Rural e-commerce should emphasize personalized, differentiated and branded development
With the widespread popularization of the Internet and the promotion and use of Internet of Things technology, following the rise of urban e-commerce in China, rural e-commerce is developing rapidly.
According to the "2014-2015 China Agricultural Products E-commerce Development Report", in 2014 China's agriculture-related e-commerce enterprises reached 31,000, of which agriculture-related trading e-commerce companies numbered 4,000, forming a market structure of “two superpowers, multiple strong players, and niche players”. Among them, the “two superpowers” made up of Alibaba and JD.com occupied the main share, while in recent years some emerging agricultural product e-commerce companies have also formed their own distinctive development models after obtaining capital injections. According to statistics, the sales of agricultural products on the Alibaba platform grew from 3.7 billion yuan in 2010 to more than 80 billion yuan in 2014, with an average annual growth rate of 112.15%. As for Taobao's fresh food e-commerce, in 2013 the national fresh food e-commerce transaction scale reached 13 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 221%, and it was expected to reach 26 billion yuan in 2014.
⟦NL> Regarding the development of rural e-commerce, some people say it is like the spring thunder of May, coming quickly and going quickly as well. According to statistics in the "Report", at present only 1% of domestic agriculture-related trading e-commerce companies can make a profit, 7% have huge losses, 88% have slight losses, and 4% break even. Regarding the problems existing in China's agricultural product e-commerce, the famous scholar Hong Tao believes that the serious homogenization of e-commerce website construction has led to disorderly competition, loss-making operations, and even the coexistence of website building and website closure.
The Internet's characteristics of freedom, openness, equality, free access, interaction, cooperation, individuality, virtuality, continuity, and globality determine that in the new era of continuous information development, e-commerce is closely related to people's work and life.
The widespread application of the Internet in rural areas has further promoted revolutionary changes in the production and sale of agricultural products. In the past, the self-sufficient and closed business state of rural residents, who “only cared about planting, not selling, only buried themselves in production, not the outside world, and only cared about having enough to eat, not about becoming wealthy”, is quietly changing.
With a single optical fiber, one computer, several cameras and other equipment, sitting at home in the countryside, one can send out sales information for agricultural products and let people all over the world know about it. Even consumers thousands of miles away can follow the clues and buy the agricultural products they desire at any time.
Why is it that for the seemingly simple rural e-commerce, among the many agriculture-related trading e-commerce companies, those who profit are extremely rare, and the scale of losses exceeds people's expectations?
From an analysis of the current operation of agriculture-related trading e-commerce, the main reason lies in “commonality, homogenization, and miscellaneous branding”.
Commonality makes the agricultural products sold through e-commerce dazzling in variety, yet it is difficult to find the personalized products consumers need; homogenization makes the agricultural products sold through e-commerce all seem familiar, yet differentiated goods that consumers need are nowhere to be found; miscellaneous branding makes the agricultural products sold through e-commerce countless in number, yet agricultural products with strong brands that consumers need are mixed in like fish eyes among pearls.
For rural e-commerce operators to develop steadily in the highly competitive market economy and obtain the best economic benefits, they must work hard on “personalization, differentiation, and branding”.
Rural e-commerce should emphasize “personalization”
In contrast to mass marketing, personalization is often used to refer to needs and services with individual characteristics. In today's era, the improvement of material and cultural levels has made people's consumption increasingly show the distinct characteristics of personalization.
Diversity of choice. A fully open market, abundant agricultural product resources, and living conditions free from worries about food and clothing allow many consumers today, when purchasing agricultural products, to use a discerning eye among colorful goods and select exactly what they need. For example, among many corn cobs, some consumers choose purple corn, some choose blue corn, and some choose red corn; among all kinds of fresh sweet potatoes, some choose to eat them raw, some choose to roast them, and some choose to eat them puffed, etc.; in mass-market flour consumption, some like to make noodles, some like to make dumplings, some like to make pancakes, and so on.
To adapt to consumers' “personalized” consumption needs, it is necessary to satisfy the diversity of consumers' choices. Only by adapting to consumers' personalized needs will they frequent your agricultural product e-commerce platform all the time, and the e-commerce platform will grow and strengthen amid a continually growing number of consumers.
Participatory choice. In an era of increasing attention to food nutrition and body health, people's demand for agricultural products is no longer limited to consuming whatever the e-commerce website provides. What deserves great attention is that they will directly participate in the product design process.
In the era of the planned economy, for major grain varieties such as rice and flour, people were already satisfied if they could eat even grade-one rice or standard flour. But now, people no longer prize grade-one rice or standard flour. For consumers who find it hard to tolerate excessive processing of grain that loses natural nutritional components, they need stone-milled rice and stone-milled flour produced using traditional stone mill techniques; for consumers suffering from different diseases, what they need is no longer ordinary rice, but rice with functions such as regulating human physiological functions. Examples include selenium-enriched rice, germanium-enriched rice, low-protein rice, high-protein rice, high-lysine rice, suitable-for-diabetes rice, hypoallergenic rice, vitamin A-rich rice, low-phosphorus rice, chlorophyll rice, and so on.
Let consumers participate in the design process of agricultural product production and ultimately obtain the products they need, and they will favor rural e-commerce platforms even more as they receive respect and have their needs met, and rural e-commerce platforms will also shine brilliantly.
Originality of choice. The rapid changes in science and technology, reflected in agricultural species, will continuously produce new beneficial varieties. Among hundreds of millions of consumers, there are versatile scientific and technological workers who are both familiar with the field and far-sighted, and their originality is extraordinary.
Media reports show that in the history of world corn cultivation, only two people have archival records. One is Wallace, founder of the American Pioneer Seed Company, who is the holder of the world record for spring corn high yield; the other is China's Li Denghai, who is the holder of the world record for summer corn high yield. For a new corn variety, from breeding to success, the probability is only 1 in 120,000. A farmer with only a junior high school education succeeded. In 2005, he set a world summer corn high-yield record of 1,402.86 kg per mu, which still stands today.
Li Denghai is a producer and also a consumer. Li Denghai's deeds prove that as long as one can recognize talent with a discerning eye, it is possible to create miracles in new agricultural product species.
For high-yield and high-quality corn varieties, producers —— the vast number of farmers —— need them, and consumers —— feed and breeding enterprises —— need them, and all can achieve high yields and high benefits. Therefore, rural e-commerce platforms should attach great importance to consumers' original insights and achieve mutual benefit and win-win results through bold support.