Digital intelligence has become a new trend in retail industry reform.
Our reporter Feng Qiyu
As the terminal link of commodity circulation, the retail industry is the focal point for consumption to drive economic growth, and it is also a reservoir for employment.
With the rapid development of information technology and logistics industry, the demand for transformation and upgrading of physical retail has become stronger in recent years.
The outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic has had a profound impact on my country's retail industry: while causing great losses to individual retail formats in the short term, it has also provided an opportunity for the digitalization and intelligent upgrading of traditional brick-and-mortar retail facilities to accelerate digital and intelligent transformation.
The latest data shows that my country's online retail sales in 2021 will be 13,088.4 billion yuan, an increase of 14.1% over the previous year.
Among them, the online retail sales of physical goods was 10,804.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.0%, accounting for 24.5% of the total retail sales of consumer goods.
Many experts said that looking forward to 2022, the integration of online and offline will continue to generate new consumption patterns, maintain the growth of online physical retail sales, and create favorable conditions for the digital and intelligent transformation of the physical retail industry.
The transformation of the brick-and-mortar retail industry is accelerating
In recent years, my country's brick-and-mortar retail industry has faced such drawbacks as fierce homogeneous competition, weak digital foundation and capabilities, and lagging enterprise management models. The outbreak of the epidemic has put forward new requirements for the brick-and-mortar retail industry to build an omni-channel and smart retail ecosystem.
Therefore, supporting the digital and intelligent upgrading and transformation of traditional brick-and-mortar retail facilities is of great significance to stabilizing consumption, growth, and employment.
In particular, through the transformation of digital intelligence, the physical retail industry has the ability to serve the individual needs of customers entering the store, ranging from grasping consumption trends to more accurate grasp of the consumption needs of customers visiting the store.
"The improvement of this capability is a very important feature of the digital-intelligence transformation." said Li Mingtao, chief e-commerce expert of China International Electronic Commerce Center.
Specifically, the transformation of the brick-and-mortar retail industry in 2022 will have the following characteristics.
Brick-and-mortar retailers will focus more on building unique brands.
Based on a relatively complete data industry ecology, some data tools are precisely used to enable enterprises to reposition their brands, so as to attract consumers by providing unique products and services for specific consumer groups.
Full-process participation of digital and intelligent tools.
Digital intelligence is a higher level than digital, and a notable feature is the full-process participation in the physical retail industry.
Brick-and-mortar retail enterprises will use more digital and intelligent tools in the decision-making process, and are no longer satisfied with digital and intelligent aspects such as store location, consumer spending power in surrounding areas, product placement, etc., but the entire chain. Digital reconstruction.
There will be more companies trying to do their own brands.
"Increasing private brands is a big benefit for consumers," said Zhao Ping, vice president of the Research Institute of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.
From selling goods from suppliers to having the ability to make their own brand products, the precise grasp of demand is the key factor for the success of the transformation.
Through the customized development of its own brand products, more accurate demand matching can be achieved.
The ability to create self-operated products is also one of the more typical features of an enterprise's digital-intelligence transformation.
The sinking market is still the main target
The improvement of the digital and intelligent capabilities of retail enterprises and the improvement of supply chain service capabilities, in turn, can further expand the service scope of retail enterprises.
In 2021, affected by the spread of the epidemic in many places in China, consumption in communities and other near-life scenes will be more active.
Through intelligent transformation, retail companies have further extended their reach into sinking markets such as communities and villages.
Whoever is closer to consumers can better discover and meet their needs, thereby creating value.
Recently, the first "Community Sales Service Store" of Suning.com Retail Cloud opened in Nanjing.
"Through the integration of online and offline, with the sales radius of the physical store itself as the characteristic, we will carry out precise marketing to the customer base. The integration is no longer about moving the physical store to the online, but truly empowering the physical store, making it a facelift, with A new form appears in front of consumers." Zhao Ping said.
In cities, the retail overlay social model will still have a lot of room for development.
The health retail industry, which is dominated by community drugstores, will also develop rapidly.
With the advent of fast-paced urban life and aging, healthy daily necessities are gradually becoming the high-frequency commodities for families after fresh food.
In addition, community neighborhood centers and life centers will provide new development opportunities for the transformation of regional department stores.
Thanks to the rapid development of technology, the development potential of the retail industry in rural areas has been further explored.
In recent years, the income growth of rural residents in my country is significantly faster than that of urban residents.
As new products, new services, new technologies, and new concepts go to the countryside, the gap between urban and rural consumption will gradually narrow. How to enable farmers to enjoy the same level of consumption environment, products of the same quality, and services of the same standard as the city at their doorstep will become a problem. The main goal of retail development.
Through the collaboration of digital capabilities, one-person stores and mom-and-pop stores have been effectively integrated into the supply chain of retail enterprises, expanding the scope of services in rural areas, and the trend of consumption upgrading will continue.
In addition, new marketing models such as online live planting and planting of grass have formed a good interaction with offline retail, attracting customers with online celebrity products, and then retail companies will create new consumption scenarios around new consumption hotspots, in addition to shopping needs, make social needs are met.
Cross-border collaboration in the retail industry is more efficient
my country's retail industry is large in scale and low in output. It is a big retail country but not a retail power.
The main reason is the lack of layout planning and standardized governance of the circulation industry, excessive marketization, resulting in low-level repetitive construction of the industry.
Pei Liang, president of the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, said that the rapid development of online retail in my country has driven innovation in the retail industry, but it has also exacerbated the unfair competition between Internet retail and brick-and-mortar retail.
The retail industry is an industry with a high degree of marketization and full competition, and also has strong public infrastructure attributes. Therefore, on the one hand, through the improvement of anti-unfair competition, anti-monopoly and other laws, fair taxation, market supervision, and market access are implemented. and other measures to promote fair competition in the industry; on the other hand, the government also needs to increase investment in circulation infrastructure, including agricultural product supply chains, digitization, and support for small and medium-sized enterprises, to achieve healthy and sustainable development of the industry.
Pei Liang said that increasing the added value of the retail industry will help improve the retail industry's ability to absorb and place jobs, help improve the retail industry's contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP), and help improve the industry's ability to attract capital and talents, and then Improve the innovation and high-quality development capabilities of the industry.
Zhao Ping believes that the integration and application of modern information technologies such as 5G, big data, the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence with the retail scene will improve the digitization level of the whole process of commercial logistics and all-factor resources, and promote the efficient connection of commodity circulation network nodes and retail network. The level of integration, synergy, standardization, digitization, intelligence and globalization has been greatly improved, making the flow of goods and services smoother.
At the same time, through cross-channel and cross-industry integration, the collaboration between physical retail enterprises and production, wholesale, e-commerce, import and export, and logistics enterprises has been further deepened, business processes and channel management have been further optimized, and new revenue growth points have emerged. It will focus more on the competition of goods and services, and the brand differentiation of goods and services will continue to increase.
Relevant experts suggested that in 2022, the brick-and-mortar retail industry should develop a retail system with efficient and intelligent facilities, convenient and complete functions, and information interconnection, so as to achieve cross-regional linkage, cross-business complementarity, and reduce enterprise costs.
Furthermore, with the help of an open digital and intelligent service system, through cross-industry integration, we should strengthen collaborative innovation capabilities, continuously expand new fields, and strengthen efficient coordination and control of the entire supply chain, so as to improve the speed of market response.
At the same time, the physical retail industry needs to further innovate the organizational form, change the extensive development mode based on the expansion of the number of stores, and gradually use technologies such as big data for scientific location selection, intelligent product selection, precision marketing, and collaborative management to improve the quality of development.
Feng Qiyu