Digital defense of traditional enterprises: new economic rise breaking information gap

Berners in the invention of the World Wide Web will not think that the next more than 20 years, the entire Earth into a "global village", not to think of a digital divide across, tearing up the emerging and traditional.

The gap has not only laid bare the borders of developed and less developed countries, but has also labeled different economies: one side is logistics, the other is information, and an island, a network.

Fortunately, a stream of undercurrent is creeping up, filling the chasm that divides the greater. The rise of mobile internet and the popularity of social media have begun to invade the genes that enter traditional businesses, and business models and marketing models have never been as diverse and subversive as they are today.

Whether it is to prepare for the early defense, or to meet the difficulties of pioneering territory, for the traditional enterprises, this is a bad era, but also a best ERA.

New economic situation in the digital age

The new economic model, led by the mobile internet and social media, is built on the core of people-oriented, healthy user ecosystems, from Solomo to O2O, from Facebook to micro-mail, from App Store to Kindle, These strong forces in the field of consumer innovation in the user's traditional consumption habits, to create a new gold mine, but also constantly erode the traditional enterprise site. In the history of the retail industry, this trend is increasingly obvious.

In the past year, Wal-Mart Laboratories in California State have helped Wal-Mart improve its search engine and improve its delivery services in the fall of 2012. These are undoubtedly the most obvious signs of Wal-Mart's foray into the e-commerce market. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retail supermarket chain, has become a laggard in E-commerce, and the mighty Amazon has a bigger ambition after Barnes & Noble and Best Buy, and is beginning to try to dabble in Wal-Mart's main business.

In the long run, Wal-Mart's shift to digitization takes more than 10 years, but Wal-Mart has begun to master and apply Web technology, and digitization is not a company project, but an overall strategy.

What is the impact of the new economic model on the traditional retailing industry? More conservative and traditional home giants Ikea's move seems to illustrate the trend than Wal-Mart. Ikea, which has always focused on "shopping experience" and "impulsive consumption", said late last year that it would conduct e-commerce in most markets over the next decade. An Ikea UK official says arranging certain categories of online sales will lead to significant sales growth, but this will never be the mainstream of IKEA. The essence of O2O is that the user's consumption behavior can be tracked, measurable, predictable, all users online and offline behavior can be recorded, resulting in a huge amount of consumer behavior database. For Ikea's future marketing and decision-making, this is the most tempting. Data mining has become an important part of traditional retailing industry innovation.

Compared to the frustration of retailing, the traditional payment industry – the banks – has taken the initiative to become an adversary, before it has been subverted and mainstreamed, as the safest defense.

For the U.S. mobile payment industry, this is a dispute of the Warring States Period, Square, PayPal and Google Wallet by virtue of the first advantage of a certain lead. America's credit-card giants are clearly not turning a blind eye, and they are acquiring and developing their own mobile payment tools. Visa has not only invested in square, but has bought mobile payment companies Fundamo and Playspan, and American Express has released its own product serve, and MasterCard has spent 520 million of dollars to buy Datacash. The other camp's traditional retail giants are reluctant to take the market, and the US's biggest chain retailers, Wal-Mart, Target, 7-11 and Best Buy, announced this week to set up a joint venture merchant Customer Exchange to plan to develop mobile payment applications.

Across China, the bank also raised the banner of innovation. Last September, China Merchants Bank announced that it would be the first to scrap credit cards, change the form of credit cards, fully transplant its functions to mobile device terminals, and compete for mobile payment for this future battlefield. In the following two months, China Merchants Bank and HTC and China Unicom to reach a solid landing. At this time, China's mobile payment market is still in the ascendant, traditional banks embrace and intervene, for themselves and the industry, is a kind of promotion and innovation.

In contrast to the retail industry's defense and banking embrace, the auto industry represents a third way for traditional companies to deal with digital trends: pioneering. In the traditional automotive sector, the Giants are trying to build a new ecosystem of Apple and Google (Weibo) around the product, in order to exploit the consumer market and tie the customer down. At the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show this January, both Ford and GM both caused a sensation, with two companies planning to invite software developers to develop applications for cars. This is an unprecedented race to see who can make the driving process more convenient, safe and enjoyable.

Under the new economic model, the weak traditional enterprises are radiating the "second spring" under the wave of digitalization.

Model: Nike's Digital Rebirth

From a traditional sportswear company to becoming a digital sports kingdom, Nike has fully demonstrated the successful track of the digital transformation of traditional enterprises.

Just the end of the 2012 can be called Nike's motion digitization, its digital movement platform Nike ushered in a full-scale outbreak. In a short span of 1 years, a variety of heavyweight products have come out successively, the number of registered users of the Nike online community has increased rapidly from 5 million at the beginning of the year to more than 10 million of the scale. Sales of Nike in North America reached $2.7 billion in the first quarter of 2013, up 23% per cent year-on-year, up from the average growth rate of the past few years, and Nike is becoming a new engine to boost the company's growth.

In May 2006, Nike and Apple, the two coolest companies hit, came together and released a joint nike+ipod campaign kit in New York. From this name, you can tell that Nike's original intention is to combine sports with music. But while it's not uncommon to listen to music while running, users can do it with other branded products, and Nike needs a "gimmick" to tie its running shoes tightly to Apple's products. Thus, "data" became the link between the two. The Nike+ipod component allows users to see their own pace, distance, and other running data in real time by adding a sensor to the shoe and installing a receiver on the ipod. Both sides have been successful, with Nike's running products earning more than a prestigious basketball product in 2010.

Rapid changes in the market environment, so that the importance of the data began to highlight, Nike has been revising their own ideas--nike+ gradually from a positioning of music products began to a flagship movement of the digital function of the product transformation. With the advent of the iphone, a group of Nike inspired by the application of sports have sprung up, including Runkeeper and Endomondo and other leaders soon get tens of millions of dollars of wind, has been brought together tens of millions of users.

If a company like Runkeeper is comfortable with apps only, then maybe Nike doesn't have to be overly nervous, but as the size of the smartphone screens grows and the portability performance gets worse, the startups start rolling out their "hardware" devices. For example, Endomondo not only with Fitbit and other companies to launch portable devices, but also to create their own sports apparel brand, directly with Nike Rob business.

Eyeing the siege of Nike in 2010 set up an independent digital sports department, and Nike's research and marketing departments belong to the same level, the movement of digital officially become Nike's strategic development direction.

After the 2012, Nike suddenly accelerated, in only a year to complete the movement in the digital field layout. February, the digital sports department released the first heavyweight products--fuelband movement function bracelet, a nearly able to measure the wearer of all the daily activities consumed energy products, completed the movement of the crowd, and further popularized the concept of Nike. At the same time, Nike began to build a moat for its digital kingdom, introducing a differentiated unit of energy metering nikefuel, which set barriers for users to migrate from Nike to other products such as Runkeeper.

Nike, on the other hand, is also gradually reducing its reliance on Apple's ecosystems and building its own sports ecosystem. Launched in early June 2012 with the well-known navigation products supplier TomTom cooperation with the GPS function of the sports wrist watch, late June, Nike+running landed on the Android platform. In the Nike+basketball and nike+training of these two products matching shoes for the special sensor, has not seen the Apple logo. Nike's online community, while fulfilling its social attributes, is glowing with the power of the data and pointing the way for Nike's decision.

To their great admiration, Nike recently launched the Nike+accelerator project with TechStars, the second-largest American incubator, to encourage entrepreneurial teams to use Nike platforms to develop more innovative applications. This has undoubtedly become Nike about the future battle of the important piece.

The advent of the digital era represented by mobile internet and social media makes the development of enterprises no longer depend on the size of capital scale, but also on the understanding and embracing of the new economic model, which greatly expands the boundaries of traditional enterprises.

"Tradition" is only a label, do not make it a property of its own curing. In the digital universe, only "change" is the only certainty. Whether it is helpless to deal with, active hug or confused pioneering, innovation is always the driving force for progress, but also the guarantee of success.