One, five minutes to show you what new retail is
Ma Yun said: There will be no e-commerce in the future, only new retail. He said frankly that the rise of e-commerce in recent years has already caused a dimensionality reduction blow to the traditional retail industry, and if the traditional retail format wants to headwind, it must take the new retail path of “online + offline” integration.
Zhang Yong, the current CEO of Alibaba, said: Retail is the connection between people, goods and markets. The new retail is the orderly reconstruction of the three elements of people, goods, and markets under the traditional retail format. It is to use Internet thinking and technology to connect the "people" who ultimately pay and the "goods" that people need to form a whole The "field" of online and offline integration.
Lei Jun said: New retail, that is, using Internet thinking to do online and offline retail formats
Liu Qiangdong said: We will soon usher in the "fourth retail revolution" (the first three revolutions of department stores, chain stores, and supermarkets), which will bring mankind into the era of intelligent business.
After reading the explanations of so many big cows above, I believe you are as confused as me, so how do you simply understand new retail?
In layman's terms, new retail is four words for customers: "more, faster, better, and less." As a customer, I don’t care about advanced business model upgrades. I only hope that my shopping experience will get a qualitative leap. This leap can be summarized as a multitude of categories, fast speed, good quality, and low price.
As far as retailers are concerned, in order to meet the needs of customers, digital technology is needed to integrate online and offline channels, and ultimately reduce operating costs and increase efficiency.
For example, Hema Xiansheng, which we are familiar with, is actually a typical representative of new retail. It cleverly integrates the three elements of "people", "goods" and "field", and realizes the integration of online and offline, and realizes " The value of "multiple, fast, good, and economical" can also provide new business value for offline retail stores. We can understand this problem in this way. The Hema Xiansheng APP is equivalent to an "online virtual field". It uses the advantages and capabilities of the Ali platform to build physical stores offline (ie, "offline physical fields"). So as to achieve the integration of online and offline "field". And "goods" refers to physical goods. Goods are a bridge connecting "people" and "fields". Users visit online or offline "fields" to find specific "goods", and fields are "goods". Provide a display platform (online embodied as APP information display, offline embodied as cargo storage). Order users, delivery staff, store attendants, these "people" are all organized around "goods" and "fields" to carry out activities in an orderly manner, they are connected to the core links of commodity demand, sorting, and distribution.
2. The essential difference between new retail and traditional retail-mining the value of data
With the above example of Hema Xiansheng, I believe you have a general understanding of the concept of new retail.
So, what is the essential difference between new retail and traditional retail?
Through an analogy, we can understand this problem in a popular way.
Generally speaking, community mom-and-pop shops are small in scale, and the husband and wife have multiple jobs, both as purchasers, cashiers, and warehouse clerk; historical sales data cannot play a role in guiding decision-making, resulting in purchase and distribution relying on intuition; warehousing data cannot Real-time online, so every time inventory re-listing is cumbersome and often lost or dropped parts.
Hema Xiansheng, as a representative of the new retail of daily chemical supermarkets, can be said to use the value of data to the extreme.
Through advanced technologies such as big data, mobile internet, and automation, Hema realizes a full-link data drive from online APP order, to store packaging, and to terminal delivery.
Through the above example, it is not difficult to find that current data has become one of the most important means of production, and the essential difference between new retail and traditional retail is the mining of data value. When the value of data is mined, how to make it empower the staff of the enterprise in an "approachable" way is what visualization technology needs to do.
3. A case that will show you the potential of data mining and visualization in the retail industry
Since the underlying support for the transformation and upgrading of traditional retail to new retail is data mining and visualization technology, how do they empower specific business modules? Let's start with the three elements of people, goods, and markets, and discuss them one by one~
1. People-consumer insights, from B2C to C2M
As the saying goes, knowing oneself, knowing one's enemy, and winning in all battles, insight into consumers is the first step in subsequent product selection and consumption guidance.
In the past, the entire traditional retail industry's insights into customers were still on the surface. Most of the time, a series of decisions such as product selection were made by the operators. In this traditional B2C model, retail generally centers on the production enterprise and implements large-scale, standardized assembly line production. After production is completed, it will eventually reach the end customer through circulation links such as primary distribution and secondary distribution. In this mode, the supply chain The lack of communication between the various entities in the above can easily lead to the problem of "asymmetry between production and demand".
The C2M model takes the customer as the center and realizes the reverse "demand-driven supply chain". After a series of preliminary work such as drawing customer portraits and demand research and forecasting, manufacturers can conduct "flexible production" according to demand. It is a good way to avoid overcapacity.
And what specific indicators should the consumer portrait focus on? How are these indicators unearthed?
For example, as shown in the figure, it is a large digital screen of consumer portraits based on data mining and visualization technology. Among them, hard indicators such as age, gender, city, province, and membership level are focused, and these indicators are all uploaded synchronously by offline "fields" using store wifi, face recognition, and membership systems. In addition to the above indicators, you can also perform further data analysis and mining through the large screen, such as the year-on-year growth of members, sales proportion, and preference for single product forecasts.
2. Goods-product selection, delivery and review
In addition to "people", "goods" must also achieve full online and offline links through data interconnection.
The retail industry's core work around "goods" can be roughly divided into three major links in chronological order: product selection before production, delivery after production, and resumption before reproduction. Since the product selection work largely depends on the portrait of the consumer, and the portrayal of the consumer portrait has been described in the previous article, this article mainly elaborates on the delivery and re-listing of the "goods".
As far as delivery requirements are concerned, it can help retailers to uniformly command the warehousing, inventory, and logistics scheduling of various stores by building a data center. Through the platform, the warehousing, inventory, logistics systems and online retail platforms (Tmall, JD, etc.) of all stores are opened up, and the “goods” are connected with offline stores. In this way, products can be directly put on the shelves in all channels, and the membership system is opened up in all channels, thereby transforming all the existing internal systems of retailers and brands to maximize the application of big data.
In terms of remarketing, data mining and visualization techniques can be used to display product sales on a real-time large screen, and can quickly adjust product strategies. As shown in the figure below, retailers can combine the main SKU products of their brands in each season to visually display brand products, including brand matrix, category sales proportion, main product sales, and product sales rankings.
3. Field-online and offline "field" interaction
In the past, traditional retailers focused on offline physical store channels, and after migrating from the traditional offline layout to "online + offline", they also put forward higher requirements for "field" interaction.
As far as the online “field” is concerned, the unified data integration of offline physical stores and online e-commerce stores through visualization technology empowers management-level personnel. As shown in the figure, the large screen can display real-time sales, amount, traffic, etc. of all channels, and can simultaneously display the completion rate of the current month's indicators, which is convenient for management-level personnel to implement product strategy formulation and iteration through data.
In addition to using digital large screens to build online "fields", retailers should also strengthen the digital process of offline "fields", such as using smart devices (try-on evaluation, thermal dynamics, etc.) to collect customer behavior after entering the store Data, carry out targeted in-store shopping guides.
Fourth, the conclusion
Finally, the retail industry still has a long way to go in the future, and new retail will not be the end of iterative progress in the retail industry. Although we cannot foresee in what form the future retail format will exist, one thing is certain, that is, data mining and visualization technologies will play an increasingly important role in helping the retail industry to transform and upgrade.
The above new retail digital big screen case comes from Kangaroo Cloud