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Building a long-term mechanism for intelligent consumption growth

2025-04-08   

Smart consumption covers multiple fields such as smart homes, smart healthcare, smart transportation, and smart education, and is becoming a new highlight in China's consumer market. Developing intelligent consumption, in line with the public's pursuit of high-quality life, is an important strategic choice to promote the synergy between consumption upgrading and industrial upgrading. Under the dual combination of technological progress and policy promotion, the field of intelligent consumption in China has grown significantly. According to the "2024 China Smart Wearable Device Industry Market Research Report" and the "2024 Automotive Industry Analysis Report", from 2017 to 2023, the market size of China's smart wearable device industry will grow from 21.26 billion yuan to 93.47 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 28%; The penetration rate of intelligent vehicles has increased from 18.5% in 2019 to 57.1% in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of up to 34.2%. In recent years, China's smart consumption market has grown rapidly, but there are still many uncertainties in the future market, and it is urgent to constantly explore and innovate to cope with potential challenges and lay a solid foundation for its sustained, stable, and healthy development. In depth analysis of development constraints distinguishes intelligent consumption from traditional consumption, which combines multiple attributes such as economy, society, technology, and culture. Its growth logic is no longer limited to the production capacity of the supply side or the income level of the demand side. To this end, we need to break through the traditional "production consumption" analysis framework and instead construct a multidimensional analysis framework that covers "psychology ability market guarantee", in order to deeply explore the key factors that constrain the full release of intelligent consumption potential. Firstly, cultural adaptation barriers lead to insufficient endogenous motivation for smart consumption. Nowadays, the development of smart consumption not only depends on economic capacity, but also on the use of digital technology, understanding the value of smart products, and the ability to participate in the smart consumption ecosystem. Artificial intelligence technology has profoundly reshaped the form of contemporary interpersonal communication and human-machine relationships, and the digital space and intelligent platform established by Quyuan have become important fields for consumption. Faced with the social and cultural environment changes brought about by changes in consumption patterns, people face varying degrees of challenges in adapting to digital culture, especially rural and elderly groups with lower education levels and incomes, which are prone to a series of problems such as technological fear, digital anxiety, and virtual value confusion. This group has weak self identity adjustment ability and often refuses to integrate into the digital cultural space, which greatly hinders the popularization and development of smart consumption in a wider range of social groups. Secondly, the new "digital divide" has led to an imbalance in intelligent consumption capabilities. Due to the widespread integration and application of big data and algorithms, the traditional "digital divide" consisting of "access channel usage channel result channel" has rapidly evolved into a "digital intelligence divide" that includes new representations such as "intelligent interaction intelligent literacy data algorithm fairness", which is more covert, complex, and impactful. It not only affects individuals' consumption choices and abilities in the era of intelligence, but also profoundly reshapes the distribution of opportunities and power relations in the social structure. Both explicit and implicit "smart divide" have further exacerbated the inequality of smart consumption, and with the frequent iteration of artificial intelligence products, many users are facing the dilemma of being unable to keep up with the rapid progress of intelligent technology. The faster the development of artificial intelligence, the further backward regions and groups that have not kept up with the pace will be left behind, which will further exacerbate the Matthew effect in the field of intelligent consumption. Thirdly, the lag of small and medium-sized enterprises in "smart transformation and digital transformation" affects the effective supply of the smart consumption market. On the one hand, in the digital transformation of enterprises, due to multiple constraints, small and medium-sized enterprises generally encounter the dilemma of "unable to transform, unwilling to transform, unable to transform, and afraid to transform", which limits their innovation vitality and response speed in the smart consumption market. This issue may exacerbate market monopoly, which is not conducive to maximizing overall consumer welfare and hinders the sustainable and healthy development of the smart consumption market. On the other hand, companies in different industries have varying levels of digital capabilities, which can easily lead to structural imbalances in market supply. In areas where there is an oversupply of smart consumption, companies may fall into price wars and their profit margins may be continuously compressed; In areas with insufficient supply, consumers face a lack of choices and difficulty in meeting diversity. In the long run, this structural imbalance will lead to resource misallocation and a decrease in market efficiency, which may suppress the growth of the entire smart consumption market. Fourthly, the tension of multiple subject rights intensifies the dilemma of protecting the rights and interests of consumers in new business formats. In the consumer ecology of the digital age, multiple entities such as consumers, enterprises, platforms, and governments coexist. While promoting market vitality and innovation, it also raises complex issues of power conflicts and coordination. As the main producers of data, consumers' personal information and data are frequently collected and used, which may not only lead to unfair practices such as excessive marketing and big data manipulation, but may even breed serious violations of consumer rights such as fraud. Nowadays, algorithms have profoundly influenced consumers' autonomy and interactivity, leading to the perceived consumer freedom in the digital environment becoming an illusion controlled by algorithms, highlighting consumers' bounded rationality in the data environment. In addition, the extensive growth and "involution" competition trend of current digital platforms seriously disrupt the ecological balance of the digital consumer market, and the resulting costs and risks are often ultimately passed on to consumers, damaging the consumption environment. In establishing a long-term growth mechanism for intelligent consumption, in order to achieve the beautiful vision of consumers' willingness to consume, ability to consume, good consumption, and good consumption, targeted efforts and precise policies need to be made to explore the establishment of a dynamic, era oriented, and multi-party linkage mechanism for expanding intelligent consumption. Firstly, activate the endogenous driving mechanism of intelligent consumption. Digital cultural identity is related to consumers' acceptance of smart products and their evaluation of the value of smart consumption. Firstly, avoid self depletion. Enterprises should optimize the user experience of smart consumer products, simplify the operating interface, establish efficient customer service channels, reduce consumers' learning burden, and attract them to engage in smart consumption. Secondly, reshape virtual value. Reshaping virtual value through innovative business models and optimizing product design, enhancing consumers' perception of the value of virtual goods and services. Finally, stimulate digital self-efficacy. While providing digital skills training and support services, establish a digital consumption community and platform to promote consumer communication, sharing, and learning, and create a positive digital consumption atmosphere. Secondly, improve the mechanism for enhancing intelligent consumption capability. Firstly, it is necessary to avoid the cultural hegemony of elitism in the digital transformation, ensure that digital consumption maintains sufficient sensitivity and inclusiveness when facing the public, pay attention to the consumption needs of vulnerable groups, and improve the quality of intelligent products and digital service levels. Secondly, make full use of resources such as enterprises, associations, and communities to build a digital literacy improvement system, and incorporate digital education into residents' daily lives through digital skills training courses, digital consumption experience activities, and other means. Finally, encourage the formation of digital feedback among family members, narrow the intergenerational "digital intelligence gap", shape a diverse support structure that can effectively eliminate the intergenerational digital intelligence gap, and promote the smooth transition of elderly people from "digital survivors" to "digital residents". Thirdly, establish a market supply-demand coordination mechanism. Firstly, integrate policy supply and stimulate the driving force of innovation entities. Adopting incentive measures such as tax reduction and fiscal subsidies, lowering the threshold for the transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises, establishing research and development reserves, and encouraging enterprises to increase investment in digital technology research and development. Secondly, focusing on the integration of the three chains of "ecological chain industry chain innovation chain", promoting the model of "entrepreneurs setting questions and scientists answering questions", and promoting a virtuous cycle of the technology industry. Finally, actively creating multi-level, multi domain, and diversified intelligent consumption scenarios to enhance consumer vitality. Actively promote the first launch economy, promote the application of technologies such as artificial intelligence in education, healthcare, entertainment, and other fields, increase the construction of elderly friendly intelligent consumption scenarios, explore market opportunities brought by the long tail effect, and promote the integration of the driving force of the value chain from the supply side to the demand side. Fourth, optimize the mechanism for ensuring consumer protection in new business formats. Guided by incentive compatibility and protection of consumer rights in new business formats, optimize current systems and policies, ensure that smart consumption transcends short-term policy dividend dependence, and achieve a sustainable and independent development pattern. Firstly, promote departmental collaboration, central local linkage, and government enterprise consultation to build a positive interaction pattern between innovators, regulators, and consumers, explore the "regulatory sandbox" mechanism, and break through the "Colin Gridge dilemma" faced by innovative development and risk management. Secondly, based on the heterogeneity of the economy and consumption, distributed policy planning is adopted to formulate and implement differentiated policies in different regions and at different levels, ensuring the flexibility and adaptability of policies. Finally, it is necessary to improve the classification and authorization system for public data, enterprise data, and personal data as soon as possible, promote the security, compliance, and efficient utilization of data elements, solve the trust crisis in smart consumption, and optimize the soft environment for smart consumption. (New Press) (This article is a phased achievement of the National Social Science Fund's general project "Research on the Transformation Mechanism and Promotion Path of 'Long Tail' Consumption in Platform Economy" (24BJY034)) Author: Wang Wenji (Associate Professor at the School of Management, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications); Xia Jiechang (Researcher at the Institute of Finance and Economics Strategy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Edit:Luo yu Responsible editor:Wang er dong

Source:cssn.cn

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