Zhang Lin and Wang Xue, who had been drifting north for four years, finally chose to buy a small second-hand house in an old community in Changping after seeing countless new properties outside the Fifth Ring Road. After handing over the house, Zhang Lin finally decided to carry out "secondary decoration" on the basis of retaining the original hard-fitting parts such as water and electricity due to limited budget and tight check-in time.
Like many young people today, many small furniture have chosen to buy online, but out of consideration of quality, safety, after-sales and other issues, they still decide to buy large furniture such as sofas, wardrobes, and beds offline.
But after wasting more than a month of weekends and running through nearly ten building materials markets in various districts of Beijing, Zhang Lin did not buy all the furniture that satisfied him within the limited budget.
In the end, it was Wang Xue who opened the e-commerce platform very cautiously, and placed the last few orders after dazzling. After receiving the goods and completing a series of safety inspections, the two of them breathed a sigh of relief and finally moved in smoothly.
The decoration experience of Zhang Lin and Wang Xue is probably the way most young people learn to take root after they get admission tickets to big cities.
Home improvement, it is not easy to make young people pay
It can be said that as first- and second-tier real estate has truly entered the era of the stock market game, coupled with the support of policies such as "housing and not speculating" and "just need to buy a house" that have been released in recent years, young people's just-needed housing demand is further increasing. freed.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, sales of second-hand housing in first-tier cities have grown strongly, and the proportion of second-hand housing sales in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to the total sales area has increased from 57.7% in 2017 to 64.3% in 2020.
The "2021 China Internet Home Improvement Consumption Trend White Paper" jointly issued by CBNData and Tmall also shows that the current commercial housing sales have entered a stage mainly driven by second-hand housing and existing housing, coupled with the steady increase in per capita income and consumption levels , consumers began to yearn for a better living environment, and the demand for secondary decoration and renewal of second-hand houses came into being.
However, under such a trend, combined with the overall improvement of the culture and consumption level of young home improvement consumers in the future, the consumption needs and cognition of young people about home improvement are also quietly undergoing a lot of changes——
1. Since new buildings in first-tier cities are often located in the outer ring of the city, considering various factors such as apartment type and commuting, more just-needed houses will still be spent on second-hand houses, and secondary decoration and renovation will become the main scene of home improvement.
2. The younger generation has become the main consumer group in the Internet home improvement industry. As Internet aborigines, they will collect massive amounts of information online for screening before making decisions.
3. The stereotyped design scheme can no longer meet their requirements for aesthetics and space planning, and the requirements for design and personalized customization services will be higher.
4. Home decoration will be more focused. On the basis of simple design and outstanding style, it will pay more attention to the texture of home decoration and the scientific use experience.
5. Young people prefer to lead the decoration process and links with their own needs, rather than passively accepting the average level that the market can provide as the completion standard.
It can be said that young people's requirements for home decoration will only get higher and higher. Even if the budget is limited, they will hope to maximize the best results through cost-effective products and minimalist styles. At this time, if brands and industries want to continue to meet the new home improvement needs that are constantly emerging, it is no longer effective to rely on indifferent and traffic-based service methods.
Especially when young people do not have enough trust in online home improvement platforms, it is difficult to really take advantage of this wave of dividends of the times.
From giving choices to giving answers
Those with a keen sense of smell are already moving. On September 14th, Tmall held a home improvement ecological summit in Hangzhou. En Zhong, general manager of Tmall’s home improvement business department, proposed to continue to upgrade around the four strategies of localization, content, service upgrade, and supply upgrade. Among them, the more important actions are The release of Tmall Luban Star.
It is understood that Tmall Luban Star is a selection mechanism and standard for home improvement products launched by Tmall Home Improvement. The specific operation is to screen and rate high-quality products and services that represent the advanced productivity of the industry, and provide consumers with assured shopping guides.
For example, based on the purchase evaluation and ratings of existing users of the Tao Department, 3-star products are selected, and then 4-star products are selected through quality certification and review, and the highest level, 5, requires quality certification, review unanimous vote recommendation and council. Recognition of this triple dimension of recognition.
From an industry point of view, products rated as 4 and 5 stars basically represent the gold standard of the industry.
Their certifications come from 13 Chinese and foreign authoritative institutions, including TUV Rheinland, Switzerland SGS Group, Zhejiang Fangyuan Testing Group, and Beijing Product Quality Supervision and Inspection Institute, which cooperate with Tmall Home Improvement. They focus on durability, health, environmental protection, safety, Practicality and other 122 test dimensions are tested.
Finally, through the selection and marking of different dimensions, the products and services with a certain user reputation and quality foundation will be rated, so that the requirements of users can be matched more quickly.
On the whole, various actions can be understood as a bigger attempt by Tmall to solve the user's purchasing experience and purchasing decisions. Among them, the most important logical change is: from providing a large number of choices, making a tool to assist transactions, to accurately narrowing the range that can be filtered, and delivering the best and most suitable answers directly to consumers.
This is the most efficient and non-trivial way of trading in the modern consumer society.
Home improvement has always been a high-priced, low-frequency, low-standard consumer product category, and users are often very cautious when purchasing. Moreover, after the gradual onlineization of home improvement, although consumers have more choices, the online shopping characteristics that are difficult to experience and difficult to sell are especially evident in the process of purchasing large furniture and building materials. All of this has jointly pushed up the threshold for consumers to make purchasing decisions.
In response to this deep-rooted pain point, Tmall, as a platform, has been trying more solutions through more means.
"Tmall's most advanced technology is used in the home improvement industry." At the press conference, En Zhong, general manager of Tmall's Home Improvement Division, summed up Tmall's attempts in the field of home improvement in the past ten years. "Whether online and offline integration of new retail, or 3D technology, live broadcast, panoramic short video and other methods in recent years are the first to apply to the home improvement industry."You must know that in the decision-making process of home improvement, whether you can plant grass quickly, and whether there is quality assurance and efficient after-sales are the biggest decision-making factors besides "price". Today, a standardized, "guide-style" professional rating system is proposed, which is precisely to solve the problem of consumers' purchase security.
Therefore, to be a "Michelin" guide in the home improvement industry with great fanfare is to solve the difficulty of consumers in making decisions in the face of a large number of home improvement products. In an ideal state, an accurate guide can effectively shorten the decision-making path with the help of a third-party authority, and use the least time and energy to achieve more efficient and more customized results. For users, this is a jump in consumer experience.
Of course, under the authoritative quality inspection, it is necessary to guess the minds of young people.
This evaluation project also invites KOLs such as Qingshan Zhouping and Rebecca who have sufficient influence on young people in the field of home decoration and lifestyle to participate. Life style means IP.
In the consumption language of young people, IP has supreme influence. It can bring more friendly marketing effects. Once a certain product or brand is IP and symbolized, it will mean that it will have a better relationship with users. Trust beyond multi-transaction.
If the implementation is smooth, from the upgrade of consumer experience to the use of IP to improve the reliability of the platform, this may become the ultimate online home improvement solution in various aspects.
Home improvement "platform" needs to be redefined
As mentioned above, home improvement is one of the more difficult bones in the process of online consumption.
In the years of trying, under the constraints of the platform, online home improvement has gradually changed from the original disordered state of chaos to a regular state. Whether it is the penetration rate on the demand side, or the degree of cooperation and standardization on the brand supplier side, it has been greatly improved, and the overall penetration rate of online home improvement is still gradually increasing.
The above report shows that from 2016 to 2020, the penetration rate of Internet home improvement has increased from 11% to 19.2%, and the importance of online channels is self-evident. Among the goals proposed by Enzhong, by the end of 2022, the online share of the home improvement industry will increase from 10% to 20%, and the transaction scale will exceed 1 trillion.
But to achieve this goal, there is still a lot that the platform can do.
First of all, there is no absolute top brand in the online home improvement field, and the brand is not the most important decision-making factor in the process of choosing furniture for consumers. Product attributes including design style, material and color is the more important consideration.
This is also because the overall head brand market share in the online home improvement industry is still relatively low, there are a large number of long-tail brands, and new home improvement brands with lifestyles are constantly pouring in, which actually brings platform adjustments. Requirements for screening and supporting brand strategies.
How to screen out these personalized and standardized home improvement brands, and accurately match them to the users in need, in addition to providing traffic and transaction tools, to establish a deeper relationship between brands and users, and also to further Improve transaction efficiency.
That is to say, in order for Tmall Home Improvement to accomplish this, it needs to truly get out of the role of transaction matching, truly bring new guiding standards from the perspective of the industry, and then deeply integrate what can be provided through the needs of consumers. service.
Secondly, deeply participate in more links, from a third party to an in-depth participant in the industry, in order to obtain the first-hand home improvement needs closest to users.
At the same time that Tmall Luban Star was released, Tmall Home Improvement also announced the launch of the decoration business, and launched the "Renovate My Home" applet in Chengdu. The plan, this function is ready to expand the laying range during Double 11.
In the process of continuous upgrading, online home improvement has changed from disorder to order, and then from order to selective and efficient transaction logic, using personalized consumer demand to force the upgrading of brands and industrial chains.
Perhaps in the future, when more young people try to create their own family life in cement cities, they can easily go into battle.
It's slow work, but a new consumer generation, with a well-timed leader, may speed things up.
Post time: Nov-02-2022