In November 2021, after the sales of ideal ONE became the first new force in the month, the whole network began to output the topic of "ideal achievement and Li Xiang's success", especially digital KOLs seem to be actively discussing.
Immediately after December, a data map of "Ideal ONE used 24 months to punch the face of volkswagen CEOs so-called range backwardness" was also widely circulated on social media, and many electric vehicle media and digital KOLs were naturally forwarded happily.
The ideal ONE treatment on social media can be said to be completely different from Weilai's remarks.
What we are very happy to discuss is what the ideal ONE has done right, making a range extender hybrid that was not optimistic from the outside world to become the only medium-sized SUV that has challenged Highlander's success in recent years, and has also become the single highest-selling product among the new power car companies?
Is the product itself an absolute advantage? Perhaps not necessarily, it can only be said that the ideal ONE does not have obvious shortcomings, but it is more like the "second Highlander". Whether it is a range extender hybrid system, or the so-called three-screen, five-screen intelligent car machine, or a large space, in fact, the ideal ONE is more like a "others have me" product, there is no real unique place. Moreover, most of the people who buy medium and large SUVs are mature middle-aged people, and the acceptance of such a pure new force as the ideal car is far from being comparable to Toyota and Volkswagen.
Therefore, in the beginning, not to mention everyone, at least 80% or 90% of people must not be optimistic about the ideal ONE, and the most optimistic estimate at that time was probably "selling 30,000 or 50,000 vehicles a year."
However, now the results are known to everyone, and the ideal ONE has become a hit with bicycle sales of nearly 100,000 units. And there is another point worth mentioning - when the car was remodeled in 2021, only a six-seater model was launched, in other words, the ideal ONE is not only "recreating the consumption concept of range-extending hybrid", but also reshaping the inherent thinking of the so-called "six-seater no sales".
In this regard, we believe that what really determines the ideal ONE trend is actually some decisions at the marketing level, so that such a moderate product can kill the Red Sea.
In the big picture, the ideal car has made a very admirable decision -
Focus, focus again.
The ideal is first to focus almost all marketing resources on the concept of shouting "no mileage anxiety", and then focus on making the product the impression of a "daddy car".
Another typical focus strategy is that the ideal ONE radical configuration strategy, only one configuration, can only choose the seat, body color, etc., to minimize the consumer's entanglement, and the "science and engineering man" consumers pay attention to the intelligent experience link is all standard, and there is no need to give extra money. Even in the 2021 model, the ideal ONE only retains a six-seater model, while before all six-seater products were considered uncompetitive, but the ideal ONE that focused only on a six-seater layout was a great success.
The reason behind this may be that when users begin to accept that there is no choice, it is easier to think about their own needs. This is probably similar to the earliest Apple launch of the iPhone when there was only a shape, a size, the difference is only the size of the memory, which makes consumers will not hesitate because of which model to choose, more quickly complete the purchase.
Of course, this kind of decision-making is impossible for the average car company, and one of the reasons is that the product line is scattered, the technical route is scattered, and once the focus strategy is adopted, it can only abandon most other product lines, which is basically impossible.
My personal understanding is that because of the premise of the focus strategy, the ideal car presents a completely different marketing strategy, which is the reason why the ideal ONE eventually became a hit. This marketing strategy is —.
Completely abandoning the original vertical channels of automotive media, from the digital field to pan-social media marketing.
Because there is no need to invest in traditional automotive media channels, coupled with the fact that ideal ONE only needs to focus on the selling point of the vehicle itself, this makes the ideal car no longer have to spread based on product parameters, but to provide scenario-based communication that pan-social media audiences can carry. Secondly, because automotive media is no longer needed, the best entry point for users is based on digital KOLs to create an image that is different from traditional automotive products and closer to digital products. Finally, under the focus strategy, it reduces ineffective repetition in the automotive field and spreads the attention of non-auto consumers to the product.
So how did all this happen?
First, let's look at the item "scenario-based propagation". In some surveys of women, they remembered the selling point of the ideal ONE's "no mileage anxiety" and even thought it was a very important selling point. However, they actually do not have a clear understanding of the specific concept of "extended range", nor do they say that they have any dissatisfaction with the 1.2T three-cylinder engine, their understanding is that "the ideal ONE can achieve a long enough mileage", which is enough.
From this example, it can be seen that the ideal car has always been around the point of "no mileage anxiety" in the process of communication, emphasizing the long-distance travel scene of the product and the scene of the family's happy and harmonious travel. More importantly, in a large number of communication content, ideal car does not elaborate on "what is range extended hybrid, how the system achieves 1000 km endurance", but only repeatedly emphasizes the long-distance travel ability of ideal ONE. Even on the product introduction page, there is a special column that reads - "Energy supply form: fast charging, slow charging, refueling", which almost defaults to covering all energy replenishment methods.
A female media person said that before whether it was Cyris or Nissan e-POWER, these brands always like to talk about how their technology is realized, and use a lot of communication to talk about engine power generation, battery output, high thermal efficiency, etc., too technical. But these stereotypical technical principles and parameters are difficult for ordinary consumers to perceive - they only care about what the final result is, and the ideal car simply expresses the result of "no mileage anxiety".
In fact, the ideal car, a very grounded expression, although broad, also avoids its own shortcomings. For example, everyone will complain about the three-cylinder engine NVH problem, and the ideal car will not deliberately realize these problems as long as it does not talk about the parameters, and it will not leave room for consumers to compare. This also implants a new contrasting thinking into consumers - "comparative use scenarios", rather than technical parameters, which is actually what traditional car companies like to do.
Of course, a similar example is more interesting and more extreme, that is, huawei Yu Chengdong directly calculated the power generated by the engine oil when comparing the mileage of the AITU M5 car, plus the battery pack capacity, to get an equivalent of 213kWh, compared with Tesla Model Y products.
Also shown with the help of scenarios is the six-seat setting of the ideal ONE. Many of the communications of the ideal ONE are not like when most traditional car companies sell seven-seat SUVs, the advertising screen is full of 7 people in the car, but basically shows a family of three or two children in the city life, highlighting the demand for four seats. Coupled with the cancellation of the seven-seat version, consumers will naturally bring into the four-seat travel scene, and no longer have to struggle with six and seven who is more sexual.
Then let's understand the ideal ONE's word-of-mouth communication establishment.
If you carefully observe the spread of the ideal ONE in the past two years, you will find that this car uses a lot of digital media, and more is to present products in digital KOLs. It is as if an electric vehicle media survey found that in the circle of digital bloggers, the highest proportion of self-used cars is Tesla, and the second place is the ideal ONE, which is different from the "Wei Xiaoli" understood in the automobile circle.
Although Ideal Cars has always stressed that they do not have any additional car purchase offers or discounts for digital bloggers, they cannot "resist" more and more digital bloggers exchanging their cars for Ideal ONE. This is essentially a phenomenon of circle layering, just like the middle class loves to buy Weilai, and Internet software engineers like Xiaopeng.
Behind this is more related to li thinking that he is the founder of the digital website bubble network, and there are many operations from the digital circle in the early days of the ideal car. Therefore, the recognition of the ideal ONE in the digital circle is much higher than that of Weilai and Xiaopeng, which also covers most male audiences - after all, most male consumers will still pay attention to digital products today.
Under the continuous reinforcement of digital bloggers and the scene-based publicity of the ideal car itself, the ideal ONE car has focused more on the use experience level on social media, rather than the automotive technology level that the original automotive media will focus on. Digital bloggers will combine their own use scenarios to show the needs of large screens, seat comfort, space experience, long-distance travel, etc., which presents an image of a non-traditional car, but more like a digital product.
At the same time, combined with the ideal car's slogan of "creating a mobile home", it can also make people feel that "this is not a car product, but more like a part of the smart home". This strategy of weakening the perception of automotive products will, to a large extent, make consumers involuntarily abandon the comparison with the products of traditional car companies, and default to the intelligent experience attributes of the ideal ONE.
And the ideal car and digital KOL is more like a co-creation relationship, digital KOL because of the identity of the owner, for the ideal ONE report will pay special attention, which further strengthens the ideal brand recognition.
Finally, how the ideal ONE can achieve brand recognition under the premise of a small amount of publicity costs.
The general theory of automobile communication believes that the amount of investment by car companies in product communication largely determines product cognition, and the investment in automobile media in the first three months may account for 70% of the decisive factor. However, ideal ONE obviously did not follow this inherent idea, at least in the car media, ideal car has always shown its own "frugal" image, a large number of communication is relying on the ideal employees themselves on social media initiative to spread.
From the actual observation, the ideal car is indeed a car company that is very "slamming the door" on the auto media, not to mention that compared with the traditional car companies, even if it is compared with the new forces of Weilai and Xiaopeng, the ideal may have little investment in the auto media. However, in the end, the ideal ONE's awareness on social media is not low, and it can be said that it is a model of spending small money to do big things.
But on closer inspection, the ideal car's style of play can indeed do this. First of all, the focus on the overall strategy, and then more emphasis on the two points of the scene, so that the ideal ONE can be decoupled from the traditional automotive media communication - because there is no longer a need for parameter comparison, no longer need the product one by one comparison, so the ideal car can no longer give the traditional automotive media too much investment, but focus on the resources in the field of scenario-based communication.
Secondly, because it is more scene-based communication, it can extract more direct and concise information, which will not cause the situation of "too much content to say and lose the communication orientation". Ideal ONE emphasizes the use experience of scenarios, abandoning the marketing strategies of traditional car companies that often use engine parameters and power control experience, so ideal ONE essentially does not need to be rolled in the automotive industry. The communication channel using digital KOLs repeatedly pushes this concise and clear information to science and engineering men and digital enthusiasts, which greatly saves the cost of communication and improves the efficiency of communication.
Again, it is only necessary to focus on one model, so that the ideal car can break the product point spread more piecemeal and the transmission cycle is longer. This allows ideal cars to find more digital media, pan-life media, and even some niche KOLs, such as "ichthyological research vehicles", to disseminate. This long-term, wide-ranging means of communication is different from the intensive bombardment of traditional car companies to pursue the market period of new cars, and has achieved a long stream.
And putting a limited amount of money into the platform media that consumer groups like to hear, and producing popular and grounded content, is also a strategy for the ideal car. For example, on the short video platform, you can see the kind of self-made, emotional resonance of the short video, focusing on the application scenarios and needs of the product, which is far more grounded than the traditional car companies often require a variety of evaluation data, all kinds of mountains and mountains to be grounded, more likely to let consumers perceive.
Driver's Summary:
All in all, the sales breakthrough of the ideal car, in addition to the fine product planning, more importantly, on top of a moderate product, a new set of marketing strategies has been adopted. By focusing on product positioning and clarifying scene-based communication, product marketing can be decoupled from traditional automotive media and automotive vertical media to form another set of communication paradigms - but behind this is the company's focus on products, the accurate refinement of information, and the courage to dare to spread across fields.
With the success of the ideal ONE, we can see that the traditional automotive companies' previous high-investment, high-return marketing strategies are gradually being replaced by "precision" and "cross-field" delivery strategies. The auto media that once took a big share in the auto marketing marketing does not seem to be necessary, especially the many auto self-media below the neck can be completely replaced by pan-life media in terms of communication.
If you want to summarize the success of the ideal car in this round of automobile marketing, it can be roughly summarized as: focusing, re-focusing; turning the parameter comparison into a scenario-based description; jumping from automotive media to pan-life communication; lengthening the communication cycle and communication details. And these four items are all progressive relationships, only the order can really achieve the goal, especially if there is no focus strategy, it is impossible to achieve subsequent execution, because there will be a lack of clear communication goals.
Further exploring the essence of the success of the ideal ONE marketing is still the classic marketing theory: focusing on tactics in the positioning strategy, and then influencing the consumer's mind in a more grounded way of communication, which is the need to accompany a long cycle of communication, and finally to reach the critical point of letting the snowball roll up on its own. Of course, all the premise is that at least to create a product without obvious shortcomings.
Finally, it should be emphasized that the transformation of the ideal automobile marketing paradigm discussed in this article is actually more like an "afterthought" of effect and cause, perhaps the ideal car itself is not promoted according to this logic, but the final result is like this. But even so, the entire marketing process can indeed find the communication dilemma encountered by traditional car companies in the new media era - why a large number of communication costs seem to fall into the water, why many products with high popularity in the circle of friends can not be sold in the end, why the products that they think are very good have not become popular...
In fact, it is because the entire big communication environment has changed, but the means of car companies have not kept up.
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