英国dissertationproposal：从渠道协调的角度研究O2O营销策略的组合

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05-23, 2018

本章首先介绍了通过对相关行业和企业在中国的发展现状，提出了本文的研究背景，然后分析了行业企业指出了本研究的研究意义和动机存在的问题RCH最后，根据研究背景和研究动机，确定了本文的研究目的和研究目标。

随着电子商务的进一步发展，O2O已经成为现代零售企业热衷于采用的一种商业模式。然而，这种模式也带来了管理和营销中的许多新问题，如渠道冲突。本文以苏宁为例，探讨零售企业如何解决渠道冲突问题。在上世纪90年代以来，电子商务作为网络发展的产品开始出现在中国迅速渗透到人们的日常经济活动效率高，促进了中国的经济格局的变革与发展。

1.0 Introduction 简介

This chapter first introduces the research background of this article by describing the development status of the related industries and enterprises in China, then it analyzes the existing problems of the industries and enterprises to point out the research significance and motivation of this research. Finally, the author has determined the research aim and objectives of this article according to the research background and motivation.

1.1 Background

With the further development of e-commerce, O2O has become a kind of business model that modern retail enterprises are keen to adopt. However, this model also brings many new problems in management and marketing, such as Channel conflict. This study takes Suning as an example to discuss how retail enterprises solve the problem of channel conflict. In the 1990s, the e-commerce as the product of network development began to appear in China and rapidly infiltrated into people's daily economic activities with high efficiency, which promoted the transformation and development of China's economic landscape (Choi, Chen and Chung, 2017). According to the report, China's e-commerce market volume was 12.3 trillion yuan in 2014, and it is expected to reach 24.2 trillion yuan in 2018, of which the online retail online to offline (O2O) business grew 42.8% in 2016, which is a new force that cannot be ignored in e-commerce (Huang et al., 2017). In the future, China's commerce ministry forecasts, China's most retailers will adopt O2O business model, the rising popularity of the Internet and e-commerce make traditional retailers set up e-commerce channels and transform to multi-channel retailers (He et al., 2016). For example, Walmart has invested in YHD in China to develop its online channel, Yintai department store open Yintai mall online and Carrefour also has its online supermarket; Wanda group cooperated with Baidu, Tencent to develop its e-commerce by using its own powerful offline commercial real estate and retail store resources, integration of information to form the shopping closed loop of offline experience and shopping online (Huang, Pan and Liu, 2017). On the other hand, large Internet companies continue to implement offline strategy, optimizing the allocation of resources through investment and acquisition to promote online and offline integration (Long and Shi, 2017). Online e-commerce companies such as Alibaba has launched an offline strategy to invest in Yintai business, promoting the development of O2O business through the use of Yintai mall stores, business products and membership data (Riquelme, Román and Iacobucci, 2016). E-commerce enterprises such as Jumei, JD and Vipshop have also opened offline retail experience stores to promote the complementary development of business online and offline (Huang, Pan and Liu, 2017).#p#分页标题#e#

Table 1 List of Bankrupt O2O Startups in China in 2016

Name of company Time of establishing online Industry

Every Day Orchard 2009 Fresh food e-commerce supplier

Delicious Seven Seven 2013 Fresh food e-commerce supplier

Fruit Eating Group 2014 Fresh food e-commerce supplier

Yizhuo Network 2015 Fresh food e-commerce supplier

First Fresh 2015 Delivery service company

Car Wind Network 2013 Car e-commerce company

Bobai Car 2014 Car e-commerce company

Master's Taste 2015 Catering takeaway company

Amoy Network 2014 Cross-border e-commerce supplier

Magical Department Store 2015 E-commerce company

Soon Home 2014 Rental trading platform

Tintin Rental 2015 Rental trading platform

Amoy on the Road 2011 Travel booking platform

O2O model will further improve the requirements for enterprise supply chain management strategy, zero supply relation and organizations’ coordination degree (Scarpi, Pizzi and Visentin, 2014). Offline retailers’ online retail is the extension of the original business to network, network channels are able to complete the transaction with low cost and high efficiency, which greatly extends enterprises’ original market power and scope (Riquelme, Román and Iacobucci, 2016). However, the road to mutual integration between traditional retail and online retailing has not been smooth. According to the research report on the online retail of traditional retailers in 2014, there were 43% of the companies which conducted online and offline business at the same time, traditional retail enterprises that have introduced O2O business failed to get rid of the traditional way of management, the lack of effective independent e-commerce operation and management institutions made it unable to support the development of online business (Wu, 2017). In carrying out online retail, most traditional retailers are limited to the regional market of the original brick-and-mortar stores, only 29% of them expanded their online business to the national market. In general, traditional retailers are not happy about the current situation of online retail (Long and Shi, 2017). Most of the enterprises are facing challenges such as low investment returns and poor profit outlook. As Table 1 showed, there have been a number of enterprises involving O2O business failed, many of which failed because of poor earnings caused by channel conflict. The combination of online and offline channels will widen the original marketing channels, but the limited resources within and outside an enterprise will be reconfigured. In this process, resource robbery may occur, namely, there will be channel conflict phenomenon. Xiao, S. and Dong (2015) found that the problem of channel conflict is the most difficult problem for enterprises to expand online marketing. The original offline channel customers migrate to the network channel, make the sales of the offline stores was transferred to the sales of online stores, but in fact, it has a little influence on the overall sales and ascension of performance of the business (Chaitanya and Varadarajan, 2016). It can be seen that for traditional retailers, driven by the e-commerce environment to transform to multi-channel retailers is an opportunity and challenge. How O2O retailers avoid channel conflict and substitution effect to realize channel coordination becomes a hot point of research.#p#分页标题#e#

1.2 Motivation

Suning Appliance in 2013 proposed the "Suning cloud business" model. After several years of development, the integration of Suning's online and offline channels has yielded some achievements. However, overall its business did not increase as a whole. The data showed that its overall sales revenue growth did not increase significantly in 2013-2014, its online business has grown 30% and its offline business has dropped 15% (Huang, Pan and Liu, 2017). Long and Shi (2017) and other scholars pointed out that this reflected a clear channel conflict between Suning's online and offline sales, their research summarized the following several reasons for this. First, Suning shows much more products in its Web page than in the offline stores. Second, Suning originally requires a same online and offline price, but in practice, in response to the challenges of competitors, Suning takes a low price strategy in the online channels, compared with the offline stores, prices of products sold online are generally lower 1% to 5% (Huang, Pan and Liu, 2017). Although Suning originally requires the same price of online and offline products, not all products can achieve the same price online and offline. Third, Suning online channels are often engaged in promotional activities because other online providers often are engaged in promotions, such as double 11, mid-year shopping festivals, and offline promotions are less frequent and less discounted (Huang, Pan and Liu, 2017). Finally, in addition because products sold through online channels are irregular, the logistics and distribution online are more frequent, logistics services of online sales are more thoughtful, Suning not only require timely delivery of goods, consumers can always keep track of the goods logistics information. The logistics services for offline product are relatively slow, consumers can not track the logistics information in time, which easily leads to consumers’ dissatisfaction. It is precisely because of the above and many other reasons, resulting in that Suning's O2O strategy just shifts the existing offline consumers to the online, and it fails to help Suning to attract more new consumers. As shown in Figure 2, proportion of Suning's offline revenue has risen from 18% of total revenue to about 36% of the revenue in 2016 since 2014, while proportion of the online revenue has dropped from 82% of the total revenue in 2014 to about 64% in 2016. Thus O2O is less helpful for improving Suning’s overall sales revenue. Therefore, for Suning, to understand whether there is channel conflict in its O2O strategy and the causes of its channel conflict, as well as how to solve the channel conflict problems to bring more new consumers is a topic that is worth of researching for Suning.

4P marketing theory is one of the classic marketing theories. It mainly summarizes the main factors of marketing from four aspects: product, price, place and promotion. Product strategy requires that products should have a unique selling point to meet the needs of consumers. Price strategy means that an enterprise formulates the price according to its product cost, competitors’ price, substitute price and product value perceived by consumers. Place strategy means that an enterprise does not directly face its consumers but focuses on the cultivation of dealers and establishment of sales place, contacts between enterprises and consumers are carried out through distributors. Promotion strategy includes brand advertising, public relations, promotion and a series of marketing activities.#p#分页标题#e#

4P marketing theory was founded in the 1960s. Although the theory has some limitations with the development of time, it has a significant reference value for today's marketing. It also has good guiding value for today's corporate O2O marketing strategy. First, both online marketing and offline marketing should be based on 4P marketing theory to formulate appropriate marketing strategy. Second, in order to avoid channel conflict, retail enterprises need to coordinate their online and offline products, prices and marketing strategies, making their online and offline marketing strategies set free from conflicts to play the roles of channel coordination. All in all, 4P marketing theory provides a practical theoretical framework for Suning's solution to channel conflicts.

1.3 Research aim and objectives

Research aim: to evaluate Suning’s marketing strategies of online and offline combination from the perspective of channel coordination.

Based on the research aim of this study and the marketing theory, the following research objectives are formed:

Research objective 1: to evaluate the characteristics and deficiencies of Suning’s online and offline coordination strategies from the perspective of product strategy;

Research objective 2: to evaluate the characteristics and deficiencies of Suning’s online and offline coordination strategies from the perspective of price strategy;

Research objective 3: to evaluate the characteristics and deficiencies of Suning’s online and offline coordination strategies from the perspective of promotion strategy;

Research objective 4: to make recommendations on how Suning Appliance should implement O2O coordination strategy in the future.

2.0 Methodology 方法论

2.1 Philosophical position

2.1. 1 Epistemology

Epistemology is a philosophical theory that explores the nature of human cognition, the relationship between cognition and objective reality, the laws of occurrence and development of cognition, and the truth standards of cognition (Danneels, Viaene and Bergh, 2017). There are two main schools of epistemology, positivism and anti-positivism, and anti-positivism takes interpretivism as the most important theoretical school (Hull, 2015).

Positivism thinks the world is real, and it can also be observed, the human society as well as nature has the objective regularity, if people want to know the human society, it must be achieved by observing all kinds of information, through scientific, objective processing to get the understanding of human society; if the results of this understanding can be confirmed through new cases, it will be preserved as a general rule of universality (Outhwaite, 2015). Empirical research means that researchers collect raw data and information in person based on their research hypothesis, so as to verify if the original research hypothesis is established by analyzing the data and information (Keuth, 2015).#p#分页标题#e#

Interpretivism holds that the world is the result of the subjective construction of people. Therefore, the most important thing for people to know the world is to understand why people construct so and to understand the differences between the worlds they construct and the hidden significance hidden behind the differences, rather than to summarize the common law (Packard, 2017). Interpretivism researchers advocate that people's cognition of the world comes from people's experience and viewpoint (Tsang, 2014). Researchers should interpret, deconstruct or rebuild people's experience and viewpoint through scientific research in their special context (Chapman, 2017).

The characteristic of this research is to study the impact of Suning's current O2O strategy on consumer satisfaction, to find commonalities from their evaluation, so as to determine what the advantages and disadvantages of Suning O2O strategy are, rather than to investigate the differences in the impact of Suning's O2O strategy on satisfaction of different consumers and why there are the differences. The first step of this study was to put forward the research hypotheses based on relevant literatures, and then collected data through questionnaire survey, and through the analysis of the data to verify or overthrow these research hypotheses to finally draw the conclusion to reveal the universality of consumers’ evaluation on Suning’s O2O strategies. Therefore, considering from the research aim and research steps of the study, it is appropriate for this research to use positivist research philosophy.

2.1.2 Methodology

Methodology refers to the way that people use to know the world, methodology that researchers usually carry is determined by the epistemology they support, in general, people who hold positivist epistemology adopt objectivism methodology, and those who hold interpretivism epistemology usually adopt the methodology of constructivism to know the world (Moya, 2017). Since this research is based on positivist epistemology, the methodology of this paper is objectivism. Objectivist methodology believes that knowledge is objective existence, through certain research techniques, which are usually quantitative research methods, researchers can identify and understand the objective knowledge to summarize and find the regularity of generality (Dhir, Brito, Lynn and Silva, 2017).

2.2 Research design

This study uses positivist research methods to collect consumer data on the evaluation of online and offline strategies of Suning, and through the quantitative analysis of these data to understand the current consumer satisfaction with Suning’s online and offline strategies, the weaknesses of Suning’s O2O strategy and future consumer preferences for Suning’s online and offline channels. In the end, the author also judges whether there is a channel conflict in the current O2O strategy based on the quantitative analysis results to make suggestions on how to solve the channel conflict problem for Suning.#p#分页标题#e#

2.3 Research approach

Quantitative research is research approach based on positivist epistemology and objectivism methodology, quantitative research refers to expression of problems and phenomena by quantity, and then to analyze, test, interpret to gain the change rule of quantity. In this study, it was through questionnaire survey to collect consumers’ evaluation on Suning’s O2O strategy, changing the evaluation into data for quantitative analysis, so as to find the weakness of the current Suning’s O2O strategy.

2.4 Research hypothesis

Riquelme, Román and Iacobucci (2016) were from the perspectives of product, price and marketing strategy to discuss the reasons leading to channel conflict caused by differences between online and offline marketing strategies. Based on the study of Riquelme, Román and Iacobucci’s (2016), it has formed the following research hypothesis.

Research hypothesis 1: online products and offline products are consistent to a certain extent in terms of category, specifications and other aspects, which leads to O2O channel conflict phenomenon;

Research hypothesis 2: online products and offline products are consistent to a certain extent in terms of price, which leads to O2O channel conflict phenomenon;

Research hypothesis 3: online products and offline products are consistent to a certain extent in terms of promotion, which leads to O2O channel conflict phenomenon.

2.5 Research tool and sampling strategy

In this study, quantitative research method was used to collect quantitative data through questionnaires. The questionnaire was used because questionnaire can help researchers collect a large amount of data in a short period of time (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2007) about what they thought about Sunning’s O2O strategy, the data collected was also easy to be processed by statistical analysis to avoid the subjective bias of researchers in the survey. The disadvantage of using questionnaire is that it is not conducive to investigating respondents' psychological motivation and thinking process. At the same time, if the respondents are not very serious in filling in the questionnaires, which will affect the reliability and authenticity of the questionnaire results (Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill, 2007). In order to solve this problem, the author conducted a reliability and validity analysis on the questionnaire, and the author continued further analysis on the questionnaire results when the reliability and validity were qualified.

The questionnaire survey was conducted towards Suning consumers. 150 objects were surveyed. The samples were selected by random sampling. The questionnaires were distributed and taken back through the network by using China's online survey website named Questionnaire Star. The content of the questionnaire is divided into three parts, the first part was to introduce the purpose of the questionnaire and how to fill out the questionnaire, the second part was from three aspects: product, price and promotion to understand the impact of Suning’s O2O coordination strategy on consumers’ satisfaction, questionnaires of this part were expressed by using Likertscale method, from 1 to 5, representing from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. The third part of the questionnaire was examined the respondents' personal information, including gender, age, occupation, income and so on.#p#分页标题#e#

2.6 Data analysis

In this study, SPSS 21.0 will be used for data analysis. The data analysis process will be divided into three steps. The first step was to test the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. The author used α reliability coefficient method to analyze the reliability of the questionnaire, if Cronbach α is greater than 0.7, the questionnaire reliability was qualified. The second step was using factor analysis to test the structural validity of the questionnaire, of the KMO value was greater than 0.5, the P value was less than 0.05, and the Barlett Test showed P< 0.01, indicating that the questionnaire's structural validity was qualified. Then the results of the questionnaire were processed by using descriptive statistics, including the mean, standard deviation, frequency and so on. The third step was using T test to determine whether there was a statistical difference in the impact of multi-channel coordination strategy and non-channel coordination strategy on customer satisfaction.

2.7 Reliability and validity

2.7.1 Reliability analysis

Reliability refers to the extent to the consistency of the results acquired by repeated measurements of the same object by using same methods (VanDerHorn and Mahadevan, 2017). In this study, Cronbach α was used to determine whether the questionnaire has enough reliability, if Cronbach α was greater than 0.7, it indicated that the reliability of the questionnaire was qualified. The Cronbach α of the questionnaire was 0.94, which showed that the reliability of the questionnaire was qualified.

2.7.2 Validity analysis

Construct validity refers to the extent to which a test aims to measure (Neo, 2017). This study used exploratory factor analysis to test the construct validity of the questionnaire. The KMO value of this questionnaire was 0.8172> 0.7 by SPSS analysis, Bartlett hemisphere test results showed that X2 = 1191.27 p = 0 <0.05. These results indicated that the questionnaire results could be processed by exploratory factor analysis. Factor analysis results showed that 87.417% (greater than 70%) of the sum of the variance could be explained by a factor whose eigenvalue was greater than one. From the exploratory factor analysis, it could be seen that the design structure of the questionnaire in this study was more reasonable and it has higher construct validity.

2.8 Generalisability

In order to ensure that the results of this study have certain generalisability, this paper adopted a random sampling method. Random sampling method believes that all parts of the population are equally likely to be sampled, which conducts a sample survey completely in accordance with the principle of equal opportunity to ensure the representativeness of the study sample. The survey sample chosen in this paper came from the network and they were also taken by random sampling method. They could reflect consumers' overall view of Suning's O2O strategy to a certain extent and they have certain generalisability.#p#分页标题#e#

2.9 Research ethics

The research data and conclusions of this study were used in this study only and were not used for other commercial purposes. The survey data involved in this study were stored in the author’s private mailbox and no person has access to these data and materials without the author’s permission. Thus, it provides a maximum degree of protection of personal privacy and any personal information will not be revealed. The author personally involved in the data collection, statistical and analysis process of this study to avoid possible errors.

2.10 Limitations

One of the limitations of the research method in this study was that the number of questionnaires issued is too small. The number of Suning’s consumers in China is more than 10 million. The data collected in this paper was only 150, and the proportion of samples to the total was too small. Therefore, whether the surveyed results could represent the overall opinion of all Suning’s consumers remained to be further investigated. The second limitation was reflected in the uses of the questionnaire only to collect the quantitative data, and the lack of qualitative data was unfavorable to analyze the psychology and motivation of why the consumers have such evaluation. It is necessary for the author to cite relevant literatures as a basis for in-depth analysis on consumers’ psychology and motivation.

3.0 Results 结果

3.1 Demographic information

A total of 150 questionnaires were sent out and 150 copies were returned, of which 141 were valid, the recovery rate and the effective rate reached 100% and 94% respectively. The survey respondents included 88 males and 53 females. 35 respondents were 18-30 years old, 61 respondents were aged 31-40, 40 respondents were aged 41-50, and 5 respondents were more than 50 years old. 35 respondents acquired the annual income of 50,000 RMB below, 65 respondents have the annual income of 5-120,000 RMB, 31 respondents have 12-240,000 RMB yearly, 10 respondents have more than 240,000 RMB yearly. Among the respondents, there were 56 white-collar workers, 32 teachers, 11 civil servants, 18 blue-collar workers and 24 respondents engaged in other occupations.

3.2 Descriptive statistics and T test

Chart 2 Descriptive statistics

3.2.1 Consumers' evaluation on Suning’s Online / Offline product strategy

Q1: You believe that Suning's online/offline products are plentiful, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.48±0.70, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of2.87±0.68. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed Suning’s online products were more abundant than its offline products.#p#分页标题#e#

Q2: You believe that there is detailed and correct information description for Suning's online/offline products, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.54±0.67, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.83±0.75. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that there was more detailed and correct information description for Suning’s online products than that of its offline products.

Q3: You believe that there are good before and after-sale services for Suning's online/offline products, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.60±0.68, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.85±0.52. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that there was better before and after-sale services for Suning’s online products than for its offline products.

3.2.2 Consumers' evaluation on Suning’s online / offline price strategies

Q4: You believe that Suning's online/offline products are affordable, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.48±0.64, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.52±0.60. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that Suning's online products were more affordable than the offline products.

Q5: You believe that there are more discounts for Suning's online/offline products, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.50±0.67, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.89±0.79. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that there were more discounts for Suning's online products than for its offline products.

Q6: You believe that the prices of Suning's online/offline products are more transparent, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.67±0.59, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.79±0.66. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that the prices of Suning's online products were more transparent than that of its offline products.

3.2.3 Consumers' evaluation on Suning’s online / offline promotion strategies#p#分页标题#e#

Q7: You believe that there are frequent promotion activities for Suning's online/offline products, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.48±0.67, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.27±0.64. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that there were more frequent promotion activities for Suning's online products than that of its offline products.

Q8: You believe that there are many promotion ways for Suning's online/offline products, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.43±0.68, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.60±0.62. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that there were more promotion ways for Suning's online products than that of its offline products.

Q9: You believe that there are many Suning's online/offline products involved in promotion activities, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.46±0.70, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.26±0.64. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that there were more Suning's online products involved in promotion activities than its offline products.

Q10: You are satisfied with Suning’s online/offline shopping, do you agree?

The score that the respondents gave Suning’s online products was 3.47±0.67, the respondents gave Suning’s offline products the score of 2.33±0.64. The T test results showed that P < 0.05, the two were statistically significant, indicating that the respondents believed that there were more satisfied with Suning's online products than its offline products.

3.3 Correlation analysis

3.3.1 Product strategy and customer satisfaction