On December 22, 2018, TATA wooden door reached a strategy with Shangpin Home Delivery. One is a wooden door brand and the other is a furniture custom brand. Why did companies that originally belonged to two different sub-categories suddenly announce their joining forces?
According to the official explanation:
is the two leading brands in the fields of wooden doors and whole-house customization. The two parties will cooperate in and link in terms of products, channels, traffic, etc. in terms of products, channels, traffic, etc. Through this new model of cooperation between strong complementary brands, it aims to provide consumers with the best one-stop overall home solution.
The author summarizes: the marriage between TATA wooden doors and Shangpin Home Delivery to achieve category integration is to better team up to seize consumers and resolve the dilemma of stores.
Although TATA wooden door monks’ home delivery are all top brands in their respective subcategories and seem to be a bad business, in this industry with cloud-like brands, consumers have gradually begun to be unable to tell which one is better and which one is worse, and every company is facing the problem of how to seize consumers.
The author happened to be on a business trip in Chengdu these two days and witnessed the fierce competition for home furnishing brands.
In a store in Chengdu, there are few people in the crowd, but on the same floor, there are "first-line brands" such as Sophia, Oppein, Horake, Dinggu, Wole, Piano, Pearl on the Palm, Lauca, Zhibang, etc., and they are all next to each other.
each company has its own spokesperson, claiming that it is a one-stop whole-house customization brand, with a plate xx level environmental protection level, and each has its own algorithm for the discount. As an insider, he is already confused, let alone how can a new consumer make a decision?
When the advantages of a single brand are hard to refresh, the best way is to form an alliance and take advantage of each other to strengthen consumer confidence.
So what benefits can this category alliance bring to home furnishing stores?
On the one hand, the brands of both parties take advantage of each other and form new selling points through the superposition of brand effects; consumers who recognize Shangpin Home Delivery can transfer this part of the cognitive potential energy to TATA wooden doors, and the same goes for the other hand.
On the other hand, through category integration, one-stop purchase can be provided, which can provide greater discounts; at the same time, one-stop service can be provided, such as pre-sales measurement scales, design plans, logistics installation, etc., which can be served together to form another selling point.
The higher level is that if the consumption database of both parties can be opened, they can jointly establish new user portraits, develop new products, and occupy the market from a higher dimension.
is precisely because of its various benefits that more and more brands enrich the content by integrating categories and even adding new categories.
For example, Oppein is a representative of its new categories. According to Oppein's business map, the categories involved already include six major categories: cabinets, wardrobes, wooden doors, bathrooms, kitchen appliances, and soft furnishings. These categories are laid out through different store forms, such as the complete decoration home furnishing store, micro home furnishing store, cabinet and fusion store, icing and wood fusion store, etc.
But can this kind of category integration or the way of adding new categories resolve the store’s dilemma?
Lao Siji believes that if home furnishing stores want to have category alliances or add new categories to achieve the expected results, they must cross the following threshold:
1: How to use limited space to display unlimited products?
When a home store places multiple categories of products such as cabinets, wardrobes, beds, wooden doors, sofas, curtains and soft accessories at the same time, consumers who originally planned to buy a certain product are placed because the store has complicated categories, just like entering a home warehouse, and they are easily overwhelmed and have no idea how to start.
At the same time, the area of home furnishing stores is limited. The space originally focused on placing a certain category, but due to the addition of other categories, the number of core categories that can be displayed has been greatly reduced, which has weakened its original competitiveness.
Because for consumers, the first thing they need to do is to meet the satisfaction of a certain major product category in order to further meet the needs of the whole-house product category.Home is a high-priced and personalized product, and most consumers still have certain personal requirements for home products.
Unless some companies provide ultra-low package prices, they can "force" consumers to forget their local preferences and "take the overall situation into consideration" because of the price discounts.
So how can home furnishing companies resolve the contradictions?
The author noticed that some home furnishing stores that keep pace with the times use sample display + ipad renderings to resolve this contradiction.
Specifically, the store only displays limited items, such as 3-5 wardrobes, more styles and matching solutions, and displays them to consumers through the iPad storage rendering scheme.
This really looks like a good way to crack it. The displayed products can allow customers to experience the quality of the brand, and the iPad renderings can allow customers to choose from unlimited possibilities.
But the problem is that with the store traffic so scarce and home consumers have many choices, how many consumers are willing to sit down and look at the iPad and listen to the endless explanations of the shopping guide?
Therefore, limited samples + ipad renderings can achieve results, which must be based on the premise that customers are willing to accept the brand.
2: How to make customers willing to stay in home stores?
This returns to the most essential question: How can a store allow willing customers to stop?
each company has its own approach, but the insight into consumer needs is inseparable from behind.
The author has noticed that some companies have redefined home furnishing stores and adopted a more lifelike design method to transform stores. It can be understood as a small version of muji or IKEA.
Just two months ago, Country Garden opened a home store called Orange Life O-LIVING. The official introduction said that it is a brand new home + life retail business model, claiming to be the zara in the home furnishing industry.
Pictures are from Orange Life
I am not sure whether home consumers need zara, but Orange Life O-LIVING has indeed played differently.
It is said that fast fashion products such as Spain's top soft furnishing brand LaForma, American fast fashion overall home furnishing brand INK+IVY, and NetEase's original life self-operated e-commerce brand Yanxuan, etc., are not expensive and are very affordable.
Pictures are from Orange Life
When the products displayed in a home store are no longer cold cabinets, but have diversified life elements, the opportunity for consumers to stay and watch will increase greatly, so that they can work as mentioned above using sample cabinets + ipad renderings to display the unlimited products behind the brand.
3: How to achieve integrated marketing in multiple categories?
even if the problem of display and attracting customers to stop is solved, home furnishing stores still cannot get rid of the status quo, that is, how can a rich variety of products be placed into the minds of consumers and thus into the homes of consumers?
Take Orange Life O-LIVING as an example. The more likely products that consumers are willing to buy in large quantities lies in those small items that are "seeing is real". Such as small accessories, single sofas, etc., can impress customers by relying on the design of the product itself.
But for home furnishing stores, these products that can impress customers are often used as embellishments, rather than the main business. Large products such as wardrobes, cabinets, beds, etc. are the main force in home furnishing stores.
As mentioned earlier, more and more home stores have integrated a large number of categories, such as cabinets, wardrobes, wooden doors, curtains, beds, sofas and other products.
But these items are scattered in different areas of the store, and it is difficult to describe the sales of the store according to the needs of consumers. Just draw a "big cake" of the whole house home products to customers. In the end, customers can only buy whatever they like, and they have not achieved the goal of providing multiple categories with one-stop shops to consumers.
The author noticed some home furnishing stores and began to use home cloud design software like Cool Home , combining customer needs with store products by designing renderings in advance, and then presenting them to customers in the form of a 720-degree panoramic view.
renderings are not just floor plans, but can also achieve dynamic effects like playing movies, which can easily attract consumers' attention.
At the same time, the designer put the 720-degree roaming panoramic view on the TV screen. The designer operates the roaming pictures and explains the key points to the customers as if they were screening a movie. Through this immersive experience, the designer "aming" the whole house products to customers, ultimately achieving the purpose of category integrated marketing.
4: How to achieve one-stop delivery? The
store successfully sold the plan, which is just the first step in the Long March. If the later product delivery cannot satisfy customers, then this category alliance model will be doomed to fail.
As mentioned above, the many benefits of category alliances are: through category integration, one-stop purchase can be given, which can provide greater discounts; at the same time, it can also be provided in one-stop service, such as pre-sales measurement scales, design plans, logistics installation, etc., which can be served together to form another selling point.
With 3D design software like Cool Home Store, the measurement scale and design solutions before sales of home stores can well integrate multiple categories and provide corresponding services.
When the order is completed and production and delivery is involved, this is the most difficult part, especially for two brands like Tata Wooden Door Monk Pinzhad, which are not the same, it is even more difficult.
How to effectively split the orders in the same store and accurately pass them to their respective factories for production? After production is completed, how can we achieve "one-stop" logistics and installation?
If you rely on manual to complete the above steps, according to the current order volume of Tata wooden door monk Pinzhad, it is probably not possible to double the number of people who have doubled their number. Obviously, this is unrealistic.
is becoming increasingly customized home brands. We began to consciously look for high-quality global design and docking production software, and solve the problem of large-scale order distribution by creating an integrated front-end and back-end information construction.
When the store designer completes the order through the design software, he can submit the order to the factory in one click through the design software. After receiving the order instruction, the order splitting software on the factory equipment can intelligently split the order.
For example, split the orders in the wardrobe into a pile of data, split the order data of the sofa into another pile of data, and send different data to different production workshops for production and delivery.
can perfectly solve the order distribution problem through intelligent processing of order dismantling software.
Shangpin Home Delivery is the earliest customized enterprise in the industry to complete the integration of front and back ends. Therefore, this cooperation with Tata wooden doors must be based on mature informatization to dare to play the "category alliance". Otherwise, order processing alone will defeat this alliance model, let alone the one-stop logistics installation in the later stage.
In summary, category alliances need not only consider how to implement the marketing level, but also how to implement the product delivery level. Only by opening up all the above links can the category alliance be truly implemented and become a way to break through the difficulties of the store.
