New Retail Technology Allows Lining To "Understand" Consumers.

In 2015, the obscure movie "the wolf of war" won a good reputation after it was released. Finally, it won 550 million of the box office. Although this score was not too high at that time, it made a lot of money with a small cost of $12 million, and pioneered the hot wolf IP and patriotic military themes. On this basis, the 2017 "Wolves 2" released a thorough detonation of the market, setting a 5 billion 600 million box office record, becoming the most popular movie in Chinese movie history.

Behind the bustle, some sensitive enterprises find a market trend which is not easy to notice. The acceptance and recognition of domestic brands and domestic IP by the post-90s group is greatly improved. Lining is one of these forerunners. His market and product team, based on the accurate portrait of potential customers, launched a batch of fashion clothes with classic red yellow flag and "China Lining" logo according to their preferences. It gives people a refreshing feeling and a lack of stereotypes before design. The company even took advantage of the 2018 fashion week in New York, causing a stir at home and abroad.

For a time, Lining, an old brand of sporting goods, became a fashion trend for young people. In Sanlitun and Nanjing East Road, young fashion fads queue up in front of Lining store, leaving Adidas and UNIQLO next door confused. In 2018, with the representatives of Lining, the Imperial Palace Wen Chuang and the hundred elk as the representative, the domestic brands, relying on Chinese traditional culture, boldly innovated and communicated with consumers, made beautiful report cards, and started a new trend of new domestic products.

Lining can sensitively capture the subtle changes in consumers and markets and efficiently carry out product innovation, which is inseparable from the new retail transformation that has been committed by enterprises in recent years.

"If you're still talking about O2O, it's out of date." As Walton O2O school professor David Bell (David Bell) said, O2O has some limitations, mainly refers to consumers search online products, view commodity information, and then enter the physical store experience, purchase. But in the future, retail must develop towards another more extended concept, that is, full integration of online and offline and the establishment of a complete ecosystem. Retail is entering the era of O+O.

But how to achieve full channel and full link operation under the new retail environment is a problem of great concern to retailers, especially traditional retail brands. Lining, the representative of entity retailing and national brand, has given the answer.

In fact, before the start of the new retail transformation, Li Ningzheng came out of a stock crisis that threatened the whole industry. By the end of 2011, the development of sports goods industry was full of channels, and the problem of overstock began to erupt. In 2012, the industry closed shop tide. In 2013, Anta, Lining, XTEP, 361 degrees, PEAK five sports brands need to digest at least 2 billion 940 million yuan of inventory.

"We realized that in the past business, Lining played the role of wholesaler more frequently. The channel establishment was not perfect, and the connection with consumers was not very close, which led to the decision oriented rather than consumer oriented. Zhu Yuangang, director of information technology of Lining group, restarted the initial dilemma.

In 2015, Lining joined hands with Arivan and other new retail technology providers to create a "digital business platform", using the full channel, full contact consumer data collection and analysis, to provide precise, efficient and personalized service and experience, and to guide store operation, thus transforming the Internet + sports life experience provider.

Double stations break the data chimney and realize data operation closed loop.

At the beginning of the digital transformation, Lining began to exert power from the establishment of a full channel business platform. "The data between many isolated systems that the company has built up is not in circulation, and the information such as goods, inventory, orders, stores, and micro stores, including inventory, purchase and sale of distributors, can not be integrated. Therefore, we lack the perception and overall control of the market, nor can we quickly respond to the needs of consumers, and can not play a good role in supporting the retail business mode. " In order to break the data chimney, Lining creates a unified platform for all terminals through Ali cloud, including the establishment of members' platforms, the access of online and offline membership data, and the efficient collection and management of the entire business chain.

At the same time, Ali cloud also helped Lining set up data platform, and connected with the business platform, real-time data transmission of the front-end business system to the data center. When the data link is connected to the market, transaction and service, it can analyze the data of consumers and stores, and realize automatic or semi-automatic business decisions based on insight to guide the implementation of front-end system applications, and ultimately form a closed loop of enterprise data operation.

In the realization of data driven decision making infrastructure cloud upgrading, Lining's operation ability has been rapidly improved, such as "optimizing the store distribution according to the big data group model, and testing the store to achieve an increase of about 20%." The company's consumer insight ability has also been greatly improved. The data can be used to build 150+ tag and fine portrait of consumers. It has a strong reference meaning to fine crowd operation and store location.

In terms of commodities, Lining can understand the common features of high water, high volume and high gross goods in many stores through the data platform, understand consumers' preferences for commodities and provide suggestions for assistant designers in product design; in many commodities, they can see which channels are better, and guide stores to choose products. And in the comprehensive store basic data, membership data, data collected in the membership tags and portraits, store sales, Lining can build intelligent algorithm to drive store clustering. Zhu Yuangang said that the above way of using big data models to help businesses make decisions is "significantly improved in operational efficiency than in the past by way of artificial experience judgment."

The operation of "people and goods" is implemented in the "field" of digital stores.

In addition to digitalization of online business, Lining is also strengthening the construction of digitalized stores under the line. On the one hand, it collects behavioral data from the more intelligent devices, such as thermal lines, commodity touch / try out assessment, from customers being attracted to shops, shopping guides, trading links and follow-up members. On the other hand, the full channel platform transforms data resources into business capabilities, allowing Lining to have a comprehensive understanding of "people" and "goods" to accurately mobilize, effectively support and guide the store's interactive scene design for different customers, and provide customers with personalized and vivid experience.

In June 2019, Lining combined with ALI Yun in June 2019 for young people to build the "digital store" of Shanghai Expo Park as an example. Before entering the store, consumers could interact with stores through vending machines, rented charging treasure, Focus Media (5.310, -0.03, -0.56%), OTT and other terminals in the vicinity of Lining's business circle. They could receive coupon information from stores or participate in interactive window style somatosensory games, and were eventually attracted into shops.

After entering the store, consumers can identify their membership through the Internet of things technology, and then the shopping guide will give targeted recommendations. Shopping guides will also guide members to use electronic shelves. When stores are out of stock, consumers can directly buy and send express products to the home on electronic shelves. When consumers visit or shop, which items will be touched or tried on, the flow route and consumption data will be input into the data platform through sensors and video recognition technology, and generate guidance for product and store operation. At the time of checkout, members can carry out simple and quick face payment which is popular among young people.

After the customer left, Lining could continue to reach consumers through the membership system. Whenever there are new products or marketing activities, customers will receive personalized merchandise recommendation or coupons, and continue to interact and connect with Lining. The new consumer experience of digital stores enables customers, especially young people, to feel their needs understood and responded. Lining's brand tone and image are also changing. Many young people lamented, "I didn't expect that one day we would be in line to buy Lining."

"We can see that the number of digital stores has effectively increased three conversion rates, that is, in store rate, intra store conversion rate and repeat purchase rate. In the future, we will further restructure offline stores, improve our full channel platform, provide consumers with more targeted products and optimize experience, at the same time, effectively enhance the efficiency of store operation, and really play a lot of goods.

Key to success in transformation

In recent years, Lining's performance has been climbing steadily, and with the help of new retail technology, digital transformation has been carried out rapidly. In the first half of fiscal year 2019, the market value of the company reached HK $50 billion, a record high. At the same time, Lining began to make frequent appearances at the international T station, plus the "digital store" that understands the minds of young consumers, and brand positioning and external image are becoming younger.

Summing up Lining's transformation experience, Zhu Yuangang believes that the key points are the following points. First of all, Lining's main asset is the more than 7000 entity stores under the Internet. We need to vigorously promote the digital transformation of offline business, including the transformation of digital stores and the digital transformation of all aspects of the entire business process. "Because only the data of each terminal can be grasped, the action of the data decision model built in the background can be made."

Secondly, business platforms and data stations must be connected to achieve data sharing and interaction. The data of the front-end business system should be entered into the data platform in real time. The result of the decision of the Taiwan business must be timely feedback and docking to the business system, and make the business system automation or semi-automatic to execute these decisions. Only when the two platforms interact, the value of the data can be brought into play, and finally, it will be reflected in business.

Finally, in the process of building the business platform and data platform, technology should match the pain and demand of the business, instead of mechanically carrying out these operations, and technology for technology. Lining will also use small steps to accelerate the way to build the platform in the process of iteration, because transformation can not be completed in one step.

Leadership support is also indispensable. For example, when pushing through inventory, stores have a lot of concerns, worried that inventory sharing will affect the performance of their stores. The top executives, including the chairman, agreed on business model innovation, and from top to bottom set up new incentive policies and assessment standards, so that stores do not have to worry about their performance. "Finally, we have promoted the whole business, and now we have covered all the self owned stores in our country, including a part of distribution and distribution stores." Zhu Yuangang said.

In addition, Lining's IT department played an important role in the intellectualization transformation. In Zhu Yuangang's view, IT capability is the core and foundation for the realization of a consumer oriented data operation mode. In fact, any good company in the future will be IT company. Of course, Lining is not a company specializing in IT services, but our traditional companies must have a strong digital ability to do well in their own products while truly empowering the whole link to operate intellectually and efficiently to respond to changes in the market and consumer demand. At present, we are in the stage of supporting and promoting the business transformation and development with the support of Ali and other advanced digital technology providers, but in the future, IT will eventually play a role in guiding and influencing the business.