Don’t fall into the trap again! Common problems and strategy analysis of community operations!

What is the difference between community operations? This article analyzes the characteristics of the community, as well as its operating model and profit model, and finally summarizes and points out the blind spots in community operations.

As a trillion-dollar pie, the community market has become very popular since 2012. It was also from that time that the online bottleneck of e-commerce platforms became prominent, sales growth encountered obstacles, and offline became a new breakthrough. As a result, community O2O companies emerged in a rapid pace. However, in less than three years, most of these companies failed and disappeared...

However, this is not the end. With the emergence of new retail, offline supermarkets and convenience stores have emerged again. Capital has finally found another outbreak point in the community. The rise of large fresh food supermarkets such as HEMA Fresh and Super Species, and the emergence of various convenience stores such as Suning Store and Convenience Bee, almost all major platforms have announced their layout of offline community markets. The community market has ushered in the second spring of capital, and community convenience stores, fruit stores, and fresh food stores have begun to flourish everywhere.

With the arrival of the economic winter, the profitability of offline community stores is still worrying. Major companies have shown signs of cooling down to varying degrees. Community platforms have suffered losses to varying degrees and even laid off employees. How can the community's business model be monetized? Perhaps only after the tide recedes can we know who is swimming naked. What exactly is the difference in community operations? The following is an analysis from these aspects:

1. Characteristics of the community

The community determines that community operations are different from offline channels and online e-commerce models.

Conceptually, the word community is not widely used in daily life. What people often say is neighborhood, "I live in a certain neighborhood..." Community is more of a government administrative division for the convenience of management.

Therefore, in terms of market execution, what we are more exposed to are actually residential communities. A community will contain several residential communities, each residential community will contain several buildings, each building will contain several units, and each unit will have several floors and number of households. The characteristics of the community can be started from smaller residential units.

Community population characteristics: Basically, the permanent population of every community in a big city is composed of the elderly, children and working people, while the people left behind in the community on a daily basis are the elderly and children, and the young people go out early and come back late. The difference is that there are more elderly people in old communities and more office workers in new communities, so the floating population in the community is relatively scattered and it is difficult to form a scale, which is far less than that of commercial areas. This also determines that large-scale, high-operating cost business models are not suitable in the community.

The surrounding environment of the community: Various small shops around the community are an integral part of the community's ecology. They can meet the needs of the community residents, such as pharmacies, barber shops, vegetable markets, small supermarkets and convenience stores, small restaurants, clothing stores, laundries, etc. These small shops are generally small in scale, with only one or two people running the business, and their regular service customers are the regular residents of the community. In fact, the biggest competitors faced by any business entering the community are often these small shops, because the owners of these small shops are already very familiar with the surrounding area and have accumulated a large number of connections.

Characteristics of community needs: The needs of community people are actually diverse, many of which are scattered and not concentrated, and the total amount is not high. After all, there are only about 2,000 households in a community, and each small store has the same competitors, and they can only serve a few hundred households. This is one of the reasons why many community O2O companies cannot make profits. The allocation of heavy assets will definitely not work in the community.

Characteristics of community management: When developing a community or doing activities, it is often unavoidable to involve property management and neighborhood committees. No matter what business you do, you need to maintain good relations with them and try your best to gain their support. In that way, many things will become much smoother. Providing a good store experience and emotional experience for users to obtain long-term customers is the foundation of store survival.

Behavioral characteristics of community people: The functions of a community can be simply divided into living area and commercial area. The function of the living area is for daily living, which is what we often call a community, and the commercial area is mainly for business and work. Young people are basically in the commercial district during the day because they have to go to work. The living area is a place for the elderly and children. The daily life of the elderly is to go to the market, cook, take care of children, play mahjong, etc., which revolve around the living area. It can be said that a community is a relatively fixed population with relatively dispersed and diverse individual needs, centered around a life-centered market. Therefore, restaurants, small supermarkets and other small stores with high demand frequency can survive, while those with low demand frequency face losses, those with poor service and poor customer relationship maintenance face losses, and those without competitiveness face losses...

Social development opportunities: In the short term, the community market faces great opportunities for consumption upgrading under the conditions of the Internet and economic development. In the long run, the community is also facing the impact of an aging population. These are factors that need to be considered in the community market, such as how to use new technologies to improve the convenience of shopping for the elderly under current conditions, and how to make good use of big data of the community population to match population needs. These are all issues that need to be considered.

From the above characteristics, it can be seen that community management must cater to the needs of the elderly, who are the main consumer group and consume more life service products. Young people like to go shopping in commercial areas, so many products are difficult to sell in the community.

There are also products for children that meet their growth needs. If you observe carefully, you will find that there are some small education and training institutions in every community.

In addition, there is the issue of community operating costs, which include personnel costs, material costs for event promotion, time costs, etc. With small flow of people, low coverage, and long time, community promotion faces many practical problems.

2. Community Operation Model

Community operation is not simply to apply the e-commerce or supermarket model mechanically, but to change the thinking and find a more suitable model.

When doing community O2O, whether from online to offline or offline to online, the original operating model is not adapted to the new channels. There are many differences between offline and online. It is like driving a car into the sea. The original way will not work and you need to change to another way. Enterprises must be able to change their operating ideas in time, combine their own advantages, integrate online and offline resources to achieve complementary advantages.

Online e-commerce is based on the big data of the Internet and relies on the support of logistics. People all over the world can be your users, so the traffic of the online platform is very important, the conversion rate is very important, and hot products are very important. It is different offline. Fixed store locations cover a relatively fixed number of people and may also face several surrounding competitors in the same industry. More emphasis is placed on the store’s scene experience, visual image, emotional communication, and repurchase by old users.

1. Operation model of online e-commerce platforms

The key to online e-commerce platforms lies in traffic, which drives conversion, transaction and sharing in a continuous cycle, thereby achieving user growth and a significant increase in sales. As a platform, it fully utilizes its aggregation capabilities, linking product resources on one end to provide rich and reliable products, and linking user resources on the other end to effectively connect user needs with products.

2. Offline store operation model

The operation and sales of the community are also very different from offline distribution channels. Traditional offline channels are basically in the form of tiered distribution, and offline stores are just a point in the channel network, so-called channel is king.

Through comparison, we can see that there are essential differences between online platform operation and offline store operation. However, the operating ideas of many companies are still based on their previous experience. Whether it is from offline to online or online to offline, they cannot change their ideas. What's more, many companies have even formed a deep-rooted corporate culture in their previous operations, and they are powerless, so that major problems have arisen in the operation of community O2O.

Therefore, companies should start with themselves, seek truth from facts, attach importance to data analysis, and open up operational ideas, rather than simply moving online experience offline.

3. Community Profit Model

The community’s profit model needs to consider the nature of the needs behind the business, and what value the product can provide to users and what needs it can solve.

The logic behind every successful business model should be that users are the ultimate beneficiaries. For example, e-commerce has cut out multiple layers of dealers and directly connects brands or factories to users, which reduces product prices. Users can buy high-quality and low-priced products. Offline convenience stores reduce the distance and time users travel to visit large shopping malls, which is more convenient and time-saving for users.

Smartphones have overturned the traditional concept that mobile phones are mainly used for making calls and have now become personal mobile entertainment smart terminals. If a company wants to enter the community market, the business logic needs to consider how it has changed the lifestyles of community residents, what conveniences it has brought to residents, and how it has changed certain rules or user experience? What are the benefits for end users?

From the user's perspective, dig deep into the user's needs, especially the needs behind the needs. Just as David Ogilvy said, what the user needs is not a drill but a hole in the wall. Then think more deeply about why the user needs to drill a hole in the wall? This is the demand behind the demand, and companies will be able to discover greater business opportunities

Summarize

The operation of a community lies in controlling every link to achieve refined and vertical operation, and mastering the consumption psychology and behavioral habits data of the target population in order to better serve the community.

Many companies have many blind spots in community operations:

1. Blind expansion, wanting to do everything. Many companies want to be all-inclusive, and want to be the only one. They feel that they can sell everything and want to sell everything. They blindly pursue full categories and ignore vertical refined operations. Complex operating models and overly long product lines have caused companies to waste too much time and money, and have greatly increased their operating costs. It is better to dig one deep well first and get water out first than to dig many wells.
2. Products do not match demand. Many companies have ignored the actual needs and purchasing power of community groups. In fact, community development is a market for a fixed population. It is necessary to accurately segment the needs of community groups, and continuously adjust product SKUs based on actual sales data. In order to grasp the sales rhythm of high-frequency and high-demand products and continuously improve the freshness and experience of stores, we can have a larger and more stable user base.
3. Wrong market forecasting and research. For example, many businesses like to conduct activities such as tasting, trial use, questionnaire surveys, etc., but they ignore the control of consumer psychology and ask users on the spot if the food tastes good. It tastes good, will you buy it? Yes, when you actually sell it, you will find that Chinese people love face and it is difficult to hear the truth.
4. Lack of control in each link, product procurement, transportation, warehousing and other links may increase the company's operating costs, so the company must strictly control and reduce costs in each link to have room for profit;
5. Due to excessive reliance on capital, e-commerce's money-burning model has also spread to offline. In many cases, companies compete not on products and services but on their capital, but what happens when the money is burned out? Enterprises still need to have their own skills.

Source: huanlewuyo