This article will analyze the membership system of the Alibaba system from four main scenarios: e-commerce members and financial members as the main business to local life and hotel and hotel membership as the secondary business. enjoy~
There is a book that once summarized the corporate moat There are four types: intangible assets, customer switching costs, cost advantages and network advantages. In the B2C market, an excellent membership program can well cover the four points mentioned above. Alibaba Group, as the largest financial company in BAT, also has the most complex and complete membership system.
This article will analyze the membership system of Alibaba system from four main scenarios: e-commerce members and financial members as the main business to local life and wine and travel membership as the secondary business. The next article mainly introduces the wine and travel members and financial members. .
1. Wine and Travel Membership
1. Wine and Travel Membership
In the process of creating the ecosystem, in addition to the large ecosystem of Alipay, on October 27, 2016, Alibaba launched a product for wine travel among many products. Fliggy , a small ecosystem product of the industry, was formerly known as Alibaba Travel. Different from other OTA platforms such as Ctrip and Qunar, the spoiler Fliggy is based on the strategic consideration of "global FUN" in Alibaba "Five Globals" strategy and proposes the OTM model, attracting a large number of global wine travelers. Businessmen from the industry have settled in and opened stores. Based on many factors,
’s membership system is also benchmarked against the giants in the wine and travel industry, aiming to create a full-scenario ecosystem for the wine and travel industry.
The entire Fliggy membership system is mainly calculated in three levels:
- F1: free registration;
- F2: experience value reaches 6,000 and above within one year;
- F3: experience value reaches 20,000 and above within one year + invitation.
There are three main ways to obtain experience value (i.e. growth value):
- GMV orientation - Obtained by purchasing goods directly: Except for some special items, you will obtain 1 experience point for every 2 yuan spent on shopping.
- DAU guide - Participate in the interaction within Fliggy to gain: Post comments, post notes, post reviews, collect, like, follow and other behaviors in Fliggy to gain variable experience points.
- Operational orientation - Participate in specific activities launched from time to time to obtain: For example, if you have purchased specified categories of goods and completed a trip before, you can obtain 1,500 experience points for each category.
Figure 1: Fliggy’s main experience value source
There are three main ways to obtain Fliggy miles (i.e. points rebate):
- Activation (Activation) Retention (Retention) - Miles earned by sign-in: 1 mile per normal sign-in, continuous The maximum limit for signing in is 7 miles, and after interruption it becomes 1 mile.
- Increase income (Revenue) - mileage for consumption: most categories of goods will earn 1 mile for every 2 yuan spent when shopping.
- Acquisition, Activation, and Refer - mileage earned from various activities launched from time to time.
Among these rules, points rebate and growth value acquisition are just the beginning. Only when users feel that this point and level system is useful to them will users follow the direction guided by the rule setter.
For the Fliggy platform, one of the top priorities of the membership system is to bind the direct sales channels of many large and medium-sized merchants in the wine and travel ecosystem through the level system, and at the same time rely on the membership point system to release some of the platform's own rights and interests to assist , thereby stabilizing its market share in the OTA industry.
2. Hotel and Travel Joint Member
On August 8, 2017, just 2 months before Marriott completely withdrew from the Chinese mainland market due to the email scandal, Alibaba and Marriott announced plans for a joint venture. The two parties began to start from the previous tentative part. Cooperation has entered an era of comprehensive mutual recognition of levels.
At that time, although Marriott had just acquired Starwood and became the world's largest hotel group, its channels in the Chinese market were still controlled by many OTA platforms. In addition, it faced many problems such as brand aging. Fliggy may not be the best choice, but its method of supporting direct operation and mutual recognition of levels is at least much better than other companies that completely control public domain traffic.
From now on, this step taken by Marriott officials at that time is particularly important. After all, one year and four months after the Chinese official website and APP were offline, Fliggy flagship store had become Marriott’s only direct operation option in mainland China at that time. The power of
role models is huge. After connecting with Marriott members in August 2017, Fliggy has attracted 2 million new users for Marriott within one year. This is after Marriott was affected by the email scandal. Following in the footsteps of Marriott, major hotel and travel industry giants including Shangri-La, Hilton, Singapore Airlines , American Airlines , etc. have also launched the Fliggy membership interoperability program, and Alibaba’s joint wine and travel membership system has also taken off. After international brands have successively entered Fliggy's platform, the increase in user activity and the release of multiple rights have also brought differentiated experiences to members. In just two years, Alibaba has established joint memberships with more than 20 major international brands.
Currently, Alibaba’s wine and travel co-branded members mainly match group members of the two main business types: hotels and airlines.
There are two main forms of joint membership in the hotel industry:
- One is to recruit new members through Marriott, Shangri-La and other international high-star luxury hotels. Due to its high operating costs, privileged membership levels often have additional The check-in requirements only lower the threshold for new members imported from the Alibaba system to become high-level hotel members.
- Another method of attracting new members, which mainly operates domestic economic chain hotels such as Home Inn and Grand Skylight, directly corresponds to Alibaba Fliggy and hotel membership levels.
airline industry joint membership analogy hotel. Members of large international airlines represented by Singapore Airlines need to introduce new members through the Alibaba system and have additional airline flight records before being upgraded to a new level. Due to their weak bargaining power, domestic regional airlines such as Sichuan Airlines directly correspond to the membership levels of Alibaba Fliggy and the airlines.
Figure 2: The complex Alibaba-based wine and travel joint membership
Liu Dongdong, general manager of Fliggy’s membership business, once said in public: “People don’t just complete reservations on Fliggy’s platform, but have more and more interactions. It makes Fliggy more and more lively. This is also a result of mutual achievements between Fliggy and merchants. It can be seen that the joint membership of Liquor and Travel has a huge impact on the daily activity and GMV of Fliggy platform. When Alibaba gradually started to operate an ecosystem of direct merchants in the wine and travel industry,
itself naturally grew into the cornerstone of this ecosystem. As the leader of travel alliances, Alibaba products will obviously continue on this path of joint membership.
2. Financial membership
After talking about the small ecosystem of hotel and hotel membership, let’s talk about the large ecosystem system built by Alipay. Alipay starts from finance and connects most of Alibaba’s existing businesses. Its membership is divided into 4 levels:
- Popular member: Free registration
- Gold member: 2000 tier points within one year 13
- Platinum member: 6000 tier points within one year 13
- Diamond member: 18000 tier points within one year 13
Corresponds to other existing Alibaba membership systems Among them, public membership, gold membership, and platinum membership are basically equivalent to level 1, level 2, and level 3 in the three-level membership system. For example, the level matching with Homeinns co-branded members corresponds to the silver, gold, and platinum cards of their hotel members respectively.
The growth value calculation method of Alipay financial members has undergone many changes. When the new level was opened in April 2016, the activity ranking was used as the growth value calculation level. Diamond members are the top 100,000 users, platinum members are the top 10 million users, and gold members are the top 100 million users.
Although everyone usually cares about the MAU of the APP, it is indeed rare to directly use the MAU as a member rating, and this algorithm will cause many strange phenomena. For example, there was a report at that time that the person with the highest Alipay membership level was actually a college student born in the 1990s. In fact, Alipay's membership level system was indeed changed very quickly. In June 2017, Alipay updated the membership level system to the current new algorithm.
Figure 3: The early Alipay membership level algorithm
html After the major changes in 117 years, although there have been many detailed changes in growth value and points rules, the basic framework has been finalized. That is, there are three main ways to obtain growth value, five types to obtain points, and three ways to consume points. The three major directions for obtaining growth value ofare essentially to obtain all aspects of user data, so as to cooperate with the strategic goal of the data company required by Jack Ma and . After setting upper limits respectively to ensure the effect of data risk control, the following three types of core data were actually obtained:
- Shopping data: 1 point for every 20 yuan of shopping
- Life data: Daily household expenses, 10 points per time
- Financial data: Purchase Financial products, the monthly average daily AUM value is 150 points and 1 point
Among the 5 types of points to obtain, the first 3 types are consistent with the growth value rules, and the last 2 types are as follows:
(1) New activities - cooperate with various types The new activities are online and launched to get points for completing new tasks: including the perennial points for inviting friends to use Alipay, the recent points for upgrading health insurance and critical illness insurance, and the past points for withdrawing reserve funds. Such activities are often It is specially formulated for operational promotion needs.
(2) Daily activity subsidy - various types of additional points that can increase the frequency of APP use during daily use: including fixed points for signing in and random points for consumption. This way of earning points does not require you to participate in new activities. Often you only need to make simple purchases to receive additional points subsidies.
Alipay points system is based on various considerations. Currently, there are three main ways to consume points:
(1) Own system redemption: supports the redemption of Alibaba products, increases the value of points through self-production and sales, and diverts traffic to each other. For example, points can be redeemed for Ant Forest protective shields and Youku monthly memberships. Since Alibaba products now cover many aspects of clothing, food, housing and transportation, they can relatively meet the needs of some people.
(2) Merchant cooperation to attract new customers: Use points as an introduction to let users pay to purchase goods, and attract new customers to cooperative merchants. For example, electric toothbrushes, driving recorders, and portable juicers. The prices of the corresponding models of these products are much higher than the prices on the official website. It seems that the prices of Double Eleven products are increased and then discounted.
(3) Activity voucher: Points are used as the threshold for participating in some Alipay activities, such as price guessing and scratch card activities. Points are recovered through zero-sum game and negative-sum game to control the point inflation rate.
Point consumption is an important part of the financial system of points, which determines the value of the points themselves. Blind inflation or deflation is not advisable. Because Alipay points are not interoperable with many independent points systems, they cannot be indirectly linked to legal currency . It is not like JD Finance's steel points system, which uses indirect exchange and direct cash redemption rules through the points alliance to form the "exchange rate" between steel and legal currency. Therefore, the value of Alipay's points is controllable as a whole and is not easy. Affected by various external conditions. However, this advantage will also bring about another problem, which is the decrease in user appeal caused by the lack of legal currency anchoring of points.
Due to the unclear strategies and data available to the outside world, the direction of further adjustment of Alipay’s membership points in the future based on market conditions cannot be determined. Whether it will be closer to legal currency in the later period or completely become an auxiliary tool for activities requires patient observation.
3. Development analysis
1. Development of financial joint memberships
Currently, Alipay has relatively few types of joint memberships, which are mainly launched in collaboration with hotel alliances to divert traffic. In future development, we can launch joint cooperative memberships with more types of merchants, such as some large financial institutions.
Among the currently common financial institutions, those with clear hierarchical systems include card organizations such as UnionPay, Master, VISA, American Express and many commercial banks.For example, the most common UnionPay card organization system in China divides its members into four levels: ordinary, gold, platinum, and diamond (sounds like the weapon and equipment levels in the game). UnionPay authorizes major commercial banks to issue UnionPay cards. Cards are given to members to classify them into four major levels in the UnionPay system.
Similarly, major commercial banks will also provide different membership status to their users. Take the common China Merchants Bank as an example. China Merchants Bank currently divides its members into five levels: ordinary, gold, golden sunflower, diamond, and private banking. It provides benefits such as fee reduction and travel VIPs step by step, and even ingeniously provides gold. Customers above Kuihua specially provide a set of UI styles for the APP (does it sound like the weapon and equipment skins in the game) to show their nobility.
Based on the existing mature membership systems of these domestic financial institutions, Alipay's next joint members can completely develop in the direction of mutual certification. For example, Alipay diamond members can give priority to apply for the diamond card of XX Commercial Bank. After the application is successful, existing Alipay points can be exchanged with bank points, and the rights and interests of both parties can also be exchanged. Of course, in real life, due to various considerations such as strategy and cost, these cooperations require multi-party communication before they can be launched.
2. Alibaba Middle Office
Taobao and Alipay, as the two main pillar APPs of Alibaba, guide and connect a large number of Alibaba and partner products. This is consistent with the entire Alibaba management model of "small front office, large middle office" Inseparable. It is rumored that Alibaba’s middle-station strategy originated from Jack Ma’s business visit to Supercell in mid-2015. At that time, the company adopted a middle-station support model and achieved huge business prospects. After Alibaba also adopted the middle-end model,
continued to synchronize the financial consolidation and middle-end processing of branch companies and acquired companies. Through the processing of the middle platform, many Alibaba products can well integrate user data into one through the middle platform, and this strategy has also formed the basis for unifying user identities in many Alibaba products today.
Through data accumulation in the middle office, Alibaba has formed a very complete account system. For example, the four major membership accounts included in 88vip can be bound to each other as the main account, thereby forming an interconnection of interests. The solid data foundation, in turn, supports the business and forms feedback. The fact that Alibaba products can form the largest and complementary membership system in BAT today is inseparable from the fact that it established a complete mid-stage strategy very early on. Comparing
with and Tencent , the decentralization of its business lines and internal fragmentation are well-known things in the Internet industry. For example, WXG is almost an independent kingdom under the jurisdiction of Zhang Xiaolong . Even so, Tencent does not follow Alibaba’s policies. Rotate senior executives. Although Tencent has gone through many organizational structure adjustments, its product functions still restrict each other.
Of course, the development direction of Tencent’s social + games has been going very well so far. Perhaps from a strategic perspective, Tencent does not need to build a middle platform that covers most of its products and a full-scale network built on the basis of data, like Alibaba. Position membership system. Different choices of
will definitely bring about completely different effects.
During the development of Starbucks in China, it first cooperated with Tencent. As early as December 8, 2016, the two parties announced a strategic cooperation, and WeChat even gave up its position as a wallet. But for big KAs like Starbucks, the cooperation of WeChat itself is far from enough to meet its own needs.
From the perspective of Starbucks takeout delivery alone, the market share of Tencent-based Meituan is higher than that of Alibaba-based Ele.me . However, it is obvious that Meituan cannot make Tencent the same as Alibaba commanded Ele.me. Free command. Without the comprehensive breakthrough effect of unified command, no matter how good the talks between the two parties were when the strategic cooperation was signed, as time goes by, trust has long been gone.
mentioned in an article in the early years that many of Tencent's data are scattered among its various departments and become internal "private property". So far, there is no middle platform to open up internal data, and there is no efficient link between different departments. communication mechanism.
Under this circumstance, it is not difficult to see why Starbucks later chose to cooperate with Alibaba. After all, not long after the new cooperation was announced, Starbucks appeared in all Alibaba-based apps in different scenarios such as Taobao, Tmall , Alipay, Ele.me, Hema, and Word of Mouth. Starbucks’ membership data also matched The Alibaba APP is fully integrated, and the cooperation between the two parties' membership systems is going very smoothly.
3. The Stone from Another Mountain
Finally, let’s briefly talk about other membership systems that also have an ecosystem nature.
In Japan, there is a CCC Group, which operates the membership system T-Card and the joint points program T-Point. The latest number of members of this membership system is close to 70 million, which is more than half of Japan's population. Because its partners are spread across many daily life industries such as public utilities, e-commerce, real estate, finance, travel, and catering, the company can track the consumption of more than half of Japanese people through consumption data collected from various places and a nationally interconnected points program. Behavior, the huge value it brings is immeasurable.
In China, Ping An Group’s Ping An Miles points program has also adopted a similar interoperability mechanism, and has now completed interoperability with many industry leaders such as e-commerce, finance, local life, aviation, hotels, communications, etc. Of course, because the ecosystem built by Ping An itself has just exceeded 180 million users in 2018, it has not reached full trust status in the domestic financial industry. It has not yet reached the influence of T-Point in Japan, and the amount of data collected is also Far worse.
In fact, for corporate entities who want to build a membership system, only a centralized mechanism can run the system well. Whether it is T-Point or Ping An Miles, only by making a profit can a virtuous cycle be achieved.
In the current domestic Internet environment, only Alibaba has the strength and need to build a membership system that may be the largest in the world. After a complete membership system is established, it goes deep into all aspects of life, which is equivalent to establishing a new political and economic system composed of "natural persons", and this is what Alibaba people are best at.
In this regard, Facebook’s eagerness to launch Libra to reshape the financial world can be used as a good reference. After all, the financial industry is the second most profitable legal enterprise in the world.
This article was originally published by @子夜鲁歌 on Everyone is a product manager. Reprinting without permission is prohibited.
title picture comes from Unsplash, based on CC0 protocol
