Grabbing the Highland of Industry and Research: A New Exploration of Retail To B

Source | Alter chat technology (spnews)

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More and more retail enterprises are being forced out of their comfort zone.

A well-known sports brand disclosed in its latest mid-term performance report that both revenue and gross profit in the first half of the year have declined, and the number of stores has decreased by 567 compared with the beginning of the year.

The black swan incident has put retail enterprises in a difficult situation in offline stores, but the downturn does not mean the disappearance of consumer demand, but accelerates the transfer of consumption habits to online. Under the special background of the coexistence of crisis and opportunity, the retail industry has gradually formed two basic consensus:

1. When middle-aged and elderly people start to learn to shop online, the transaction will further shift from offline to online, which is an irreversible industry trend;

2. Only retail enterprises that fully implement digitalization can improve the efficiency of online transactions and finally survive the transformation of the retail industry.

In the time when the old and the new are intertwined in the retail industry, almost everyone is aware that a huge change is taking place. It’s just that the protagonists are obviously not only retailers who are trying to get out of the second growth curve online, service providers are also engaged in a war without gunpowder on the B side.

01

Retail enters the deep water area

The digital or intelligent transformation of retail is no longer a new topic. Around 2018, a wave of retail upgrades began to rise. Carrefour, Yonghui Superstores, BBK and other industry "leaders" have tested the water one after another. New retail formats such as unmanned shelves and unmanned supermarkets have also sprung up like mushrooms after rain.

The difference in 2020 is that digital transformation has changed from an "optional" to a "required question", and a large number of inexperienced merchants are forced to "catch ducks to the shelves" for digital exploration. In this transformation following the direction of the tide, some merchants accidentally encountered hidden reefs, and some merchants walked into deep water unknowingly.

I thought that digital transformation was nothing more than opening a small program mall, and then stepping on the wind of live broadcast to accumulate private domain traffic, but the increase in the weight of online orders is forcing retail companies to "go to the cloud" in the whole link of supply chain, warehousing and other links. At the same time, the evolution of the transaction structure also poses new challenges to the internal organizational structure of the enterprise.

A series of changes brewed a series of thorny problems:

For example, the ERP, WMS, CRM and other systems of many retail companies use products from different manufacturers, and each system is building its own chimney, causing data barriers one after another. When online orders continued to increase, it was discovered that the inventory and front-end data were not connected. The inventory search for each item had to be manually operated by the shopping guide, which virtually increased the time cost of the shopping guide and seriously restricted the processing efficiency of online orders.

Another example is that the organizational structure of many retail companies still continues the model of offline stores, and there are varying degrees of acclimatization when they transition to online.

An example is: the reassignment of roles, the link involved in completing an online order transaction is much more complicated than offline, who is responsible for drainage, who is responsible for maintenance, who is responsible for customer service, and who finally concluded the transaction. The reasonable performance attribution of different roles is behind the adjustment of a complete set of complex organizational structures.

Another example is: the evolution of the store manager’s responsibilities. In the past, the work focused on morning meetings, operations and review. While digitally redefining the store, it is also redefining the scope of the store manager’s work, including how to attract traffic, distribute, and live broadcast in private domains. A series of new challenges, such as , community management, etc., are regarded as the core grasp and super touch points of private domain traffic.

Regarding the issue of data barriers, at the moment when concepts such as refactoring people and goods yards are popular, quite mature solutions have emerged in the industry. The industrial empowerment emphasized by Internet giants such as Tencent includes a package plan for data interconnection. Weimob And other business service providers to help customers get through the front-end and back-end systems, but also to speed up the flow of data.

How to solve the organizational structure problems encountered by retail enterprises? This is an intricate management issue. It is related to whether retail enterprises can find their own business scenarios for verification, promotion, and replication. It has long gone beyond the scope of technology, but it is the core competition point of the B-end competition.

02

Methodology and Climbing the Cloud Ladder

In conventional cognition, the digitalization of retail enterprises is often divided into five key elements, namely customers, stores, supply chain, collaboration and decision-making.

Among them, there are three digitized objects, namely customers and their shopping trajectories, goods and their time and space status, and employee collaboration mechanisms. In essence, it still solves the problem from the perspective of the people and goods market: analyze consumer behavior through big data mining, and then carry out "thousands of people and thousands of faces" differentiated marketing according to consumer preferences; use big data to select products to achieve Flexible and accurate commodity supply, while improving the efficiency of logistics distribution.

As for the collaborative division of labor among employees, the most common is tool output, such as tools such as mini programs, WeChat public accounts, enterprise WeChat, video accounts, WeChat payment, etc., to help employees of retail companies connect with their potential customers in WeChat, and reduce the cost as much as possible. The threshold for merchants to attract new users and transform.

However, decision-making is often a detail that is habitually ignored. Different companies have different digital foundations and emphasis levels, and the process of smart retail is at different stages. It is impossible to generalize.

In particular, some companies that started to explore smart retail after 2020 may not have a clear concept of what smart retail is, so how can they talk about transformation and self-help?

In other words, simply exporting tools and services may not be able to solve the thorny problems encountered by retailers, and systematic empowerment is also needed.

03

Redefine "third party"

For a long time in the past, third-party business service providers have played the role of infrastructure "transformers": the transformation of the field, the transformation of goods, and the transformation of user data.

Switching to the retailer's position, the so-called "third party" is just a service provider that provides tools. Later, some traffic giants entered the market and gradually packaged it into the image of an enabler. But in any case, "third parties" are like marginal players in retailing. Although they have a complete set of theoretical foundations and are far-sighted in predicting the direction of retailing, it is difficult to truly establish a commercial relationship with the brand if they do not personally deal with the market. alliance relationship.

The gap between retailers and business service providers seems to have affected the outside world's understanding of "third parties". If tools and traffic are only used as moats, the resilience of the business model may be compromised.

Many companies are trying to redefine the role of a "third party": not only a service provider that provides tools, an enabler that distributes traffic, but also a guide that leads the industry out of "uncertainty", extending from tools and traffic to Knowledge System.

When an industry is at a new turning point, the first person to eat crabs will reap not only the early traffic dividends, but also the practical experience gained through hard work. It is no doubt that these experiences will be reviewed, refined, precipitated, and then exported. It is the core asset that affects the wind direction of the industry.

When thinking about the moat of business service providers later, there is an additional layer of depth in addition to width and length. After all, tools and traffic are substitutable to a certain extent, but the knowledge system composed of experience and customer resources is a core capability that cannot be replicated in a short period of time.

When cracks appear in the cornerstone of business, To B players in the retail industry are trying to pry open a larger market space.

04

some thinking

When talking about China’s retail reform in 2017, Bessich, the global executive vice president of Wal-Mart, gave this point of view: “The business society is always changing, and what companies need to do is to adapt to this change. Opportunities belong to those who can read ahead. Someone who understands change and establishes a plan to execute."

Although these remarks did not attract much attention three years ago, they are predictable now: the black swan event in early 2020 has accelerated the changes in the commercial society, and some retail companies that had previously carried out intelligent transformation stood on the frontlines. Other retailers were forced to make up classes.

Now the same scene is happening again on the B side. Business service providers with a keen sense of smell have already seen the direction of the industry from the pain points of customers. While creating additional value for partners, they are also digging their own moats.