Asia Pacific "Best Retail Brand List"

WAL-MART topped the list of North American markets. China brand Zhou Dafu, Suning and BELLE international list the Asia Pacific region.

Interbrand, the world's leading brand consulting firm and publisher of the annual best global brand list, has released the world's best retail brand list for fourth years in a row. This year's list of Chinese brands has Zhou Dafu (fifth place), Suning (twenty-second place) and BELLE International (twenty-sixth), compared with 5 brands last year, the number declined slightly this year. Bosideng, Semir (Semir store) and Gome dropped out of the list. Zhou Dafu came on top for the first time, ranking fifth.

The "best retail brand list" in 2014 is the fourth joint evaluation and release list of Interbrand and Interbrand Design Forum (Interbrand group's focus on retail brand service). This list is also ranked by calculating brand value. As always, third independent audited financial data and extensive consumer research and market information were used to select the top fifty retail brands in the North American market, the top fifty retail brands in Europe, the top thirty retail brands in the Asia Pacific market, and the twenty top selling brands in Latin America. WAL-MART is the most valuable retail brand in North America and all four markets (North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America). Its brand value is as high as 131 billion 877 million dollars.

From the China part of the Asia Pacific list of the "best retail brand list" in 2014, we can clearly interpret the development trend of four Chinese retail brands:

　 Retail brands should not be differentiated by electricity providers or non electric providers.

With the development of the past 7 or 8 years, China's physical retail brand and e-commerce retail brand have gone through several stages, such as fighting against each other, the rise of the electricity supplier, the retail business of the real retail brand, and the retail brand of electric business. In the past year or two, we have seen a number of physical retail brands embrace the Internet with the fastest speed, and have won great imagination in the capital market, such as cooperation between Yintai business and Alibaba (Baba store), Haier's cooperation with Alibaba and Suning's transformation.

In the current list of brands, though it is a physical retail brand, in fact, the traditional retail brand has entered the trend of the electricity supplier. The boundary between the entity brand and the e-commerce brand will be smaller and smaller. The issue of development is no longer whether to enter the electricity supplier, nor can we simply define the retail brand with this dimension.

As the world becomes more and more digitalized, if we want to continue to lead in the future retail brand, we must give full consideration to what value the brand can bring to consumers, and make the technology of electric business become a tool of value creation rather than a formal sign.

The biggest challenge to the brand in the digital age is the imagination and the ability to put it into practice.

In 2013, there were five Chinese brands in the list of best retail brands. They were Suning (first place), BELLE (second place), Semir (third place), Bosideng (fourth place) and Gome (fifth). Suning won the first place in the best retail brand in China with its brand value of 550 million dollars.

In 2014, "best retail brand list" was left with Suning, BELLE and Zhou Dafu. Gome, Semir and Bosideng are all out of the list. In 2013, Suning decided to close several stores and vigorously develop the "cloud merchants" with the courage of being brave and broke out, and put forward that "sunning Yun business is a combination of Suning traditional entity shop + Suning electricity supplier + Su Ning's supply chain management + background services". It should be more systematic, more comprehensive and adaptable to the future, so as to bring more growth themes to the capital market and itself. But last year, after the same price, the gross profit margin declined and other reasons occurred. 2014 is the year of its strategic landing. We expect that its operation system will mature, personnel qualification will be more and more reasonable, supply chain efficiency will be improved, user experience will be improved, and the performance in the second half of this year will rebound.

Over the next one or two years, we will continue to see more and more new concepts emerging. We are looking forward to seeing imaginative and practical concepts that really bring value to the brand.

　 Identifying market growth opportunities and building their core competencies are more valuable than blindly following the trend.

The reason for BELLE's continued strength in the list is that it continues to open retail outlets in the mainland. BELLE has a total of nearly nineteen thousand retail outlets in the mainland, and this figure is still rising. Three of them are shoes Dot network, 1/3 for sports Clothes & Accessories All outlets are directly managed by the group. Last year there were nearly two digit growth.

"Multi-channel management and management of the group" is one of BELLE's core strengths. When we are catching up with the footsteps of the electricity supplier, we also need to see new growth opportunities in the two or three line and the consumer market in the western region, so as to truly continue to build the core competitiveness of the brand.

In the future, we will see more clearly that identifying opportunities for market growth and building core competitiveness are more valuable than simple diversification.

　 What consumers need is not more retail brands, but better retail experience.

No matter how rich the technology means, the retail brand is fundamentally driven by consumer demand. The popular concept of business is also based on a better consumer experience.

This new brand, Chow Tai Fook, is the world's largest pure jewellery listed company with the largest market value. It also won the JNA annual retailer award in 2013. This is a brand that attaches great importance to customer service commitment, professional and meticulous. It is committed to providing customers with the best quality products, services and shopping experience. It is not only the first jeweller in China to carry out jewelry business in the second tier cities in mainland China, but also more than 90% of its retail outlets in mainland China. It has become the most popular jewelry brand in China, occupying the largest market share in the mainland of China. In recent years, Zhou Dafu has integrated the electricity business with the physical retail business, not only extending the customer base to the online customers more deeply, but also generating synergy between the online and offline businesses. For example, Zhou Dafu is one of the most sought after jewelry brands in mainland China's website platforms (such as Baidu), and is also Taobao Tmall's best-selling jewelry brand.

With regard to other industries abroad, in the US best buy and Japanese home appliance chain stores, software and content services still account for a high proportion. Brand experience is crucial in these areas, and the gross profit margin of related goods and services is as high as 25%. Therefore, China's retail brand has great potential in improving consumer brand experience.

In a word, China's entity retailing and e-commerce retailing will further integrate vertically and horizontally, using digitalization to collect and process user information, further analyzing user needs through big data mining, thus identifying and using consumer information, further expanding consumer demand and guiding brand development strategy is a very important part. At the same time, offline entity business has traditional advantages in brand user experience, environmental design, logistics procurement and so on, and is also an indispensable link in building the core competitiveness of retail brands.

Interbrand, China's regional strategy director Yao Chenggang, said: "the ultimate goal of retail brands is to provide consumers with value in channel access. Therefore, in the future development of the list, the most valuable retail Brand must be a brand that can discern the needs of consumers and use all kinds of means and resources to constantly optimize the consumer experience.