Written by / Windsor
Editor/ Zhang Nan
Design / Shi Yuchao
The whole car film is 2500 yuan, the wheel changing hub is 400 yuan, the starry sky top is 1600 yuan, the retro steering wheel is 450 yuan, the instrument color change is 1300 yuan, and the interior color change is 1800 yuan... A sharing of Wuling Hongguang MINIEV's whole car color change + starry sky lamp overhaul, the number of likes on the Little Red Book reached 33,000.
According to incomplete statistics, in 2021, the number of posts with the theme of Hongguang MINIEV tide reached more than 6,000 on the Little Red Book.
People look forward to having a unique car of their own, and in a world where everything can be DIY, the universal Taobao has helped people realize this dream.
Doraemon car stickers, macaron-colored dashboard anti-slip mats, front and rear anti-collision beams, rain and shine baffles... Search for "Wuling Hongguang MINIEV" on Taobao, only you can't think of it, and you can't buy it without it.
Parallel to the folk DIY is the official customization. Tank Cyberpunk Edition, Dongfeng Fengshen Yixuan MAX Dark Night Sharp Edition, Lynk & Co 06 Xiqi E-sports Customized Edition... It's 2022, and when Chinese brands launch new cars, if they don't have a striking suffix, it almost proves that you're out.
About a hundred years ago, Ford announced, "You can want any color car, I only have black." "Ford invented the world's first mass production car assembly line, popularizing the car to thousands of households, but today, the same car shape can no longer meet the needs of young consumers, customization and modification has become one of the important ways to promote personality and create a more comfortable car environment."
This trend has intensified from the previous two years, and today it has become a climate.
"2021 is the first year of the tide reform, and in the future, it will be called no makeup and no street, no car on the street." Sun Xuechen, founder and CEO of Zhongchuang Premium Automobile Technology (Jiangsu) Co., Ltd., described the image in an interview with automotive business reviews, "Now buying a car is like buying a rough house, and everyone is finely decorated according to their own preferences. ”
Traditional and modern modifications
Modification and customization in the traditional sense are usually divided into three major types, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.
First, for the traditional individual single modification shop, the development to a certain scale will become a modification chain store, customer acquisition mainly rely on the gradual accumulation of word of mouth and relatively fixed circle of car fans.
The advantage is that it is more flexible, you can directly communicate with users on demand, the disadvantage is that it is still a manual operation mode, the price is high, the quality is not guaranteed, the promotion channels are limited, and the scale of to C is always small.
Second, provide modification customization for dealerships. The common way is that the dealership purchases various types of modified parts to sell to the owner, but it is illegal modification; or let the owner pay the advance for the modification in advance, and then the dealer coordinates the announcement of the main engine factory, and then opens the mold to produce the modified parts and install it.
The common denominator of this category is that there are links to buy new cars in bulk from car companies. The advantage is that there is a stable to C channel, and the disadvantage is that the endorsement of the main engine factory is used, but the main engine factory obtains little or no profit.
Third, for e-commerce companies such as JD Tmall, all kinds of car stickers, decorative parts and peripheral products are sold, and users buy and install themselves. The advantage is that users can purchase conveniently, and the disadvantage is that users have limited installation capabilities, and the conversion of tidal reform demand is seriously inhibited.
In the new era of automobiles, the meaning of modification has also changed. In Sun Xuechen's view, the relationship between the newly emerged outlet and the traditional sense of modification is not large, and the format is completely different and cannot be defined as modification.
In this round of new competition, the main engine factory joined the modified melee, less elements of the change, more custom taste, with mass production modification and mass production customization to describe seems more appropriate, MG XPOWER, Great Wall Tank Cyber Edition, Dongfeng Fengshen Yixuan MAX Dark Night Model and so on are among them.
"It's not so much an official modification as it is a small makeover model launched by the main engine factory at the same time." Sun Xuechen said.
According to her, usually the main engine factory will avoid products that are too personalized in order to balance the input and output of large-scale production and sales. Since Ford promoted the assembly line, the automobile industry has built the process, system, organizational structure and production mode of the main engine factory based on scale. This large-scale gene and the personalized and diversified needs of mainstream consumer groups have produced an increasingly fierce contradiction.
In the fierce market competition, the automotive market has completed segmentation and re-segmentation, but as a bulk consumer goods, and a complex product with thousands of parts, the automobile can not achieve a thousand faces. Through modification and customization, the coverage of people who like a specific style can eventually not only be converted into sales and increase profits, but also close the distance between them and consumers and highlight the brand personality.
Spring has not arrived, and the 100 billion market has come first
Before the opening of the two sessions of the National People's Congress in 2019, Wang Fengying, then a deputy to the National People's Congress and president of Great Wall Motors, and Li Shufu, a deputy to the National People's Congress and chairman of Geely Holding Group, jointly launched the proposal "Suggestions on Regulating the Automobile Modification Industry and Promoting the Optimization and Upgrading of Automobile Consumption" for the first time.
The two giants of China's own brands have taken the lead in seeing the potential of the modification market.
In 2020, when the new crown epidemic is raging, according to the preliminary calculation of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, the size of the automobile modification market reached 65.2 billion yuan, an increase of 7.1% year-on-year. According to the preliminary estimate of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, by 2027, the market size of the mainland automobile modification industry is expected to exceed 200 billion yuan, accounting for about 7% of the mainland automobile aftermarket.
Still, China's modified car market is still in its infancy compared to overseas, largely due to policy restrictions. In Sun Xuechen's view, the modification wind can not be blown up in the short term, and in the past ten years, the signal that the spring of the modified car is coming has also been released several times, and it has not come.
The demand gap is getting bigger. According to the lessons of overseas markets, when the market gradually matures, the proportion of modified cars will gradually increase. Official customization and private tidal changes have found a way in the gap between policies and needs.
Sun Xuechen calculated such an account for auto business reviews. Assuming that according to the annual sales of 20 million passenger cars, every 50,000 units is an official personalized model, then it means that the main engine factory needs to develop 400 small modification models. According to the price increase of 5,000 yuan per small modification, the theoretical total scale is 100 billion yuan per year.
"Small remodeled models with the theme of Chaochuang can also expand derivatives and peripheral Chaochuang products, similar to the Theme of the Forbidden City, which also increases the source of revenue." If you add 120 million owned vehicles and a re-purchase about two years after the purchase of the car, the scale is even more impressive. She said.
In the face of huge market potential, companies with a keen sense of smell are moved by the wind.
MG officially launched mg XPOWER, a sub-brand of personalized sports modification, in June 2021, and formally reached a cooperation with the Joint Promotion Office of Automobile Compliance Modification, and the follow-up will mainly focus on four dimensions, that is, from virtual to reality, from high-performance vehicles, lightweight modified mass production models, to the full ecological creation of official certification kits, providing professional and legal upgrade solutions for vehicles.
Wuling's modification customization has risen to the height of corporate strategy. As a new energy car with a starting price of 29,800 yuan, Hongguang MINIEV has a tidal change ratio of more than 72%, and in the plan, the brand hopes to promote official personalized customization to unlimited close to 100% of users.
In February 2022, with the listing of Hongguang MINIEV GAMEBOY, Wuling Hongguang launched the "first original factory personalized customization service platform in China", which reserves the Chaochuang interface on the product, and will create a series of models that can be purchased by users and DIY to create and play at will, achieving a thousand cars.
The next new outlet
Official customization and personality trends have changed to play the edge of the policy. The similarity between the two is that the places that change are mainly the visual parts and functional parts of the perceptual source.
For example, the exterior of the front and rear bumpers, headlights, side skirts, wheels, luggage racks, exterior color changes, etc., the interior of the main and secondary dashboards, ceilings, carpets, seats, storage and electronic functional parts, etc., also include derivatives and peripheral products.
According to the survey data of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the modification projects in this regard, such as filming, color change of car body, and upgrading of car audio equipment, account for 85% of the entire automobile reform market. In general, the current stage of car modification in mainland China can be summarized into three needs: First, it is for better appearance and more personality. The second is to make driving safer. The third is to make the speed faster.
That is to say, this wave of upgrades and changes is not too high technical content, what is needed is to grasp the trend, understand consumer preferences, and the ability to open up the supplier chain.
Fu Bingfeng, secretary general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, mentioned in an interview in 2021 that it is still difficult for enterprises to achieve personalized customized production, on the one hand, meeting different consumer demand means that the same number of orders need different parts, procurement and production costs will rise in a straight line, on the other hand, if you can not effectively manage the production line, supply chain, production rhythm will also be affected.
Turning the large-scale production of the main engine factory into a diversified customization is a big outlet. This requires the company to have the ability to develop and sell official personalized customized products jointly with the OEMs, and can provide full chain solutions for the development, supply/installation and after-sales of the vehicle standard design.
Sun Xuechen's enterprise is positioned as a personalized customization service provider. "It's so difficult, our company was founded in 2016, and finally saw the dawn and proved that we were on the right path." Sun Xuechen sighed that her company has served four OEMs, covering Dongfeng Fengshen Yixuan MAX Dark Night Model and Wuling Hongguang MINIEV.
With the development of policies and changes in the market, there may be new changes in the modified car market. There are many well-known car modification companies in developed countries in Europe and the United States, such as AMG, ACSCHNITZER, ABT and TRD, which have become special modification companies for Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi and Toyota.
In the century-old period of change in the automotive industry, new opportunities continue to emerge, and this time, it is finally the turn of the modified car.