Why the sudden start of the United States mission to advertise?

In the past month, the U.S. delegation suddenly started advertising. The subway, buildings and television were overwhelming. This is the first large-scale commercial launch since the establishment of the U.S. Mission in the past four years and the first time in more than 10 years that its founder Wang Xing started his business.

It is estimated by the industry that this beautiful group has invested nearly 100 million yuan. Although this investment in the fields of O2O and e-commerce is really not "shocking," it is already a generous gesture compared with the past style of the U.S. delegation. Perhaps it is precisely because the advertisement is different from the style before the corporation, so that the privately owned rumor of the industry begins to guess what the special purpose behind it is. It is estimated that the listing schedule has been started more and more.

Going through the process of listing things geek park multi-confirmation can not be clearly confirmed. However, during the process of inquiring, it was found that the common view of practitioners in the industry was that "the United States delegation did indeed arrive at the time when it advertised and made its brand.

According to an insider analysis, the U.S. group's annual turnover target of 40 billion yuan this year, with the volume of trading surging in the past few months, has gained momentum (2.5 billion in April and 2.9 billion in May) Yearly turnover is likely to go well over 40 billion. For this volume of companies, never spend money on marketing itself is relatively weird.

Compare Jingdong recently listed, from its IPO prospectus, Jingdong annual turnover of 77.3 billion in 2012, it spent more than 1 billion to do marketing. According to this ratio count, the United States Mission this year to spend hundreds of millions of yuan in marketing is. So it seems, the United States delegation may have generous should follow.

However, it is possible that Wang Xing is not so calculated, because he will not agree with the JD input logic. Zhang Peng, the founder of geeks, commented that "it is probable that Wang Xing would vote for the advertisement because he may not have as much enthusiasm for marketing."

In fact, Wang Xing is a person who is very concerned about the data and efficiency. With his style of scrolling through the office of the U.S. delegation and showing the real-time scrolling data, he has never had a cold on the unquantifiable issues of traditional advertising.

So what are the reasons for this? Maybe this may be related to the pressure exerted by the changes in the external environment on the U.S. mission.

In January of this year, Baidu announced the acquisition of all the shares of glutinous rice held by everyone and the transaction was completed in the first quarter of 2014. One month later, Tencent announced a public comment. The most direct change brought by these two events to the U.S. delegation is that the traffic from Baidu and Tencent will tighten. As two large, ambitious companies in the field of local life, they naturally would not have watched as the outsider growing up in the United States, the traffic blockade was a natural move. At the same time, the old rivals of the U.S. regiment have been getting lower and lower their flow rates after receiving the support from the two companies. The bigger the gap, the more likely it is that there will be no money to buy at the end.

At this point, getting users through marketing, brand building has become particularly urgent.

The brand is also a problem that the U.S. delegation needs to solve in order to move to the next stage. When the US group is still doing group buy may not need to pay special attention to the brand, when it decided to turn itself into a local life service companies, they have to consider. Honestly, the vast majority of people today still have the impression that "it's a group purchase," which makes it very difficult to get rid of cheap labels. But in the local life service, the price is only one part, not even the most important part.

Lynx "double 11" hot and mobile Taobao "3.8 Life Festival" bleak contrast between the best. The same is true of using low prices to attract people, the latter's failure lies in the price is not the most important factor in local life services. Speaking of "service" means not just a few clicks on a cell phone, but time and energy costs, going from place to place. Even there, found that quality of service and their own vision of a great difference, no matter how low the price can not make up for their losses.

This non-standardization of services, users need to invest time and effort, it is difficult to impress people with price alone, which is the public comment on the advantages of such companies. Although the U.S. group now accounts for 50% of the group purchase market, the first-tier cities such as Beicheng Broadcasting Co., Ltd. are commented on for their partial share pressure.

The reason for this difference today is that the two products have different logic from the very beginning. It is not an easy task to change. Taking the brand "Cat's Eye", which extends from the US group, despite the dilution of the parent brand of the US group, the "Cat's Eye" is still the same as the "Douban Movie" because of the group buy-in Lower level of the brand. This is like the difference between Q and WeChat, no matter how hard Q hand, is off the low end of the brand image. The United States mission to get rid of a simple low-cost image, but also need to invest more in brand building.

Now that the U.S. delegation has taken the first step, this step is also a very rare rebellion against the "past self".

In the first half of 2011, it was the period of crazy expansion of group buying, handle network, Wowo groups in the financing of the major cities of the bus, subway, elevator filled with advertising group buy. At that time, Wang Xing faces an important choice: whether to join the advertising group buy.

His choice is: Instead of smashing up ads, spend every penny on the knife edge, converting marketing directly into purchases nearest the consumer. So when the ad war to 100 yuan to obtain a user stage, the US group to choose 10 yuan online access to a user, which helped the United States team from that crazy melee win.

When Wang Xing made this distinctive decision, it seems to us today that it is a very remarkable thing. Now that he deviated from his own inertia, he made another decision different from that of the past.

And this decision is likely to be correct, not even late.