Author: Tazushi
On the road to entrepreneurship and world fighting, history is always strikingly similar.
Li Ziqi and Hangzhou Weinian's confrontation with the court once again reflects the infighting relationship between the partners. In the field of FMCG, internal disputes arising from equity, trademarks and other issues are emerging in an endless stream.
Taking the "trademark dispute" as an example, the "Jiang Xiaobai" trademark dispute, which lasted for 7 years, went through four rounds, and finally Jiang Xiaobai Company, represented by Tao Shiquan, won the Jiangjin Distillery and regained the right to use the trademark.
The uniqueness and exclusivity of the trademark represents its immeasurable value, especially when it is recognized by consumers and forms a certain market size, the trademark represents the brand value, and the bundle is the interest relationship. It is conceivable that Jiang Xiaobai Company and Jiangjin Distillery should spend a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources, and also save the "Jiang Xiaobai" trademark. Behind it is a real conflict of interest.
From ancient times to the present, there has never been a shortage of such cases in history.
Money and "power" that cannot be avoided
Chen Sheng once said to his companions when he was working in the cultivated land: "Do not forget each other, if one day we develop, do not forget each other." Later, he met wu guang, an entrepreneurial partner who revolted with him, and the two hit it off, raising a flag against Qin in the torrential rains of Daze Township.
As the rebel army grew, Chen Sheng proclaimed himself King of Chen and Wu Guang was made a false king, but just a few months after the uprising, Wu Guang, as the second in command, was beheaded by a subordinate named Tian Zang.
Although history does not clearly record that Chen Sheng signaled Tian Zang to get rid of Wu Guang, it records a detail: when Tian Zang "sacrificed his head to King Chen", Chen Sheng, instead of punishing Tian Zang, gave him the Chu Ling Yin Seal and made him a general.
In the "Records of History", it is recorded: "The false king is arrogant, does not know the power of the army, and cannot be calculated, and is not condemned." To put it simply, Chen Sheng could not control Wu Guang, and since this was the case, it was better to kill him.
Human nature has a weakness, it can share hardships, but it is difficult to be rich and noble. In the commercial landscape, many people are Chen Sheng and Wu Guang.
History pushed back, and in the past few years, the "Red Bull Trademark Battle" once became the talk of the major media at that time.
This small gold pot with brand assets of tens of billions of yuan in China is actually a mixed-race child with ambiguous ownership. Thailand's "biological father" Xu family controls Red Bull's legal identity and controls trademark authorization; while Red Bull's "adoptive father" In the Chinese market, it relies on China's "adoptive father" - Yan Bin.
In the past 20 years in China, Yan Bin will be "thirsty, tired, drink Red Bull", "your energy, beyond your imagination" and other advertising words all over the streets, Red Bull China occupies the domestic beverage single product sales champion, peak period, the annual income of up to more than 20 billion yuan.
The Xu family and Yan Bin's years-long negotiations began, because of the issue of equity and dividends, the Xu family wanted to recover the Chinese Red Bull that carried huge profitability, Yan Bin believed that its behavior of "picking peaches" was despicable and shameless, and the two sides could not continue to trust each other, and were doomed to break up.
There is a saying that goes like this: "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with you."
In fact, the evolution from the initial entrepreneurship to the parting of the road does not have too many trajectories, and the farther the companions, the more human nature is involved. At that time, Xu Shubiao and Yan Bin's interests were immediately matched, and today's China Red Bull has been achieved.
When huge interests are put in front of them, the first to break the dike is often the internal collapse, the Xu family and Yan Bin both use their own benchmarks to measure the so-called fairness, in the face of the dispute between "power" and "money", human nature is eclipsed.
When two tigers fight, there will be an injury
The red bull dispute can't help but remind people of the "Wang Laoji" and "Jiaduobao" dispute of that year.
The 8-year-long lawsuit is the same as the Red Bull dispute. Hongdao Group Chen Hongdao signed a contract with Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Group and obtained the trademark of Wang Laoji and the production and operation right of red can. Chen Hongdao, who has devoted himself to studying the herbal tea market, has achieved sales of 15 billion yuan from 100 million yuan to 15 billion yuan in sales after ten years of sales, and even surpassed Coca-Cola to become the first sales of canned beverages in the country.
The trademark dispute thus began, as the creator of Wang Laoji's trademark, at this time to recover the right to use, Hongdao Group can only "endure the pain of cutting love", and through the use of the "Jiaduobao" trademark and Wang Laoji to seize market share, triggered the subsequent red can dispute, advertising dispute, snowflake pieces of complaint passed to Jiaduobao's hands.
For several consecutive years, the two sides have disputed nearly 20 lawsuits. The Supreme People's Court finally ruled that the trademark of Wang Laoji belongs to Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Group, and both parties can jointly enjoy the rights and interests of the packaging and decoration of "Red Can Wang Laoji Herbal Tea" without harming the legitimate interests of others.
When two tigers fight, one will be injured, and the other side will not win completely. On the surface, although Wang Laoji won the lawsuit, the internal friction brought about by the struggle made Chinese herbal tea, which once exceeded the scale of the Coke market, lose.
Although JIADUOBAO continues to adopt a large-scale advertising strategy, including the draft programs that have spread all over the country, including the title "The Voice of China", it still cannot recover the decline brought about by the loss of the "Wang Laoji" trademark, and sales continue to decline.
From the perspective of the industry, the malicious competition from the founders to the enterprise not only dilutes the consumer's value cognition of herbal tea "prevention of fire", but also produces unnecessary internal friction on brand resources and social resources, affecting the sustained prosperity of the entire herbal tea category.
After taking stock of past historical events, it is found that "rich and noble, no forgetting" seems to have become an unreachable utopia. Even the closest couples have started a partnership, and the equity disputes generated by the interests have never stopped.
Dangdang.com is a typical husband and wife entrepreneur, which has the characteristics of a family business in corporate governance and equity structure. Initially, Dangdang benefited from this, Li Guoqing and Yu Yu complemented each other's shortcomings and once became listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange.
Although they are husband and wife, the tug-of-war between Li Guoqing and Yu Yu is essentially a struggle for the company's interests. Li Guoqing wants to use the official seal as a chip to regain his dominant position in the negotiations, Yu Yu wants to let Li Guoqing leave Dangdang in a cost-effective way, the two sides are deadlocked, so that the contradiction gradually heats up: litigation divorce, robbery of the official seal, Weibo tongue war, occupying the first place in the hot search list.
Source: Interview with Yang Lan
Yu Yu's guest "Interview with Yang Lan" once said, "I especially want to give advice to people, husband and wife do not start a business together, life is not easy."
Indeed, whether it is a close husband and wife relationship, or a like-minded partner, in the end, they have all turned into enemies in the court: the family dispute of True Kung Fu; the equity dispute between the co-founders of Young Master Xi; and the two founders of "Luo Ji Thinking" broke up due to uneven equity distribution.
Similar incidents abound and are not uncommon in the business world.
Behind the calculation of interests is the "good and evil" of human nature
From a general point of view, the partners tear from the inside to the outside, and the results of the confrontation are mostly the damage or even bankruptcy of the enterprise, the parting of investors' liquidation of assets, the departure of the people to set up another portal to compete, new media, Weibo and so on. Because interests make human nature more naked and desires more inflated, when "money is in power", the entangled relationship between human nature and interests is constantly rationalized and chaotic.
In the end, there is no definite answer to who wins and who loses, because there is no once and for all contract, and it is difficult to have eternal cooperation. "To be united, we must first have a common enemy," Churchill said of a partner in the true sense of the word.
When the enterprise first began to develop, the biggest problem was survival, and when facing the problem of survival together, the partners were the partners who were really warming up. Once the survival problem is solved, it is time to test humanity.
At this time, the founding members have a high probability of divergence in business strategy: uneven interests, opinions to the left, lost roles, high achievements and other issues, just like a few small partners who ate and lived together in a trench in that year, suddenly divided into three, six, nine, etc., the gap naturally appeared, whether it was psychological or grade.
This requires that both parties have a flexible space to dynamically match the value of each party, and the proportion of equity depends on the contribution or value of the founder, which is a dynamic indicator. Based on this premise, human nature is not repeatedly tested, and it can still be "good gathering and good dispersion".
As the prototype of the script of the movie "Chinese Partner", the real-life Yu Minhong, Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang made New Oriental the first stock of Chinese education, known as the "troika of New Oriental", and finally ended up "separating the family". But after the breakup, they still maintained a revolutionary friendship, taking time out of their free time to meet two or three times a year.
In 2018, Lei Jun adjusted Xiaomi's organizational structure, and co-founders Zhou Guangping and Huang Jiangji resigned from the company. Xiaomi's original "Eight King Kongs" only left 6 people, including Lin Bin, Lei Jun, Li Wanqiang, Liu De, Wang Chuan, and Hong Feng. Lei Jun held a farewell party for the departure of the two, and Huang Jiangji also praised Lei Jun on Weibo: "The most affectionate and righteous boss Lei Jun."
Similar to the decent breakup of Xiaomi and New Oriental, for enterprises, the combination is two benefits, and the scatter is both complete. Therefore, a reasonable dynamic equity distribution mechanism is the premise of respecting human nature, but good equity design often has to have an "altruistic heart", the more you give to others, the more you will get, starting from "human nature", this is the essence of equity design.
Therefore, it is more certain that in the face of interests, human nature still occupies a dominant position, do not test human nature at any time, and at the same time do not try to eliminate the evil in human nature, what we can do should be to respect the existence of "evil", and then strive to inspire the "good" in human nature, and finally be able to "drink a glass of wine to release the military power".