Recently, a post-00s colleague who just graduated from college in the company bought his first new car, the Genises G70. When he said his choice, almost everyone present could not understand that such a niche model could really be bought by anyone.
On the brand, The popularity of Genises in China is not high; on the product force, the G70 is almost the smallest size of the luxury medium-sized car; on the price, the landing of 300,000 yuan actually has a lot of cars to pick.
However, if you change the perspective, in the price of less than 300,000 yuan, the GeniseyS G70 has a rear drive, Brembo braking system, electronically controlled suspension, mechanical limited slip differential, and a 245 hp 2.0T engine. For a young post-00s who has just entered society and loves cars and driving, this is the only thing that decides to pay for it.
It is not that the world of young people cannot understand, but that the concept of consumption is rapidly iterating. The old world is still there, but the new world has arrived. The shaping of a brand cannot be the same as 20 years ago, when it is difficult to have a new all-you-can-eat brand like Volkswagen and Toyota today, how should those joint venture brands that have a little shrinking share space survive?
In addition to the top five, how much space is there for joint venture brands?
In 2021, the market share of new cars of joint venture brands will decrease from 50.2% in 2020 to 43.7%, and the lowest market share in a single month will be only 40.8%, and the lost market share will almost all be eaten by independent brands.
If you look at the market segment, the share of the joint venture brand in the mainstream family car market with the most advantage in the past, mainly the compact/medium-sized sedan/SUV market, has declined, and in the medium and large sedan/SUV market with larger size and higher price point, the joint venture brand has no breakthrough trend.
However, within the joint venture brand, the proportion of the five joint venture brands of Volkswagen, Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Buick has exceeded 80%, and none of the remaining joint venture brands has a market share of more than 2%, and even since Mazda ranked 9th, there has been no joint venture brand share of more than 1%.
In other words, the vast majority of joint venture brands have become de facto "niche" brands.
The breakthrough of niche brands is nothing more than two paths:
The first is to expand the product line and scale, from a "niche" brand to a "mass" brand that covers more people.
Second, accept the reality of a niche, but focus on value, explore the potential of the long-tail market while reducing operating costs, and ensure sufficient profitability.
Among them, the first path is basically blocked. In a fully competitive mature market, starting from scratch (or even "starting from negative") to be a large and complete brand is not only costly and inefficient, but also easy to walk into a dead end without personality, lack of labels, and lack of memory points, which is no longer the mainstream route today. That is to say, it is unlikely that another Volkswagen or Toyota will be born today.
So, there is only a second path left.
Mature, conservative consumer groups are not the target of niche brands, niche brands need to use strong personality to find new groups, rely on innovation, rely on radicalism, rely on paranoia to find market gaps, in order to survive.
What should niche brands do?
Here is a question to ask you: which non-luxury joint venture brand has the highest average price of bicycles?
The answer is Ford. In 2021, the average price of Ford's bicycles was 182,000 yuan, an increase of 13,100 yuan compared with 2020, and it is also the only mainstream joint venture brand that is higher than the average price of bicycles in the Chinese auto market.
In fact, if you have a little understanding of the current situation of Ford dealers, it is not difficult to find that the profitability of Ford dealers is even better than many joint venture brand dealers who are several times the size of their own. Although Ford's sales of 625,000 vehicles in 2021 seem to have halved compared to 1.2 million sales at the peak in China, After smoothing out the internal system and accepting the status quo, Ford has embarked on a cost-saving and efficiency-enhancing value path in China.
Even, if Ford had been bolder, brought Bronco into the agenda ahead of schedule, and given a reasonable price, perhaps the current popularity of the Tank 300 would have appeared in Ford.
Brands that also want to do this, there's Jeep. This is a highly sentimental brand, so after a sharp decline in volume, the best way is to play the sentiment card to the extreme. Including but not limited to drastically reducing the product line, retaining only icon models, closing unnecessary production lines, and customizing classic cars such as limited editions, special editions, and co-branded editions. There is only one purpose, not to seek great and complete, only to serve this group of people with feelings, so that more people with feelings can enter Jeep's circle.
If you look at some more brands, Mazda has a reputation for styling and chassis tuning, Chevrolet has high performance and strong genes, when the market share hovers around 1%, what needs to be done is to play the brand characteristics to the extreme, so that the 1% of users get a strong sense of satisfaction.
And the same is true for popular brands. For example, Toyota, on the one hand, launched the GR brand to strengthen the track sports label, on the other hand, there are also rumors to import the crown and resume prado production. For example, Honda, Civic Type-R's CKD domestic production has even entered the substantive promotion stage.
These "niche cars" that have been cut down and abandoned on the grounds of fuel consumption, emissions, costs, etc., are regarded as important pawns by foreign brands in today's era, and in fact, they are also a new recognition of the iteration of the concept of consumption in the Chinese market.
Back to the beginning of the story, the reason why our post-00 colleague chose the Genises G70 is precisely because of its "small"? If the GeniseyS G70 also had a body extension process in China like the BBA, would it still be attractive? The group of mainstream consumers who boldly abandon the BBA for all-round home use, and the new generation of people who specialize in driving control and love technology, are precisely the survival of the Genissy G70.
Write at the end
China is not only the world's largest and most dynamic auto market, but also proved to be much higher than the rest of the world after the epidemic and its market prospects, which will make foreign car companies rely more on the Chinese market. Although the reduction in the number of joint venture brands is a major trend, in addition to a few large-scale brands, the size and distance of the Chinese market will still leave opportunities for small-scale brands, and allow enough focus on small and beautiful existence.
The personalization pursued by the new generation of consumers will be further released with the development of society and economy. Those born in the era of rapid GDP growth after 95 and 00, they will not want to see the same model, nor will they want to see a clear water barrel model. Therefore, accepting the reality calmly and then exerting the brand personality to the extreme is the only hope for the joint venture brands that are turning from the public to the niche to survive in adversity.