This article will explore what categories are suitable for thousands of people from both the consumer and production sides, and help companies find ways to achieve thousands of people.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Linear Capital” (ID: LinearCapital), author Ren Yuying | Yuan Liyong.
Author: The author of this article is the eighth small line of meat, Ren Ying, Bella, who is currently pursuing a double degree in data analysis and psychology at Emory University; Yuan Liyong Parker, now studying economics at Tsinghua University Double degree in studies and business administration.
Thousands of thousands of faces as an algorithm and marketing method were first proposed by Taobao, but its meaning and application are far more than that.
This article will explore what types of products are suitable for thousands of people from both the consumer and production sides, and help companies find ways to achieve thousands of people.
01.Thousands of people in the C-side
Diversification of needs
Abraham Maslow proposed in the Hierarchy of Needs theory that human needs are made up of a pyramid.
At the bottom of the pyramid is the lowest level of physiological demand, which in turn is the need for security, the need for subordination and sociality, the need for love and self-esteem, and finally the need for self-realization.
Before the underlying requirements are not met, people will not have the energy to pursue a higher level of satisfaction.
Hierarchy of need
The demand pyramid is clearly visible in the development of the consumer market.
The earliest consumer market focused on meeting the most basic needs of consumers – ensuring quality and offering the right price.
Therefore, the emergence of the brand gave consumers a sense of identity, so they are willing to spend more money to buy a product in order to get a sense of identity.
As the level of consumption continues to increase and technologyDevelopment, consumers have come up with new ideas – they want products to match their unique needs, or to perfectly represent their own ideas and perspectives.
This demand has driven the emergence of product personalization.
Harvard Business Review points out that we are shifting from a mass market focused on high-volume production in the 1960s to 1970s to a market that is increasingly focused on retaining customers and increasing loyalty, and finally entering a focus on user experience and high personality. The era of change.
The idea of the first thousand people to propose thousands of faces is Taobao.
Taobao uses personalized purchase and browsing records to provide personalized recommendations. At the same time, consumers’ basic information and search records will be used by Taobao to match various labels (such as “Pet Lovers”, “90s” and “White Collars”) to provide more targeted product recommendations.
Thousands of people in this way eliminate the noisy information and help consumers quickly find content of interest.
Taoqian thousand people face a concept of “personalized search”.
It effectively implements accurate marketing through algorithms. However, this classic application has limited the understanding of thousands of people for many businesses.
First of all, when thinking about what products are suitable for thousands of people, many businesses are limited by the current situation, and the possibility of implementing product personalization is determined according to the existing attributes of the product.
Secondly, the existing knowledge of thousands of people is often stuck in product applications, and many businesses are not aware of the effectiveness of personalized customization concepts in the production process.
In essence, the concept of thousands of people has brought about two major leaps – one is to transform product attributes, develop consumer demand for products; the second is to reduce costs through targeted production processes. .
Follow-up, we will talk about the possibility of applying thousands of people from these two perspectives.
Non-standard products have advantages
First of all, the concept of product personalization provides new ideas for the development of product potential.
Before discussing this point in detail, we must first introduce the concept of non-standard products. The standard refers to products with little difference in appearance. Some examples include headphones, air conditioners, and the like.
General users will be very clear about what they want before buying the standard: For example, when consumers want to buy headphones, they often search for “Apple Headset” directly on Taobao.
Non-standards are completely different, and non-standards refer to products with a large variety of styles.
The classic non-standard representative is clothing. When ordinary consumers want to buy clothes, they generally do not directly lock a certain brand. Instead, they input words such as “shirts” and “jeans”.
Standard/non-standard comparison
For several reasons, non-standard products will be more suitable for thousands of people.
First of all, the customer needs of non-standard products are more personalized than the standard products.
Many of the items are similar to large household appliances (such as air-conditioned dishwashers) and daily necessities (such as laundry liquid mineral water).
The need for consumers to purchase these items comes from everyday needs, so their expectations for the product are to meet the required functions.
However, when buying non-standard products, customers will add personal preferences to the measure of product quality.
Therefore, the key to non-standard sales is to accurately target the different needs of customers and tap into clear selling points.
Secondly, based on the basic attributes of the product, non-standard products have a greater price change space.
Because the standards are more homogenous, consumers tend to use price as a measure. Therefore, it is difficult to have too much price difference between different businesses for the same standard.
Compared with the standard, there is no uniform measurement standard for non-standard products. Each product may have different selling points to meet the preferences of different angles. Therefore, when consumers judge whether they want to buy non-standard products, they often do not put the price first, and are more willing to pay more money in order to “combine” with the design concept of a product.
Therefore, merchants will have the incentive to increase the value of their products by developing thousands of people to cater to the concerns of all potential customers.
There is a chance for transformation of non-standard products
Based on these theories, many standard vendors will find it difficult to achieve complete personalization of their products, and ultimately they will only be entangled in brand price wars.
However, the change brought by thousands of people is not only to make non-standard products better to personalize the characteristics, but also to give many opportunities for the transformation of the standard.
Some traditional enterprises have made good use of information data to personalize the original single product and successfully convert the standard into non-standard products.
The most popular example is the recommendation algorithm for today’s headlines. Similar recommendation algorithmBefore the advent, traditional media presented the same information to everyone.
However, the interest of each reader may be quite different, and in order for everyone to see the current affairs of their concern, the media needs to be comprehensive and provide a lot of news about different topics.
In this way, the reader needs to spend a lot of time in the sea of information in the ocean, filtering and filtering out the content of interest.
This process is not only labor-intensive, but also makes it difficult for readers to understand a topic in a limited time.
Today’s headlines put forward the concept of “What is your concern is the headline”, based on the reader’s basic information and access tendencies, through the algorithm to push different messages to each user.
This process frees the user from the cumbersome process of filtering unwanted information and directly delivers the article with the highest personal preference.
In addition to the media, banks have used thousands of people to make use of information data, breaking the limitations of traditional services.
In the paper “Personalized Product Recommendations for Commercial Banks Based on Association Rules”, the author discusses how to explore potential links in big data through association rules algorithms to accurately locate customer needs.
For example, the bank manager specifies the appropriate customer classification criteria based on the details of the current bank. Subsequently, the system automatically updates the classification of the customer according to the standard, and combines the customer deposit amount with the product level for recommendation.
At the same time, the algorithm explores the relevant association rules based on the financial products that the customer purchases in the future, and then provides recommendations that match the parameters of the most recently consulted product.
These processes allow the recommended products to take into account customer preferences and purchasing power, which in turn effectively increases the efficiency and impact of marketing campaigns.
Overview of the above examples, they are actually similar in nature to Taobao’s personalized search. The key point is that the above mentioned companies break the limitations of product attributes in traditional industries and successfully use technology and creativity to achieve Thousands of thousands of people.
These examples are all reflected from the side. One of the keys behind the concept of thousands of people is the development of product potential. Darren Vengroff, chief scientist who helped retail websites create personalized product recommendations, has pointed out that companies should “work hard to understand what services they can offer to their customers, and these services may not be discovered by customers themselves.”
For some traditional products, consumers may feel inconvenient or unsuitable in the absence of personalized use, but they are still in the status quo due to long-term use habits.
If a business can see the possibilities of transformation and make changes on top of the existing situation, it can open up new demands and stay ahead of the market.
02.Thousands of thousands of people at the B end
Economic changes and globalIn terms of the impact of manufacturing, the vast majority of changes and upgrades occur at the 2C end. For example, the thousands of people mentioned above, we have been able to see and enjoy a lot of automated, intelligent, digital services. means.
But many aspects of the 2B end are still in an isolated state, and many parts need to be integrated. Therefore, the 2B-side thousand B-thousands may have greater commercial value than the 2C-side thousands of people in the future.
Consumer side forced
The thousands of people at the 2C end, whether it is the two-way integration of the product category and the retail channel, or the perfect grafting of the personality design and technology elements of the offline store, is essentially to cater to the wave of consumption upgrades. Users’ new demands for personalized, diverse and experiential consumption.
In order to provide consumers with high-quality goods and services efficiently, in addition to making a fuss about the direct-to-consumer C-side, it also relies on the strong support of the B-end supply chain, which occurs to a certain extent in the consumption side. It also forced the industrial transformation of the supply side.
In the Internet age, consumer demand has shown a significant long tail effect:
The mass demand that leads the consumer trend is concentrated in the head, while the personalized, fragmented and small niche demand is distributed in the long tail. If the demand of the long tail part is added up, it will form a head than the head. A much larger market space.
In order to achieve personalized and customized production for consumers in the long tail market, it is inseparable from the supply chain support of thousands of thousands of faces, which requires design, production, manufacturing, distribution and logistics in the supply chain. A link must be more flexible and flexible.
The long tail market is gathering a lot of niche needs
In the apparel industry, the traditional “first-time after-sales” model has caused garment enterprises to face huge inventory pressure. Under the background of consumption upgrade, overcapacity and intensified competition, clothing brands represented by Uniqlo and ZARA have created The flexible supply chain adapts to the rapidly changing consumption escalation trend of the market.
There are also some technical service providers in the market that provide intelligent and flexible supply chains for clothing brands. They are committed to opening up customized platforms for front-end retail brands and back-end C2M mass customization production platforms, using data to open the front and back of the industry chain. Flexible manufacturing drives the apparel industry to form a closed loop of on-demand production and customization.
This is not only the pressure of the consumption-side change on the supply-side industry, but also the requirement for the company to achieve lean management.In terms of the end, it is a thousand people, and in the case of enterprises, it is a thousand enterprises.
Production change
In the retail industry, for example, under the traditional supply chain conditions, manufacturers usually use orders received from retail warehouses to predict consumer demand, while the “information island” effect between upstream and downstream companies allows The time it takes for the entire supply chain to respond to market changes has increased dramatically.
It is very likely that when the supply chain reacts, the heat of market demand has already faded, which increases the backlog of goods and waste.
In addition, if there is an unexpected situation in the market, the demand for certain commodities will increase sharply, and it will inevitably be able to produce and replenish goods in a timely manner, regardless of efficiency, profit or user satisfaction.
Under the consumption upgrade situation, the uncertainty of market demand has further increased, orders from customers are more diversified, varieties are increasing, batches are shrinking, and delivery times are becoming shorter.
At this point, increasing the speed of the supply chain’s response to market demand has become a top priority.
The meaning of the company is to achieve the best inventory and even zero inventory, to meet the immediate changes in the market with the lowest cost and the fastest response speed, and to obtain the maximum operational management benefits.
In response to this demand from enterprises, some supply chain management platform service companies have advocated lean supply chain management, and combined with the characteristics of the company’s own industry chain, continuously implement supply chain management through the comprehensive means of “software + hardware + solution”. The benign cycle iteration.
There are standard services and products in the practice scenario, empowering more large manufacturing companies to create end-to-end supply chain collaboration solutions from raw materials to finished products to distribution and distribution.
There is ultimately a reduction in the cost of the supply chain and an increase in overall management effectiveness.
Comprehensive Collaborative Supply Chain Management
The chance of a thousand people on the B side
In fact, the C-side digitization has been gradually completed, and any consumer portrait can be clearly portrayed through consumption data.
However, the digital transformation of the B-end is just getting started.
The reason is that some enterprises in the industry chain have a low degree of informatization, and the internal business processes and information transmission methods are far from being able to meet the requirements of today’s information age, which in turn affects the entire supply chain to rapidly adapt to the ever-changing market demand. response.
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