AI empowers smart retail, making bosses understand their business better

The retail industry changes with the "new"

In the era of planned economy, people are quantified by bills to quantify their monthly or annual consumption. After the reform and opening up, the market economy began to be tested, and traditional department stores appeared, but the attitudes of shopping malls towards consumers were mostly indifferent, which was quite different from the current service level. With foreign companies entering China, such as Carrefour, Wal-Mart, RT-Mart and other hypermarkets, family-style one-stop shopping at these hypermarkets on weekends has become the best place for many families.

With the changes of the times, the retail model has also been changing. Of course, every era is pursuing a "new" word, including new service levels, fresh and practical products, and new shopping environment. and lifestyle. Today's shopping malls make our shopping environment more three-dimensional, such as the display of different types of goods from -1F to 7F of the mall, one-stop service from household products, food, clothing and entertainment to theaters, of course, this new The business format has been undergoing subtle new adjustments, so the retail industry has been chasing new changes.

In the era of e-commerce, Jack Ma has changed the way of life of many people. E-commerce has made shopping more convenient and diversified. At the beginning of e-commerce, some brand products will refuse to be e-commerce, because there are some differences between the existence of e-commerce and the operation of brands. In fact, on the contrary, this e-commerce shopping trend has changed some shopping methods. Lu Xiaoming, CMO of Beijing Horizon Information Technology Co., Ltd., shared his experience in making cosmetics at L'Oreal at the "2018 Global Smart Product Summit Forum". When L'Oreal just joined Tmall, the first-year sales accounted for 10% of the total sales of all channels. %.

A good consumer experience will promote the return of offline smart retail

In October 2016, Jack Ma proposed "New Retail" at the Yunqi Conference ": "In the next 10 or 20 years, there will be no e-commerce, only new retail. That is to say, online and offline and logistics must be combined to give birth to real new retail. Offline companies must Going online, online companies must go offline, and combining online and offline with modern logistics can truly create new retail.”

According to statistics, currently online Retail accounts for about 30% of total retail, but with the arrival of smart retail in the future, Lu Xiaoming believes that "artificial intelligence will empower offline retail, and the proportion of offline retail will quickly return in the future".

The life cycle of each period of commodity circulation is different. The life cycle of wholesale markets is about 20 years, the best days of department stores are 10 years, and the best days of shopping malls are no more than 5 years. The most prosperous days of commercial retail are about 3 years. The environment of China's commodity retail and the needs and requirements of Chinese consumers for shopping experience, products, logistics, and payment methods are getting faster and faster.

The value of people is indeed not replaceable by data. Lu Xiaoming said that when we face new retail and smart retail today, are we ready to deal with the process of rapid changes and iterations, which will be very fast. No matter how fast the iteration is, we should grasp the essence of new retail "people, goods, and market", plus a consumer's experience, no matter how we play, we can't do without the "3+1 model". In short, the consumer experience is irreplaceable.

AI empowers smart retail to make consumers more happy

Nowadays, brick-and-mortar retail stores are facing some internal and external problems. As store rents, personnel costs, and product costs continue to rise, the profits of brick-and-mortar stores are becoming less and less. Even the clerk you have spent three months training hard will just quit because the salary offered by the store next to you is 100 yuan higher. These are the dilemmas faced by the brick-and-mortar store. However, the retail price of goods in brick-and-mortar stores cannot be increased because of the above-mentioned cost issues, but various marketing plans must be developed to attract consumers.

At the same time, the impact of various promotions of e-commerce has diverted a large part of consumers. How can we make physical retailing more pleasant and intelligent?

In 2017, Zhang Jindong took the lead in proposing "smart retail", and at the end of the year, he proposed a smart retail development strategy, announcing that Suning's Internet stores will expand to about 20,000 in the next three years. In 2018, with the implementation of the smart retail development strategy, when the industry entered the cold winter, Suning quietly blossomed. To investigate the reason, it is precisely because Suning has always firmly grasped the retail essence of creating value for consumers, and has deeply cultivated retail and service.

Professor Zeng Ming emphasized that compared with the more traditional, closed and linear supply chain management mechanism in the industrial age, the whole society can use a multi-role, large-scale, real-time social collaboration method based on the network. to create new value, which will be the source of value for any future enterprise competition.

Lu Xiaoming believes that in order to break through the predicament of traditional offline retail, it is better to return to the essence of retailing and use big data to study the loss of consumers entering the store. For example, there are 100 people in the store, and only 5 people buy things. Can you study why the other 95 people didn't buy things? What is their movement in the store like? What services did the service provider provide to them? Through the study of precise passenger flow, consumer attributes and the movement of consumers entering the store after entering the store, these 95 people can be converted into a 5% transaction rate.

Lu Xiaoming said that under the general trend of consumption upgrade, Horizon wants to use Horizon's digital capabilities to provide retailers with a set of snapshot data acquisition from front-end artificial intelligence cameras, to middle-stage data comparison analysis, A complete solution for labeling, to back-end data analysis-based marketing optimization. In this way, store managers can manage and train store staff in a more targeted manner, monitor and optimize product display in real time, adjust inventory, and provide some convenience in maintaining existing users and tapping potential customers.

The beautiful offline consumption experience will gradually drive the consumption patterns of the post-90s and post-00s with huge consumption potential to be more "healthy", not just lying on the sofa and shopping with mobile phones, but going offline Physical store.