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What are you posting upside down?

First, e-commerce will launch various traffic packages, rankings, and advertising spaces during the holiday season. To put it bluntly, it is to segment the traffic and marketing resources, and then sell them to brand owners at an increased price.

Most brand owners will still choose to buy, because the sales data of the e-commerce festival has become a social evaluation standard, and brand owners cannot afford to lose.

“Do you want to be the first place in the 6.18 water category?”

“Do you want to be on the opening page of the double 11 home appliance breakout stage, there are only 30 positions!”

Every e-commerce festival, countless similar conversations will occur between platform vendors and brand vendors.

This is still the most obvious “holiday tax”, not to mention even more ruthless. For example, it is an indisputable fact that every year “2 choose 1” will drive countless brand owners crazy.

In fact, in order to cooperate with the e-commerce festival, most of the participating brands not only have to pay the platform commission, various “golden advertising space” and “category list unit” fees, and even carry out various external activities for marketing. Kind of resource coordination.

Take the elevator advertising that we are familiar with, for example, the advertising space during 6.18 and 11.11 every year will be rushed. On the one hand, the platform side wants to grab, JD.com and Taobao Tmall want to grab; on the other hand, every brand participating in the “festival” wants to grab, especially when everyone has been harassed by traffic marketing when the festival is warming up. At that time, the elevator advertisements that appear in the space you must pass every day have become a marketing tool.

Why? Because the detonation potential of such platforms as Focus is stronger, and elevator advertisements generally appear before consumers enter two scenes-one is an apartment building and the other is an office building.

According to the big data statistics of the e-commerce festival over the years, shopping peaks actually occur at three times: 10 o’clock, 15 o’clock, and 21 o’clock.

Why? Because the first thing at work is to receive emails. After receiving the emails to see if there is no urgent matter, it happens to go shopping; 15 o’clock in the afternoon is the time to wake up after lunch break, receive another wave of emails, and visit the website again; and at 21 o’clock, It’s the time when most people eat dinner, take a shower, lean on the sofa or bed, and enjoy the most relaxing time of the day…So, andElevator advertisements that are directly related to the consumption scene are particularly effective for e-commerce festivals.

The author even heard a very interesting sentence from the top of the e-commerce platform. He said: “In fact, all consumption occurs in apartment buildings and office buildings, and the elevator advertisement is the last advertisement seen before the consumer behavior occurs. Therefore, I have the deepest impression, so there is a high probability that you will buy products of this brand as soon as you walk into the office (home).

Don’t look at the value of each e-commerce company. In fact, they are well versed in human nature and are familiar with the time and time when the social animals draw water. For example, Yan Limin, the founder of Juhuasuan, set the opening time of the group at 10 am every day. He even ordered a batch of mice to send to consumers. The mouse will automatically prompt every 10 o’clock-Juhuashua is open. .

Okay, it’s a bit far-reaching, let’s get back to the troubles of platform vendors.

3. The kidnapped person is unable to resist

Actually, as far as most of the brand owners I have interviewed, they don’t like holiday promotions very much. Their favorite is called “flat sales.”

Flat sales are not flat sales, but stable sales. The smaller the curve, the better.

Why? Because such inventory management and supply chain management are the least difficult. Participating in the e-commerce festival is a huge test-if you have too much stock, you can’t sell it, so you can only digest it at a lower price; “.

What’s more frightening, the brand’s heartfelt fear about the e-commerce festival is that the promotion of the e-commerce festival is often characterized by an increase in volume (For example, buy 5 pieces and get a 50% discount), so once the consumption window of certain types of consumer goods, especially daily necessities, is occupied by opponents, it can be described as a nightmare for brand owners-you can count on a toilet paper that has been stored for a year Of people spend your products in these 12 months?

Since the brand owners are afraid of the e-commerce festival and have so much distress, why don’t they unite to oppose it and bargain with the platform providers?

It’s not that I don’t want to fight back, but I really can’t fight back. why?

The first reason is that the e-commerce platform has been continuously creating festivals,The concept of making “e-commerce platform things cheaper” is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, which has led to a fact called “emptying offline”.

The so-called emptied offline means that the offline consumption scene keeps shrinking and shrinking, so that consumers feel that offline consumption is inconvenient and uneconomical, and the offline assets and storefronts of various brands continue to shrink. ,Disability.

Gome and Suning were first-class 3C hypermarkets back then, but if you go to most cities now, many Gome and Suning only have one storey left. All the products are on the first floor. The hypermarket is disappear.

This is not edited by the author. Let’s look at a set of data. From January to October 2019, the national online retail sales were 8.2 trillion yuan, of which the online retail sales of physical goods was 6.5 trillion yuan, accounting for 19.5% of the total retail sales of consumer goods.

In 2010, ten years ago, how much online physical sales accounted for the total social consumer goods, less than 4%.

The middle 15% is the progress of e-commerce and the shrinking of traditional retail.

Of course, we cannot deny the convenience, speed, and comparison of e-commerce, and we have to admit that whoever is the advanced productivity is the iron rule of improvement. But we must know that the growth of e-commerce is not growth out of thin air, it is accompanied by the collapse of the entire offline scene.

Next we will talk about the second problem that brands cannot resist, that is, path dependence and inability to resist.

E-commerce is not only a way, but also an addiction. Once path dependence is formed, it is difficult to resist.

I recently read an article about Benben Financial Analysis of Three Squirrels, and the case in it is very representative.

Three Squirrels is a top-notch snack brand in China and a typical “Internet snacks” enterprise. It is a golden case of e-commerce platforms advocating “e-commerce to create new brands” countless times.

The semi-annual report of Three Squirrels issued on August 20 this year showed that the company’s net profit fell by 29.51% year-on-year, and its main business operating costs rose by 69.73% year-on-year. While achieving revenue of 5.2 billion yuan, this Internet snack The company’s net profit is only 180 million yuan.

At one time, the three squirrels were inexplicably grateful to JD.com and Tmall because the combined sales of these two platforms accounted for more than 80% of the total sales of the three squirrels.

However, the relationship between the iron and the iron is the iron, platform service fees, logistics fees, and value-added marketing feesWhat you should give is still to give, and at most give you a serious discount.

This article of Benban tells us that it doesn’t take too much effort. It can be seen in the financial report that in the first half of 2019, the service fee of the three squirrels e-commerce platform accounted for 18.9% of the sales cost, becoming the third One of the largest cost items for squirrels; by the first half of 2020, this proportion has risen to 39.8%.

The snack food industry has a relatively high net profit margin in the traditional industry, and the three squirrels are still the main concept of consumption upgrades, and they are not cheap. However, starting from 2017, the sales net profit of the three squirrels continued to decline, from 5.44% all the way to 2.35%, which is much lower than the industry average.

Until this step, the three squirrels discovered that their marketing capabilities have been infinitely strengthened by relying too much on online platforms, and on the other hand they have been infinitely weakened.

In 2020, the three squirrels will have only 139 directly-operated stores, including franchise stores, only 617, while the two direct competitors, Liangpin Store, have more than 2,100 offline stores, and come to Yifen In 2018, the number of stores has reached 2500.

Therefore, for the consumer goods industry, e-commerce platforms are by no means a “big tree” that you can rely on without thinking. From basic economic principles, you can know that putting eggs in one basket is very unreliable of.

Even if the three squirrels have to resist, how much bargaining power does their annual sales of 10 billion have for an e-commerce platform with a total sales of several trillion?

Even if three squirrels fall down, what effort will it take for an e-commerce platform to hold out another “four squirrels”?

So, you said, if the e-commerce company allows three squirrels to participate in the e-commerce festival and asks for discounts and value-added services, can the three squirrels refuse?

4. Does it make sense to stop making festivals?

At this point, some readers may say that the brand owners are indeed miserable, but don’t consumers have nothing to lose?

Indeed, on the face of it, consumer goods have received substantial benefits, and they have really not lost much when they buy favorite discounted products.

Although, every year, the e-commerce business will make news such as “xx women emptied their shopping carts and were sent to mental hospitals”, but this is not the biggest harm to consumers during the e-commerce festival. After all, most people still consume rationally. of.

The real damage is that we live in an economic system. If we get excess benefits, someone must pay for it. In the early days, e-commerce attracted consumers by improving the supply chain, providing a better consumer experience, competitive prices, more comprehensive after-sales, and reducing intermediate link costs. At that time, our “cheap” came from the benign value increment, which is the advanced and progressive side of the e-commerce platform’s capabilities, which saved us money.

However, the “money saved” is now very limited, so for e-commerce platforms, the best and most direct way is to cut the brand’s leeks.

Therefore, in such an economic system, when you are no longer enjoying the benefits brought about by technological progress and model upgrades, but by the benefits of a certain part or a certain part of the benefit, this kind of preferential How long can it last? Do you know that the leeks that are cut tomorrow are not your business?

So, it’s not a bad thing to make e-commerce festivals, but it reflects that e-commerce platforms are losing their innovative power and upward power and have become the same path. Those with vested interests who rely on and try to “make money”.

Among the representative and top enterprises of the Internet in China, e-commerce or e-commerce business accounts for too much. If such a huge force loses its motivation and ability to innovate, it will affect the entire economy. How terrible the negative effects produced by society will be!

So why do we need to engage in new infrastructure, we need to engage in internal circulation? In the final analysis, it is to allow innovation to go deeper into the traditional economy, and constantly let new technologies, late-comer technical forces and business models force the first-mover vested Stakeholders have to move forward, and cannot make “lazy money” or “lie to earn” so as to maintain the innovation ability of our entire society.

This article is from the official account:Current Tech (ID: dengling40) author: Zhong Shenxiu