In 2023, after a year of e-commerce's "low price" strategy, the market value of Pinduoduo will surpass Ali for the first time, and JD.com will still be sluggish, and the entire market will be filled with cost-effectiveness. With the arrival of 2024, the e-commerce track is estimated to define the supply chain, or to roll up the "lowest price" dispute.
From the extinction of new consumption to the outbreak of mass selling snacks;
From "it's not that you can't afford down jackets" to "but military coats are more cost-effective";
From JD.com and Taobao shouting a loud slogan of returning to low prices at the beginning of the year, to the later surpassing of Ali in the market value of Pinduoduo's U.S. stock market.
The main theme of the consumer and e-commerce industry in 2023 can basically be closed, that is, "low price"!
So under the inertia of the consumer market, how should the e-commerce industry further implement the low-price strategy in 2024?
The answer is to go back to the most basic supply chain and the efficiency level of matching supply and demand, and ask for lower prices. Therefore, JD first announced that the annual fixed salary of front-line business personnel such as JD procurement and sales will rise by nearly 100% from January 1, 2024, and then issued a convening order for JD procurement and sales, calling for the former "procurement and marketing brothers......
From this, it is boldly predicted that the main theme of the e-commerce track in 2024 may be one thing: redefining the supply chain, both low price and quality.
First, the supply chain is preparing for war, and the "cats and dogs fighting" show their talents
In fact, looking back at the e-commerce rivers and lakes in 2023, Cats and Dogs have revealed a lot of market signals in advance at the supply chain level.
For example, Pinduoduo, the newly appointed co-founder Zhao Jiazhen, is not only the leader of Pinduoduo when it launched the upgrade of its supply chain system. And according to CEO Chen Lei, Zhao Jiazhen will also focus on Pinduoduo's supply chain management and business operations in China in the future.
In addition, under Zhao Jiazhen's new tone of high-quality development, Pinduoduo has opened the third 10 billion project - 10 billion ecology, which more systematically demonstrates the direction and measures of Pinduoduo's supply chain optimization. For example, in terms of funds, we will use tens of billions of yuan to support high-quality merchants and brand enterprises, and in the market, we will help high-quality merchants become bigger and stronger through measures such as creating explosive products and expanding the international market......
As for Taobao, it first experienced the adjustment of the organizational structure from Dai Shan to Wu Yongming, ushered in a number of post-85 cadres of Alibaba to enter the core management, and then began to try to attract more low-cost small and medium-sized merchants by changing the "soil" fertility of the platform's operation. For example, the platform commission was reduced from 5% to 4%, and the assessment mechanism was adjusted from focusing on sales to attracting new customers and paying buyer data.
At the same time, it also goes deep into the supply chain industrial belt, and incubates and supports more white-label enterprise products by giving full play to Taobao's supply and demand matching advantages......
Looking at JD.com's efforts in the supply chain, it also started with the change of management. Tianyancha APP shows that the newly appointed Xu Ran himself has many years of CFO career experience, and is known as "walking excel" within JD.com, so it is more suitable to find more granular and timely space for internal supply chain cost optimization from a financial perspective, and release more price advantages.
Of course, the most direct thing is to increase the wages of JD's front-line business personnel who are deeply involved in the supply chain of various categories.
As a self-operated e-commerce company, JD.com is now raising the wages of front-line business personnel, which at first glance seems to be due to the smooth exit of JD's procurement and sales live broadcast room at the end of 2023, which makes up for JD's congenital deficiencies in the live broadcast ecology.
But in fact, if you look at it from a broader historical perspective, this is more like a return to the market strategy of the past few years and the current low price within JD.com, as well as the beginning of the review and correction of the supply chain efficiency optimization and the pursuit of extreme low prices in the future.
Because looking back on the past of JD.com, you will find that from Liu Qiangdong as the first purchaser and salesman of JD.com to knock down the price of its products, and then JD.com and the procurement and sales team relied on the low-price advantage to pull Suning and Dangdang off the market throne, and "low price" has been imprinted in JD.com's original supply chain gene for a long time in the past.
However, along the way, JD.com's low-price cognitive impression has gradually been forgotten by consumers, and it has been labeled as "expensive".
Perhaps because of this, Liu Qiangdong shouted to JD executives and JD's procurement and sales team before that, if he doesn't regain his price advantage, he will become the second Suning sooner or later!
However, it is not too late to make amends. When the original intention of the strategic layer and management to wake up to the low price, JD.com through the optimization of the upstream and downstream supply chain, as well as the professional "bargaining" sales cooperation with the front-line procurement and sales team, the low-price advantage of JD's products in the market can be quickly recovered.
After all, the Jingdong e-commerce model from self-operated logistics to self-operated stores can squeeze out more room for price concessions in terms of cost. And in the past, the core of Jingdong procurement and sales may be quality, and the focus of the entire supply chain is to support quality brand merchants in a thousand choices, but now in addition to quality, what Jingdong procurement and supply chain have to do is only to take into account low prices, which is actually a bit high-dimensional and low-dimensional.
We take the sale of Yangcheng Lake hairy crabs as an example, before Jingdong required relevant merchants to provide 8 kinds of qualification documents, including agricultural products geographical indication grade certificate, Suzhou Yangcheng Lake Hairy Crab Association authorization letter, etc., while Taobao requires 5 kinds, Pinduoduo only needs 1 kind - food business license.
In contrast, JD.com's entire crab category supply chain qualification is very tight, so the price of hairy crabs will continue to rise.
But the current consumer trend is that it doesn't matter whether it is a hairy crab in Yangcheng Lake or not, if the quality of ordinary crabs in other places is not bad, then it can also meet the needs of most consumers, and even because there is no excess brand premium, it will be more favored in the consumer market.
Therefore, it is not difficult for JD.com to screen out more brand enterprises that have both quality and are willing to take the route of small profits and quick sales in the feedback and help of the procurement and sales team by appropriately relaxing the supply chain qualifications.
It's just that the new question is,Now Jingdong's quality and low price methodology has indeed been formed,But where is the actual landing grasp in the future?
The answer is the Jingdong procurement and sales live broadcast room, which has exploded since the end of last year.
Although like most of the over-the-top anchors, the basic advantage of the continuous exposure of the live broadcast room of JD procurement and sales is also low price, but the obvious difference is that the low price of JD procurement and sales is not based on the premise of sacrificing product quality, nor is it from over-squeezing the profit margins of brand enterprises.
Relying on JD.com's extreme compression of supply chain channels, that is, the three nos characteristics of "no talent commission, no routine, and no pit fee" that are the main features of the procurement and sales live broadcast room, have reduced the channel cost and premium of brand products to the greatest extent. Coupled with the team's own professional procurement and marketing literacy and in-depth understanding of the whole chain of the industry, the Double 11 JD procurement and sales live broadcast room can cover multiple categories such as 3C digital, clothing and beauty in a short period of time, and dare to compete with the super anchors for the lowest price......
Second, the lowest price, mental marketing first?
Back to the marketing level, in the past few years, there don't seem to be too many marketing moves, and the overall investment growth is relatively weak. Although this is understandable, after all, in the past three years of the epidemic, due to the incomplete impact of the external environment and its own strategic transformation, Taobao Jingdong's marketing is more of an improvement marketing to stimulate growth, and the strategic significance of driving growth is not great.
However, after the outbreak of the low-price consumption trend in 2023, the Internet Jianghu believes that for Taotian and JD.com, which have not yet imprinted the low-price tag in consumer cognition, they may need to increase marketing investment again in 2024.
The reason is very simple, if Taobao Jingdong was improved marketing in the past, then it is rigid demand marketing now and in the future.
On the one hand, although Taobao and Jingdong have left a low-cost platform impression on the consumer market in the past, they have basically become very blurred now, and Liu Qiangdong's shouting has proved this. Therefore, the return of Taobao Jingdong to low prices and users this time is almost equivalent to the second entrepreneurship of the brand mind, and marketing investment is naturally indispensable.
On the other hand, in terms of strategy, the three cats and dogs are carrying out strategic adjustments from top to bottom and from the inside to the outside, and they have also set up a flag that takes price power as an important label of the platform. But the problem is that due to the limitations of the price war, on the basis of not sacrificing quality, even the current cats and dogs fight for the compression of the supply chain and price power, in fact, it is very limited. As for the comprehensive subsidy for burning money, it is not a long-term solution.
Therefore, this means that Taobao Jingdong is now in the supply chain, and it is far from enough to continue to support the low-price supply ecology, and at the same time, it is also necessary to use marketing as a table to continue to stimulate and deepen consumers' low-price mental impression of their own platforms, so as to quickly form a long-term consumption ideological seal of low price = Pinduoduo or XXX.
In this regard, Taobao has taken the lead. The most direct is the cancellation of Taobao Double 12 in 2023 and the renaming of the "Good Price Festival", which means that Taobao has entered the era of "good price" with both quality and low price, shaping the user's perception of the quality-price ratio.
From a marketing point of view, Double 12 has been changed to a good price festival, and Taobao has actually seized two IPs:
One is the cognitive traffic of Double 12, or it belongs to Taobao.
Double 12 is the first of Taobao, occupying the source of the mind, to the double 12, other e-commerce platforms on the market are still building momentum around this IP, this node still has traffic potential. The time node of the Good Price Festival is the same as that of Double 12, which is seamless, and there is also an additional cognitive label - Good Price.
The other is to penetrate the mind of good prices and use this as the origin to find growth potential.
If marketing around Double 12 is to expand the public domain mind, then marketing around the good price festival is undoubtedly from the public domain mind of Double 12 to seize the private domain mind.
The good price festival creates a private domain cognition and private domain traffic that belongs to Taobao.
For Internet companies, cognition means user Xi, and behind user Xi habits is traffic, scale, and industry status. When it comes to search, it is Baidu, when it comes to social networking, it is WeChat, when it comes to taxis, it is Didi, and when it comes to good prices, will it be Taobao?
In today's e-commerce industry, Jingdong has returned to low prices, and Pinduoduo emphasizes quality and service. In the past, Pinduoduo's broader cognitive label was low price, but now the emphasis is on service upgrades, and cognitive labels are moving towards good prices. Jingdong's cognitive label is quality and service, but it is expensive, so now Jingdong is also emphasizing the quality-price ratio and transforming to the label of good price.
It's just that the label of the good price, although everyone wants to paste it on their own platform, but no one has stuck it firmly, at least it has not become a recognized label, Taobao Double Twelve changed its name, and the cognition of this label is more in-depth, and it is currently relatively firmer.
Of course, the good price festival can only be regarded as a marketing of Taobao, and how to do a more systematic job in low-price mental marketing in the future?
Let's recall first, how did the cognitive label of "Almighty Taobao" come about?
At that time, Taobao vigorously supported small and medium-sized businesses, and opened up a platform for creating creativity and innovation, so as to prosper the entire Taobao universal ecology, and on the other hand, it established a new evaluation system in marketing and social networking, and played marketing as a social network.
In the context of the endless emergence of strange and wonderful things created by various small and medium-sized businesses, Taobao is not only an e-commerce platform and content platform, but also a "media launcher" in many cases, through a variety of unexpected Taobao creative things to constantly create social topics, network hotspots and other marketing phenomena, and then spread to other network areas like a tide, and finally form a new Taobao social evaluation system.
For example, when it comes to "pro" now, it is no longer a verb, but a greeting noun exclusive to Taobao in the social context;
So now, what cats and dogs have to do is actually to turn the concept of "both low price and quality" into a social cultural label exclusive to their own platform through a variety of marketing methods, just like the current "It's not that the down jacket can't be worn, but the military coat is more cost-effective" is so deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. This may be where Taobao and JD.com need to think about communication in 2024......
Columnist
Liu Zhigang, WeChat public account: Internet Jianghu (ID: VIPIT1). Everyone is a product manager columnist. Senior media person, in-depth reporting in the TMT field.
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