· This is the 4349th original debut article with a word count of 5k+ ·
· Su Qingxian | Wen Follow Qin Shuo Circle of Friends ID: qspyq2015·
"From Chance to Necessity"
One day at the end of 2015, Haiyi E-commerce (the predecessor of Anker Innovation), which has only been established for more than four years, received an invitation letter from Amazon, inviting the company's founder Yang Meng and the core founding team to go to Shanghai to attend a meeting of employees in China convened by Amazon's global business leader.
This rather unexpected invitation made Yang Meng and the head of marketing Zhang Shanfeng a little "flattered". At that time, their cross-border e-commerce business based on Amazon's platform had just improved significantly, and they did not expect to enter the vision of Amazon's top management.
Amazon's managers found from data such as product star ratings, repurchase rates, and user reputation that Anker (Anker Innovation's brand) is not simple. They wondered: Why did Anker do so many categories and be so popular?
The image of Made in China, which used to be labeled "imitation" and "branding", was completely subverted by Anker innovators who were committed to making "good products".
From a few people at the beginning of 2011 to more than 3,000 people today, Anker Innovation has developed from the earliest single-category product research and development to a multi-brand, multi-category series product matrix.
Yang Meng frankly said: In the past, the success of Anker Innovation was because he did the right thing at the right time, and some of the right people met together by chance. But when we go to new categories in the future, how can we ensure that we can "accidentally succeed" every time? Huawei is not very successful in every category, but the overall success rate is very high, which needs to be supported by a highly innovative organization.
Yang Meng said that today he and the company are facing a complex stage of organizational innovation. "From chance to necessity" is a phrase often said within the company.
Starting in 2019, YangMeng will put more energy and wisdom into organizational change, hoping to build an organization with a high success rate.
Zhu Xiaobin, co-founder and CEO of Lingjiao Business Academy, described the organizational development of Anker Innovation at this stage as a "thrilling leap". He said that in the face of this critical stage, many companies cannot jump over, and even if some jump over, they will find that they will fall into a mediocre bureaucratic organizational form.
Zhu Xiaobin described the transformation of entrepreneurs as "turning over mountains". He believes that in order to truly grow into a world-class enterprise, the company leader should lead the team to cross the "three mountains" of economic value, organizational value and social value. Crossing the three mountains is the process of entrepreneurs constantly ascending.
In an in-depth interview with Anker innovators such as Yang Meng and Zhang Shanfeng, we tried to outline the story of a head cross-border e-commerce company from one "mountain" to another.
The "key leap" from product to brand
Yang Meng is a native of Changsha, Hunan, with the diligence, tenacity and fierceness of Hunan people. In 2011, because of the experience of replacing the battery of a personal computer once but not being able to buy the right product, he had the idea of building a good product himself.
"I sincerely want to show something that lasts and is beautiful in front of the world, not something that I bought for a dollar and will break down after three months." That year, he decisively resigned from his position at Google's headquarters and returned to Changsha to register Hunan Haiyi E-commerce Co., Ltd., while registering his first brand, Anker in California.
Yang Meng has been overseas for many years, understands the consumption habits and preferences of Europeans and Americans, and if the design is distinctive, the consumer experience is leading, and the price is moderate, it will be very popular.
As a super product enthusiast, Yang Meng has an essential difference from the general grassroots cross-border seller, and he has an inseparable belief and feelings for technology and research and development. He identified one point: as long as the technology is made and the good product is made, it is not worried about its commercial value.
After returning to China, Yang Meng found that smartphones with different systems have their own chargers and cannot be used universally. So he and his team spent more than a year "tinkering" with a universal chip that automatically recognized smartphones with different systems. Functional innovation, combined with a beautiful design, made The Anchor charger quickly become popular on Amazon.
In 2012, the company just gained a foothold, Yang Meng and the founding team opened a research and development office in Shenzhen, and by 2014, after paying a lot of tuition fees and "stepping on the pit" experience, they began to have independent research and development capabilities.
At the time, their most critical job was consumer insights.
From the beginning of the establishment of the enterprise, they collected a large amount of user feedback obtained in the sales process, put it in a table, and then labeled all the user feedback into categories to see which feedback was more concentrated, and then focused on solving. Almost every year, Anker Innovations generates millions of customer calls and emails.
Today, user feedback is no longer an EXCEL form, but a powerful system that captures, translates, automatically marks, and provides a lot of data.
Zhang Shanfeng recalled his early entrepreneurial journey: "We have a word called VOC, Voice of Customer, product development lifecycle management based on user voice. This is a "key move" to help Anker Innovation stand out from thousands of cross-border e-commerce groups.
Zhang Shanfeng, the same age as Yang Meng, worked at Google and is currently responsible for Anker Innovation's global sales and branding.
"We were on a system that focused on a lot of customer reviews on Amazon, not only ours, but also competitors," he says. Amazon's ecosystem has its own logic, and better products will have better ratings and higher star ratings, so brand sellers will have the motivation to continuously optimize products. Many of our products, users have given tens of thousands of reviews, or even hundreds of thousands of reviews, some reviews are still thousands of words, you can imagine how great a value this is. And sometimes these reviews are real time, real-time, which means that users buy them today and you get reviews tomorrow. This is unthinkable in the traditional era of trade. ”
With such a system, teams can see not only their own products, but also competitors — what they call "perspective industries" — and for free.
Zhang Shanfeng said that VOC is not only a system, it has a set of operating mechanisms and organizational systems to support, there are systems, organizations, people, methodologies, decisions, processes. VOCs are the most important starting point for Ankers innovation.
"It greatly reduces the impact of the product manager's personal subjective decision-making, but more allows consumers to choose all the way, to choose all the way, and we even have to look at the VOC when the product is delisted." Sometimes there will be internal debates about some product details, such as whether a product is red or blue, in fact, there is no need to argue, the data is taken out to see, the consumers of the previous generation of products have been selected in the reviews. Therefore, in many specific scenarios, it increases the probability of making the right decision because it is consumer-oriented. Zhang Shanfeng said.
VOCs may seem simple, but they need to be closely coordinated based on the design of the external environment, the platform, and the entire organization.
The "transmutation" from innovative thinking to organizational thinking
There is a popular saying that "there is no innovation in a big company."
In the past few years of the rise of the mobile Internet, we have seen the story of small companies subverting innovation, and mediocre large companies have declined all the way.
This may be a common conundrum, where as a business grows larger, its ability to respond to changes in external circumstances or new business models is often weakened.
When Anker's innovative organization grew to more than 3,000 people, the company's management found that it was in a similar situation when faced with new opportunities and challenges.
How can we drive continuous innovation? How can we avoid the failure of successful companies in a single category such as Go-Pro, Arlo, and iRobot to continue to innovate? This is a question that Yang Meng has been thinking deeply about for the past two years.
He is very crisis-conscious and a leader who is good at knowledge innovation. After absorbing a lot of knowledge through reading, he will innovatively propose his own ideas and action paths.
For example, the "shallow sea theory".
He compared the many categories of consumer electronics to different areas in the ocean, and how big the area is, how big the category is. The largest category is smartphones, equivalent to the Mariana Trench, with a market of about $500 billion; computer PCs, which have a market of $200-300 billion; televisions, a market of about $100 billion; tablets, a market of $70-80 billion; and further down, traditional Bluetooth headsets may be less than $50 billion.
Conversely, the vast majority of the ocean is made up of shallow seas, and there are hundreds or thousands of very small categories, such as mobile power, sweeping robots, USB connectors, and so on.
"When we want to innovate, do we choose trenches or shallow seas?" Yang Meng said that Anker's strategic choice is shallow sea, that is, it continues to be successful in many sub-categories.
Zhang Shanfeng said that in the past, the success of Anker's innovation may have relied more on the talent, love and single explosive products of engineers, but now it has to slowly turn into a more organized form. In other words, it is to improve the ability of organizational innovation and system integration.
Yang Meng believes that in order to become a sustainable winning company in the consumer electronics industry, it is necessary to make the method process, ability platform and organizational openness through organizational innovation, and turn the company into a platform suitable for overseas hardware entrepreneurs through empowerment.
In the past year or two, Yangmeng has spent a lot of time visiting and learning, and the company that has learned the most is Huawei.
But he is not a Handan toddler, nor is he copying it all, but a tailor-made reference.
With the help of the three-pillar model of human resources, Yangmeng has split the functions of the department into three different parts: BP business partners face the business, follow the business, and help the business solve problems; the COE expert center, behind which is a small team of experts, is responsible for solving difficult and complicated diseases and empowering business representatives; the SSC shared service center, which extracts some daily trivialities and puts them into a special team to run.
However, where there is change, there will be pains and costs. For example, Huawei's IPD (Integrated Product Development), which is a typical system that will reduce efficiency and increase costs, but the probability of successful decision-making will increase. This is actually a change of "exchanging efficiency for higher probability".
Yang Meng said: "When we are on the IPD, we also talk to many companies, and the most heard is that if we go to the IPD, either the company dies, or the IPD dies, anyway, one of the two will die." But in fact, after we carefully dismantled its underlying principles, we think this should not be the case. If you just do this metaphysically, the probability of failure is very high, but if you can grasp the essence of its essence like Ding Ding, and then push it in layer by layer, and talk about rhythm and method, I think there is still a chance to succeed. ”
Change is really a bit like a cattle solution. Yang Meng's experience is that to do organizational innovation, we must take the best people up, and we must experience it firsthand. To let the core team figure out the essence of the change, to judge and grasp it by themselves, this process can be consulted, to consult, but in essence, thinking and decision-making depends on a "Cu Ding".
Yang Meng's organizational vision for Anker Innovation is called "live long, live well, live happily". If money brings more happiness, he said, it does in the short term, but that happiness won't last.
In the conference room of Anker Innovation, a picture of Yang Shen's "Linjiang Immortals Rolling Yangtze River East Passing Water" was hung: success or failure turned to the air, and a pot of turbid wine met happily.
Yang Meng said: "To a certain extent, no matter how brilliant your career is, there will always be 'success or failure and turn the head' in the future, for me, seeing some people continue to grow is the most valuable." ”
From the United States back to China, the "walking" path of the natural global enterprise
From the day of its birth, Anker Innovation has been a typical natural global enterprise.
Since becoming Amazon Best Seller in the summer of 2012, Anker Innovation has relied on the expansion of Amazon, a mainstream online platform in Europe and the United States, to enter the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Canada in North America, and then into Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia and other countries and regions.
The Japanese market is a bit different, and the peculiarity is that if you want to open a store on Amazon in Japan, you must have a company registered in Japan. So while Anker Innovation was still studying whether to enter Japan, Yoshinori Ido, a Japanese who had worked in an investment bank, was also looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. He was very interested in the consumer electronics industry, so he went to the American website to check, found that Anker's things were selling very hot, so he sent an email to Anker to seek cooperation opportunities in Japan.
In 2012, he joined Anker Innovations and registered a company in Japan with the help of the company, forming a local team, and contributing to The success of Anker Innovation in successfully occupying two mainstream Japanese e-commerce channels in Japan, Amazon and Lotte, as well as success in the offline market.
By the end of 2014, the globalization of Anker Innovation had encountered another important opportunity. At the beginning, some people took the initiative to send emails asking if they could be an agent of Anchor Innovation in the Middle East and other regions. In 2015, Anker Innovation began to try to expand the offline market.
In 2016, Anker Innovation once again ushered in a major breakthrough. In October of that year, Anker's innovative products successfully entered Wal-Mart's more than 3,000 stores in the United States after undergoing layers of quality audits. Wal-Mart's entry threshold is very high, and serving Walmart has put forward new requirements and challenges for Anker, and has also promoted the upgrading of Anker's offline business capabilities and organization.
Walmart's major breakthrough has greatly increased the confidence of Anker Innovation's management, and they have formed an RSO (Regional Sales and Operations) team since 2016, focusing on regional sales expansion. In the United States, in addition to Walmart, Anker Innovation has also successfully entered the top offline retail networks such as Target, Costco, and Best Buy.
Not only in the United States, but also in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and basically all the offline retail systems of developed countries, Anker's innovative products can be seen.
In the Middle East, where the urban retail system is not developed, Anker innovates according to local conditions and adopts the method of recruiting local strength agents, such as in Dubai and Kuwait, often in the most C-bit shopping malls, you will see an Anchor flagship store, which is opened by the agents themselves.
In the past decade, Anker Innovation has blossomed in the global market on all sides, thanks to good products and continuous brand building, and also benefited from the overseas market management system similar to Huawei's "national representative".
Take Japan, for example. As the "national representative" of Anker Innovation in Japan at that time, Yoshikei Ino was both an employee of Anker Innovation and enjoyed some dividend policies, and all he needed to do was to form a sales team and marketing team in the local area, while the Chinese headquarters was more like a supplier, mainly providing product and online operation methodology support.
Product support also includes customization. According to the feedback from the Japanese front-end market, such as Japanese consumers' preferences for color and packaging, special customization. Unlike Europeans and Americans who like black, Japanese consumers like white, so white products in the Japanese market sell best. In addition, Japan's offline consumption channels are also very developed, especially convenience store culture, so when purchasing products in such a scenario, the packaging of the products should be more transparent, so customization is needed.
Now, Anker Innovation is beginning to experiment with the creation of "national representatives" in each market country. In a larger market like the United States, there are both online and offline businesses, and in order to avoid conflicts between teams, one person is needed to be responsible for the landing of the entire set of products in the United States. This person must have a sense of operation and a global mindset.
The underlying logic of Anker's globalization
As a naturally global enterprise, Anker's expansion path seems to be a natural success, but in fact, it is still supported by its strong underlying logic.
First of all, Yang Meng realized very early that the essence of his business must be the product experience to the extreme, so Anker is very heavy on research and development, today the company's nearly 3700-person team, more than 40% are R & D personnel, in 2020 R & D investment of more than 500 million yuan.
Secondly, Anker management really values localization and respects the local market. On the one hand, they respect consumers and really sink into understanding consumer habits. It is not easy to truly "meet the needs of users" because it may make the price too high for others to accept. On the other hand, they respect the rules of the platform, neither to brush praise, nor to deceive the algorithm, nor to buy traffic. Previously, they also put the responsibility of maintaining product star ratings on the product manager, so that the product can fully consider the user experience at the beginning of the design; but recently it has been upgraded, because they found that when the product manager carries the star rating, they dare not let go of their hands and feet to innovate, and the really large-scale innovation of the product, the first generation of the experience will not be good in most cases.
Along with the global market attack, Anker has also turned its attention to China in recent years.
Anker's management told us that they had been entering China's home market since 2015, thinking that they would be as invincible as they were in foreign markets, and after a year of hard work, they found that sales were not as good as selling on Amazon with their eyes closed and "lying flat" for two weeks.
One reason is that Anker has become the top third-party brand on Amazon, and its position is unassailable; another reason is that the Chinese market is a fully competitive market, and the price of many product categories is very low. In 2015, a 10,000 mAh charging treasure, the standard price recognized by consumers, is the 59 yuan package price of some domestic brands, but Anker was promoting a 10,000 mAh charging treasure in the Chinese market at that time, which was sold to 149 yuan.
Zhang Shanfeng described the difficulty of the Chinese market as follows: "If we had started a business in the Chinese market at the beginning, it is estimated that we would have returned to work in large companies at this time." Because consumer electronics is too hard in China."
He said that Anker's innovative development to today's scale, one is to stain the light of the global market; the other is to really do a good job in the global market, you must become a global enterprise.
"What is a global enterprise? To give you an example: Google bosses don't have their own offices. In Anker's Shenzhen office, Zhang Shanfeng and Yang Meng, as well as another founding partner, Zhao Dongping, also don't have their own offices and have been sitting side by side in open workstations for years.
From openness to transparency, coupled with a degree of equality, this is the foundation on which a global business can be founded. "Without that, it's hard to really go very far on the path of globalization."
However, both Yang Meng and Zhang Shanfeng have expectations for a new generation of young entrepreneurs. "I believe that more and more Chinese companies will be like us, who can open up a world in the global market," Yang Meng said.
" Picture | Visual China"
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