Under the new retail, who is the next ＂live broadcast＂？

Editor’s guide: 2020 is about to pass, and many new terms have appeared this year, which has also made many industries stand on the cusp of the times. Live delivery of goods has "sprung up everywhere" in the new retail industry and achieved outstanding results. In the face of new technology and new situation, will there be the next "live delivery" in the new retail industry? This article will analyze from three dimensions, hoping to help you.

Since October 2016, Ma Yun first put forward the concept of "new retail" in Hangzhou, and the wheel of e-commerce has been pushed invisibly: "The era of pure e-commerce will soon end, and in the next ten or twenty years, online and offline and logistics must be combined to give birth to real new retail."

Following the pace of entrepreneurs, the Opinions on Promoting Entity Retail Innovation promulgated by the state in November undoubtedly pushed this concept to the peak.

However, today, when Li Jiaqi knocked on the gong and shouted "Buy it!" At that time, the live broadcast of goods was like a spark, which burned the whole e-commerce industry. The concept of new retail seems to have long been forgotten, and the new word that was heatedly discussed by many entrepreneurs and scholars at that time is no longer fresh.

However, there has never been an innovation out of thin air, and there is no creativity independent of the world. After the live broadcast of goods has pushed the development model of the e-commerce industry to the extreme, what should be done next to create greater value? It is better to trace the source from the beginning and re-predict the tuyere direction according to the experience.

As early as 1958, Harvard professor mcnair put forward the economic theory of "the wheel of sales". The sales model with low cost, low price and low profit as the basic strategy will enter the market and occupy the market strongly.

However, with the continuous improvement of soft and hard facilities, the increasing number of competitors, and the rising cost of operating quality and service level, the original "three lows" competition strategy will inevitably move towards the "three highs" model of high cost, high price and high profit. Further become the target of a new round of retailers.

It seems to be an endless "sales wheel", which has been improved by Japanese scholar Masao Nakanishi. After studying the development and change law of retail format, he thinks that the competition in retail industry can get rid of the influence of price appearance, and emphasizes technological innovation as the guide, so that enterprises can be promoted in logistics distribution, cost control and information management.

From price to service, the important factors that attract consumers have changed unconsciously. While Taobao is still attracting customers with low price as a gimmick, Pinduoduo’s huge subsidies have quickly squeezed out the vast number of fourth-and fifth-tier cities in China. At this time, the improvement of service systems such as next-day delivery and door-to-door delivery in JD.COM next door has already occupied half of consumers’ minds.

On the one hand, after full speed in recent years, the user growth and traffic dividend brought by the widespread popularization of Internet and mobile Internet terminals are gradually shrinking, and the growth "bottleneck" faced by traditional e-commerce has begun to appear.

On the other hand, the traditional online e-commerce has obvious shortcomings that are difficult to fill since its birth. It is an indisputable fact that the online shopping experience is always inferior to offline shopping. Online e-commerce has never found a realistic path that can provide real scenes and good shopping experience.

How to better combine online and offline has become a breakthrough to solve the retail problem. To build an omni-channel platform in modern retail enterprises is essentially to build a retail ecosystem oriented to meet the needs of consumers and then solve the pain points of consumers. Nowadays, when consumers buy goods, they often need both reasonable prices and reliable quality, and also pay attention to the process experience of shopping.

The emergence of emerging technologies represented by 5G undoubtedly provides a good opportunity to break through the retail cycle.

The take-off of e-commerce is inseparable from the maturity of Internet technology, and the rise of mobile e-commerce benefits from the widespread popularity of mobile intelligent terminals such as smart phones, tablets and wearable devices.

Then, in the mature "new retail" era, the main role of applying new technologies at the practical level is to enhance the consumption experience and improve management efficiency. Specifically, the technologies to enhance the consumer experience are mainly oriented to self-service settlement, intelligent fitting, unmanned logistics, AR/VR experience, indoor positioning navigation and other scenarios; The technology to improve management efficiency mainly focuses on mobile office, unattended, intelligent decision-making, accurate scheduling and so on.

The live broadcast with goods is undoubtedly the best case of combining technology and sales. Grasping the psychological characteristics of young people in today’s society, such as strong fragmentation, high randomness, high pressure and easy to be incited, short videos are pushed to the forefront, and short video sharing+live broadcast with supporting sales methods such as Tik Tok.

On the one hand, the seller makes use of marketing means to improve its sales volume, and the buyer obtains a good shopping experience by buying the seller’s goods, so that both parties can achieve satisfactory trading purposes.

On the other hand, with the support of advanced technology, the seller constantly updates and improves the commodity structure and price system on the trading platform, and increases the categories of commodities, which increases the buyer’s selectivity of commodities on the trading platform, so that consumers can more intuitively understand the information such as commodity characteristics and price concessions, and enhance their shopping experience in the trading process.

The combination of online and offline is the fundamental way for new retail to go further. Compared with the customer service communication of traditional e-commerce, live delivery promotes the sharing of resources between buyers and sellers with high synchronicity.

Anchor can efficiently feedback consumers’ confusion and questions and solve them in time, eliminating the lag of traditional customer service and greatly improving consumers’ experience. And consumers can also know the product information to the greatest extent and grasp the product texture as much as possible. Live delivery reduces the information gap between e-commerce buyers and sellers to a certain extent, and achieves an intuitive sense similar to offline entity.

In addition, by opening and operating offline stores and other means, offline traffic will be expanded and drained to online, helping online shopping malls to open bottlenecks and increase new traffic, thus further developing online shopping malls, which is also a new model for subsequent development.

With the help of online mall’s activity marketing and word-of-mouth image promotion, people gradually get to know more about the brands or projects of merchants and become more familiar with the brand names of offline stores, and then lead online mall traffic to offline stores, so that online and offline stores have common traffic and help offline stores attract traffic, thus sharing passenger flow resources.

How to connect online and offline is the most important link. From traditional e-commerce to live delivery, logistics will inevitably become the focus. Internet orders have greatly increased, especially in major e-commerce festivals such as Double Eleven and 6.18, which has brought great challenges to the business capabilities of logistics such as package collection, transportation and delivery. Therefore, the transformation of the logistics industry has become an inevitable trend.

In the new retail mode, logistics has developed a logistics cloud system with the help of Internet information technology. On the one hand, it has increased the scope and speed of merchant logistics distribution, which not only greatly improved the speed and efficiency of merchants’ purchase and transportation, but also greatly shortened the time from ordering to delivery of goods in merchant distribution services, greatly improving customers’ shopping experience; On the other hand, it shortens the time for retail enterprises to purchase goods and transport goods, saves a lot of time for goods in transit, and wins more time for the development of new retail models.

Although problems such as technology, service and quality have long been commonplace, the core of sales is still inseparable from the control of these crucial issues. How to use technological innovation to promote service innovation, and how to use service innovation to enhance customers’ senses and consumption experience, so as to better promote the development of retail industry, these three complement each other like a gear and keep moving forward in economic development. Perhaps in the future, the development of retail industry will move towards a deeper reality.

Live delivery is already a representative of sales scene. Anchors and products are turning with consumers’ problems, but in the future, more retail stores will join the ranks, shifting from simple live broadcast rooms to more realistic scenes, and now there are some attempts, such as "supermarket+catering" by Box Horse and Yonghui, and retail+online platform of Ctrip.

In today’s information explosion, the way of consumption has changed greatly, and consumers’ choices are also diverse. When stores experience scenes of goods and services, it is undoubtedly a plus item to consider the scenes where consumers buy such goods.

Live delivery has been close to offline shopping in physical stores to the greatest extent, but the emergence of virtual reality technology is undoubtedly the dominant direction for subsequent development. When the network can solve the actual touch problem of goods, there is no actual distinction between online and offline. The development of real technologies such as AR/VR and air projection has brought consumers a brand-new product experience, and new retail scenes and service innovation models have also emerged rapidly. Offline experience stores can not only increase the demand for online channels, but also improve the customer conversion rate brought by customer experience, thus stimulating the total demand of omni-channel consumers.

Fully integrated into the "new retail+sharing economy", through big data analysis, we can more accurately predict the needs of consumers, realize real resource sharing among producers, manufacturers, distributors and consumers, improve the efficiency of retail processes, and achieve mutual benefit and win-win for customers, enterprises, suppliers and other multi-subjects.

In the new era of Internet, "new retail" must start with the marketing concept, customer-oriented service tenet, diversified marketing models and means, and constantly optimize and improve business transaction processes, and enhance the C-end experience of the new retail model with the help of the increasingly developed data cloud and logistics cloud of the Internet. Only in this way can retail enterprises get more healthy and sufficient development opportunities through the new retail model.

Meng Yonghui, WeChat WeChat official account: menglaoshi007, everyone is a product manager columnist. Senior writer, special commentator and industry research expert. Long-term focus on industry research, the cumulative publication of financial and scientific articles over 4 million words.

This article was originally published by everyone as a product manager, and it is forbidden to reprint without permission.

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