Brand to succeed, how to occasion?

Introduction: Many very popular views, are used in inductive method: A successful case to refine a few points, with easy to remember the language to express. These views are right from a single point of view, like elephant, in fact, each person is talking about a part of the elephant.
Many friends asked me, is not opposed to the recent popular views, such as: do a good product, single point of extreme, hardware free and so on, that these are wrong?

On the contrary, I think these views are all right and I am reading and thinking carefully. But there is a difference: a lot of people use induction to see a successful business, and I just want to use the historical, logical way to restore it.

Many of the most popular ideas are summed up: A successful case is distilled into several key points, expressed in a language that is easy to remember. These views are right from a single point of view, like elephant, in fact, each person is said to be a part of the image, is a very accurate part. But we do it without drawing another elephant. I try to go back to history, the process of a case from small to large, with the logic to restore out, digging out the truth behind, and then we learn its way, and then learn its surgery, to the road first, to learn the truth, for their own use, otherwise become kezhouqiujian, will go astray.

For example, Mr. Fu, who moves the cheetah, says he first followed Mr. Zhou's point of view, but do 360 products to achieve a great success, and do the cow image is not successful, so that the single point of view is wrong, more important than the ultimate is "point" to choose in the trend, find Mr. Lei said "Typhoon", and according to " The typhoon "theory made the cheetah.

However, Mr. Fu never said how to identify the typhoon, we do not know whether the cheetah's success was accidentally hit, or thinking beforehand. In fact, everyone knows to homeopathy, the key is how to identify "potential"? Where is the typhoon in our industry?

Therefore, if the millet can not be reduced to the "potential" in theory, and then applied to the practice of the industry, we can not be made "typhoon mouth of the pig", "Good wind by virtue of force, send me on the Qingyun" can only be a dream. What I want to do is to be a serious and honest researcher, to reproduce the logic of enterprise success or failure, to make people think and comprehend, and then take less detours.

That's all.

Back to the subject.

I object to the idea that doing well in the internet age is enough

Good product, is only the condition, not the result. Product thinking, the focus of thinking in the enterprise, not the customer. It's dangerous. In the 1960, Mr. Levitt said, "What customers need is a hole, not a drill," and the enterprise is always standing in the customer's perspective to think.

Mr Christensen, a successor to the theory of subversion, extended the concept of Levitt, pointing out that the product is not the purpose of the customer, but the means by which the customer accomplishes something. This means that the first thing enterprises have to think about is not the product, but "what the customer is going to accomplish." I understand this as a way of life (consumer) or mode of production (business-to-business).

The relationship between the ins and the will is first to distinguish. Enterprise's fundamental is to conform to the customer lifestyle to define the existence of value, the product is only the process of the means or a part of it. According to the philosophy of Procter and Gamble is "if can help the consumer to win the life, will certainly win the market".

Apple or millet success, the key here. Mr Lei's "Typhoon" is the customer's way of life, this is the potential of this. Apple is based on this, creating a typhoon. Millet in this, but also borrowed the potential of the Apple, this is the potential of the end, that is: the leader to create a potential, but can not meet all customers, millet homeopathy, to meet the unmet group.

Apple is a start-up, not only to create solutions, but also to affect customers, millet is more labor-saving. Before the birth of millet, target consumers have been starving: they want apples, but they can't afford them. Millet gives these people (not customers) the ability to afford the "Apple-like program." This is the potential to borrow the leader, but you can not directly into the "cottage version of Apple", but to the target consumers to develop "exclusive services." This is the marketing skill question, after the article discusses again.

The kernel of millet is the whole "apple-like". This is the millet compared to "Chinese cool Union + the Charm clan" clever place. The latter is to do products, directly imitate the Apple mobile phone, learn the shape of Apple, Millet is to meet the customer lifestyle, learn the soul of Apple, from imitation of Apple system software began, do the first rice pomelo, a year later to do mobile phones. The two are very different, millet after the hair first to the truth?

To understand this, let us briefly review the history of mobile phone competition: How Nokia defeated Motorola and was defeated by Apple? How can Samsung follow Nokia and follow it up? And then perhaps better understand the millet pattern.

Nokia's growth: adapting to fashion's speed strategy

The industry of mobile phones began with Motorola, which also maintained its position as a leader for a long time. But Motorola is technology and product-oriented, the definition of mobile phones as a communications product, in the era of analog technology has accumulated considerable technology, and thus lead.

Each other, consumer demand for mobile phones is mainly in the convenience and core functions. Convenient performance for the size of small frivolous, key or interface friendly, standby time, etc., the core function is strong signal, stable quality. Competition is carried out along these elements.

Wave Guide, Amoi and other domestic mobile phone companies to follow up from this era, and before and after 2001 to reach the peak. Each other, the success of these companies also leverages the trend created by the leading companies to provide products for the low-end market. But they did not understand the nature of the "potential", the connotation of the potential changed, they did not change, the result in a straight line of fall.

The development of digital technology, so that mobile phone from the function of fashion. The consumer's fashion demand performance is two aspects: one is the function compound, the handset is no longer limited to the communication, needs to integrate the music, the photographic and so on other functions; another is the appearance of fashion, style, style, radian, color and so on, more in line with consumer aesthetic, identity and lifestyle.

The competition rule under fashion trend is the speed of product renewal. Who first launched the product, who can lead the fashion, and then sell a high price; When competitors follow up, the leading enterprise volume, price reduction, is usually doubled the size of the scale, doubling the speed of the price, and then retreat, while the introduction of more advanced products; Thus, competitors cannot follow up, or even recover costs. A few products beat down, the competitor was eliminated.

One example: When the Motorola China marketing team suggested that the company put a camera on the phone, it was rejected directly by Motorola's US research and development headquarters. It's not that Motorola can't do it technically, but they think it's unnecessary. Product thinking is very easy to evolve into subjectivism. Motorola did not follow up until Nokia sold its camera phones around the world, but it followed a 2 million-pixel product, and the Nokia phone's camera was 5 million pixels.

In the functional era, mobile phone service life longer, as long as can be used, and fashion era, mobile phone service life significantly shortened, to meet even the trend of leading. Nokia sees through the competition rules of this era, proposes "the Speed strategy": The first time captures and satisfies the consumer demand. Therefore, Nokia directly set up a team to do consumer research, especially focusing on unstructured data research.

Competitors focus on static data, from structured data--as long as it's past sales data--and continue to produce this product in the past when it's hot. Nokia pays more attention to dynamic data, goes directly to consumers, captures information about unstructured data, and judges the current and future needs of consumers, rather than what he likes in the past.

One data comparison: Nokia launched a new product at a speed of 1 months, while Motorola is 6 months. What's the result? I visited one of Tcl's founders, Mr. Shincheng, who gave me an example: In 2004, TCL proposed to put a business card on the phone to automatically transfer the function, the plan to sell 4000 yuan, but lasted 12 months has not launched a formal product, Nokia has already launched its third generation of products with the same functionality, and the first generation has fallen below 1500 yuan. This means that TCL products can not launch the market, research and development costs are completely wasted, can not compete.

Where's the 6-month-old Motorola? And the same period of Samsung to follow up, Mr Lee Kun-hee proposed the concept of sashimi, Samsung's new product launch speed from 8 months, quickly shortened to 2 months, close to Nokia. Samsung's product strategy is accurate: follow up on its opponents in a functional, winning appearance. So Samsung is more focused on the study of appearance, especially on the fashion trends of female Asian consumers. This is Samsung can surpass Sony, Ericsson, Motorola and other enterprises, closely follow the root cause of Nokia, the second is to borrow the sports competition to cultivate brand marketing means. Lenovo learned sports marketing, but did not learn the speed strategy, the effect of a big discount.

During the period, there have been some enterprises with the success of a certain product, but all become meteors, can not help enterprises continue to grow. Because in front of fashion, a product's popularity soon passed. For example, Sony Ericsson's music phone, Tcl's so-called "diamond" mobile phone.

Apple's subversion: selling not mobile phones, is lifestyle

The smartphone creator is not an apple, but a BlackBerry. But BlackBerry is still selling handsets, a different phone from Nokia, so BlackBerry has become a niche market, without changing the industry's pattern.

Apple has changed the mobile phone industry, its thinking is on the phone. When you can look down an industry, you can see through it, can be overturned or beyond.

Apple sees the future of the mobile phone industry as a part of consumer life in the Internet and mobile Internet, not as an isolated product. Later, Mr. Lei summed up as "triathlon". From the development of the iphone, Apple's focus is not on hardware, although it is superb in hardware, its focus on software, the functions that smartphones can achieve, and those functions are in the consumer's way of life.

Apple did not create smartphones, but it created "Iphone+ios+appstore" solutions. Rivals see Apple's extreme hardware, but ignore Apple's more extreme models. Apple built the iOS platform and opened it up to application writers, building 37 split patterns, and using the crowdsourcing approach to develop applications with great efficiency. As I've written before, Nokia's smartphone is no worse than Apple's, but it's a lot worse to use.

Mr. New Wengwen, the entrepreneur, said a very enlightened word, but it was drowned. He said that the era of "products to be serviced, services to the public packaging." The so-called service is to make the product become the means or components of the solution.

Apple has been thinking along the way of customer life. They believe, for example, that smartphones are mostly not work, but entertainment, and that they are used anytime, anywhere, on sofas, on trains or on the SAT, at work or in entertainment, where consumers are sedentary for long periods, while ipadmini are used on subways for short periods of time. This kind of thinking, the enterprise can understand the consumer uses the product the situation and the goal, can produce the ultimate experience.

Samsung's transformation: following and attacking the enemy with its own strengths

The giant of the age of the function machine, in the era of intelligent machine can still be proud of the forefront, only Samsung. Samsung is a company that conforms to the times and has long-term strategic thinking and is well worth learning.

Mr Lee Kun-hee insight into the digital technology era, the function of mobile phones must be complex, not the hardware module of the simple superposition, but the combination of integrated functions, so Samsung launched in the Hardware field layout. 2000 years later, Samsung has struggled to get into the software and the Internet, but not as a father, not succeed.

Samsung understands that the nature of "potential" is responsive to changes in consumer demand. In the age of the functional machine, the demand trend is "stylish", so Samsung followed Nokia with almost the same speed strategy, but poured resources beyond Nokia to counter Nokia; In the era of the smart machine, the demand trend is "integration of software and hardware" (solution), Samsung to judge the trend, The subject is switching from Nokia to Apple, and then leveraging Google's Android system and platform to quickly transform and leverage its hardware advantages to rival Apple.

This is the art of War said, "in a positive, a surprise"

Samsung's follow-up to the smartphone is not simply imitation of Apple, but rather the apple as a competitor. There is a point I agree with, you can't beat your opponents the same way as your competitors. When Apple built its brand in the high-end market, Samsung used the hardware advantages and channels such as mobile phone field of the first advantage, in the midrange market to form a sniper.

And Samsung is a multiple product strategy. Here I would like to say that I am opposed to another popular view: Single goods win. The single product is not the absolute rule, but the strategic choice in the competition pattern. In the era of functional machines, Samsung and Nokia are multiple products because of the market trends: enterprises need to adapt to different consumer needs of the fashion requirements of the full segment of the market coverage, do not give competitors a foothold in the opportunity.

In a deterministic market, the pattern of competition is generally the same: the leader will take the initiative to segment the market, and then try to provide a product for each market segment, to cover all segments of the market, to form a multiple product strategy, and the challenger because of the disadvantage of resources, it is necessary to choose a single product strategy, from a market segments, such as straightforward, to form a Then cover other markets and directly challenge competitors. And the challenger's niche market choice is usually the small but promising market for growth. The existing scale is small, the leader is easy to overlook, the growth prospects are good, the challenger has the opportunity to develop homeopathy.

A lot of subversion starts like this. For example, when Yili entered the ice cream market, it discovered the opportunity of 1 yuan market segment, cut into the bitter coffee torch product, established the brand and channel, and then developed to the low-end, With 0.5 yuan of small pudding unified Popsicle Ice Cream market segment, and then to high-end, challenges and brands and Nestle, and then in the midrange market for multiple product coverage, become leader.

Nokia, like many industry leaders, has adopted a multiple product strategy to market depth coverage; Samsung also follows up with multiple product strategies, and then looks for differences in product appearance. Both of them sell mobile phones, different phones. Apple is not selling mobile phones, but the Internet lifestyle solution, it is to change the model.

Apple is a challenger, unlike Yili, where Nokia and Samsung did not give Apple the opportunity to segment the market. Apple is a new model to challenge the mobile phone industry, not the leader of a segment of the market. This is the strategic starting point. Apple to promote the new model, a small number of products is the best choice.

Apple is not a single product, it has two black and white, and there are different hard disk capacity, now more. Many people think that Apple is a single product because Apple only launches a 3.5-inch screen specification. Some even think that Apple's failure to launch a 4.7-inch screen was a mistake for Mr Jobs. It's all about looking at the surface and the words are naturally wrong.

Mr Jobs knows that the key to Apple's defeat is to promote new models, new experiences and standards. As I said before, Apple won the model and won 800,000 apps for 300. But, let so many application software on a system, a hardware platform, show impeccable extreme experience, not easy!

The leader enterprise must be the organizer of the industrial chain, and must build a win-lose ecology. Mr. Jobs was familiar with the truth. So, Apple chooses to do only one hardware specification, lets the application software enterprise with the minimal cost, concentrates the development one version product, and achieves the extreme state together. The paper, which was forced to open in 2012 by Apple in a lawsuit with Samsung, shows that Apple has long analyzed that two market segments will become the mainstream of smartphones, one for 4.7-inch screens and one for low-end markets.

The low-end market is something Apple doesn't dare to do, worry about the impact of high-end properties of the brand, but also worried about Samsung or millet in the low-end after a firm foothold to the high-end market impact, so gradually in order to reduce the 5s in the low-end set firewall; 4.7 inch screen The apple is not ready, specifically, not the Apple itself is not ready ( Mobile phone production has been highly standardized, the technology is not high, but the application software provider is not ready, Apple must give them time, so that the software can adapt to large screen, can continue to maintain the ultimate experience of the brand image.

Therefore, the folk kept discussing or asking Apple why not big screen, did not see the fundamental. Apple has been developing large screens, just waiting for app vendors to keep up.

Samsung is to understand the apple, it is to seize the opportunity to win hardware, so continue to use a multiple product strategy against Apple. Samsung is using the Android platform, continue to highlight products, in the midrange market for in-depth coverage. November 2013, I visited a Samsung executive, sweltering good words, praise Samsung mobile phone sales exceed Apple, the other side bluntly "Samsung is far from Apple, smartphone future in software, this is Samsung's disadvantage, Samsung to have more urgent sense of crisis, catching up."

Millet follow-up: Starting from the rice pomelo

The biggest difference between millet and Chinese cool is that Millet learns the Apple model directly, and the Chinese cool joint learns Apple's handset product. In the preface to the sense of participation, Mr. Lei wrote: Mr. Li Vanchang to talk to Lei about entrepreneurship, lei to persuade them to follow their own business, Li Vanchang a promise, Lei asked "Do you know what I want to do", Li Vanchang answer "do mobile phone." Visible, millet at the beginning of the establishment of the smart phone, but did a year of Rice pomelo, not mobile phone. Also want to do is rice chat, did not do up, be micro-letter occupy.

This period of history, I later analysis of millet from the non-customer start to do Word-of-mouth strategy, and then elaborate.

"Software is releasing incredible power that will change our society, and two exciting things are happening in the software industry, one for user-oriented programming and the other for the internet," Jobs said in an interview in 1995. Fortunately, Mr. Jobs said, Microsoft has yet to discover the change (or ignore the change), leaving Apple with many innovative opportunities.

After 20 years of development, as Jobs said.

And millet is through the apple, imitation thoroughly, so in the competition with the Chinese cool, the shot won. I always think that the rival of Millet is not the Chinese cool alliance, but Apple and Samsung, first of all Samsung. The following must be the pattern of the Three Kingdoms killing, millet to use software and the advantages of the Internet to eat up the middle end of the market, so millet single product after the dash, first down to do red rice, meat first, China's rural market there are huge functional machine consumers want to change the smart machine, and then will be up to do a high price products; and Samsung to maintain the advantage of the midrange market, must be to the software and the Internet, on the block Apple sink, down to prevent millet upgrades.

The history of mobile phone competition is to explain that the essence of "potential" is the trend of customer life style, to seize this trend, there will be a chance to defeat the advantages of the previous industry leaders. This is Apple's "potential" to defeat Nokia. The secondary factor of potential is the trend created by the leader, which has formed a wide range of consumer preferences, but the leader is too late to satisfy all consumers. This is the "potential" of millet to beat the Chinese cool, borrowed from Apple.

So are other industries.

such as the menswear industry. Youngor, Shanshan and other Zhejiang faction Enterprises to do the ultimate, careless of their products, forget the changes in the lifestyle of customers. Wait until the leisure lifestyle with the popular music of Hong Kong and Taiwan into the mainland, consumer demand for clothing completely changed, casual wear replaced by the mainstream. Lee Lang Homeopathy and for, with the help of Mr. Chen's image force business casual men, a leap into the mainstream of men's clothing brand. Typhoon, more Fujian sent enterprises to follow up quickly, borrow wind and line, develop into a brand cluster, Zhejiang sent men fell.

Therefore, the Ming "potential" will have the opportunity to become a "typhoon mouth of the pig", as for the Big pig, pig or god pig, look at the realm of entrepreneurs and thinking.