, and the growth is limited, and the other 9 revenues have declined, and the decline is almost in double digits. The particularity of Suning and Yonghui in it is that they have been at the forefront of transformation, trying to compete with new formats and Internet forces.
The new retail format represented by super species pushed Yonghui's market value to the peak in 2017. In the stage of overall market shock, the stock price of Yonghui Supermarket has risen all the way, from 4.76 yuan in early 2017 to 12.12 yuan in January 2018, and the market value has increased by 2.5 times, becoming one of the phenomenon-level stocks of the year, but the super species has always been in a state of loss. Then the market value of Yonghui, a stripped super species, fell all the way down and almost returned to the original point.
From the opening of 80 stores to the announcement that "it is not the focus of the business", Yonghui Super Species ended in "failure". "It is said that the epidemic is the last straw that crushes the super species, but it is not."
Some people in the supermarket industry pointed out that the problem of Yonghui super species lies in consciousness and internal organization. "For example, the original system should be hard added to the new format, blindly new when it is not considered, wrapped in other star formats and plunged into the seafood, the application of the suspension chain system, etc., but in fact, they have not thought clearly about their real role."
Suning on the other side was actually the first retail giant to react to the "new retail" at that time, e-commerce. In order to cope with the impact, Suning shifted its business to online and began to operate Suning Tesco. But after 6 consecutive losses, the "receiver" behind the scenes to save Suning from life and death seems to be still a platform.
On July 5, State-owned Assets of Jiangsu Province and Nanjing Municipality led the establishment of Jiangsu New Retail Innovation Fund Phase II (Limited Partnership) to acquire 16.96% of the equity of Suning Tesco. The industrial investors in the New Retail Innovation Fund also include Huatai Securities, Alibaba, Xiaomi, Haier and other partners. According to relevant media reports, the candidate to succeed the chairman of Suning Tesco is likely to be Huang Mingduan. But although Huang Mingduan has experience in single-handedly founding RT-Mart, RT-Mart has long been handed over to Ali, where can Suning Tesco have a way forward?
At an industry forum in April this year, BBK Chairman Wang Fill exclaimed: "Affected by the impact of community group buying, the supermarket format has reached the darkest moment of life and death." This year is likely to be harder than last year. ”
But supermarkets, is it the end?
Becoming the first batch of crab eaters for digital transformation is because supermarkets are relatively standardized in offline formats. The understanding, practice, and running through digitalization, the pits they have stepped on and the difficulties they have overcome in digital transformation, other retail companies can not bypass it.
02 Ali + Tencent Settlement:
The traffic ecology is unprecedentedly open, how can brands catch up with the express?
Just a few days ago, Ali and Tencent were rumored to be about to carry out the great reconciliation of the century - to open up the ecosystem to each other.
Event Review: Ali Tencent Century Great Reconciliation: Xue Pinduoduo Traffic Negative ByteDance?
Alibaba's initial moves could include introducing WeChat Pay to Taobao and Tmall; Tencent could allow Alibaba's e-commerce information to be shared on WeChat, or allow WeChat users to use some of Alibaba's services through Mini Programs.
No matter which platform is more beneficial, it can be clear that brand merchants will definitely experience a round of changes in the great opening up of the Internet. When the industry is open enough and huge traffic opportunities are pouring into enterprises, does the brand have the ability to comprehensively precipitate data, and can it have the ability to make rapid responses, more accurate marketing, and more reasonable decisions?
The changes don't stop at the platform environment. A large number of new consumer brands born from demand are also impacting traditional brands.
"Half of our founding team is from the gaming field who are good at adapting products to user needs, and half from the cosmetics industry who knows very much about products." Some Shanghai cutting-edge wash and care brands told Ebang Power that digitalization is an "invisible" concept in their minds, and they don't even feel that it exists outside of daily operations.
With the influx of new players born of demand, can brands that survive on experience still turn a blind eye?
"For brand retail, we are facing a major change that has not been seen in a hundred years. The ecology is opening up, the traffic tends to peak, the rapid development of live e-commerce, the new consumption is hot, and digitalization is also one of the major trends. Is the company doing a good job of understanding it? Are you ready to take on this change? At the "Yangtze River Delta (Changshu) Industry Digital Innovation Summit and Ebang Future Retail Digitalization Course", Jia Penglei, president of Ebang Power, threw out the most critical thinking to brand owners.
"Digitalization is a 'game of the head' that not all businesses can afford." More than one retailer told Ebang Dynamics that the systematization and enormity of digital upgrading is a hurdle.
"In the past year, the enthusiasm of retail companies for digital construction has reached a peak, but there are still relatively few successful cases of digital construction in the industry." Some digital middle office service providers pointed out that the main reason for the status quo is that the perception of digitalization by retail enterprises has not really changed.
"The epidemic has made everyone very eager to digitize, but once the epidemic is over, everyone has returned to the same idea as before, thinking that digitalization is only to solve the front-end sales problem of online and offline integration." In fact, that's just one result of the importance of digitalization, which requires more infrastructure behind it. He added.
Intelligent customer service, live broadcasting, intelligent shopping guide, smart store, SCRM, e-commerce SaaS, AI model measurement... From the front end to the back end, from offline to online, from the public domain to the private domain, from the internal to the external, the angle and link of the digital upgrading of retail enterprises have been carefully dismantled, and along the general direction of cost reduction and efficiency improvement, it seems that everything around the "human goods yard" can be reconstructed and upgraded in a digital way.
According to the "2021 China Brand Digital Practice Research Report" released by Ebang Power Research Institute, digital construction has become the consensus of retail enterprises, and more than 70% of enterprises have been trying digital transformation, or driven by digital thinking from the beginning of their inception, accounting for 53% of the retail sales with more than 100,000 yuan invested in digitalization every year.
Qian Xiaoyun, CEO of Evely Group, said that brand power is the foundation of the brand, management power is the ability that the brand needs to have after the continuous growth of the scale, and digitalization is the empowerment of the first two. Although digitalization cannot bring brand power or fully create management power, it will increase the efficiency of the brand, and the brand must first achieve 1 to achieve 10.
"Product power, channel power, communication power are all elements of the brand, but all of this is based on insight into consumers." Gao Hongqing, founding partner of Bailian New Consumer Industry Fund, pointed out that the improvement of these capabilities depends on digitalization, and digitalization is the most important factor driving these four forces.
Chen Chuan, general manager of Lily business fashion, believes that digitalization has brought new market channels, and from this point of view, digitalization has brought new market dividends. Although digitalization will be ranked behind basic elements such as brand power, you are also the most important thing, which is the amplification of all the basic capabilities of the brand.
There is a consensus that digitalization cannot change everything about a brand, but digitalization is extremely important and is a weapon that can create brand efficiency. But a hidden message is that a brand does digitalization, the premise is to build up the basic capabilities, and then use digitalization to improve efficiency. This is also one of the reasons why brands' practices for digital construction are uneven, and the entire industry is still in the early stages of practice.
Fortunately, in the entire industry, the rich role of service providers makes it possible for brands at different stages to digitize part of their business.
Zheng Zeyu, founder of Zhiyi Technology, pointed out that there are many uncertainties in the traditional (clothing) selection by subjective selection. The accurate and effective digital model of "big data + AI" can help brands accurately understand consumer preferences, judge market trends, rationally plan category distribution, better grasp the new rhythm, and help provide data-based style design and supply chain services.
Huang Peng, CTO of Xiaoduo Technology, an intelligent customer service service provider, said that the customer service team needs to shift from the previous cost center to the profit center, change the service from traditional reception to mining, better understand the needs of customers, and then use goods to meet their needs and improve the shopping guide ability of customer service. The relationship between customer service and users is no longer to let users convert and let users trade deals, but users have a need to help users meet this need.
Xu Xiangle, founder of Landong Technology, pointed out that in the era of stock economic competition, making good use of traffic resources and making good use of offline store resources is the key; through the coordination of commodities and supply chains, the planning, design, research and development, production and supply, and commodity operations form a closed loop of supply chain, which can greatly improve the acceptance of traffic dividends.
"At a time when the public domain delivery channel is rolled up, brands need more efficient places to communicate and trade with users, and enterprise WeChat has become the first position for brand private domain traffic (DTC). Gu Zeliang, co-founder of the brand private domain service provider Yizhi Intelligence, pointed out that the industry has entered the stage of "private domain persuasion" from "private domain refueling", if you do not think clearly about what the private domain means to yourself, it is recommended not to do it first, and once you think clearly, the best time to do private domain is in addition to before it rises, it is now.
However, there are also some brands who are obsessed with digitalization that at present, the digitalization of the industry is still too rudimentary.
"The essence of digitalization is to improve efficiency, including open source and throttling, but everyone's application of digitalization is still concentrated in the front end, circling in new traffic and consumer operations, and the real back-end transformation has not yet been done." Some retail digital service providers believe that the real digitalization should be from the inside out, from the digitization of the business to the digitization of data, to complete the overall collaboration from the front end to the back end, if all the links can not be opened, the solution is only the problem of traffic efficiency.
In the face of such "baggage", Wei Zhe, founding partner and chairman of Jiayu Fund, reminded the dreamers: new retail is solving the problem of "people, goods, and fields" in which "field" cannot be changed, and the order in which "people, goods, and fields" consider problems cannot be changed. If you don't have a recognition of the new crowd, a recognition of the new goods, and just want to change the field, it will not bring particularly good results.
03 Shorten the flow of ingredients to 5-7 days?
Blockbuster products rose to 600,000! Digital sales are powered by closed loops!
The current depth of practice of brand digitalization is also the best choice for brands in stages. Through the survey, Ebang Power found that there are many cases worth learning from in the retail industry.
Truth. When the digitization of the entire industry has not reached the stage of automatic data learning, the collection and application of data is already a method that can bring increments to enterprises.
In the first half of this year, Heilan Home's explosive products rose from 500,000 in the same period in 2016 to 600,000, and the sales volume of super categories rose from 2.7 million to 5.5 million.
Behind this, through the digital platform, Heilan Home will turn sales data, products, SKUs, raw materials, warehouses, etc. from multiple channels into a complete closed loop through cleaning, testing and intelligent analysis, turning the scheduling of new products from pre-sale pre-sales, planning process management to supply plan adjustment, etc., efficiently connecting user demand drive and supply chain integration.
After opening up user needs and back-end supply chains, Heilan Home can predict and evaluate the effects of super categories, and quickly replenish according to the results. As of November 2020, the number of members and fans of major platforms has exceeded 19 million, and the number of fans has exceeded 25 million.
During the 618 pre-sale period this year, Lin Qingxuan's 3-hour transaction exceeded the full cycle of last year's pre-sale, and 16,000 pieces of camellia emollient oil were sold in 60 minutes; offline stores achieved sales of nearly 40 million.
Lin Qingxuan's "online and offline" performance growth goes hand in hand, thanks to the "OMO model" (meaning the integration of online and offline) explored in 2020, that is, consumer-centric, breaking the boundaries of the company's internal organizational structure, online and offline through; using online traffic increments - live broadcast, private domain and other platforms, at a lower cost of offline cargo customers to cultivate a huge fan pool and traffic pool online, and then divert to offline stores to complete the sales closed loop.
From the perspective of customer experience, Lin Qingxuan adheres to the common relationship between online channels and offline stores, and consumers can receive products at home within half an hour after placing orders online.
Another pot circle food exchange that Wei Zhe judged as a hundred billion brand is also a typical case of digitalization. In 2017, the first store of Pot Circle Food Hui opened in Henan, a food chain supermarket co-founded by catering veterans, which has now grown into the second largest food buyer in China after Haidilao, opening more than 7,000 offline stores across the country. In just two years, the company has raised nearly 3 billion yuan in cumulative financing.
Since 2019, Pot Circle Food Hui has begun to access third-party digital systems: convenient storage management of ingredients with WMS, rapid logistics management with TMS, membership management with SCRM, and financial management with Kingdee system... At present, pot circle has built a cloud information center platform to facilitate the digital management of the entire food supply.
From the front-end members, cashiers, back kitchens, etc., real-time grasp of the store operation, real-time monitoring to the flow of ingredients in each store. Under such a layout, the pot circle has shortened the turnover days of store ingredients from 30 days common among peers to 10 days, and may be further shortened to 5-7 days or even 3 days in the future.
Ma Haochao, president of Ebang Power Research Institute, pointed out that there are currently the following effective paths for brand digitalization:
First, open up the front-end and back-end, linkage sales end, and even the entire consumer market big data, reverse guidance supply chain production and replenishment, improve commodity turnover and customer satisfaction;
Second, open up the internal and external aspects of the enterprise, so that the originally separated business links and the brand are integrated, and build a contact channel between the brand and the consumer, and efficiently capture the needs of users;
Third, open up online and offline from the sales side and the user side, so that user needs and resources can be accurately matched;
Fourth, open up the public and private domains, operate users in depth, realize the accompaniment and management of the whole life cycle of members, and further strengthen repurchase and low-cost innovation.
"Digitization is a technique, not a way."
Some investors in the retail industry pointed out that the basis for brands to do a good job in digitization is to clarify the vitality of digitalization itself, and to choose the steps and service providers of digitalization according to their own needs, and not to blindly follow.
"Digitalization is to use data to improve the accuracy of supply and demand and the synergy of the whole chain, it cannot solve all the problems of enterprises, so it is especially important to have a correct understanding of the effects of digitalization within a certain time frame." The person said.