Wen 丨 Wang Xinxi
In the field of acquaintance social networking, WeChat has always been considered to have no competitors. But in recent years, in the children's watch market, a phone watch product called Little Genius seems to have opened a hole in the field of children's social networking.
Earlier, Weibo Big V said: Although WeChat and QQ have a high market share and an unbreakable position, Tencent's internal employees are like enemies and trembling all day long, discussing whether the little genius phone watch will kill them....
The reason why the voice of "little genius may threaten Tencent" exists is because the little genius phone watch is currently quite similar to the iPhone in the children's group, it builds a set of software and hardware closed system, and it also has the stickiness that the iPhone does not have - closed circle social networking.
But in the author's opinion, the circle social model of the little genius has its own highlights and hidden worries.
Behind the rise of little geniuses: the booming market for children's watches and closed circle social networking
Behind the little genius is the vigorous development of the children's watch market.
According to the 2019 global children's watch market share released by Counterpoint, China's children's smart watches account for 62% of the global market, of which the little genius watch (imoo) accounts for 26% of the global market, and in the domestic market, its market share is the first, more than the sum of other domestic children's watch markets. As of March 2019, the total shipment of small genius telephone watches in China has exceeded 20 million units.
According to the number of people under the age of 14 in China (about 240 million), almost every 10 children, there is a small genius watch, and even from the trend point of view, this proportion is still growing. Because from the perspective of the incremental space of the entire market, the market space is still far from the top.
The reason why children's watches originally appeared was based on the demands of parents - it can be located through the GPS on the watch, so that parents can always know where their children are.
As early as June 2015, when the first Y01 model watch was launched, it focused on GPS positioning, which has a "find child" function, which can help parents navigate the specific path and warn children of the risks of abduction, getting lost and so on when they travel.
The watch also has an SOS rescue function, after clicking the SOS function key, the distress signal will be sent to all bound mobile phone contacts in the form of a group, while displaying the location of the watch to issue an alarm. Later, on the basis of iteration, XiaoTian introduced functions such as high-precision positioning and two-way video calls, which further met the safety needs of parents for their children.
Making friends is a core need for children. It has successively added social functions such as micro chat, circle of friends, and shake to meet the dual needs of children and parents, and has become a children's version of WeChat.
It functionally simplifies and makes the process of making friends fun - touching each other's watches can make friends with each other, and thus forming an exclusive social network that belongs to the primary school campus + community.
Although other children's watch brands also support this feature, most can support mutual friendship between brands. The social network of the little genius phone watch is closed - only the little genius user can add the little genius user as a friend.
After being added as friends, they can chat with each other through the watch's micro-chat software, send circles of friends, like each other, send gold coins to each other, brush steps, online payment, video calls, etc. In the watch, it cannot install third-party social software such as WeChat and QQ, which promotes the formation of a closed social circle.
Based on the social needs of small circles such as schools and communities, once there are more people around with small geniuses, more children will be replaced by small geniuses. For children, they do not have a clear idea of the good or bad experience of the product, the biggest reason is that "the class uses this." ”
Southern Weekend pointed out in a 2019 report entitled "Selling not watches, but children's social networking": Some parents said, "If you don't buy it, you can't enter the post-10 class group..." Most of the students in the class wear phone watches, half of whom are little geniuses.
And there may be nothing more lost than being isolated by most of the people around you, so based on the need to integrate into the unified circle group, you eventually have to use a little genius.
This also creates a good basis for hardware to sell high prices.
From Apple's business model, it can be known that a closed ecosystem is often the best model for harvesting profits, especially when people have extremely high stickiness to the hardware and software of a closed system, and the high premium and high profit of hardware often follow.
Its imagination space lies in the fact that in the future, it can combine social networking and build a value-added service system exclusive to children through revenue models such as membership, super VIP, point system, and paid content.
From the hardware level, the small genius model is divided into Y, Q, Z three series, in the past, the low price is roughly two or three hundred, the current search e-commerce platform pricing can be found, the current relatively high-end Z series pricing in 2200 ~ 2300 yuan.
Under this pricing, even if it sinks into the stores in third-tier cities, merchants can still make profits, which also helps it build a wider network of offline dealers.
The gamification of children's watches is a hidden worry
This closed circle social model of the little genius has created huge profits for it and has gradually established market dominance. But that doesn't mean its future is one to sit back and relax.
In the author's opinion, whether the little genius can balance the policy trend and the important direction of future regulatory risks needs to be considered. Little genius phone watches can't play games – this is the little genius's past propaganda strategy, which caters to the policy trend.
But we know that the creator of the little genius is Duan Yongping, Duan Yongping once created Xiaobawang and Backgammon, these two products are impressive in the minds of the post-80s and 90s, and their product promotion strategies are the main learning.
But we know that these products once had a history of playing games with the help of learning machines in their childhood after the 80s and 90s. Backgammon has a spelling quiz game, XiaoBawang was originally a game console, it imitated Nintendo's red and white machine, but with the help of learning in the name of adding a keyboard to become a "learning machine".
For many children at that time, in the name of learning, parents were pestered to buy Xiaobawang, more for the purpose of stealing the game function.
Nowadays, some players have also found that the little genius also has its own "hidden game", you can enter a text mini-game similar to raising pets and fighting through the voice assistant, although it still carries the learning attribute. In Baidu, we know that there are also users who reply to the download path and operation of the hidden game into the little genius.
In fact, today's point of view, we found that children's watches equipped with intelligent systems, many apps that can already support music apps, pet cultivation games and learning apps are also getting closer and closer to casual games, such as idioms elimination, word fun bucket, etc. Some insiders pointed out that in addition to the "Glory of kings" game that parents strictly guard against, the watch can do almost anything.
The function of the watch is becoming more and more gamified, and the children like it more and more, but the disgust of parents is gradually surfacing. Today's educational environment is different from what it used to be.
In order to prevent minors from indulging in online games, the domestic anti-addiction game supervision policy for minors has become more and more stringent, and manufacturers still have risks in using learning games to play the edge ball in order to attract children's interest in their own products.
Whether children's watches will eventually deviate on the road of play, whether they can take into account the future policy trends and regulatory risks, may be worth thinking about by major manufacturers, including small geniuses.
Will closed hardware socialization deviate from the road of conspicuous consumption?
We know that when social exists as an open software product, it cannot create a sense of group superiority.
For example, WeChat Weibo, it is just a platform or tool, everyone can download and own it for free, so it can not produce conspicuous consumption, but when the value of social networking bundle hardware products sold together, it has another attribute - social conspicuous value.
The essence of the little genius phone watch is to create a closed children's social circle, and have exclusivity, and then through the introduction of new product iteration, and more expensive and more dazzling new products are often better in value, function, material, naturally more attractive to children, and therefore easy to create a hidden sense of social show off in the student group.
"Conspicuous consumption" was proposed by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book The Theory of The Idle Class—that is, people use material wealth as a measure of social status and identity, and by purchasing corresponding products to highlight their (ideal or actual) social status and identity.
In a sense, the little genius phone watch touches the action of making friends, which implies the attributes of product display, due to the low, medium and high hardware pricing of different watch products, different positioning and natural products have created a chain of product contempt in the circle - because better hardware products are naturally more likely to attract the attention of others around, produce hidden show-off value and sense of identity, and promote others to upgrade.
In the past, Southern Weekend's report also pointed out: "Parents are not unaware of the cost of children's watches, but they do not want to buy cheap products and lose their children's face." The little genius just happened to capture this consumer psychology, and the Z series products, which are mainly multi-functional, sell better than the Y series with basic call functions. ”
When other students use the latest and most expensive little genius, others will undoubtedly start to let their parents buy the most expensive and newest one. From the current point of view, this tendency undoubtedly divides the chain of contempt within the same hardware circle.
That is to say, once the value of this children's watch as a social currency in the circle exists, the little genius can continue to harvest the wallet of parents by continuously improving the price and constantly iterating hardware.
Earlier, the Shenzhen Intelligent Wear Industry Federation launched the "China Children's Smart Watch Quality Friends Alliance", hoping to open up the dating problem between different children's watch brands through cooperation between different brands.
The opening between different brands is actually conducive to breaking the chain of contempt in the social circle formed in childhood, breaking the inherent prejudice of people in groups, and guiding children to form healthy social habits.
The essence of closed circle layer socialization is to form a closed and exclusive group consensus at the level of children's wear, and through the continuous iteration of hardware, parents are indirectly allowed to pay for this kind of conspicuous consumption wrapped in children's groups.
In today's policy of double reduction and encouragement of the second child, those educational products that are not conducive to loosening and reducing the burden of parents in the manufacture of inner volumes, the social model of children's conspicuous consumption, and the untiement and burden reduction of parents are often easy to touch the future regulatory red line, which is the risk of the future expansion of small geniuses, the manufacture of closed social circles and the continuous upgrading of iterative hardware to make parents pay.
Circle social products are easy to become circles, and defeat circles
In The Circle Effect, the author finds from interacting and interacting with young people that today's children are more group than ever before, that community is their conscious inner choice, and perhaps the most important identity criterion for millennials, that community gives them a sense of belonging, purpose, meaning, and acceptance, that they are particularly supportive of the community they decide to belong to, and that they prefer to make their own decisions rather than impose them on them.
In essence, the play of the little genius children's telephone watch is actually corresponding to the current millennial circle layer group behavior characteristics, its software and hardware integration closed social model is a circle social model, the little genius in the future in the social imagination space is very large.
But the challenge is whether it can maintain the stability of the circle, drive the upgrading and migration of the social circle, and bring the brand impression and social chain established by the child in the childhood to adulthood. But this is the hardest.
Some people may think that the products they used in childhood will make them have special feelings for these products in adulthood, and they will rely on the brand, this possibility will exist, but another possibility also exists -
In fact, we can know from the past childhood experience of the 80s and 90s that in childhood, they liked the red and white game consoles, small overlords, and electronic game halls, and they also loved BB machines, functional machines and other communication hardware in their adolescence, and also used social products such as Renren.
In adulthood, recalling these products, people will have nostalgia, but these products are more of a phased product, and there is no childhood software and hardware product that will accompany the life of the 80s and 90s.
With the change of the times and the increase of people's age, software and hardware products with circle attributes are more likely to be replaced by new trend products.
The typical software product of circle social networking is Renren. Before 2010, Renren was an essential social product for many high school and college student groups, and many campus activities, campus gossip, and dating have all occurred on Renren.
However, with that generation of students entering the workplace, the era of mobile Internet arrived, WeChat turned out to be a world, and the generalized acquaintance social network became the mainstream, and the original campus circle social network of Renren network no longer existed, and Renren network also declined rapidly.
From another point of view, as a circle social product, the success and limitation of the little genius children's watch lie in its circle closure, which is often easy to become a circle and lose the circle.
The core of circle social networking is to generate social monetary value in a circle layer, when with the growth of users, the circle changes, its closed model is often no longer effective, because the user no longer belongs to the original circle.
The social value of children's watches is that it is more in the primary school group in a small circle of classmates and students in the same school, from primary school to junior high school, to high school, to college, to the workplace, they are constantly growing, and the circle of friends is constantly changing.
Children's watches as a product in the special period of children, as their school age grows, there will be multiple new social circles, at this time, the product no longer has the value of the circle, because their circle has changed.
Especially after entering the workplace, they will also usher in universal social products, this universal social software products, the current is WeChat, DingTalk, Weibo and other products, of course, the future may appear emerging social products and workplace office products, but the probability will not be the one they used in childhood.