Produced by | Tiger sniff car group
Author | attentive
Header image | Visual China
"She" economy, has long let the car worry about.
According to the "AutoMotive Content Industry Ecology Report" jointly released by E-Car and Xinbang Research Institute, female users account for 49% of the potential customers entering the car 4S stores and showrooms, and post-95 women have become an important force in automobile consumption.
As a result, we see more and more car brands beginning to exert efforts on female users. The proportion of "female drivers" in the video advertisements of car companies is getting higher and higher, and female content platforms such as Xiaohongshu are increasingly becoming the launch position of digital marketing departments of car companies.
But this group of "straight men" of car companies may not understand women's minds.
"I'm going to be silly and nice to her"
As we all know, although the vast majority of car companies have now established a FLAG of "to transform into a travel service provider", large-scale manufacturing enterprises led by design, research and development, production and sales are still the underlying identity and business model of most automobile companies. As a result, the executives, engineers and employees of automotive companies around the world are mostly men. Exactly how to attract women's attention, these straight men.
But the ancients had clouds: care is chaos.
I heard a story when I was communicating with insiders of NIO. At the first car delivered by WEIO in 2017, "ES8", the company's founder Li Bin and angel investor Li Xiang jointly demonstrated the "Queen Co-driver" option that focuses on caring for family women. In addition to including leg rests and foot rests that lie flat like dentist seats, the feature also provides extra-long slide rails that extend enough to the second row of seats. At the press conference, Li Bin, who played the "mother", handed a bottle to the "baby" Li Xiang sitting on the second row of seats, and the scene was very warm.
At nio Day 2017, Li Bin jokingly asked Li to think of "suckling" Source: NIO 2017 NIO Day
However, after delivery and receiving user feedback, Weilai's colleagues quickly discovered the problem: when a family of three traveled, if the young child sat in the car seat in the back seat, then the "queen" in the car would definitely sit next to the child. In this way, the initial expenditure of huge resources to adjust the platform to be compatible with the ultra-long slide rail is tantamount to implementing a "pseudo-requirement". This story has become a meme within WEILAI, used to warn future generations not to define products based on their own one-sided speculation and waste valuable R&D and engineering resources.
At that time, THE PRODUCT MANAGERS of WEILAI were mostly unmarried and childless young men. They tried to add female care to a 7-seater car based on family needs, but the result was a mistake due to the lack of life experience and insight.
A similar story actually happened to MINI, only this time the engineer was not the culprit. In the eyes of many people, BMW's MINI is considered a female-exclusive model because of its petite model, shape and cute color. However, anyone who has test-driven this car will know that the steering feel, chassis texture and seats of the MINI and MINI CLUBMAN models have adopted a tough product trend, which is still heavy and bumpy for the average man, not to mention women who are generally more concerned about comfort. Therefore, we see that although the above two cars are more suitable for female owners because of their size, most urban beauties prefer the Mercedes-Benz C-Class.
However, the automotive industry has not retreated from this. Nowadays, there is already a car brand in China that tries to focus more on female users and position itself as a "car brand that loves women more", which is the electric vehicle brand of the Great Wall Group - Euler.
Building a car for women, it remains to be seen
On August 20, 2018, the iQ, the first compact electric SUV model of the Euler brand, was launched at the Chengdu Auto Show. In the period of 2019-2020, the Euler brand focuses on the small and medium-sized electric vehicle market, and in 2021, after more than a year of operation and exploration, Euler adjusted its positioning to "a car brand that loves women more", and at the same time, launched a number of models with more "feminine" shapes, colors and configurations such as Euler Good Cat, Ballet Cat, Lightning Cat, Punk Cat and so on. Building cars for women became euler's direction.
According to the data, the female population base of 20 to 60 years old in China has exceeded 400 million, and the size of China's female consumer market is as high as 10 trillion. With the improvement of the economic level and the gradual awakening of self-awareness, economic independence, spiritual independence, and independence of life have become synonymous with contemporary women, and in the next 5 years, women will concentrate on entering the entire automobile consumer market, and women in the Internet environment have gained more channels and ways to understand automobile products, and have more consumer participation and decision-making power.
"As a practitioner of the automotive industry, as well as a mother of women and children, I deeply feel that women are far from receiving the attention they deserve in the current car consumption. Automotive product development is actually far from meeting the needs of female users in terms of physiological adaptation, emotional tolerance and scene application. Euler brand CMO Wang Weiwei said to Tiger Sniff. During her pre-product research with the team, she found that women differ greatly psychologically and physically from men. Therefore, Euler has fully taken into account the different needs of female consumers in many design details.
For example, Euler customized new seat molds on the product, narrowing the shoulder size for female consumers. This not only makes the body fit more closely, but also reduces fatigue during driving.
At the same time, Wang Weiwei and his team also equipped the new car with a "wind and waves" mode, when encountering rain and snow weather, the vehicle automatically turned on the wiper headlights and maintained a safe distance from the car to improve the safety of driving. For female car owners traveling with babies, Euler has launched smart child seats, in-car cameras that can watch the status of children at any time, and a mother storytelling mode to provide travel convenience for these mothers. The above features will also be installed on Euler's first "female exclusive car", The Euler Ballet Cat, and pre-sales are scheduled to start at the end of March.
Euler Ballet Cat at the 2021 Shanghai Auto Show Image source: Euler Motors official website
In 2021, Euler sold more than 135,000 units, up 140% year-on-year. However, for whether such a good result can prove that Euler has gained a firm foothold in the minds of female users, Wang Weiwei said: "Most of the users who buy Euler at present are attracted by the fashion style and control and configuration of the model, and only by virtue of the positioning of "car brands that love women more" to order Euler, we also need to take better actions to serve users. ”
Finally, Wang Weiwei frankly said that building a car for women requires a humble and awe-inspiring mentality to move forward. In addition to providing users with high-value models such as ballet cats, lightning cats, and punk cats, it is more important to do the brand with heart, so that Euler can go from "loving women more" to "women's favorites", believing that the good for women can be run in both directions.
It is true that Euler has made a big difference in the market in the past year with the positioning of "more women", but Tiger Sniff believes that the cost performance of its products is high enough to be the decisive factor in sales. How many female users are willing to pay for women's cars, and more products need to be listed before they can prove it.
Build a car for women, don't be so straight men?
As the first automobile brand in the country and even in the world to focus on female consumers, Euler's choice can be described as innovative and bold. However, in the eyes of some automotive industry insiders, this decision is essentially the embodiment of Great Wall Motor Group's long-term product and marketing strategies. From the previous haval big dog, to the national blockbuster model and even the brand independence of the "Tank 300", it is based on specific categories and people, driving products and marketing. Switching to another car company is not necessarily easy to use. After all, everyone has seen tank 300 users lining up to pick up the car, and Haval Big Dog has fallen out of the top 15 of 130,000-170,000 yuan SUV sales.
More importantly, most car buyers still focus on the brand, model and cost performance level, in contrast, the role of marketing is not decisive. Tiger Sniff asked a female person in charge of user research and insight in the new power car companies, she told the author bluntly, if a car brand uses pink, cute and other elements in styling color, interior design and marketing to cater to the target group, it is likely to cause disgust among High-end city Kochi and white-collar women.
In Tiger Sniff's view, Euler's brand positioning of "building cars for women" can focus on users to make the needs more clear. However, this one-sided strategy is likely to make female users in high-tier cities more spending power, as well as the majority of men, detour the brand.
Women's perception of design styles and concepts is stronger than that of men Image source: Visual China
She confessed to Tiger Sniff that in fact, the biggest challenge to automobile companies is that women's aesthetic level is generally higher than that of men, and it is actually more difficult to meet their needs.
In the field research of users, the person in charge found that when she presented the concept direction of the design drawings such as watches, cars, clothing, and home improvements to the interviewees, female users could quickly and accurately describe and refine the style than men. It can be seen that the aesthetic level of women is higher than that of men.
At the same time, women's car scenes are more distinctive than those of men. The person in charge revealed to Tiger Sniff that in second- and third-tier cities, the proportion of families with more than two children is more than 10% compared with first-tier cities. Women in these families often drive the family's second car, and in addition to commuting on their own, they frequently take their children back and forth between their parents' homes and their own homes. Therefore, these users pay more attention to the function of child care. In addition, because you need to drive a larger car with children, intelligent functions such as 360 surround view impact and autonomous parking are also essential, "which can make the car less inconvenient to drive." ”
The traditional prejudice of the market against women, such as "women do not understand cars", is changing with the product characteristics and direct sales model of new energy vehicles. The person in charge said that in a user interview, a family hostess admitted that she wanted to buy a fuel car before, but she was not so concerned about the mechanical quality of the vehicle such as engine displacement and suspension. But after seeing Xiaopeng and Tesla, she found that the configuration and options of the vehicle were completed on the mobile phone, which was very simple and intuitive. In fact, in the experience of the interview with the person in charge, in the families that have purchased electric vehicles such as Weilai and Tesla, some wives know more about the functions and product characteristics of the vehicle than their husbands.
So, what kind of car can win the favor of women? The person in charge said that in addition to the higher aesthetic level, women are more sensitive to the interior environment than men, and the comfort and ritual brought by the touch, fragrance and ambient light of the material are also essential. But in fact, according to her feelings, women actually do not want a so-called "women's car", "maybe take away those too straight male configurations, focus on the quality of the vehicle, more able to attract the attention of female users." ”
Yeah, apart from those wind-chasing teenagers, who would really like the big tail and carbon fiber stickers on a hundred thousand cars?