Producer/Lianshang Network
Written by Chen Xinsheng
Between goods and consumers, there is a relationship of "one body and two wings". "One" means that there needs to be an operational bridge between the two links, and the "two wings" is data and traffic, which requires offline merchants to grasp data and traffic with one hand in operation.
Affected by the epidemic, community group buying and other factors, the living space of physical retail has ushered in changes, and merchants have begun to seek to transform into refined operations and growth through data operations, traffic operations, omni-channel marketing and other ways.
One noteworthy change is that it seems difficult for consumers to return to the pre-epidemic model, which is a big challenge for merchants who mainly operate stores. However, Deloitte's retail industry research report shows that growth retailers can seize the new spending opportunities brought by the epidemic and ensure the continued operation of stores.
In fact, the profit margin of physical stores is expected to double from the current level, but technology empowerment is needed to automate store sales. As Wharton professor David Bell sums up, digital marketing and other methods can help retail companies improve operational efficiency, improve customer service experience, and get more growth returns.
The environment is changing, the market is changing. All of this requires continuous data, algorithms, marketing, etc. to support the efficient operation of merchants. How can businesses achieve performance turnaround and growth, how can they "rely on the power of good wind"?
Where is the "inflection point" of merchant growth
For retail enterprises, the continuous decline in the number of store visitors is an indisputable fact, in the past, the traditional way of linking consumers with stores as the carrier has changed, and the marketing method also lacks the data support of consumer behavior.
Judging from the phenomenon that retailers frequently enter warehouse member stores and the rise of community stores, offline traffic has changed, and the format has entered an adjustment period. Most merchants are growing in sales, but profits are declining, and they need to develop their own capabilities to monetize traffic, monetize operations, and monetize data.
A few days ago, Kaiwei Technology held the "Digital Intelligence Empowerment Marketing Boundary-Breaking" product launch conference, invited METRO's deputy CEO and Budweiser Asia Pacific Innovation Leader to give keynote speeches, on topics such as business operation growth and digital transformation, and more than 30 enterprise leaders attending the scene, such as GSR, RT-Mart, Wanjia Digital, Nespresso, Budweiser, Laiyifen, Yili, and Shiseido, collided views.
In the view of Yang Tong, CEO of Kaiwei Technology, retailers and brand owners are currently anxious, and although the retailer stock market is large, it is difficult to find new growth points that can be copied. Most of the brand's delivery channels focus on online, and offline conversion still has a long way to go.
Industry data shows that 77% of FMCG sales in the Chinese market are still contributed by offline, of which hypermarkets and supermarkets account for 44%. It can be seen that offline stores are still the main position of business operations.
However, the problems and dilemmas of traditional retail operations are that the marketing methods are relatively scattered and single, the sense of marketing experience is insufficient, and the ROI conversion is lower, which in turn leads to a decrease in profits.
An embarrassing fact is that due to the change of consumer consumption habits and consumption behavior paths, marketing must follow consumers, where consumers are, marketing must be where, but most departments of businesses obviously do not have the corresponding capabilities.
Yang Tong told Lianshang Network that each user's time spent shopping in e-commerce may only be 5-6 minutes, but the offline scene may be 1-2 hours, and as long as consumers appear in offline stores, there are more channels and time to reach consumers and promote consumer purchase decisions, which has a huge marketing space.
However, he said that for retailers, the core focus is on store operations, which is reflected in the governance of the entire traffic and data. Online marketing is very mature, but offline is difficult to distinguish, and it is necessary to combine digital preferential promotions, digital settlement and payment, etc., to achieve data label management for people.
"All traditional decentralized stores will be chained in the next 5-10 years, and chaining requires a unified management system to achieve traffic aggregation by opening up data." Yang Tong said.
Li Xingbo, head of the wanjia digital product center, has a similar view to Yang Tong. In his view, in the traditional retail digital transformation, the core resources are stores and business circles, and merchants should always focus on the core consumers of the business circles around the stores to meet the consumption demands of different consumption levels, and only by doing differentiated operations can we effectively face market competition and form core competitiveness.
The future of retail business lies in whether it can drive business intelligence through data and content, and realize digital operation and management through offline and online business. Merchants still rely on digital stores to do customer experience, and drive the improvement of back-end procurement marketing and supply chain management through front-end store operations.
Since 2018, it has been involved in the retail industry, kaiwei technology has based on the business model of combining store digitalization and omni-channel marketing, by linking merchants and consumers, taking the store as the focus of global operation and marketing, and through online and offline data, to achieve the synergy of data, content and marketing, and help merchants achieve growth.
Different from other friends in the market, Kaiwei Technology SaaS service + marketing model helps merchants realize the closed loop of business monetization logic through online and offline traffic aggregation. By serving leading retailers such as CR Vanguard and Wumart, Kaiwei Technology empowers AI capabilities offline.
In addition to retailers' over-formats, Kaiwei technology services customers also spread throughout the new retail formats such as optical stores, clothing stores, coffee shops, and snack stores. It is foreseeable that from new retail to new consumption, under the market change, Kaiwei Technology will usher in huge market opportunities in the future.
Merchants need "connectors" to achieve the "last 1 meter" conversion in the retail yard
There is no doubt that the epidemic has accelerated the omni-channel process of offline stores. In the process of store marketing, the question that needs to be paid attention to is how many consumers can see the push online and in the store? How many consumers pass through the shelf area and finally complete their purchase?
"If you can't control the conversion of the last 1 meter of marketing to trading in the retail field, all the marketing work may be equivalent to making a wedding dress for others." Yang Tong thinks.
Retailers want to optimize offline touchpoints, enhance interaction with consumers, and promote retention and conversion rates, but they have very little interaction with customers offline and are weakly connected, making it difficult to establish one-on-one connections compared to the thousands of people online. What brands lack is how to have an innovative marketing model, insight into consumer psychology, and improve input-output ratio and efficiency. One phenomenon is that some brands can usually only be perceived indirectly through sales volume, and it is difficult to achieve monetization and growth from the data and content side with the help of effective marketing carriers.
The needs of enterprises are already imminent, and the role of third-party service providers such as Rukaiwei Technology is becoming increasingly prominent. Between the Internet and physical retail enterprises, Kaiwei Technology understands both the digital logic of the former and the difficulties and pain points of the latter.
For the majority of retailers and brand owners, Kaiwei through the establishment of Kiwi intelligent marketing solutions, with online online stores, offline physical stores, intelligent marketing as the core, through omni-channel integration to achieve marketing, data and content integration and interoperability, really help customers solve operational pain points, become a connector between business and consumers.
Recently, in order to help merchants solve problems such as marketing automation and global digital intelligent marketing services, Kaiwei Technology released Kiwi intelligent marketing solutions. Kiwi OneDesk omni-channel media marketing platform, Kiwi OneIdea creative content management platform and Kiwi OneHub & OneData enterprise-level data intelligent collection and analysis platform are the "troika" in the core products, and the Kiwi OneFlow machine learning platform is the technical ability base support.
In the view of Du Xi, partner and CTO of Kaiwei Technology, the vision of Kiwi One series products is based on AI and IoT technologies, driven by data analysis and insights, to provide customers with one-stop digital marketing creative services.
"The Kiwi One series is a new species of global marketing, combining the offline store channels and online marketing, content, etc. in the field with the Kiwi One business to help merchants achieve monetization and growth." Du Xi thinks.
Taking the Kiwi OneDesk omni-channel media marketing platform as an example, in addition to focusing on online scenes, it is more concerned about the "last 1 meter" conversion and marketing function design in the retail field. The consumer population's willingness to consume in the offline retail field is relatively clear, from the consumption willingness to the final consumption conversion, there are great market opportunities, opened to affect consumers' purchase decisions through a series of interactive games such as in-venue and online, digital contacts, secondary repurchases, and secondary touches.
The Kiwi OneIdea Creative Content Management Platform is a digital management of the entire creative lifecycle of merchants. Kaiwei's advantage lies in the new interactive form of gameplay and standard processes, providing an immersive interactive experience, and all interactions have full-link digital tracking during the delivery process.
On the whole, as an artificial intelligence star enterprise, Kaiwei has accumulated strong AI capabilities in the front end, and built a set of marketing cloud platform based on on-site offline marketing with the Kiwi One system in the background to serve retailers and brand owners.
For example, in order to increase store permeability, many retailers shorten the shelves and widen the shelf spacing, and the use of kaiwei technology digital poster function can help merchants reduce costs and increase ability permeability. With the help of Kiwi OneDesk shopping guide, merchants can revitalize customers' private domain traffic.
"We hope to be able to intelligently connect every consumer in every transaction scenario, although it is doing digitalization, but in the long run, it is doing traffic aggregation." Relying on stores to help merchants achieve the 'last 1 meter' conversion in the retail yard." Yang Tong said.
As an operator familiar with on-site trading scenarios and omni-channel traffic, Kaiwei Technology's differentiating advantage lies in omni-channel marketing and trading based on stores, and also has in-depth cooperation with head retailers such as super brands and FMCG brands.
Li Xingbo believes that Kaiwei Technology's data integration capabilities, data services from products to operations, marketing service capabilities, and the degree of integration with brand resources have unique advantages compared with other friendly businesses.
It is reported that CR Vanguard cooperated with Kaiwei Technology during the epidemic last year, and the two sides have collaborated for nearly 10 months, and the depth of cooperation and exploration degree have been progressing layer by layer. Taking Suguo store as an example, Kaiwei Technology helped Suguo fourth-generation convenience stores successfully land smart marketing solutions, and carried out multi-faceted cooperation in the digitization of customer behavior trajectories and smart marketing around store traffic and traffic diversion, helping Suguo achieve digital transformation and improve its ability to monetize.
The future market is huge, connecting every consumer with data and content
Today, both traditional FMCG brands and new consumer brands are launching new products, accelerating their capture of China's future market. In the next 5-10 years, consumers will have stronger spending power, greater desire to consume, and higher demand for the quality of consumption, which is actually a huge incremental market.
At present, offline, although the retail online traffic has been integrated, the offline is still very scattered, and all decentralized stores will be chained and will be in a reshuffle. Emerging brands will be integrated into consumers' lives through brand value, fashion sense creation, etc. As they deepen their efforts in China's emerging consumer market, the overall offline market and transaction volume are increasing.
And these are the opportunities that Kaiwei sees in the eyes of technology. In order to achieve online and offline chess, data marketing guidance business, in order to break the state of separation, a group of retailers and brand owners and head service providers like Kaiwei Technology are required to cooperate with each other.
What Kaiwei Technology ultimately hopes to achieve is to connect retailers, brands, and consumers to form a business model that integrates online and offline data and traffic.
Li Ling, a consultant at Lianshang Network, once said that only by improving retail efficiency can we better serve customers. In the link of the incremental market, Kaiwei Technology has the ability to reach, first of all, to help brands and retailers to achieve chaining and popularization, from the dimensions of digitalization and traffic monetization, "while the store is digitized, help them realize a business logic based on digital traffic operation". Kaiwei's positioning is more of an industry connector than an industry disruptor.
Just as Microsoft once had a vision of "let every desktop in every home have a microcomputer running Microsoft system", the future picture of Kaiwei Technology is to let every transaction scenario have a smart terminal operated by KiWi, connect every consumer with data and content, and detonate global traffic.
It is foreseeable that using technology to intelligently connect every consumer in the consumption scene is not only the goal of science and technology, but also the inevitable evolution path of future business.