Deer.com interviewed Pang Tao, CTO of Wisdom Space, in the hope of helping people understand how offline big data can be effectively collected and utilized, and how traditional industries should face when embracing the Internet through their product "Traffic Locket.
I met Pang Tao at the Starbucks in Xinzhongguan in the late afternoon, and he seemed to be in a hurry, having just gone to Microsoft to talk about product promotion cooperation, and then he was in a hurry to accept my interview.
Grounded hardware, intelligent space flow locket
Pang Tao's company is called Intelligent Space, in his opinion, the world is so much traffic, as a focus on the collection of offline big data business should rightly cover all the ground space, "I have a responsibility to help all the ground space to realize the use of big data to manage the flow of a kind of ability.
The company "Smart Space" is not well known in the industry, and their product "Passenger Flow Locket" is not well known by users because it is a 2B product, but that doesn't prevent them from succeeding in offline big data.
Traditional market research is to find a market research company, do some questionnaires, do a through the principle of statistics to infer the market customers. The customer flow locket is to help merchants to collect enough customer flow data, to provide solutions for monitoring the customer flow of merchants, to help retailers better realize market research. Through a device and data retention, a precise user can be identified.
For example, after identifying a customer, it can identify a customer from 9:00 to 10:00 to go, and after refreshing every 5 seconds, it can identify that the customer has been retained in this time period. If you can monitor this customer's average monthly visits to the store 4 times in six months, then the store can know the value of this customer. The radius of coverage of the customer flow locket is about 30 meters, and it can identify the model of the mobile device with particular accuracy. And the reasoning behind its ability to utilize wireless network monitoring is actually quite simple.
With the advent of the mobile Internet era, everyone has a cell phone, and these phones emit radio waves. And if a device can hear this radio wave, and at the same time can recognize this radio wave, then it can be recorded through the number of cell phones, to more accurately launch the number of passengers. We know that in the process of radio wave transmission, must be with the hardware characteristics of the code, and this feature code is fixed, through the monitoring of this can be locked in a consumer in the consumption of various stores.
What kind of product is the Customer Flow Locket? In layman's terms, it's a hardware product that monitors the flow of customers to the store, but it's probably the most grounded hardware I've ever seen. In the front-end, the customer flow box mainly uses the economic mature wireless wifi technology to identify the customer's cell phone and other wireless devices, which can accurately and conveniently count the flow of customers, the residence time, the rate of entry into the store, the turnover rate and other valuable data. In the back-end, through the system background to provide professional and easy to understand the flow of data related to the report, to help customers realize the perfect combination of offline accurate data and CRM, and ultimately to achieve precision marketing.
Now the flow of small box has probably and more than five hundred physical stores for cooperation, this year's goal is to promote to about tens of thousands of, the promotion of the main 2B channel, at present, they have also obtained the angel round of financing.
Tough front-runner, offline data on the road to pioneering
In Pang Tao's view, the Internet giants have no way to fundamentally solve the needs of offline stores to obtain users. For example, for a specific offline restaurant, how many people come to the hotel to eat a day, who come to you to eat, these people are what kind of people, in fact, for a physical store, he basically has no means, and the so-called giant in fact, there is no way to solve this dilemma.
Of course, many offline stores will have some very stupid means, but these means often have many disadvantages.
First of all, there is a lot of missing data, monitoring can not reach an effective degree of accuracy. Like Zara's all stores have put a three-way camera, this is used to count the number of people in the store. The first is that the number of people who have been in the country for a long time is not very high, but the number of people who have been in the country for a long time is not very high. Like 711 this, a down a bunch of 20 people opened the door, everyone a piece of monitoring, there is no way to accurately monitor. Cameras have the same problem, there will be a person appeared in two cameras, the phenomenon of being double counted twice appeared. And image recognition is not very accurate, which makes it impossible to count exactly how many people are coming.
Second, even if you monitor the exact number of people, you can't get a clear picture of the flow of traffic. How many people came in the store, this is only the first step of the offline big data, for the business they are more concerned about what consumers are most concerned about? They went to the store which place, in what place to stay the longest time, etc., these data for the offline stores can help them quickly adjust the commodity strategy. This kind of heat map, which is very common online for monitoring traffic, is not a solution offline.
Finally, the final conversion rate of the number of visitors to the store. I believe this will be the most important data for all businesses, which of the consumers in the store actually went to the fitting room to try on the clothes? Now the monitoring is through the data after the sale, the store sold a few single, this customer unit price is how much? But in fact, a brand has done a lot of marketing, this to the store is actually a cost. Even if it is natural traffic, that is paying a high cost to get this good location, so there is this traffic. Merchants certainly want to find a way to make the cost of user acquisition become lower.
The battle of the data giants, the conflict between cooperation and competition
In Pang Tao's view, online traffic are relatively easy to monitor, no matter what pages you visit can be monitored. But when it comes to offline, there is often not an effective means to monitor the offline traffic, people come and go, turnover rate of the most important data to the business, often can only roughly rely on the data after the sale.
This is clearly not the right thing to do, Pang Tao lamented, "We should do something for the offline merchants. For the store on the ground, it should have some sort of means to hold onto its customers. But from the beginning to the end, many people would think that collecting data this should be something that the giants do.
But Pang Tao is not very agree with this point, in his view, BAT giants very often do have this ability to help the offline stores, such as Alibaba is to give the store routers, POSS machines, but these giants have a core interest in the claim is "online traffic stagnation, so need to go to extract traffic from the offline", which is why Ali wants to buy the Yintai reason.
Internet giants try to do O2O, in fact, for this purpose. Previously, it is hoped to be able to cover from online to offline, but now hope to do is how to intercept traffic from offline. They often use the so-called Internet thinking, which simply means that through low prices or free to cater to this market. But BAT's starting point is very different from the wisdom of the space, even if the giant free or send money to the offline stores, offline merchants are not necessarily willing to cooperate with the giant.
Pang Tao said, "BAT's core demand is to guide traffic away from offline stores, this is very scary. We are to help offline stores have the ability to get users from the line as well as help merchants learn how to use big data to do precision marketing. However, the online ability is not strong enough, so now we are also cooperating with some online merchants, hoping to open up some online big data sources. Once and online big data source BAT + Jingdong, they are all from the offline flow of this demand, so the negotiations are extremely tough."
The offline store is the most valuable customer resources for the smart space, standing in the customer's point of view to start, there is no way to come up to the customer flow guide to the e-commerce and online Internet giants, but this is often the basic demands of these giants. To some extent in access to online data, often in a conflict, but Pang Tao said that we still have to adhere to the interests of the main offline, "we need to at least let everyone in an equal dialog on the exchange of traffic, which makes sense. Otherwise, the traffic is given away for nothing, how will the offline be based."
Pain points as well as difficulties, so that the cell phone number to become the only pass
Coverage, ground push the high cost, merchants are not strong willingness to cooperate and so on, these common pain points and difficulties, the wisdom of the space can not be exempted. Pang Tao said, now the wisdom of space and two large shopping centers have begun cooperation, has been online for six months. In some cafes, hotels have passenger flow locket laying.
On the issue of monitoring accuracy, I mentioned in the interview a doubt, simply through the "equipment" to identify "people", this may be no way to identify "who I am". Online and offline membership cards are quite popular nowadays, and these cards have specific identity information behind them, such as age, income, height and so on. And the customer flow locket can only monitor the customer flow, which looks like some invalid traffic.
"Membership cards cost too much" was a strong response I got from Pang Tao. Electronic membership cards filled with more information, of course, will be more accurate, but the establishment of a good membership card system, at least need millions of dollars, but also need a separate device to swipe the card to write off the cost of a membership card card production cost of 10 yuan. "In the era of big data, it is not to emphasize how accurate this data is in the end, but how big is the everyone who gets this data, which is the core idea". The passenger flow locket hopes to take the cell phone as the only mark, and then go to the identity as the only mark, and then finally let the cell phone number become the only passport offline and online.
As for how to identify these cell phone numbers, Pang Tao said mainly through the cooperation with the corresponding manufacturers to end. By comparing the recognized feature code, and web authentication manufacturers. "We'll count the frequency and they'll recognize the person. These manufacturers have no way to identify the feature code of the phone, but they have the phone number in hand. For example, in this store, there are 500 people there, and they know the numbers of 300 people. We go through 3 times of mining and compare the feature codes to the cell phone numbers. I worked as a data miner for mobile in '01 and hit these data to serve this merchant."
At the end of the day, whether online or offline, there is absolutely no need to bring a membership card, identifying a combination of cell phone number and hardware feature code, it becomes a re-establishment of the membership system identification. Combined with the hardware feature code obtained by scanning every 5 seconds, combined with the algorithm recognition, the equipment placed in various places, basically can identify where this user lives? Maintain these people, the basic lifeblood of the store will be maintained. In this way, offline stores have a very good and cheap tool.
The confusion of merchants, how to utilize offline traffic
The biggest significance of this data is that it can accurately identify the target customer of the merchant, for example, in a certain period of time to monitor a customer repeated to the store two times, which is actually a repeat customer. Online this can be very well monitored, but offline it is actually very difficult for merchants to monitor.
The customer flow locket is refreshed every 5 seconds, this number as long as it appears in the store, it will appear in the background every 5 seconds a point, which actually forms a basic data. On the one hand, you can locate the customer, and on the other hand, you can track the customer to know where the customer has gone, changed clothes or not, and whether there is a checkout. Store like Zara, certainly can not put the camera in the fitting room, this time monitoring will often be a difficult point. Through the store's box placement for monitoring, if the monitoring of a customer to go to the fitting room, then in fact, can initially determine the value of this customer to the merchant. But now the cost of merchants to get this data is 300 dollars.
300 yuan, which is the current price of the flow of small box, merchants in addition to the monthly service fee of 30 yuan. However, Pang Tao said that this 30 yuan service fee is not mandatory, but in accordance with the effect of the services provided by the customer charges, for example, the wisdom of the space to help customers lock 5000 customers, each customer looking for merchants to charge 50 cents, these users are merchants targeting accurate customers, this is worth it?
After solving the confusion of merchants in the cost, it is about how the collected data is utilized. Pang Tao's work experience in Jingdong, so that he has a very good understanding of that set of e-commerce, "I work in Jingdong will have a table to monitor the online data, monitoring pv, uv, etc., in the 618 and double 11 time why can do a few minutes to change a commodity, on a pair of shoes 5 minutes traffic can not come on the replacement immediately. At the time of last year's double 11, Jack Jones spent twice as much money as before, but the traffic still can not come. This means that the online traffic has actually reached a bottleneck. No matter how much money you hit again, it will not grow rapidly again. So this year, whether it is Jingdong or Ali have gone offline, we look at the offline traffic.
Pang Tao believes that customer demand will always be diverse, e-commerce will be a good supplement, but not all, or no way to completely replace the offline. Consumers go to Jingdong to buy 3C products on the most core factors lie in the cheap and can be guaranteed, "If Jingdong than others expensive 100 yuan, you try? Before Suning had a period of time to ensure that cheaper than the Jingdong 100 yuan, and then took away a lot of goods Jingdong"
This is the Jingdong to vigorously develop third-party rather than self-supporting reasons, and by now the Jingdong can not guarantee the advantage of low prices. So now both online and offline, become the same way.
Offline traffic is exactly what should enable merchants to make their target audience perceive a good integrated experience and value for money. For example, if a customer has been monitored by the flow box and has visited the store a few times a month, it can be concluded that the customer is a loyal VIP of the store, and a 20% discount card can be given to the customer to retain the customer.
The above is just some preliminary data utilization, the flow of small box to help merchants solve the most important two things - pull new and retain the old. "We want to make big data very simple, you can't make big data so that people can't understand it." Through the backend of Customer Flow Locket, merchants can easily export a data report, which may include data such as the mall's manager, date, number of store entries, number of customers, total daily repeat customers, sales, and customer unit price.
Any business follows the pyramid concept, customer flow, conversion rate, customer unit price, gross margin, which are the four most critical indicators of the business, whether it is e-commerce or offline stores always follow this law. Customer flow locket solves the problem of helping merchants to make up for the information that can not be collected. For merchants, what can be collected is always the customer unit price and gross margin of these sales data, to improve the merchant's data capabilities, will naturally help merchants to better realize the old stay.
Pang Tao said, there is no one person can have all the data, and passenger flow locket captures a core, who you are, where you come from, where you go, how do I contact you. When the coverage is large enough, the portrait of the user will become more and more accurate. As for how to use this data, or also depends on the merchant's own experience, customer flow locket provides just a tool.
"We can detect how long this VIP has been in this mall, and we can do one-to-one precision marketing. Do you know who 10% of the big customers in the mall are? It's also some businesses, he will buy some benefits for the business and purchase office supplies. We can help stores to capture these customers, of course this must have some traditional means, such as people watching. But would it not feel better if with this monitoring system of ours, others come in and you go over and deliver a soda. We would tell the user to say, you come to me to spend your money, we have someone on our side to serve you. We're all about helping the offline, euphemizing the offline."
On the incremental side, the core key to the passenger flow locket is to form an alliance between peers. Pang Tao said, "A and B two customers are my, I can not give A customer's data to B, the same can not give B customer's data to A, it is unethical. But if they don't cross each other, where will the incremental growth between them come from. Then I'm going to talk to both A and B. In this industry, everyone shares this data at the same time, you contribute yours, he contributes his, and everyone is in the same pool. Of course I don't tell any one person where this customer is coming from. But there are so many customers inside this pool for everyone to use and **** enjoy, thus you get the incremental volume. And then you can charge for the increment."
As a simple example, there are three cafes here with 300 people each, totaling **** 900 people. These 900 people to them is the target customers inside this mall, but the customer flow locket will not tell these customers specifically belong to which store, but just tell the business this 900 people like to drink coffee, after the competition is the quality of these three coffees and the comprehensive experience of their own ability.
The future, change, try and business model
Offline big data, this thing everyone wants to do, the most difficult thing in front of the entrepreneurs, is to promote. Wisdom space team now has 20 people, 95% of them are doing research and development. But earlier did not carry out large-scale promotion, Pang Tao think this is their product is not perfect enough.
"The concept of O2O is very hot right now, and a lot of people are doing this, but not many people can show you these tables. No one can show you the customers that come to your store every day, the contact information and whether these people are your loyal customers. We've been deep in this industry for two and a half years now, but we've never felt like the product experience was enough to promote it to the public. But now we've been waiting until this table came out and we felt like we could do some precision marketing, so we started promoting it, up to 2 years ahead of our competitors."
And when it comes to the business model, Pang Tao said that the data accumulated by the platform will not be sold to others, not because the data is a core asset, and the real owner of this data and the buyer should be the shopping mall, which is the biggest difference between the smart space and e-commerce. Because the goal is very simple is to help offline stores grow, and ultimately share some of the store's marketing expenses. So at the beginning is to help merchants maintain old customers, this aspect may be no charge, but when the merchant hopes to be able to get incremental, it will hope that the merchant will be able to give some commission, so that it can cover the cost.
As for the biggest cost problem in the hardware field, Pang Tao said they are not very sensitive to cost. As long as the data is fast and accurate enough, even if the offer is high, the merchant will still pay, the biggest difference between the B-side market and the C-side market is here.
For Pang Tao's customer flow locket, perhaps the biggest risk is the issue of user privacy. Because when merchants get the phone numbers of their target customers, they are bound to market via SMS, which is not permitted by the user. This is somewhat similar to the nature of private base stations out there.
In this regard, Pang Tao said, the base station has a fatal problem, it is no historical data for comparison, the base station is intercepted cell phone signals, that time the phone can not make a call, so the state in the fight against this thing. And the flow of small box is not the same, for example, consumers shopped a shopping mall, A/B/C three stores, these are characterized, the platform will recommend relevant things to consumers, rather than simply rude to send spam. And pushing this SMS is not something that the platform does, there are no goods in the smart space, it is meaningless to give merchants a push. The platform is just to give merchants the ability to push this, and then control the merchants, when not allowed, will not allow them to push, in the accurate time can be sent out.
Written here, almost the end of the conversation, Pang Tao on the future development of the flow of small box think thoroughly enough, the collection and utilization of offline big data will still be a not small pain point. Passenger flow locket by scanning the device feature code, identify the user's cell phone number, there is also still a certain legal risk. But this at least makes me have a thought, the Internet people in claiming to transform the traditional industry, really want to solve is to help the offline business, rather than what to get from them, which may be a correct path.
micro-signal: hizhulu microblog: deer network