Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1151
In front of Daishan, it may be the most complicated problem for Ali’s domestic e-commerce business in the past 20 years.
At the beginning of 2022, Dai Shan officially served as the chief president in charge of Ali’s domestic digital business sector, responsible for Taobao (Taobao, Tmall, Juhuasuan, Hangan, Taobao Live, Xianyu, Alimama), domestic B2C retail, Taocaicai , Taote and domestic trade (CBU) 1688 and other businesses, the status and importance of Alibaba has risen again.
These businesses together account for more than 70% of Ali’s total revenue, but in the last three months of 2021, their growth rate is only 7%, which is the four major sectors that Ali divided at the end of last year. China (domestic digital business, cloud and technology, life services and overseas digital business) has the lowest growth rate.
As Ali’s core revenue source – accounting for more than 40% of revenue – the growth rate of Taobao and Tmall’s customer management fees (including advertising fees and commission income) has declined for the first time since its listing 8 years ago, down 1 year-on-year. %.
The traffic of the whole industry has peaked, the competition pattern is complicated, and the repeated epidemics are superimposed, making this problem in front of Daishan even more difficult.
Dai Shan is the only Eighteen Arhats who are still in charge of the front-line business (18 people who started the business at the beginning of Ali). She has followed the founder Jack Ma since Alibaba was founded 23 years ago. She is the No. 11 employee of Alibaba. We used to call Daishan “MM”.
In the impression of employees, Dai Shan is kind and contagious, willing to listen, and likes to take care of people, and is more willing to achieve others. Daishan is absolutely loyal to Ali. She once said to herself that she has never been shaken or disappointed in Ali. “My love for the company has not changed since the first day, and it will be the same from now on.”
Previously, although Dai Shan’s Alibaba B-series business as the No. 1 position received little attention from the industry, it has maintained double-digit growth for many years. She also incubated two new businesses, Taote and Taocaicai. In the opinion of some Taobao employees, the current Da Taobao needs to face the complex situation of user experience and industry competition. Dai Shan is a suitable candidate. She has sufficient qualifications and courage to really use the knife against Da Taobao.
Dai Shan is no stranger to Taobao. From 2009 to 2013, she participated in Taobao’s business as HR, and returned after 9 years of going around. Last Friday (May 20), on the 140th day when Dai Shan took the post of Taobao Tmall No. 1, in an online exchange activity with more than 300 domestic and foreign consumer goods companies, which are also leading merchants on the Ali platform On the first day, Dai Shan systematically expounded her thinking and choices in Taobao and Tmall business.
When a mature and huge company’s business has come to a point where it must change, the business methodology of the new position is worthy of attention. Ali currently implements a diversified governance strategy in the organization, requiring the No. 1 position of each business segment to have a clear and firm business methodology, face up to problems and solve them.
If I try to summarize, in the past 140 days, Daishan has mainly done four things: first, she made the team reach a consensus that Taobao and Tmall will change; then she clarified the business philosophy centered on consumption; , first adjust the organization, and then formulate rules for the business.
Unified thinking: consumers become the first customer
In the last two days of 2021, Dai Shan and more than a dozen business presidents of the entire domestic digital business sector first discussed the fundamental issues during a meeting. She officially called off the development model with GMV as its growth goal and asked Taobao and Tmall to return to consumers. Experience creation.
More than five months later, Dai Shan emphasized the need to shift from transaction to consumption, which means to extend the transaction behavior of consumers in the past forward and backward. Good service, so as to enhance the consumer experience in all aspects.
From attaching importance to growth to attaching importance to experience, it is in the same line as the “transaction to consumption” strategy proposed by Dai Shan this time. The fundamental question behind is, when Ali is talking about his values ”customer first”, who is Ali’s First customer?
An Alibaba executive told us that when he was in a meeting with the team, everyone debated whether the first customer was a buyer or a seller.
For a long time in the past, everyone has assumed that the seller is the first customer. The reason is obvious. As a platform, Alibaba’s revenue comes from the seller’s fee. If the service is good, and the seller’s business is good, Alibaba can make more money.
But if you want to maximize growth, you only care about sellers. In the words of the above management, the deformed ecology of “no grass grows under the big trees” will easily appear, which is unsustainable.
In the end, everyone reached an agreement that the first customer should return to the final buyer to maximize the buyer’s experience, and at the same time fully support the seller and guide them to serve their consumers well. In a word, after serving the buyers well, the seller’s business can be more certain, and new business opportunities can be discovered and created.
This change of thinking is also in line with the actual situation. In Dai Shan’s own words, “e-commerce has entered the era of retention from traffic.”
Every year in China, more than 1 billion people shop on various platforms of Ali, and 900 million of them spend on Taobao and Tmall. According to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), by December 2021, the number of Internet users in China will increase. The size is 1.032 billion.
For Ali now, there is not much room for new user growth. Different periods have different emphases. Now, Dai Shan’s first choice is the precipitation of old users and deep user penetration.
In the online communication with 300 merchants, whether it is Zhang Yong, chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Ali, or Dai Shan, or the head of Taobao Tmall Industry Development and Operation Center, Chuixue and other executives, they all mentioned the inconvenience of the big environment. certainty.
The epidemic keeps repeating, international political conflicts bring pressure on the supply chain, and the macro economy is both complex and full of uncertainties. Find an opportunity for deterministic growth in a world of complexity, complexity, ambiguity.”
The starting point of Dai Shan and the team’s current thinking is how to make merchants have more certainty after having Alibaba’s services during the 618 promotion and the operation in the second half of the year, “Looking for the certainty of operation and the certainty of consumer demand, In this way, the certainty of supply can be organized.”
One detail is that Dai Shan seems to want to use a bottle of Coke to express Taobao and Tmall’s determination to shift from transaction to consumption. On May 20, some consumers in Shanghai found that their Tmall supermarket orders arrived with an extra bottle of Coke in their packages. This is a 520 surprise delivered by Maochao and Coca-Cola to consumers in Shanghai, with a total of 52,000 bottles, which are randomly provided to consumers who receive the goods on the same day as Maochao. A Taobao source revealed, “This is Daishan’s idea.”
Adjustment step 1: first move the organization
At the end of last year, Zhang Yong mentioned Ali’s new organizational strategy in an internal letter to all staff, which was upgraded from the middle-office strategy in 2015 to a “diversified governance” strategy, hoping to make the organization more agile.
“Diversified governance” divides multiple related businesses into one section, and sets up a person in charge to manage each section independently, focusing on independence and autonomy, and the responsibilities and commanders of each combat unit are very clear. Under this strategy, there are higher requirements for the business methodology of the No. 1 business.
As Zhang Yong said when he shared at the Zhejiang Lakeside Entrepreneurship Research Center in 2019, the position of “No. 1” has two inescapable responsibilities – business design and organizational design.
The so-called business design is to answer three questions clearly: What business do you want to do? What client do you want to serve? What are you going to do for him? It solves the problem of productivity.
Organizational design, on the other hand, solves the problem of internal production relations. Zhang Yong’s summary of organizational design is that when an organization pursues speed, it should turn its business into a vertical, independent system that runs forward separately; When the pursuit of efficiency, accumulation, and precipitation is required, some things need to be crossed over so that the entire support system, including commercial precipitation, can be shared with other teams. “
Dai Shan’s adjustment ideas for Taobao and Tmall include two dimensions: business design and organizational design.
On the third working day in 2022, on the 6th day when Dai Shan officially served as the president in charge of Ali’s domestic digital business sector, she promoted the full integration of Taobao and Tmall, and adjusted the Taobao business group and Tmall business group to 3. 1 center and 2 content e-commerce businesses, namely the industry development and operation center, user development and operation center, platform strategy and operation center; Taobao Live and Kankan, which were originally established under the platform business, have improved their status after this adjustment. The person in charge reports directly to Daishan.
The internal view is that the main purpose of the adjustment is to improve the user experience and consumer value. In the past, Ali put big merchants and small merchants on Taobao and Tmall platforms, trying to give different positioning and ways to make money, and use more traffic and resources to support big merchants that can bring more profits. An Ali person believes that such a division brings limitations to itself and delays the independent development of innovative businesses.
Adjustment Step 2: Develop business rules
After setting up the organizational framework, the next step is to formulate rules for various businesses. Daishan has done subtraction and addition. She shuts down unimportant projects and transfers them, and invests firmly in important businesses; simplifying business operating costs as much as possible, enhancing Their operating certainty and locking in new growth points.
She first comprehensively collected and optimized the marketing IP of Taobao and Tmall. In addition to retaining Ali’s S-level promotion activities such as the 618, 99 Juhuasuan Festival, Double 11 and Double 12, etc., the focus is on strengthening the small black box, super brand day, membership In addition to the daily sales IPs, the remaining marketing IPs will be optimized from more than 20 to 5, such as Tmall Zhenghong, Tmall Vitality Camp, Tmall Wonder Box, etc. These projects that have been cut are considered to have an input-output ratio. It is not clear, scattered and wastes the resources and energy of the merchants.
For example, in the industrial development and operation center, after Fubuki took office, he streamlined the marketing team and cut off some marketing projects that consumers had little awareness of, such as “50% off days” and “Midnight Explosion” under Juhuasuan.
A well-informed Ali employee said that before everyone wanted to do innovation, do 0 to 1, because the story of innovation is the best story. The result is that 1 to 10 people may still do it, and 10 to 100 are not done at all. “Now the traffic is not growing, all the stories are not well told, and these projects that consumers do not perceive deeply do not need to exist.”
For them, the most direct value of Dai Shan after coming here is to do subtraction, to sort out the projects that no one wants to do in the past and whether it is necessary to do, “It was really too much done before.”
An Ali source said that in the past, the Taobao Tmall platform had a large number of marketing IPs, and Daishan has now greatly reduced them. He believes that Daishan’s move is to optimize the platform’s business environment, balance the relationship between daily sales and big promotions, reduce business dependence on big promotions, and normalize consumer spending.
There are two common promotion methods in the field of e-commerce. One is a high-low price promotion strategy (high-low) driven by various promotions, which can stimulate demand in the short term and bring higher yields; the other is a daily promotion strategy. The low-price strategy, typically represented by Wal-Mart, can better coordinate and stabilize the supply chain, and reduce the risk of out-of-stocks through stable and high-frequency customer demand.
If you want to switch from high-low-price promotion to a low-price strategy every day, it takes a lot of investment and energy, including the education of consumers and employees, and the reconstruction of the profit distribution pattern and cooperation model in the supply chain.
Daishan, on the other hand, has made firm investments in businesses that she considers important, the most typical of which are shopping and live broadcasting in the content field. The current number of monthly active users of Kankan has exceeded 200 million. In the future, it will support brand accounts and open up shopping and shops. In the live broadcast, the store broadcast carried out by the merchant will become the focus in the future.
Daishan has repeatedly expressed her importance to shopping internally. She did not put forward clear indicators, but only “hopes to make shopping better”.
In terms of merchants, Dai Shan led the simplification of platform operation rules to make it easier for merchants to understand, and upgraded merchant operation tools to reduce merchant operating costs by releasing store deposits and reducing business consultant fees. Similar support policies will continue to be introduced.
It is equally important to give merchants more certainty, including certainty of fulfillment and certainty of growth.
On the Ali Family and Friends Day just past, Zhang Yong said at a sharing meeting that Ali service consumption must be considered as a precondition in specific scenarios. In the epidemic environment, all consumer services without certainty of performance, “actually a bit of a hooligan. Just saying that he helped him generate an order, but can’t deliver it, this must be a big problem.”
Under the epidemic, the actual problem faced by merchants is that in the process of commodity circulation, if any point is blocked, such as warehouses, central warehouses, distribution centers, transportation, etc., the entire chain will stop.
So what can Ali do? Since taking office, Dai Shan has been promoting the integration of the Tmall system with the merchant inventory system, delivery warehouse and other systems, combining far-field e-commerce, mid-field intra-city retail, and near-field instant delivery.
At the previous media communication meeting in the food industry, “LatePost” learned that Tmall has already started the urban warehouse project, and some merchants’ heavy goods can be stored in the warehouse to meet consumers’ door-to-door and upstairs services. Require. The city warehouse is currently only being tested in Hangzhou, and other cities are still being planned.
During the epidemic in Shanghai, Tmall logistics partners Albatross and Tmall cooperated in early April to guarantee the supply of mothers and babies. Maternal and baby brands put milk powder, diapers and other products in Albatross’ front warehouse in advance. After Shanghai consumers place orders, It can realize the delivery of baby milk powder at the speed of takeaway.
Li Lixun, the founder of Albatross, told “LatePost” that after Dai Shan took office, the idea of their cooperation with Tmall became clearer. Previously, Tmall Supermarket, Ele.me, etc. were all separate entrances, but now, some products The hourly delivery service is also integrated into Ali’s e-commerce link. When users place an order, there will be an additional one-hour delivery option to check, making the scene smoother and the experience better.
Hao Chen (flower name), the head of the retail business group in the same city, provided a set of data. At present, online consumption accounts for 24.5% of the total retail sales of the whole society, but the consumption of retail goods in O2O accounts for only 0.2%. The annual purchase users of the retail market increased by nearly 100% year-on-year, which has more room for growth and faster growth for merchants.
Dai Shan revealed in her speech that the diversified combination of the far, middle and near fields, the first application scenarios include fresh fruits and vegetables, fast food, vehicles and other heavy service performance areas, etc., and the midfield of beauty, clothing, etc. is not excluded. The purpose of extension is to serve the light planning and immediate needs of some consumers, which will also be a new market opportunity for merchants.
Another new opportunity is cross-category purchases by consumers. For example, if a merchant makes maternity and baby products, some consumers who only bought beauty products in the past may also be its potential customers, allowing users who purchase different categories to convert to each other.
For merchants, the most difficult thing for them is how to efficiently find potential customers who are most likely to convert on the platform. “LatePost” learned that this proposition, Daishan arranged for all her direct subordinates, Taobao and Tmall’s high Everyone is thinking about how to do cross-category.
An Taoist person said that Ali’s main two methods are to promote consumers’ cross-category purchases. One is that the algorithm recommends more weighted traffic for some categories, and the other is that merchants make profits for new customers of the category.
After unifying the thinking, adjusting the organization, and determining the rules, this is just the beginning of the adjustment of Taobao and Tmall. They focus on the level of retreat and provide the direction and guidelines for business development, but the real difficulty lies in the implementation of the specific implementation. Among the details, the upcoming 618 will be the first big test for Daishan.
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