Many years ago, my mother-in-law who was in the seedling business in Guizhou wanted to buy a van to pull goods, and the choice was Wuling. She went back to Chengdu and described the car she bought as "red diamond-shaped, a bit like a wing", the price is not the cheapest, but when it comes to buying, "they say, it's better to be more expensive."
The car was called Wuling Hongguang, and at its most exaggerated, it sold more than 80,000 units a month, and was later called "the most important car on earth" by Forbes.
Probably many years ago, no one would have imagined that the tail tag of Wuling Hongguang would be pasted on a Lamborghini car, because it could be loaded with goods and gallop on a country road that was not spacious, and it could also proudly pass by one trembling urban luxury off-road vehicle after another through the rugged mountain roads that made those hard-hitting off-road vehicles daunted, and leave them behind the dirt road, so it was crowned "China's generation of god cars".
When a brand exceeds the boundaries of its own culture and is interpreted by word of mouth into a new image, this kind of "crossing the line" or "breaking the circle" is better in China than Wuling.
Another story comes from my friend, a 45-year-old female BMW owner. One afternoon at tea she told me she wanted to buy an electric car. "Wuling's MINI electric car", the reason is that one day she was shopping in chengdu commercial universe center IFS, and saw the Wuling Hongguang MINIEV exhibition. In fact, she didn't know anything about the car, just fell in love with the appearance.
"I want to buy that pink, you said the interior skimmer I can pay to get it, when will the convertible come out?"
In the end, I found that when the god car was electrified, its label had overshadowed the positioning of "cheap" that existed on the fuel car body. Therefore, the hot sales of Wuling Hongguang MINIEV have become inevitable. So much so that people in Wuling "can't remember that it has been the number one in the sales list for several consecutive months."
Back to the serious news itself. On February 22, SAIC-GM-Wuling held the 2022 Wuling brand conference in Shanghai. My mother-in-law's description of the Wuling brand (logo) many years ago became a reality-
It really turned into two wings. It just turns the metallic red we know as the current "flat" sense of technology into the white of the current "flat" sense of technology.
Wuling will open the two wings, respectively, to give the meaning of "user wings" and "technology wings", this brand strategy is called "China Wuling, two wings fly together".
This overall idea is not much different from any car company I have ever seen, whether it is a new force or a traditional giant, the brand strategy in recent years has also focused on the two major blocks of "user" and "technology". The user is the core, and the technology revolves around electrification, intelligence and automation, which determine the cornerstone of the brand's future development.
However, Wuling made the whole strategy more concrete, did not go around the bend, did not pretend to be profound, and was easy to understand. This level requires a lot of brand learning.
In the new context of the moment, you will find that when a brand that sells cheap cars comes to talk about users, its advantages are too great: because it has enough users. If you don't have a concept, you can guess a question: Wuling only built an online one-stop social e-commerce platform LING Club in April 2021, what is the number of users so far?
The answer is 14.5 million.
Compared with this data, it can be said that all the brands here that say that they have a large number of users are brothers.
In the era of fuel vehicles, cheap cars are more of a hammer deal, and the big brothers who buy cars even repair their own cars, not too strong user stickiness. But when the industry iterates into the era of intelligent networking + electric vehicles, cheap is only relative to the price, but based on the networked online user experience,
You really can't say that a cheap car means a cheap experience.
When the brand's big net for users is rolled out online, this imagination space is too large. Based on the huge user base of 14.5 million and continuing to grow, Wuling's biggest problem is actually how to do a good job in user operation. Therefore, in the same period of last year's release of THE LING Club, Wuling also released the offline brand center LING HOUSE.
Don't ask what is the difference between LING HOUSE and other brand centers, I can honestly answer that you are no different in the core, they are all offline contact points and gathering places for users, to achieve close communication with users from online to offline, and enhance user experience and stickiness.
At present, there is still one of the biggest differences. That is, in addition to opening in the commercial centers with large traffic in major cities, Wuling announced the cooperation with the Xuedu Chongli Cuiyun Mountain User Base this time, landing the first brand "Ling Sense Base", and in Chongli, it will also land a LING HOUSE - that is to say, open THE LING HOUSE in a tourist landmark.
On the one hand, riding the wave of ice and snow sports in China; on the other hand, making a LING HOUSE directly in the destination of the user experience is far more realistic than the concept of pursuing so-called luxury art, very practical style of Wuling, and the idea is so clear that it is hair-raising.
Wuling thinks too clearly about the offline experience, that is, don't make those virtual. At the press conference, it was announced that the third season of "The Journey of Longing" was officially launched. As a variety ip derived from the "big four-seater family car" Wuling Capgemini, "The Journey of Longing" will extend from the star chapter to the user article, to put it simply: this season of "The Journey of Longing" is that the user takes his relatives and friends to drive the Wuling Capgemini to Chongli to play with the snow.
In order to enhance the actual user experience for the "user wing", technical support becomes very important. Wuling mainly mentioned two points at the press conference: Ling OS, an intelligent open ecosystem independently developed by Wuling, and Wuling's upcoming launch of a new smart power brand "Ling POWER".
"Ling POWER" is a close to Wuling's sale, and it was not mentioned too much at the press conference. Ling OS is already installed in many Models of Wuling. According to Wuling, after the new generation of Ling OS has been upgraded by OTA, speech recognition takes only 0.8 seconds, reaching the fastest level in the industry; the wake-up time of the Ling OS system is only 0.6 seconds; gps cold start positioning, speeding up to 7 seconds; system boot speed optimization to 28 seconds - these numbers directly related to the user experience are at the forefront of the industry.
Driver's Summary:
George Maxie and Aubrey Silburstone of England famously proposed a curve in relation to the production of automobiles and the cost per unit product in the book Automotive Industry:
"In the initial stage of production scale expansion, manufacturers have achieved the most savings, and when the annual production increases from 1,000 to 50,000 vehicles, the cost is expected to fall by 40%. When annual production doubled to 100,000 units, costs fell by 15 percent. Doubling production to 200,000 units could result in further savings of 10 percent. When it jumped to 400,000 vehicles, it saved another 5%. ”
Economically, we can easily prove the huge value of cheap products in the level of corporate profitability, but in marketing, cheap means that the brand premium is not high, it is easy to fall into the vortex of thin profits, it can be said that the hot sales of cheap products and the paradox of brand value in the era of fuel vehicles, has been around Wuling.
In 2021, SAIC-GM-Wuling sold a total of 1.76 million vehicles, ranking first in sales of national brand single car companies for 17 consecutive years. Among them, in addition to the Wuling Hongguang MINIEV, which "counts how many consecutive months of sales are the first", the "big four-seat family car" Wuling Capgemini ranks first in the sales volume of MPV of the same level in the fuel vehicle sequence, and Wuling Xingchen has achieved the first annual sales of SUVs within 100,000 yuan.
"Annual sales within 100,000 yuan are the first", the scale benefit is still not to be underestimated, but under the new era of electric intelligence, more than 25.5 million global Wuling users have become the most valuable intangible assets of Wuling.
The online and offline user experience channels are gradually being opened, and when cheap products have a not cheap experience, the imagination space provided by Wuling to people has begun to become boundless. This is not only for Wuling, but also for the whole of China,the experience of goods is beyond the value of purchase and use itself, the relationship between people and things is reconstructed, and Chinese-made cars and electrical appliances, and even a cup of milk tea or coffee, are rebuilding a new evaluation system.
Does having a lot of people mean great power? When we're in the right direction, it is.
From the perspective of a sober enterprise, Wuling, China, which shouts "what the people need to make Wuling", focuses on providing cheap products and value-added user experience, is telling a story of a global brand that young people are proud of. Look at the Winter Olympics, Chinese household appliances and Chinese mobile phones, and the entire Chinese automotive industry.
You can always trust China, as well as Wuling.
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