All these new changes can be said to be a transitional format in the drastic changes of retail industry. They may not be the future, or they may be the future, so there are different opinions. Today, Tiger Sniff is going to discuss a problem. These people all seem to cut in from different angles. What are their similarities?
* * * Similarly, it's like a treasure hunt. All the participants have different backgrounds, different equipment and different accents, but they are aiming at the same treasure. This treasure is the community flow of China city. They cut in from different categories and different tracks and strive for the redistribution right of community traffic. They all want to be the entrance of community traffic in the new era.
The question is, who will be the final winner? The concept of this winner may not be a company, but all the survivors on a track. In my opinion, this war is actually a war between legions, not a war between companies. It is not a question of who can be the boss of the front warehouse between Ding Dong's grocery shopping and daily fresh food, nor is it a question of who can win the breakfast market between Luckin Coffee and the convenience store corps.
Generally speaking, being a forecaster is tantamount to digging holes and filling holes, trying to see the future through time, which is doomed to be impossible. However, at this stage, we can still make some judgments according to the situation of the whole industry and the laws of business.
The first question, when everyone is talking about community, what is community? There is a mini shopping center opposite my home. There are Starbucks and Adidas under our office, and then across the street is a residential area with a long history in Beijing. Aunt Chaoyang here is also an online celebrity. So, is Starbucks a community with Adidas and Aunt Chaoyang across the street?
This question can be asked in another way: Is the business circle near the community a part of the community? Or is it just a community based on residential and underlying business boundaries? Nowadays, in many cities, the dividing line between residence and business circle is increasingly blurred. Except for some special landmark city business districts, such as Xidan in Beijing and Nanjing West Road in Shanghai, many of them are mixed. If you go to Beijing Sanlitun Bar Street, Sanlitun also has aborigines!
The significance of this point is that we need to re-examine whether the status of retail industry is important.
Traditional retail industry thinks location is important, because location is flow. How far your location can radiate, and how many people often pass by your door within this range are basically your flow pool. But even in the physical retail industry, this only exists in the case of insufficient competition. Catering convenience store industry has encountered door-to-door business, and there is a situation similar to hot pot street. That is to say, the so-called traffic in a certain community is not exclusive to you, but exclusive to * * *, depending on who has the ability to take up more. Therefore, there is also a jargon in the retail industry, "three steps to death", which means that one store is only three steps away from another, otherwise it may be crowded and you will die.
Therefore, at the beginning of the new retail, I actually wanted to change the way of traffic distribution in the past. Boxma Xiansheng's online and offline omni-channel operation, on the surface, is to transform physical retail with the help of the Internet, in fact, it first affects the direction of traffic. On one occasion, Mr. Hou Yi publicly said several "no longer important" in a speech, one of which was that with the box horse, status was no longer important.
Really? At that time, when Hou Yi said this sentence, several sleepy people next to the author were immediately awakened, refreshed and began to whisper.
The author's own understanding of this problem has gone through three stages: treating mountains as mountains, treating mountains as mountains, and treating mountains as mountains.
Say location is not important, look at box horse's own location, which shop dares to open in the middle of nowhere? Of course, the first store in Suzhou where Box Pony was later located was really biased. Some people have to take three trains to see this shop.
However, as more and more online home platforms began to set foot in this game, Tiger Sniff suddenly found that the rules of the game were quietly changing. Within the three-kilometer distribution range where Box Horse was first implanted in the minds of peers, the micro-location of different stores on the same street is really not that important. Because as long as it is within the scope of distribution, it is delivered to the door, and the differentiation is reflected in the quality, richness and service efficiency of the goods.
This unimportant statement is actually no different from the argument that "the Internet is coming and the world is flat". But the problem is that the world is never flat, and the bigger the market, the more rugged it is. Back to the community scene, a new topic, localization and personalization, has been highlighted within three kilometers of Fiona Fang.
No matter how the word community is defined, there are two meanings that must be included. One is territoriality, and the other is life.
It used to be said that Chongqing, the street here looks like Hong Kong, and when it is turned over, it is a slum. Whether this statement is accurate or not is another question, but it at least shows that even in a relatively narrow living space, people's living standards are diverse. People in the same building may lead different lives due to differences in living habits and spending power.
So to answer this question again, does location matter? Everyone who has done retail honestly admits that it is still important. Your knowledge of the local community basically determines your location and product structure. Getting home in 30 minutes is nothing more than solving the problem of "three steps to death", but it can't solve the consumption level and structure of the whole community.
To put it bluntly, when you choose to open a store in community A instead of community B, no matter what form you take, the gross profit space of the store has been decided from that moment.
Only by clarifying this point can we continue to discuss the issue of community traffic portal.
The complexity and diversity of China market determines the diversity and diversity of commercial subjects in China. From this perspective, China's retail industry is indeed a rare paradise in the world, and there have never been such different or even contradictory models that can appear in the same market at the same time.
According to the author's previous theory, the appearance of Luckin Coffee is a very strange thing.
Luckin Coffee's subversion of the traditional retail industry lies not only in his mode of operation, but also in his opportunistic ability, completely subverting the values of intensive cultivation in the traditional retail industry. On the other hand, we must admit that Luckin Coffee's way of opening a shop is actually based on community thinking. For the understanding and cognition of urban communities, this is the basis for Ruixing to dare to open a shop quickly. However, their products are standardized and there is no community difference.
This model can provide standardized goods or services for different communities and harvest some community users at the same time. One more thing, they don't pursue the full coverage of community consumption demand, but pursue a single breakthrough, look for categories with gross profit space, and try to absorb the traffic of this community. The same types are fruit chain stores, baking shops and so on. Community fresh food stores are not included in this list, and we will talk about it later. (The new tea emerging from new retail can actually be counted as this type. However, at this stage, many new teas still drive into the shopping center and take the crowds in the business circle. )
The advantage of this style of play is that as long as the back-end supply chain is stable enough, the front-end can be copied quickly, not only in stores, but also in the goods themselves. Ruixing's ingenuity lies in that it chooses a category that is less difficult than fruit and cake, and obtains as much online traffic as possible with the lowest opening cost in an omni-channel way.
Similar but different is the box horse model. Box Horse takes advantage of the relatively high cost of opening a store in exchange for a dominant position, so as to obtain as much entrance traffic as possible and then convert it into online traffic.
But what they have in common is that the store is really just an entrance. They use the mobile Internet and standardization to maximize community traffic. And they also have the same characteristics, and the traffic they get has become their own closed loop. This can be regarded as the first genre of community traffic warfare.
This standardization is a commodity in Ruixing. In Box Horse, it takes 30 minutes to go home. Standardize service, which was later done by Ding Dong to buy food.
But the question for Ruixing is, when it chooses a highly standardized and reproducible category to cut into the community and absorb its traffic, can its repurchase habits obtained through high subsidies be transformed into other categories? The author believes that the difficulty of transformation still exists. The paradox of Ruixing model is that when the basic traffic of a community is transformed from offline to online one day, the traffic pool returns to online, the frequency of repurchase is stabilized, and the value of offline stores is finally simplified and symbolized. What is the significance of its existence? Will it be a waste to maintain the daily cost of its stores?
Today, in the era of mobile Internet, there are still many people who are superstitious about the winner-take-all theory in the era of PC Internet. Of course, the social field in the era of mobile Internet has won everything. But does the winner-take-all exist in the weak social attribute trading scenario with goods as the link? This is debatable. We can see that even the department store industry with strong social attributes can't see the dawn of winner-take-all at present.
In this era, many people are talking about consumer personalization, but many people do not look at this problem in reverse. In the eyes of consumers, businesses are becoming more and more personalized. No matter how merchants flaunt themselves, what can enter consumers' minds is only a part of sticky attribute labels that match consumers' immediate needs. The miniaturization and fragmentation of mobile orders have led to the recognition of different businesses in the eyes of consumers being given many personalized labels.
The author believes that this reverse personalization of consumers makes it difficult to reproduce the winner-take-all rule in the past in the era of mobile Internet. Of course, if it is capital-led, it is another matter to make the supply-side business highly concentrated.
In the current emerging format, both standardized expansion and personalized faces can be taken into account. The most typical example is the front bin format.
There are many reasons for the rise of Qiancang, and personalization is definitely one of them. At the same time, the cost of pre-warehouse expansion is relatively lower than that of community fresh food stores.
However, the model of the forecastle has not been finalized. Moreover, it is worth pondering that from the discovery trend, due to the gross profit pressure brought by the main fresh food, expanding the category has become the mainstream choice in the industry. Is this a good choice?
The richer the variety of merchants, the weaker the ability of merchants to deeply develop their commodity power, and the less likely they are to be labeled as personalized by consumers. Some people say that Wal-Mart didn't do very well before, and many small businesses can't survive within its coverage. Please note that Wal-Mart, like the core competitiveness of large-scale e-commerce platforms in the PC era, focuses on "more" and "less" in the words "more, faster, better and cheaper".
In the past, consumers were not without individuality, but in the past, the retail channel structure made "one-stop shopping" become the mainstream, family shopping dominated, and personalization was drowned. In the era of mobile Internet, the popularity of 30 minutes to home, the demand and habit of one-stop procurement have been greatly weakened, and personal consumption has risen, which will make it easier to highlight the personalization of buyers in fragmented orders.
If not, then what is the significance of the digital transformation that many retailers are keen on?
In other words, if the front warehouse model cannot maintain the core value recognized by consumers, but hopes to return to the road of big e-commerce platform to solve the profit problem, then why is the final winner not the existing super e-commerce platform? Since it is also a comprehensive platform, aren't these super players easier to reduce their dimensions?
Of course, among the consumers of community traffic, there are also community group purchases. The author thinks that the core competitiveness of community group buying and pre-warehouse is similar, and both of them are based on the community fission of the community to do business. If they don't want to go deep into the community, do differentiation, and want to go to the so-called big e-commerce platform, the outcome is the same.
Pre-warehouse, plus community group buying, can be regarded as the second genre.
At the Cainiao 20 19 Global Smart Logistics Summit held in Hangzhou not long ago, Cainiao released a brand upgrade plan, and a brand new distribution brand "Danniao" surfaced. Due to different industries, many people in the retail industry may not notice this information.
The core of "Danniao Plan" is to provide diversified solutions for merchants and create the ultimate logistics experience of local life for consumers through the integration of national landing distribution business.
Li Wuchang, CEO of Danio, said: "At the 1.0 stage, Danio focused on fresh food, flowers, mother and baby, and the service of China parts, accumulating application scenarios and users through service contacts, and aggregating distribution capacity models." Distributing flowers and cakes is nothing new, but pay attention to rookie and rookie post offices. Also on May 28th, Lin Wan, president of Cainiao, announced that Cainiao's digitalization plan for the next three years includes establishing 654.38+million community-level websites with express delivery partner * *.
Local life, middleware services, and 65,438+million community-level sites are all vague descriptions, but they are also places where novices leave successors.
The author believes that big players who focus on real-time urban distribution will have some associations when they see these plans. Before the instant delivery in the same city, it was a three-legged pattern (JD.COM arrived home, Meituan, Hungry). Today, we can make a table of mahjong. It's just new on the dining table, and there are offline outlets (the US Mission has a front).
In addition to sending and receiving parcels, community sites may also provide more community-derived services on the basis of basic business.
Historically, the model of community+service has always been an attractive cake. In the 1.0 era of O2O, community service attracted countless heroes. Today, this is still a fascinating battlefield. In the convenience store industry, derivative services have always been considered as a source of income alongside commodity sales.
Why do you want to do community service? Compared with Rui Xing's skillful upward drainage, this is a very hard and meager track.
I think there may be two reasons.
First, in the community retail war, the so-called omni-channel means that you can't have your cake and eat it.
The word omni-channel is very common now, and some people don't like it, but use "pan-channel". There is still a difference between words. One of the meanings of "all" is "no difference", such as globalization, which is often followed by "integration". Pan-channel means "can be regarded as".
To put it bluntly, everyone who is omni-channel, which one of you thinks that the proportion of offline orders can be 50% to 50%?
This is my opinion. In the so-called omni-channel era, online and offline fish and bear's paw cannot have both. It has also been reported by the media before, and it is also the transformation of the retail industry. The proportion of online and offline orders for Boxma Xiansheng is 7:3, and Yonghui is 3:7. This is due to genes, but it is also due to laws.
50% to 50% online ordering is neither possible nor necessary. It is futile for any business or platform to maintain the absolute balance between online and offline (there will be an instant balance). Your genes, positioning and service mode determine that your income structure must focus on different channels.
Then, for companies that are heavier offline, it is obviously the only way to develop derivative community services.
Second, the stickiness under the line is stickiness, and the stickiness on the line is habit.
The difference between the two is subtle. Simply put, offline services are more likely to form personalized trust and temperature.
Personalized and lively fireworks are also the fundamental characteristics of the community. Among the three traditional retail formats, why is it that only the convenience store industry can maintain a year-on-year growth rate of nearly 20% for three consecutive years in recent years? At the same time, the convenience store industry is an industry with low Internet penetration rate. This may indicate that the ability of personalization can make up for the deficiency of Internet genes. At the same time, the store is also natural and has the ability to precipitate the emotional factors of the neighborhood.
The director of a regional convenience store brand once told the author that among the convenience stores they have served, the store with good business is not necessarily the best decorated, but the owner must be the most enthusiastic. And from time to time, they will give you a little benefit. For example, if you buy 19 20-cent items, experienced shopkeepers will say: Don't give this 20-cent item.
We look at the transformation of new retail to traditional industries in the past two years. What are the positive results? Trust between consumers and enterprises has increased. For example, I cook at home and wait for the cooking wine to go into the pot. I placed an order because I believe you will deliver it within 30 minutes, and it won't delay the meal. This is trust. But this kind of trust is still abstract trust, and it is a person facing a platform. In some industries, people trust the recommendation of acquaintances and communities, such as mothers and babies, such as pets. Online contact is because it is convenient. If you need to meet offline, the person who can find you if you have any questions is you.
Trust is the foundation of service. After all, many community services are home-based. However, the difficulty of service integration lies in fragmentation and lack of tools and rules. In some relatively low-frequency service fields, the aggregation effect of the platform has not yet appeared, so relatively speaking, the content of the service itself is more important than building the platform.
In addition, the get-through effect between different services seems to be more difficult than commodities at present. For example, I won't ask you to help me do housework or clean the range hood just because you help me receive the courier. These are two different things. From this point of view, directly providing service content is easier to be recognized by consumers and form a deep connection, which is quite experienced by established home appliance retailers.
Therefore, it is still unknown whether the logistics forces can return home in triumph in the field of community service again. The problem of how to make profits from service projects also exists, such as receiving express delivery, which has been done all the time, but there has been no more economical and reasonable solution. Most of the express cabinets in the community are losing money.
In terms of derivative services, convenience stores and community fresh food stores have natural possibilities. However, the roles and responsibilities of the platform are not easy to define. Compared with the first two schools, this may be the most bitter school in the competition for community traffic entrance, but it has broad prospects.
Generally speaking, the competition for community traffic can be roughly divided into the above three factions.
First, use standardized goods or services to expand rapidly and drain online. At present, it has started very quickly, but its stamina faces many tests.
Second, the difficulty of localization+community pre-warehouse and community group purchase lies in how to quickly build a moat to avoid being impacted by a big platform.
Third, more offline convenience stores, community fresh food stores and "community sites". For them, its online extension is just a supplement, and more space lies in the extension of offline services. But the difficulty lies in finding a good service aggregation and management method.
However, either way, we need to re-understand the relationship between business and people based on the scene of community localization and life, and then revise our business model, instead of hiding in the cloud and making decisions only by data.
Note: Wen/Yu Fang, official account of WeChat: Billion Consumers (ID: gjgc 168), this article is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Billion Power Network.