Starting with the scramble for pricing power, what will happen to retail in 2024?

Mondo Finance Updated on 2024-02-01

Author:Jia Lele,Edit:He Yueyang.

year, if there is an annual word in the retail industry, "* war" will inevitably be on the list. The struggle for the right to speak triggered by ** is also frequently staged.

2. For example, some brands have stopped supplying retailers who take the discount route, and even the "whole network**" such as the new account of the live broadcast room "Make a Friend Factory Sales" has been launchedFor example, due to the price increase of Pepsi, Carrefour in four European countries "**Pepsi."

3. The positioning of "Make a Friend Factory to Sell" and "Make a Friend Tea Factory to Sell" is an industrial belt series of accounts, focusing on "place of origin", "big-name foundry" and "no middleman", and the characteristics of the product can be summarized as"There are categories, styles, no brands, **low".。This step of making a friend can be regarded as stepping into the same river as Dongfang Selection, and then tracing back to the source, white labels, industrial belts, and other platforms such as Taote and Pinduoduo.

4. Discount retailers and making friends, these two examples correspond to different routes to achieve low prices. Get a lower **,Either let the brand willingly give up the profits, that is, to "brand" the brand, or not to cooperate with the brand, and directly de-brand.

5. Originally, most of the live broadcast rooms of influencers also took the first road, but on Double 11 in 2023, the "floor price agreement" has attracted widespread attention, and the "lowest price agreement" between the talent and the anchor can no longer fall on the surface, and the e-commerce MCN turns to the second road.

6. Using the market dominance of the traffic side to build a moat on the supply side, this road will not work, and at the beginning of 2021, Ali was fined 18.2 billion yuan is a grass gray snake line.

The strategy of "de-branding" is essentially a game of "pricing power" between channel retailers and brand owners, and it is also a choice between taking goods as the core and store brands as the core.

8. Finding the source, supporting the white card, taking the commodity as the core, coupled with the follow-up of Taotian and Jingdong on the "refund only" strategy at the end of the year, the prosperity of e-commerce is as Pinduoduo wishes.

9. The significance of the brand is to provide different practical value and emotional value. The former means strict quality control, unified packaging, and perfect after-sales, which is the key to buying peace of mind, and the latter means a sense of identity.

10. Even if it is a big-name foundry, without the constraints of brand "quality control", it may not be able to stabilize the first-quality goods, let alone the sense of identity. This is also why in the smile curve, the manufacturing link in the middle is less profitable, while the brand operation link in the back end has a higher profit margin.

The risks and benefits are equal. If the channel wants to overturn the brand and earn more added value, it must do what the brand originally wanted to do, bear the cost that the brand should bear, fulfill the obligations that the brand should fulfill, and endorse the product.

12. For channel providers such as making friends, the role positioning of "factory sales" should be transformed, from helping brands sell goods to helping users select goods, from selling to buying.

13. This is actually in line with the trend of retail development. "Oversupply" must be the main theme in the future retail market, and overcapacity must be the main contradiction. To improve efficiency, it is necessary to determine production by sales or how much production can be sold and consumed.

14. Merchants have room for optimization in two dimensions. First, the upgrading of commodities, just like new energy vehicles instead of traditional oil vehicles, the demand is not non-existent, but to find the right direction;Second, the upgrade of supply methods, such as small orders and quick returns, rapid measurement and on-demand production, reduce costs by reducing the waste of inventory, instead of the first popular trend, betting on large-scale production of explosive models to reduce costs.

15. Of course, the platform needs to be able to provide a stable market environment and accurate market feedback. The benchmarks in the small order quick return are shein and temu.

16. The former has obtained a similar monopoly position by deeply binding merchants and upstream, and has built a strong advantage on the supply side, while the latter has taken the significance of "division of labor" to the extreme through the full custody model and obtained a large number of low-price supply capacity. On the whole, the platform uses low-priced products to obtain traffic-side advantages and accurate market feedback, and then forms the advantages of vertical (deep binding) and horizontal (more merchants) on the supply side. Again, the prosperity of e-commerce is as Pinduoduo wishes.

17. Offline physical retail has gone through the market stage of no brand management and no business restrictions, and has gone through the real estate stage with brand management but no requirements for product quality, pricing and SKU, such as Wanda. Now physical retail has reached the service-oriented stage, and the quality, quantity and price of goods are managed in an all-round way, such as Sam's, Hema and Fat Donglai.

The same is true online, which needs to shift from the real estate e-commerce model with "ground rent" as the main way to realize it, to a service-oriented e-commerce model, such as Dongfang Selection and Li Jiaqi in the early days.

19. The so-called service-oriented is to take commodities as the core, through the management of quality, quantity and price, so that consumers can buy at ease, and the first chain only focuses on innovative products or on-demand production.

20. So, what will happen to the brand?

21. In the future, we may see some mid-waist brands retreat to service-oriented retailers, relying on the best ability to make money, not relying on brand premiums;There must also be some brands that will insist on establishing a brand image and maintaining the brand tonality, under the trend of consumption stratification, these brands can also live well, but they need to be prepared, do not hope for the expansion of the circle, and keep their own groups steadfastly, and do a good job of user stickiness and repurchase.

22. From the perspective of historical experience, the more you insist on being a mentally occupied brand in the non-economic cycle, the more likely you are to occupy more market share when the economic cycle comes.

23. How does the platform transform into a service-oriented e-commerce?The core purpose should be to make money to help consumers pick up goods, good goods, cheap goods, and long-tail goodsInstead of making money to help merchants sell goods indiscriminately.

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