---
title: "Channel is king, so should we do all channels? Too young, too simple!"
description: "Click the image for details. The types and attributes of channels today have far exceeded the scope of wholesale peddlers buying cheap and selling dear. Stores are channels, online shops are channels; links on the homepage when entering an APP are channels, pop-ups during live streams are channels; posting a joke on Weibo that leads to purchases is a channel, and sending a WeChat official account article that leads to a WeChat store via 'read original' is also a channel. Even various 'tech companies' hidden in hotels of all sizes, making a living by holding meetings to brainwash old men and women, are good channels for promoting all kinds of inexplicable products."
author: "黄润霖"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2017-03-14"
language: "en"
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---

# Channel is king, so should we do all channels? Too young, too simple!

> Click the image for details. The types and attributes of channels today have far exceeded the scope of wholesale peddlers buying cheap and selling dear. Stores are channels, online shops are channels; links on the homepage when entering an APP are channels, pop-ups during live streams are channels; posting a joke on Weibo that leads to purchases is a channel, and sending a WeChat official account article that leads to a WeChat store via 'read original' is also a channel. Even various 'tech companies' hidden in hotels of all sizes, making a living by holding meetings to brainwash old men and women, are good channels for promoting all kinds of inexplicable products.

**Click the image for details**
The types and attributes of channels today have far exceeded the scope of wholesale peddlers buying cheap and selling dear.
Stores are channels, online shops are channels; links on the homepage when entering an APP are channels, pop-ups during live streams are channels; posting a joke on Weibo that leads to purchases is a channel, and sending a WeChat official account article that leads to a WeChat store via 'read original' is also a channel. Even various 'tech companies' hidden in hotels of all sizes, making a living by holding meetings to brainwash old men and women, are good channels for promoting all kinds of inexplicable products.
In other words, our channels today have become so generalized that they are almost泛滥 (overwhelming).
The concept of Omni-channel Retailing was clearly proposed in the Harvard Business Review in 2012. At that time, mobile internet was rapidly rising, e-commerce was at its peak, and O2O was stirring.
Why did omni-channel retailing become a new concept that was valued at this time? In fact, as early as the 1990s, some people had already proposed the concept of multi-channel development and omni-channel integration in channel development, **that is, enterprises should walk on multiple legs in channel development, and the resources of each channel should be integrated and balanced.** From this perspective, omni-channel retailing does not seem to be a brand-new concept; at first glance, it looks more like old wine in a new bottle.
**It is precisely because of this misunderstanding that many business owners, when talking about channel development, also take omni-channel development as their goal.**
"Look, I have both offline specialty stores and direct-operated stores, as well as department store counters and supermarket shelves. I have also opened Tmall flagship stores and Taobao shops online. Now I even use the three-level distribution system of WeChat business. Isn't this omni-channel retailing?"
**Many people's understanding of omni-channel retailing still stays at the stage of multi-channel development in the last century.** This is like some older people, when faced with today's young people mentioning playing video games, still think of the 1990s of arcade machines, Thunder Dragon, and King of Fighters, not knowing what Dota is, let alone motion-sensing or VR games.
Although history is strikingly similar, it is not simply repeating itself. If the understanding of "omni-channel retailing" is only literal, it is as absurd as buying a wife cake and expecting the boss to bury a wife in the filling, or ordering grandma's vegetables and expecting a grandma to be delivered.
Whether it is FMCG, durable goods, or industrial goods, given the degree of development of the domestic market economy today, regardless of category and differences, even if only considering mainstream channels, you can find 3-5! Add other segmented and extended channels, is it difficult to find more than 10 channels for each category? Even if a company just wants to complete all channels for one category, doesn't it need to first check how much money it has left in its pocket?
Let's look at it from another angle: even if building channels doesn't cost much, all enterprises aim for omni-channel deployment, regardless of their own consumer characteristics and product attributes. Anyone with some channel experience knows that channel differences actually attach another label to a company's products and brand. Just as the catering channel is for Guangdong's "Vita Soy Milk," and the direct sales channel is for Amway in the US, product characteristics determine channel characteristics, and channel characteristics determine the way the enterprise organization is built.
If you want to do everything, you end up being nothing.
**Understanding omni-channel retailing as multi-channel development not only wastes a company's marketing costs but also may increase the difficulty for consumers to identify the brand. This is clearly not the intended meaning of omni-channel retailing.**
The reason we are full of hope for the future is that social inclusiveness and biological diversity have become values commonly recognized in this era. After using the banner of the internet to break the monopoly advantage of traditional offline brands, we cannot use the internet to advocate another form of monopoly. Omni-channel retailing is not the Matthew effect of "the strong get stronger," but just another possibility for channel development.
What I want to illustrate is: what are the differences between today's omni-channel retailing and the multi-channel development of the past?
**1. The construction of omni-channel retailing is no longer based on the channel itself, but on the optimization of the connection between consumers and warehousing.**
In the past, channel construction was along the channel path, organizing teams and resources, breaking through level by level until reaching the final consumer. Therefore, the traditional channel construction approach focused on the channel itself, and since channels are shared, everyone competes for the same resource, making competition a zero-sum game.
The concept of omni-channel retailing is to break this homogeneous channel construction approach, and instead, from the perspective of resource optimization, match the places where consumers appear with the company's nearest warehouse points in the most direct way.
To match the places where consumers most frequently appear with the company's controllable nearest warehouse points, there are two most important prerequisites: one is same-city same-price, even online and offline same quality and price; the other is that all relevant data collection of products, at least consumer order data and product logistics data, must be traceable.
**The development of the logistics industry has made it possible to track the movement trajectory of goods.** At present, what is mainly missing is the logistics trajectory after the product is purchased by consumers. Of course, electronic products such as mobile phones and other interactive terminals have partially solved this problem in advance. I believe that in the future, intelligent electrical appliances will also gradually achieve this. The probability of which cities, regions, or even which residential areas' consumers will buy which product will be matched with the inventory of the nearest warehouse or store in that area, and this information can be automatically matched on a portal platform or a segmented platform, and consumers can query at any time.
Because of same-city same-price, consumers have no need to go far for near, and because logistics data from purchase to use can be collected (some people think this involves the collection of consumer privacy data; I think as the law protects privacy more clearly, this issue can also be well resolved), this has a guiding role for production and distribution. Selling at the place closest to consumer use, reducing unnecessary circulation and transportation of goods, I think this is the essence of omni-channel retailing.
Obviously, in the stage where brand owners cannot fully control the price system and cloud data development is relatively primitive, it is still difficult to truly realize the so-called omni-channel retailing model in the short term.
**2. The transformation and influence of (mobile) internet on channels have further improved the standardization level of channel construction processes.**
In the past, when we built channels, the effectiveness and quality of channels were greatly affected by human factors. First, because the channel hierarchy was long, and there was a lot of manual filling, such as collecting end-consumer information in the past; second, because the whole process was uncontrollable, people with high business quality collected more complete information, while those with poor business quality might not get the needed information. That is why in the past two decades, the sales team emphasized execution so much.
Omni-channel retailing is based on internet information technology. On the one hand, the direct communication between enterprises and consumers is multi-channel and all-round, and all relevant behaviors of consumers are recorded and collected at any time. Even if other channel members intervene in the communication between the two, such as distributors responsible for warehousing, distribution, and after-sales service, these behaviors will also be recorded, monitored, and evaluated, minimizing all subjective evaluations of channel management.
In other words, comprehensive informatization is the most important feature of omni-channel retailing.
**3. Omni-channel retailing is neither the restrictive channel protection policy of the multi-channel development period, nor the so-called online-offline mutual traffic diversion of the O2O period, but the maximum openness and free flow within the channel.**
In the past, when doing channels, specialty stores and hypermarkets had to prevent price undercutting and cross-regional selling. So the common method was channel segmentation: different models, different packaging, different brands, but the result was still that prevention was in vain. Later, with O2O, someone invented the term "traffic diversion," which means artificially diverting online traffic offline or offline traffic online. For the sake of their own small calculations, past channel development really did not mind troubling consumers.
The development of omni-channel retailing is to break down channel barriers, allowing the flow of people, goods, and funds across channels to be shared. Regardless of which path consumers come from, they are entitled to enjoy the right to choose all categories of products, and will not be treated differently because of being labeled with a certain channel; the warehouse of a hypermarket and the warehouse of a small convenience store are essentially consumer contact points, and whoever is closer should deliver, not based on profit considerations; quick payment, online banking, and many other payment methods should be interconnected (the backend fee rate of payment methods is key), rather than telling consumers: Sorry, we only support WeChat Pay here!
**4. From the linearity of multi-channel development to the network of omni-channel retailing, using internet tools to form the lowest-cost long-tail aggregation effect, reducing the cost of competition for small and medium-sized enterprises with large enterprises, is the greatest contribution of omni-channel retailing to commercial progress.**
The greatest significance of the birth of the internet was the discussion that the long-tail effect brought hope and opportunity to break the monopoly of traditional offline brand channels. Omni-channel retailing encourages enterprises to connect and link various channels, such as physical channels, e-commerce channels, and mobile commerce channels, through the network. For those emerging small and medium-sized enterprises lacking physical channels, whether they must establish physical channels to adapt to the concept of omni-channel retailing, I think we should reserve our opinion.
**Omni-channel retailing is not simply that all channels should be done or can be done, but should be to choose the channel where the enterprise has the most advantage (simply put, the channel with the best input-output ratio) to do, at least in the early stage of development.** At the same time, with the help of the internet's low-cost long-tail aggregation effect, enterprises can use extreme products and services to satisfy seed users (which was unimaginable in the non-internet era), and thus be profitable and survive. This is the core value that omni-channel retailing brings to channel upgrading.
At this stage, omni-channel retailing focuses more on serving seed users across all channels, not all users. Startups polish their products and improve services at this stage, using the long-tail effect of mobile internet to balance channel construction costs and prepare for the realization of comprehensive omni-channel retailing.
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