Observation

Previously, Suning put forward the concept of "smart retail complex" after large-scale acquisition, and the car became the most important part. Later, Sinopec retail brand announced the expansion of automobile sales business. All walks of life want to rely on their own advantages to change the car sales link that has formed a fixed model.

On the evening of June 30th, the official WeChat account of China Petrochemical Company released a message, and Yi Jie, a retail brand of China Petrochemical Company, officially announced that it would attract investment from the society and expand its automobile sales business. The forms of cooperation include but are not limited to automobile sales cooperation, automobile advertising cooperation, venue resources cooperation and member rights cooperation.

You can imagine buying a car while filling up at a gas station. This will be crazier than shopping for a car.

In fact, this is not the first time Sinopec has set foot in the automobile business. In 2007, Sinopec began to expand its non-oil business, and the automobile business was also one of the priorities at that time; In 2008, the automobile service project group was established; 20 17 began to try to sell cars. In 2020, Sinopec has conducted live car sales with car companies for many times. At present, the highest record belongs to the direct sales Mercedes-Benz of Sinopec Zhejiang Branch, with a cumulative turnover of 25.2 million yuan in two hours.

The reform of sales model has always been a headache for enterprises. With the increasingly fierce market competition and slow growth, the disadvantages of the traditional 4S shop model are becoming more and more prominent, with limited contacts, limited radiation range only around itself, low sales lead conversion rate and high traffic cost, which are all problems that plague car companies and dealers.

Perhaps Sinopec can develop a new marketing model and use Yi Jie to help promote and even sell cars. On the one hand, the customer groups of gas stations are very accurate, and all of them already own vehicles, so the re-purchase and exchange marketing will have a higher conversion rate. On the other hand, Yi Jie has 27,000 outlets all over the country, covering cities, villages, expressway and national and provincial roads. Its radiation range is wider than that of a single 4S store.

However, consumers who walk around convenience stores are unlikely to like a car immediately, thus increasing the sales of cars. In fact, Sinopec's model is more inclined to use Yi Jie, a wide and accurate contact point, to let consumers know about brands or products, deepen their impressions, and then turn them into inbound tourists of 4S stores. This is more like a marketing tool than sales.

The more the automobile industry develops, many new words will be born, such as: new retail. New retail is defined by Baidu Encyclopedia as a new retail model in which individuals and enterprises rely on the Internet to upgrade the production, circulation and sales processes of commodities by using advanced technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, thus reshaping the business structure and ecosystem, and deeply integrating online services, offline experiences and modern logistics.

Different from the traditional 4S stores, the new retail in the automotive field has been innovated in three aspects: First, it has strong online traffic data; Secondly, offline stores adopt a completely different strategy from traditional 4S stores, and new things such as experience stores and city exhibition halls begin to appear; Finally, strictly control the cost of a single store.

Because the offline channels of new retail are generally based on existing stores, such as Suning's new car retail model, the most advantageous thing is to use its more than 10,000 offline stores to provide offline business places for car sales. Based on the tens of millions of investment costs of a 4S store, dozens of new retail channels can be established at the same price.

Automobile e-commerce is struggling because there is no offline channel, and the traditional automobile sales model is gradually changed because 4S stores do not have strong traffic data for accurate diversion.

Traditional car sales are based on 4S stores. However, in recent years, there have been frequent incidents such as shops bullying customers and extorting various fees from consumers. At the same time, the rise of the Internet has replaced some functions of 4S stores to some extent, leading to its declining position in the whole automobile consumption circle. Therefore, the substitution theory of 4S shop mode appeared.

On the one hand, with the popularity of automobiles, thousands of cars are gradually increasing, many families have more than one car, and there are also a few families with two or three private cars. At this time, people's understanding of cars as consumer goods has also changed, and cars have become an ordinary consumer goods.

But for a consumer product like a car, which usually costs hundreds of thousands, can it be the same as buying electronic products? At present, it is difficult to achieve.

On the other hand, automobile 4S shop is a sales enterprise integrating vehicle sales, spare parts, after-sales service and information feedback. Both car e-commerce and "new retail" can realize some functions of 4S stores, but obviously it is impossible to cover them all. E-commerce needs to let consumers test drive and choose cars based on offline channels; The coverage of "new retail" on after-sales service and spare parts is obviously not as professional as that of 4S stores.

It is a fact that automobile sales have changed greatly under the impact of the Internet. However, it is obviously too early to infer that the traditional automobile sales model will be subverted. Internet-based new retail has its advantages, but before it completely replaces all the functions that 4S stores bring to consumers, both of them are new channels to enrich consumers' choice and use of cars.

Under the great changes in the automobile industry, the 4S shop model has also been impacted. Even though the traditional sales model has a lot to spit out, it is actually far from the time when it quits the historical stage. No matter how many new retail and marketing methods there are, they are all auxiliary functions derived from the traditional sales model and cannot completely replace the functionality of 4S stores. What may change is the channel for consumers to understand and buy goods, but it cannot change the life of consumers buying cars and using cars themselves.