What the hell is O2O?

"Lead" near O2O this concept is very hot, this article from the complete experience, anytime and anywhere and user communication, user-centric, consumer behavior from traceable to measurable and predictable four aspects of the concept of its comprehensive description. In addition, the paper analyzes the representative cases of the prepaid consumption platform and the idle resources under the organization line from the angle of the line, and also lists some online marketing tools which can be used by the merchant.

O2O This exotic concept is like a potion of aphrodisiac in 2011 years to the Chinese Internet industry practitioners an exciting point, but also as a poison in 2012 let these practitioners stop.

WEB2.0 concept of the development of today, can be said that each site is WEB2.0 site, are more or less borrowed a lot of 2.0 of ideas such as user-centric, UGC, sharing, bookmarks and so on, these ideas for the entire Internet product evolution has played a very important role. and O2O as WEB2.0 complexity, it seems not easy to tell exactly what O2O means.

The four elements contained in O2O

For the concept of O2O, generally understood as online to Offline, also some people understand it as Offline to Online, but no matter how to understand, its idea is mainly including the following aspects:

First, to have a complete experience, with the user to a product or service point of contact from the offline entity store services to the virtual contact point through a variety of terminal equipment, the merchant's service interface expands indefinitely, at this time the merchant should consider to the user's experience and brand influence from the whole, And not just physical considerations.

In fact, this is also an important difference between the electric business and O2O, the electrical business mainly rely on logistics express to the consumer experience to the hands of consumers, but O2O must rely on the line of the service process can constitute a complete experience of consumers, that is, offline service experience is an integral part of the entire link is essential and If the price is the key word of the electricity quotient, that experience is O2O key word.

Second, anytime and anywhere to communicate with users, benefiting from the increasing popularity of mobile devices, users at any time online, regardless of the user's use of feelings or feedback on some issues, can communicate with the business.

Third, the user-centric, truly in accordance with the user-centric to build their own service system, rather than product-centric, in order to pull a new business, but also through a number of tools and means for its retention of old customers, because most of the profits of the business from those who really old customers.

Finally, it can be said that the essence of O2O, that is, consumer behavior can be traced to measurable and predictable, and all users can record and measure the behavior of online and offline, and finally form a database of users ' consumption behavior, and then predict the impact of marketing behavior on users by mining and analyzing these data.

The above factors are several key points of O2O, which can be related to each other, or can be split into several smaller points. In addition, the impact of these ideas on the entire business ecosystem will also be long-term and gradual, and the entire IT technology advances, including smartphones, payments, cloud services, large data are the important basis for these ideas.

O2O case on platform level

Theoretically, along any line of product form (group buying, booking, coupons, membership cards, etc.) and combined with a specific industry (catering, hotels, beauty salons, cars, etc.) have a possibility of making a O2O platform. If the broad discussion O2O platform, in addition to trading platform, can also include information display and marketing platform (such as life search, maps, coupons, reviews and classification information, etc.), but the following pure information platform has been around for a long time. So in order to make a more meaningful discussion, the O2O platform of information flow we do not discuss, only in a narrow sense of those for the final trading behavior can be tracked measurable O2O trading platform, from the current development, there are two main types, one is prepaid consumption, the second is the organization offline resources. Here's a look at each of these two types of platforms for each representative case.

1. Prepaid Expense Platform

First of all, airfare and some hotel reservations belong to a considerable part of this, but this kind of prepaid consumption is actually more because of the air ticket, the hotel's consumption behavior habits decided. such as 7 days chain hotel CEO Zheng revealed that the current 7 days 70% of orders and room rates are from their official website online booking. And Ctrip is undoubtedly the representative of this kind of platform, because Ctrip makes many people say O2O as early as more than 10 years ago has appeared, even if it does not have a prepaid fee, but it through call center and integration incentives can still be the user's consumption behavior tracking.

The second is to the United States to represent the group buying site, is undoubtedly the most popular prepaid consumption platform, but because the pronoun can be said to be ultra-low discount, it through ultra-low discounts to achieve the cost of users prepaid, so for the merchant to pull through the majority of the new customers do not stay down, thus the lack of long-term value, More opium-style temporary promotions, as well as the user experience, due to the long-term value of the business is small, leading to the promotion of customers to buy customer service enthusiasm is very difficult to come up, so that the overall user experience is not very optimistic. Because of the nature of the pattern of defects, but also because of the disorderly development of domestic group buying industry and competition, resulting in the number of group buying site sat a roller coaster. And at present, many group buying sites are also in the mode of Life Mall transformation, but because of ultra-low discounts and other factors left the user, business loyalty and low sequelae, group buying site can be transformed successfully also full of variables.

At the same time, we have seen the emergence of a number of new online booking platform in the past two years, such as movie tickets online booking platform Guevara, online booking platform, such as Lala, this kind of platform basically abandoned call Center, more is to get through the line under the information system automatically to achieve the booking, booking and online payment functions. But also because users pay for most of their life-service spending, the online prepaid platform will change the user's pay habits, or there is still a long way to go.

2. Idle resources under the organization line

The main cases of idle resources under the integration line are based on idle housing rental Airbnb and domestic love daily rent and other types of short-term rental platform, based on personal taxi service Uber and domestic easy to use car (no own car and driver), as well as personal driving services based on the e-generation driving.

From these cases we can also see another common point, that this type of service industry most of the lack of offline stores, which determines the business or individuals they are more online demand, because such businesses do not like restaurants and other stores, such as shops, Even without any online promotion can have a certain line of natural passenger flow into the store consumption. They also have a common short board is that this kind of service consumption frequency is basically not too high, this will bring the platform marketing cost is higher, but because there is no offline store, its profit space as a whole should be relatively high.

O2O tools at the merchant level

For businesses that already have offline service entities, there are opportunities and challenges in the face of O2O, and if they are not able to embrace O2O soon, they are bound to face the impact of the current commodity dealers. Therefore, in addition to the concept in accordance with the O2O advocated for their own service links reengineering, how to use the Internet and mobile internet to better improve their marketing effectiveness and operational efficiency, business is an increasingly urgent thing.

From the operational level, businesses can use the following online and information tools to carry out more attempts (for example, catering business) in order to be able to in the new era of consumption to keep pace:

1, shop overall marketing level attempts: Life search (including public comments, etc.), maps, micro-letter near, two-dimensional code;

2, a variety of marketing means: coupons, vouchers, buy;

3, Word-of-mouth: Reviews categories of websites, micro-blog, forum (various raiders);

4, booking service: Telephone booking, network booking, takeout;

5, Member Services: Membership card, CRM, micro-letter;

6, operational efficiency and experience: electronic point meal, queuing system.

The above O2O respectively from the line, the angle of the line from the point of view, I hope that the relevant practitioners to find the right positioning and the starting point can be a certain help.