Home Appliance Stores First Mashup Operation: Against Traditional Home Appliance Chain

Before the actual problems of rising costs and single categories, the distributors may share the store as a “expedient measure” for future development to counter the traditional home appliance chain. The reporter learned yesterday that some of the stores in the United States are selling Skyworth branded products, and Gree will also share the network resources of the stores with Konka.

A store is a retail business that specializes in or authorizes the operation of a major brand of goods (manufacturer brands and middleman brands). In the field of home appliances, in addition to home appliance chains, appliance manufacturers such as Gree, Midea and Haier have accelerated their own sales networks in recent years.

For the United States and Skyworth to share the store's behavior, the relevant person in charge of the United States electrical appliances, said some of the United States stores do exist the above behavior, but this is the autonomous behavior of dealers, the company's headquarters did not know. Responsible person of the United States and electrical appliances also said that due to the number of single-brand products and functional restrictions, dealers to introduce products of different categories to complement each other, this approach is understandable.

Talking about the manufacturers' self-built channels, "Geli Incident" is one of the node incidents. In 2004, Gome failed to reach a consensus with Gree in a nationwide unified air-conditioning price-reduction action, so Gree began to withdraw its products from Gome stores. Although Gree had made great efforts to step up the construction of its own sales channels, Gome and Gree made high remarks afterwards, but it has not yet entered another major appliance chain, Suning Appliance. However, Gree stores are close to Suning's stores, which also shows that although failed to enter the national appliance stores, but the popularity of selling places to attract and attract Gree air-conditioning is the most valued.

Liu Buchen, an observer of the household appliances industry, said that after seeing the success of Gree’s self-reliance, merchants have tested water stores and accelerated their expansion. However, with the increase in the awareness and dependence of domestic consumers on traditional electronics shopping malls, the development of specialty stores has become difficult. Some brand stores have even gradually withdrawn from first and second-tier cities and have moved to third- and fourth-tier cities.

For the establishment of stores, Gome President Wang Junzhou has said that the premise of opening a brand store is irreplaceable products, home appliances brand out of home appliance chain is too early. Wang Junzhou also pointed out that at the moment, customers not only require convenient transportation of chain stores, but also purchase goods with suitable cost performance, and they have extensive options. Although brand stores can meet consumer demand in transportation, single-brand products cannot meet consumer demand for product diversity. In addition, the increase in the cost of opening stores as well as market downswings and other real market issues have made the development of single-brand stores challenging.

According to sources in the industry, traditional chain companies have charged various fees to manufacturers by virtue of their advantages in channels. This is one of the reasons why some home appliance brands have established their own businesses. Recently, the Ministry of Commerce and other departments jointly issued the "Notice of Clearing up and Reorganizing Irregularities and Charges from Large Retailers to Suppliers", and it is necessary to clean up the evils of many years of channels under the background of stimulating consumption. However, home appliance makers who declined to be named stated that the actual impact of the notification remains to be tested. The expansion of franchise channels has become one of the measures taken by manufacturers and distributors to counter home appliance chains.

"Multi-brand shared store sales, may affect the brand image." Liu Buchen said that the US's influence in the home appliance industry is relatively large, while Skyworth has performed flat. Although "mashups" can complement each other, there is still a certain gap in brand value. If a specialty store only looks at the current stage of performance and ignores future development, it will certainly be eliminated by the market.