Author: Liu Xiaolong He Xiaoqing et al
Changes are quietly happening in offline retail stores:
Wal-Mart's new generation of stores in Chengdu follow the "scene experience" rule to design the moving line, with the life-oriented consumption scene as the main line to connect clothing, bedding, mother and baby and other scene-based experience shopping areas;
Shanghai Sam's Club has been renovated and upgraded, adding a wine tasting area, Sam's kitchen, activity center, mother and baby room, glasses service area, etc., to further enhance the experience function of the store;
Gome Electrical Appliances is constantly adjusting its product portfolio and categories, increasing the proportion of intelligent and integrated products;
At the same time, many Internet companies are committed to helping traditional offline stores to carry out digital transformation and upgrading, for example, Meituan will help merchants, through software and hardware transformation and business model iteration, upgrade the original dine-in stores to "next-generation stores" with both online and offline business capabilities and service capabilities.
Scenes, experiences, category reconstruction, digitalization... Nowadays, major retailers and brands are striving to build "next-generation retail stores" in all directions.
Imagining the future, we have summarized the ten major development trends of "next-generation retail stores", which will lead the planning, design and landing of future store models.
01
User Mind:
From "single point breakthrough" to "multi-point penetration"
Kearney's consumer survey found that consumers have now upgraded from simply "looking" for goods to "finding" goods, "choosing" goods and "visiting" stores, which means that the image of stores in the minds of consumers (store mentality) in the past can no longer match the needs of consumers.
In the past, the main mentality of retail stores, such as Carrefour, Walmart and other hypermarkets, was often "low price", "good goods" and "complete", and its essence was to gather various products for customers to choose to meet the purpose of consumption users.
With the rise of e-commerce and the change of consumption habits, the traffic of offline retail stores has shown a downward trend, especially for retail stores with standard products such as home appliances. In order to save the decline, there have gradually emerged store mentalities such as "category collection experience" and "one-stop matching", however, such stores are still difficult to hit the needs of consumers to "shop".
The reshaping of the new store model begins with reconstructing the mind of the store in the minds of consumers.
Traditional stores focus on "finding" customers, while the next generation of stores highlight the simultaneous penetration of "finding, shopping, and selecting" three types of customers.
For example, Japan's Tsutaya Home Appliances continues the aesthetic style of Tsutaya Bookstore, creating a store mentality of "restoring the taste of life and providing diversified life choices", so that consumers can "find" and "choose" goods while entering the store to "shop"; Wanjia City Supermarket Stores highlight the store mentality of "surprise experiential consumer shopping places" to stimulate consumers' shopping impulses when visiting stores.
The minds of "overall solution", "life explosion scene" and "life proposal" are becoming a higher-level store mentality, passing on the concept of "enjoying a comfortable shopping time while discovering new life needs" to consumers.
Store mind iteration process
02
Store Positioning:
From "Big with Small" to "Near with Far"
Store positioning is iterating from the traditional "radiating small shops around the city/business circle" to the new customer positioning logic of "obtaining customers with community near-field stores and delivering city flagship stores".
In the past, chain stores often seized offline customer flow in the form of "wide open stores", and a situation of "taking the big with the small" would be formed in a city by multiple stores of different sizes. Behind this model of multi-store and intensive coverage in one city, there are problems such as same-store competition, overlapping positioning, and discounted operating effects.
"Near and Far" store positioning model
Leading retail stores have begun to adopt the positioning method of "near and far" to reshape the competitiveness of customer acquisition - developing urban flagship stores in core business districts or suitable locations, focusing on services such as experience, display and delivery, thus forming a traffic whirlpool; laying out small near-field customers near new and old buildings, providing rapid experience and docking services, and diverting traffic from large stores in the central city. Online layout O2O, to create a near and far store layout and customer acquisition network.
IKEA city, the world's first city store in downtown Jing'an Temple, Shanghai, is a new attempt to "take the near and the far". The store is located in the city center, so that it can more "conveniently" reach urban consumers, provide goods services and experiences faster, and enhance the interaction between IKEA and consumers.
Decathlon also tried the near-field layout in 2019, with about 200 square meters of "small" store Decathlon CONNECT layout in downtown Shanghai Inner Ring, and launched the "online order, 2 hours store immediate pick-up" service.
The world's first IKEA city store located in the downtown area of Jing'an Temple in Shanghai
03
Format layout:
From "Category Display" to "Scene Experience"
The iteration of the format layout of the store can bring consumers a more intuitive impact and a subversive experience of shopping methods. Nowadays, offline stores have gradually transformed from the stacked brands and categories in the past to the "scenario-based experience store model", and finally towards the "lifestyle proposal store" model.
Store model iteration process
The one-stop and channel goods model of traditional supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and RT-Mart is difficult to resist the impact of e-commerce multi-brand choice and one-click operation; while traditional home appliance stores have problems such as fewer brand choices and insufficient price transparency.
On the other hand, the recent rise of category specialty stores - such as Lianhua Whale selected according to the categories of boutique home, leisure food, personal care beauty, maternal and infant products, etc., divided into independent areas - its essence is still around the collection of products around the scene experience area rather than life scene, and the shopability is limited.
The layout of the future store format will jump from category thinking to user thinking, and develop a "scenario-based store" form.
For example, Haier's three-winged bird home appliance experience store focuses on the theme of scene-based, directly displaying unique life scene model rooms in the offline store, such as fat-burning balconies, happy hi singing living rooms, and skin-beautifying bathrooms.
These new scene schemes create scenes around home appliances, reshape the living space by embedding home appliances, meet the strong needs of the scene under the new consumption trend, and realize the functions that cannot be met under the original living space.
Another higher-end store layout is the "lifestyle proposal store". Japan's Tsutaya Home Appliances in-store format, from the perspective of "proposal for life", from the perspective of "proposal for life", through the display around a variety of themes, arouse the user's interest in exploring in-store.
For example, Tsutaya home appliances are integrated into different life scenes by matching different furniture, furnishings and home appliances, books, miscellaneous items, etc., simulating a warm and beautiful family atmosphere.
This kind of life proposal-style business scene allows customers to encounter new life when visiting the store, lamenting that "the original life can be like this", so that the seller's electricity is not only the seller's electricity, but also provides users with diversified lifestyle choices to stimulate purchases.
This layout method that allows customers to "meet and discover a new lifestyle in the store" requires the store to have deep operational skills, accurate consumer insights, etc., which will not be quickly rolled out in China in a short period of time, but the momentum has risen and the future can be expected.
Tsutaya Home Appliances "Lifestyle Proposal Store" located in Tokyo, Japan
04
Visual Effects:
From "Flat Straight Talk" to "Immersive Enjoyment"
As young people become more and more of a consumer force, the importance of visual effects for retail stores is becoming increasingly prominent.
This year's young people are almost all "visual animals" that have grown up in social networks, and the new generation of retail stores can only truly win the favor of the younger generation by realizing the revolutionary innovation of "shopping mall-like" and iterative innovation in façade, space layout, internal beauty and circulation design, highlighting the sense of no boundary, the sense of yearning, the sense of substitution, the sense of immersion, the sense of style and other elements.
The new generation of retail stores are good at using the façade for image display, the first time to attract the attention of consumers.
"Lifestyle Proposal Store" Tsoya Home Appliances creates a "sense of transparency" through the glass façade, which most intuitively shows the overall aesthetic style of the store's interior, while U479, a new landmark of the Magic City Trend, stands out through the night vision of the lighting design, making people feel like they are on the neon streets of Japan.
The "neon sense" façade of the U479
Entering a new generation of retail stores, consumers will feel an unprecedented sense of "no boundaries" in a limited space.
TX Huaihai, known as the "Young Force Center", replaces the "closed area" with an "open block", the theme style of each unit is clear from the outside, the cross-district access is free and convenient, greatly enhancing the walkability, and the whole floor presents an extremely simple industrial style, so that the theme of a hundred flowers is "compatible" in the same space.
TX Huaihai's "unbounded" neighborhood
The internal Beauty chen of the new generation of retail stores is "soulful", narrowing the distance between users through strong content attributes.
Although the traditional store is spacious and bright, it still gives people a sense of alienation, while TX Huaihai and Tingya home appliances are the same, expressing the attitude of life through design and art, empathizing with consumers, making them feel a sense of yearning and substitution in the immersive experience, which in turn triggers consumption desire.
The new generation of retail stores will reflect the beauty of the "winding path" and maximize the shopability.
The new format of the community store of Fat Donglai breaks the inherent square movement line of retail space, and adds the arc moving line commonly found in shopping malls, avoiding the flatness and visual fatigue of the space, extending the user stay time while enhancing the user experience, and greatly increasing the purchase conversion rate.
05
Merchandise Planning:
From "Goods As the Beginning" to "Beginning with the Field"
The product planning of traditional stores is often based on the existing given commodity pool and forms a combination of goods based on consumer demand.
This kind of "goods-based" commodity planning idea has two major shortcomings: on the one hand, according to the dynamic sales rate, new product listing and other factors, passive commodity replacement, in the long run, there will be problems such as aging commodity structure;
On the other hand, under the premise of not actively updating the iterative commodity pool, the commodity portfolio is often thin and outdated, which is difficult to support the complete business scene and meet the requirements of a new generation of "scenario-based" stores.
Scenario-based product planning ideas
The new generation of retail stores will carry out "scenario-based" commodity planning based on format layout planning, from supply-side driven "push thinking" to demand-side driven "pull thinking".
Before doing commodity planning, we must first clarify what scene space is under the layout planning of the store format, what scene theme is corresponding, and then reverse backwards in order to support which categories need to be planned for each scene, and then combined with the preferences of consumers around the store for price, tonality, etc., plan what brands should be adapted under each category, and which SKUs should be planned under each brand.
This new commodity planning model of "starting with the field" also puts forward new requirements for the procurement and marketing model. The traditional procurement and marketing model needs to be transformed into a "buyer's hand" in order to truly realize "scenario-based" commodity planning.
As one of the innovative formats of hypermarkets, Lianhua Whale Selection divides the store into dozens of boutique pavilions of about 300 square meters, and the business initiative of each boutique pavilion is handed over to the corresponding buyer planner, who combines lean iterative commodities according to the theme positioning of the boutique museum and the needs of the customer group, thus ensuring the selection of the boutique museum, high-end quality and brand refinement.
06
User Acquisition:
From "Passive Rear" to "Front Interception"
As overall solutions become the demands of more and more consumers, consumption nodes have begun to be preemptive, and this trend is especially evident in low-frequency categories with longer consumption chains.
For example, in the pan-home industry, in the past, consumers mostly configured home appliances after the decoration was completed, and now more and more people make home appliance purchase decisions during the decoration process, and begin to incorporate home appliances into the overall decoration style and home style.
For stores located at the back end of the consumer chain, the decline in customer flow has become the "sword of Damocles" that must be faced. In the past, the "sitting business" model that waited for consumers to come to the door was tantamount to "sitting and waiting", and the next generation of stores must change to the "business" model as soon as possible, from "passive customer reception" to "active customer acquisition", where the user should extend the tentacles to where, take the initiative to grasp the vitality.
In the future, a new generation of stores will be transformed into the role of "base area" and "experience field", store personnel from the "base area" to take the initiative to obtain customers, while through the cross-industry alliance "unite all possible unity of strength", and the store itself is ready to experience and transaction traffic to undertake.
Taking the head HVAC company Chengdu Meijing as an example, on the one hand, it enters the upstream store Red Star Macalline and other home furnishing stores, on the other hand, it cooperates extensively with decoration design companies to obtain consumer HVAC consumer demand, so as to turn the crisis into an opportunity under the torrent of preposition of consumption nodes.
07
User Services:
From "dot touch" to "butler companionship"
The customer reception and service model of the next generation of retail stores has begun to shift to specialization, integration and full process.
The user service staff of the store has transformed from a simple sales guide to a professional exclusive butler service, becoming the main or even the only interaction point for docking with consumers, and providing consumers with professional and high-quality active shopping guides and after-sales service services through the effective integration of other service resources.
"Butler accompaniment" user service model
This trend is preferentially presented in "slow" decision-making retail stores, such as home improvement and home appliance retail stores. In the past, home appliance stores adopted the traditional third-party brand factory promotion model, which made customers who entered the store need to dock back and forth with different factories, with mixed information, a strong sense of separation and a high decision-making cost.
Kearney's research found that the world's leading home appliance retail stores are changing to varying degrees to the full-market home appliance service consultant model.
For example, Jingdong's super experience store has increased the number of self-operated service personnel, and in the low-floor category scene area, Jingdong is equipped with self-operated category experts to explain the product introduction and sales process, and control the transaction link;
Haier Three-Winged Bird, a leading scenario-based store, has launched a "1+N" "butler accompaniment" service model, in which the project manager (sales consultant) specially docks store customers and coordinates the personnel required for other projects to land, such as docking designers to undertake design needs, and docking home improvement companies to follow up on landing decoration.
08
Traffic management:
From "In-store Local Area" to "Global Revitalization"
Traditional retail stores are a "local field" limited to offline stores, and in the future, a new generation of retail stores will become a "wide-area field" that breaks physical boundaries, extending from offline to store scenes to online departure scenes, creating O2O traffic disks with "stores" as the core.
In the future, in addition to purchasing selected goods in the limited space offline stores, consumers can also enjoy a richer product pool on the online "cloud shelf" Mini Program after leaving the store, and the store can avoid the loss of departing users, carry out long-term traffic management through the Internet, and build a moat for private traffic.
Sales shopping guide is the key to the new generation of retail stores to revitalize online and offline traffic. The identity of the future sales guide is not just an ordinary store clerk, but also a role similar to "group leader" or "micro-business", and even transformed into a KOL with goods.
Taking the perfect diary with 48 million private domain traffic as an example, offline store sales guides across the country attract consumers to add WeChat to "hooks" through exclusive offers, close the distance between users with the "small complete" private beauty and skin care consultant "human settings", and pull into the WeChat fan group named after the "Little Perfection Research Institute", and the sales guide regularly pushes various new products or offers in the fan group every day, guiding users to directly place orders and purchases in the mini program platform of "Completed Heart" to achieve conversion.
Behind the seemingly omnipotent sales guide is a "fool-like" intelligent back-end system that provides a series of full-link traffic operation functions, including:
Through tools such as intelligent automatic group robots, help sales guides push information in batches; help key potential order users by capturing user browsing records, and evoke their chat dialog boxes with one click; help sales guides improve sales scale through functions such as one-click live broadcast and friend grouping; help sales guides increase user loyalty by automatically pushing birthday wishes and other member care, and so on.
The most important thing in the intelligent back-end system is the accurate people-cargo matching system. The sales guide captures user characteristics based on offline face-to-face contact experience, manually marks on the user management console, and the follow-up background system will intelligently tune user tags according to the user's product browsing records.
The intelligent commodity distribution system will intelligently match the user label with the commodity label on the "cloud shelf" Mini Program, accurately recommend the best products that are most suitable for the user, and help the sales guide improve the "hit rate" and strengthen the traffic monetization ability.
Shopping guide empowers people and goods matching system
09
Clerk Operations:
From "Human Brain Decision Making" to "Algorithmic Decision Making"
Traditional retail stores are highly dependent on people's experience and quality, the future retail industry will enter the era of algorithm-driven, a new generation of retail stores will be hundreds of decisions per day to computer intelligent algorithms, through the whole process of digital intelligence management to reduce the dependence on people to the minimum, so as to achieve a qualitative leap in operational efficiency.
The "behind-the-scenes heroes" of the new generation of retail stores are the "central brain" operating system, all processes are abstracted into a complete and systematic capability map, engineers find laws for each of the ability modules and establish algorithms, the human experience and ability are precipitated on the "central brain", the "central brain" analyzes the data input in daily work, and outputs effective decisions, while the store manager and clerk only need to follow the instructions issued by the "central brain" and do a good job in user service.
Selection has always been the key to testing the experience and ability of store staff, the "central brain" of the new generation of retail stores can listen to the public opinion trends of major social platforms in real time, insight and analysis of past procurement and sales data, predict demand and identify explosive products according to the consumption preferences of surrounding people, and provide the optimal product combination recommendation of "thousands of stores and thousands of faces".
Ordering is also a large occupation of a lot of energy of the clerk, the future "central brain" can monitor the inventory health status in real time, once the replenishment trigger point is automatically issued replenishment orders;
Pricing promotion is also one of the headaches of store staff, the future "central brain" will calculate the most effective revenue curve through historical data, choose the optimal pricing promotion strategy, decide what goods, at what time, according to what strength to discount, and automatically dynamically adjust prices through electronic price tags.
As China's leading smart convenience store, Convenience Bee has minimized its dependence on people through "full automation" and created a high degree of replicability, opening more than 2,000 directly operated stores across the country in less than 5 years.
Convenience bee store manager training cycle only takes 45 days to 6 months, and the industry average is 2 to 3 years, this amazing speed thanks to the convenience bee "central brain" operating system, the system through the Pad every 15 minutes to push the task instructions to the store manager, the work instructions are meticulous to do a few buns each time, meat and vegetarian bags are a few, everything is in the system control.
10
supply chain:
From "channel segmentation" to "collaborative convergence"
The change trend of the front end of the store can be more intuitively perceived by consumers, and the supply chain innovation of the back end is more reflected in the improvement of the operating efficiency of the store.
We have observed that with the popularity of e-commerce and O2O, the supply chain of retail stores has also shown a variety of innovative models, of which online and offline "one plate of goods" has become one of the hot words in the new retail era.
Stores are changing from the original channel segmentation to "omni-channel one plate of goods", leveraging the potential of online and offline omni-channels, maximizing scale effects and dynamic sales efficiency, and realizing the collaborative integration of supply chains.
Compared with "multi-plate goods", "one plate of goods" focuses on the unified management of omni-channel commodity inventory, breaking the channel segmentation, and realizing inventory sharing and efficient commodity distribution.
A domestic cosmetics brand retail store is innovating the "one plate of goods" model in the supply chain, by concentrating all the inventory available in offline store warehouses and other warehouses such as e-commerce warehouses to online and offline shared inventory pools, so that its online e-commerce channels can also share offline store warehouses in real time.
The brand's online Tmall flagship store orders can therefore be delivered in stores according to the new routing rules, avoiding the embarrassment of less available inventory or even out-of-stock when e-commerce channels are concentrated in sales, maximizing the efficiency of sales while optimizing the user's shopping experience, delivering nearby and accelerating the efficiency of commodity distribution.
The development trend of future stores is unstoppable. For retail companies, no matter which direction they are to transform their new generation of stores, they need to change their mentality, take the consumer as the core; adapt to local conditions and avoid blind replication; careful planning, bold trial and error iteration.
The future is here, and the future can be expected.
Winshang.com's cultural tourism real estate value dissemination and content co-creation platform
【Winshang Cultural Tourism】With the posture of hiking, we foresee the general trend of cultural tourism
Time and place: May 18-19 / Poly World Trade Center Expo Center, Guangzhou