A case study of the Art Dragon: How to seal the road of the development of enterprise positioning?

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The Art Dragon did meet the ceiling.

Yi Long Net 2013 years of financial results are not beautiful: Although the revenue reached 1.01 billion yuan, but the net loss of 168 million yuan, the year after the loss, which is from 2009 to achieve annual profits in five years of the first annual losses. To the author's point of view, the ceiling has long been in the art of positioning hotel in the beginning has been buried. Why the original art Dragon strategic positioning for the hotel business?

There are traces to follow is the Yi Long net CEO Cui speech. Cui once made a summary of the art Dragon strategy:

"We first analyze where the focus of the industry is?" where is the overall focus of the opponent? Research opponents have several centers of gravity? If possible, attack one of its most important priorities. To take several offensives, if possible, concentrate on an offensive, knock off the opponent's center of gravity, let it lose balance, and win the war. ”

It can be seen that Cui's deep understanding and admiration of Reese's and Trout's positioning theory (in the two-position father's book "Commercial War" has a similar idea in the expression). In 2007, Cui quickly established a "focus on hotel reservation" growth strategy for the Arts dragon shortly after taking office, slashing the product line and cutting off vacation and travel services.

Focus on the hotel business, so that the arts dragon can concentrate resources from competitors to compete for share. After painstaking, to 2012 years, its market value from the original Ctrip 1/14 soared to 1/5. But with Ctrip on the internal business Framework, management structure of the reform, as well as the United States Group Group purchase site to kill into the hotel industry. However, entering the 2013, the development of the art Dragon encountered a bottleneck.

Pain point One, customer base is diverted

From the entire OTA industrial chain, there are three main nodes: from the beginning of the booking of air tickets, booking train tickets, to the Middle hotel, and then to the back-end of the attraction tickets. In the 07, the Art Dragon thought the easiest point to break was to book a hotel. At that time, the strategy of centralizing hotel business has its correctness. There are two main reasons:

1, in the 2007 consumer awareness, Ctrip in OTA front paragraph (booking business) become the most important consumer applications, art dragon positioned in the middle of OTA hotel business, can effectively avoid ctrip strong areas, in the hearts of consumers to build their own unique strong region.

2, hotel business in the OTA industry chain, the demand is very large, is a piece of fat oil.

The correct strategy of the year, the development of today has become the bottleneck of the development of the company. "Booking Hotel with art dragon", this year as if the sword deus positioning why today but as a spent? The root of all market problems are in the customer base.

What is the main customer base for the hotel? Broadly speaking, it can be divided into three categories: The company's customers, travel customers and local customers.

Company class customer, means business trip customer. The feature is not care about the price, but very concerned about convenience. Ctrip and where to go net from the booking set off, became the first class of customers to the entrance, and then Ctrip and where to go to the network to launch hotel booking services, consumers do not need to convert the site, so in the convenience of the advantage, more attractive to such consumers.

Tourism customers in different places value prices, but the strategy of hotel reservation is still less than how cheap. There are two reasons: 1, the company's customers because of Ctrip and to which network consumption habits, and more easily adhere to the use of Ctrip or to which network. 2, the hotel business homogeneity of serious. Occupy the front section of Ctrip or go to where the net will also occupy the advantage of convenience.

For these two types of users, the art dragon facing the biggest competitor is OTA one-stop web site. In the hotel business is similar to the situation, occupy the ticket entrance in the competition is more advantage (talk, Ctrip business are self-signed, and to which nets mainly by crawling, so in the service, Ctrip more occupy the advantage, more attractive company-class customers; In the price, to where the net more occupy the advantage, more attractive to travel customers in different places. )

What about local customers? The main consumer group for local customers is young couples. The main demand is the activities they loved--open a room. So for these users, the frequency of the hotel demand is not very high, the United States and other group buying sites in the local group to join the hotel plate can fully meet their needs, for this special download Art Dragon app becomes troublesome and impractical choice.

In view of this, for the hotel's mainstream consumer groups, Art dragon competitors will be divided into different types of vertical customer base, occupy the innate advantage. And the art of the hotel location bottleneck is this: customer base is not clear.

Pain point two: lack of competitive advantage in the overall market

It may be pointed out that the premise of "similar hotel business is comparable" can be overturned. The same market, if the Arts dragon with greater strength, more focused resources, it is possible to be far away from other competitors in the hotel?

It seems to me that there is little chance. There are two places where the hotel may have an industrial advantage: a more complete hotel and a lower price, but it is difficult for the art Dragon to form a prominent advantage in both areas.

First look at the number of hotels. In terms of industry law, a site to open up a hotel difficult, but similar web site sales follow-up is very easy-this gap is very easy to make up, can not produce competitive advantage; In addition, the existing major OTA website has the number of online hotels, has been basically able to meet consumer demand. There are many options available in each area, even if there are more hotel options, the attractiveness is limited (the author means that the art dragon is invested to do the increment has not been able to achieve significant results and performance, titanium Media note).

Hotel prices. First, it is also easy to follow the price of similar products. Second, other rivals also have the power to fight price wars. Third, in any case, OTA site is just a hotel platform, the hotel is to be profitable, so there will not be too much room for price reduction. If the site alone subsidy, then the range of price reduction is also very small, for remote users of one-stop demand and local users low frequency of the demand is difficult to make a big impact.

Pain point three: not keep pace with the changes in consumer demand

From 2007 to 2013, the Art Dragon has always adhered to the hotel strategy, but in recent years the company has grown from high speed to weak growth, the fundamental reason is that consumer demand has changed.

The strategy of the Arts Dragon in the 2007 (attacking profitable and weak opponents) is correct, but neglects the evolution of future consumer habits. This is also the disadvantage of traditional positioning theory (Business Position) in the internet age, the traditional positioning theory is to occupy enough advantage at one point, can grow and develop. and the Internet to eliminate the point of demarcation between the point, in the early days of the industry can really rely on a point of strong competition, but in the late, must be a point into a chain to survive.

For pure Internet enterprises, the openness of Internet makes Internet products tend to homogeneity. At the same time the Internet greatly reduces the cost of linking. If a chain of services, people need to be from a single portal to complete rather than convert. One-stop will become an increasingly important consumer demand. At the same time, with the deepening of the mobile Internet, this trend is further accelerated. Ctrip and go to where the network in the OTA chain to complete one-stop, American group and other group purchase site in local group to complete one-stop. Art Dragon in the hotel aspects of a single point of operation in a one-stop chain-type operation has been powerless.

How to solve the dilemma of positioning?

So how will the art Dragon network crack positioning of the sleepy? This is a very complex problem, I presume to speculate: first of all to eliminate the "one point" of the enterprise, at the same time did not do a net of the ability (now basically only bat has integrated multiple chain of ability), Art Dragon Choice only one: to do a chain.

To do a chain, there are generally two choices:

1, for a certain type of consumer group integration chain as the current strategy.

For example, for travellers, the convenience of the ultimate. This strategic representative success case is watercress for the young people with common preferences, community sites occupy their own place. But for OTA industry, all kinds of consumer groups need different products, it is difficult to find effective methods to provide targeted services. Personally, this method is not feasible.

2, direct next to the main art Dragon tour. This is a strategy that can be tried.

Why? Remember the car industry has a hit case in the US. As we all know, the original positioning of Volvo Cars is "safe." However, with the development of the industry, "security" for consumers less attractive, and at that time survey showed that most consumers of Volvo has "old-fashioned", "inflexible" bad impression. Therefore, in order to change this image, Volvo launched a large-scale advertising campaign called "Deadly Volvo" to focus on Volvo's sports car, the speed, the trend as the main appeal to attract young people. The last car was a great success. What's more, the consumer's psychological perception of Volvo's safety has not been attenuated by the campaign, and the brand image of Volvo has grown in popularity after the ad campaign.

So, the comparison to see the art of Dragon flagship tourism is feasible?

Although the OTA industry has been fiercely competitive, but mainly in the price war mainly. In real sense, the promotion of tourism as the focus has not yet begun. So, is there any chance of the sudden exerting force on the art dragon Tourism, just like the Volvo in that year, the formation of a more rich understanding of the art Dragon? Hotel and Tourism is closely related to the business, if the art dragon can be done in the hotel is very good, then consumers also have reason to believe that the art can be done in tourism. Of course, to maximize the results of the need to launch a "surprise." In the promotion of the search for opponents in the media category, time of the empty file, products, subterfuge perfect products, focus on the breakthrough. If successful, then the Art dragon in the OTA chain of the layout can be the first-scale.

In addition, now do the main art Dragon tour, there is an additional opportunity-micro-letter portal. OTA industry in the future will have enterprises to get micro-letter entrance. Micro-letter Portal now has not given any OTA, in addition to the current OTA use frequency is not too high, there is also an important reason: micro-letter Want is a mature chain of enterprises, rather than to air tickets, hotels, tickets to create competition with each other. So from the current situation, Ctrip is the most suitable enterprise at this stage. But if the art dragon can in the tourism exerting force, with OTA whole chain as the competition main body, then by virtue of Tencent has already invested in the Art Dragon, calculates the superiority of "the own", obtains the micro-letter the entrance opportunity will increase greatly.

In a word, the bottleneck of the art Dragon is the contradiction between the industry chain and the strategy that the enterprise insists on doing. How to change the traditional mode to adapt to the change of market environment depends on the continuous exploration of the art Dragon. (This paper is the first titanium media)