The world’s largest food and beverage company Nestlé focuses on three key areas to win in ecommerce – brand innovation, offline-online integration, and the effective use of data to target consumers and optimise the supply chain.
Lynne Xing, director of Nestlé China’s ecommerce supply chain operation, commented at Edge by Ascential’s APAC Ecommerce Accelerator Summit that the company is striving to empower its many brands to gain more opportunities in China New Retail.
Fill the form to download Lynne Xing’s full PPT, entitled “New Retail, New Journey”.
“The choices available to consumers are increasing all the time, and the traditional functional attributes of a single product can no longer easily impress our consumers. Brands need to operate through the various scenarios to establish resonance with consumers,” she said.
The solution, Xing said, is “consumer-centric digitalization” focused on leveraging data to seize the opportunities provided by New Retail to target customers and improve supply chain efficiency.
Embracing digital
“In the face of New Retail, Nestlé believes that the brand has been provided with more opportunities, mainly in three aspects – brand innovation promoted by consumption upgrades, online-and-offline integration to provide consumers with multi-sensory brand experiences, and data. When it comes to New Retail, it is crucial to talk about big data and how it is data-driven,” Xing said.
To succeed in the New Retail, she said, it is essential for companies to “transform the organization for digital to enhance the seamless connection to consumers.”
“Whether it is front-end research & development, production or sales, everything must start with market data, and we need to constantly enhance brand innovation around the real needs of consumers.”
The decline in the traffic for traditional offline stores is leading to a decline in brand penetration, but digital marketing can help solve the problem by creating what Xing called “digital reflow.”
Digital marketing to target groups
“In traditional marketing, we distribute products through distributors and sub-distributors but when we get to the store, it is difficult for the data created to be recovered by the brand. We don't know what kind of consumers we are reaching, and we may have to make an imprecise estimate based on store location,” she said. “But new digital marketing allows us to push customized products and services based on a clear target group. According to the preferences and shopping habits of different groups, we can recommend related products to increase the recruitment of new consumers to the brand and attract consumer repurchasing.”
Nestlé believes that New Retail organizations should be a comprehensive consumer-centric network “with digital all-round interconnection between multiple scenarios and interactions with consumers.”
Restructuring the supply chain to take advantage of the advantages of New Retail is a major focus of Nestlé. Xing said that by focusing on data, the company had increased online availability from less than 80% in 2017 to approximately 94% today.
“We continue to improve our ecommerce supply chain capabilities. An important indicator of our ecommerce supply chain is online availability. Our goal is to enable Chinese consumers to enjoy Nestlé's high quality and fresh products anytime anywhere, and I am very grateful to our partner, Edge, for helping us to track the online availability of our products over the past two years,” she said.
Fill the form to download Lynne Xing’s full PPT, entitled “New Retail, New Journey”.
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