The 'water' in the domestic bathroom market is too deep
- Date: 2024-11-23
- Read: 851
I often hear insiders exclaim: the water in the bathroom industry is too deep! Indeed, bathroom enterprises are not as easy to do as many people imagine. Leaving aside the long-standing dissatisfaction of international brand Shuishi, in fact, its proportion in the overall market share is very small. Looking at domestic bathroom enterprises, whether it's real estate miscellaneous brands with front stores and back factories, regional brands that dominate the market, cross-border home appliance companies that specialize in bathroom products, or professional national brands, "every household has a difficult lesson", some are not profitable, and some are not big enough. What is the reason behind this,? The answer is definitely subjective and the wise have their own opinions.
Sanitary ware is an integrated product, customized product, and engineering project, which determines that the service support system of sanitary ware enterprises is much more complex than traditional industries. For traditional industries, the entire sales process after the user signs and pays is called after-sales service. You just need to buy a piece of clothing and bring it home, and at most add a handling step when buying a TV, which is very simple. The bathroom is exactly the opposite. After signing the contract, there is a complete production, logistics, and installation process, which is prone to errors and requires human and material resources to ensure. In fact, it is a crucial link in the entire order implementation process.
Distributors need to have installation teams, logistics, and warehousing conditions, while manufacturers need to have the ability to control product quality, ensure delivery time, provide user information, and handle complaints. These factors make the importance of the entire service support system incomparable to traditional industries. But the current situation is that most bathroom manufacturers, including many branded bathroom products, have no regard for the management of end consumers, resulting in a much lower customer satisfaction rate for bathroom products compared to traditional industries. Of course, there are multiple reasons for this. The user expects the merchant to complete a part of their kitchen decoration project, with relatively strict requirements for design, installation, and delivery time.
The order management of bathroom enterprises is very complex. From dealer direct sales representatives introducing products, designers measuring rooms, re measuring, to order confirmation; There is a long process from headquarters receiving, reviewing, and dismantling orders, to product procurement and installation information feedback. Every step is prone to errors or delays, so order accuracy is a very important management indicator in the bathroom industry. Some large enterprises in the bathroom industry have even separated order management from sales management and become a separate system, which shows how important order management is! Order management requires the support of information systems or a large amount of manual labor, which is an insurmountable obstacle for many enterprises.
We know that traditional product marketing generally includes sales management systems (sales personnel management, channel management, order management), marketing promotion systems (market research, promotional activities, new product launches, brand promotion), service support systems, and product development systems. These bathroom systems are needed by all bathroom enterprises, but their connotations are very different.
The product development system is also different. The development of traditional products emphasizes the functionality, cost, and price of the product, while the development of bathroom products focuses on the appearance, style, style, and culture of the product. In addition, the integration concept is prominent in terms of functionality. For teams accustomed to traditional industry development processes or modular division of labor, bathroom development is difficult to understand.
The bathroom store is an integrated experience store, and its location, size, and decoration image are the key to its success or failure, which is very different from traditional industries. And display design is not just a part of the store, bathroom products and corporate culture occupy a very important content. Moreover, the layout of bathroom shopping malls is diverse, and it is difficult to rely on general decoration companies to do terminal store display design, let alone the home appliance and clothing industries to do a set of store image standards, which dealers can follow. Brand bathroom enterprises need to have the ability to support the display design of "giant" multi storefronts.
Sanitary ware is a new industry, and most of the employees are inexperienced, but the core positions in the industry, such as direct sales, design, and installation, are highly specialized. And the personnel for these positions can only be trained by the enterprise itself, which requires bathroom brand enterprises to have strong training support capabilities.
It requires companies to have sufficient capital, talent, and bosses or decision-makers with a thorough understanding and insight into the industry, which is difficult to achieve. Grassroots bathroom brands often struggle with capital and talent; For those who cross over into the bathroom industry with household appliances, few decision-makers have sufficient understanding of the bathroom industry, and their minds are only focused on household appliance marketing. This is the fundamental reason why bathroom enterprises cannot do well and cannot do well.