Consumer brands never imagined that one day, they would compete with them for a golden spot on the first floor of a shopping mall.
Suddenly, new energy and shopping malls are becoming the standard for each other.
Starting from Tesla, and finally almost all new energy brands, without exception, they have extended the tentacles of their experience stores to a corner on the first floor of major shopping malls across the country.
According to media reports, in 2021, more than 80 car brands will open stores in shopping malls, most of which are new energy vehicle brands, and even the gorgeous scene of a shopping mall introducing multiple new energy brands often appears.
For example, some media wrote: Now on the first floor of Beijing Chaoyang Joy City, every door and every elevator entrance has a new energy brand "handle", from the westernmost to the easternmost, you can see the ideal, Xiaopeng, Extreme Krypton, Lantu, Cadillac five brands of exhibition cars.
The collective heading of new energy vehicles to shopping malls is a metaphor for their positioning: new energy vehicles are not only traditional means of transportation in 4S stores, but also new consumer goods that represent "the future has come".
So the question is, what is the core purpose of new energy vehicle companies?
Growing grass is bigger than selling
The answer to this question is nested in a larger question: What is the core purpose of new energy vehicle companies at this stage?
There is only one answer: maximize market share.
The opening logic of new energy vehicle companies must serve this core purpose.
If the traditional 4S shop model is "people looking for a car" - if you want to buy a car, go to the 4S store to shop; then the model of the new energy experience store is "car to find people" - where the most potential buyers are, where the store is.
So shopping malls became the first choice.
First of all, the customer base of shopping malls has a high degree of overlap with the users of new energy vehicles. According to Ai Media Consulting data, users in the 26-45 age group are the main force among China's new energy vehicle users, accounting for 76.09%. According to the "White Paper on Commercial Attractiveness of China's Key Cities" launched by Tencent Real Estate and Tencent Map Location Big Data, the 26-45 age group is also the main group of visitors to key shopping malls in The country, accounting for 58.33%.
This group of people is the mainstay of the consumer era, willing to contact new things, pay attention to emotional value, and indulge in social currency. When they hold the Starbucks or Xicha they just bought on the first floor of the mall, and see a chic new energy vehicle parked on the first floor of the mall, they will look at it twice more than other people, and then quickly form a secret emotional connection with it.
Well, just as the so-called "all the goods for artificial dreams are worth placing on the first floor of the mall", they are the people who love "dreaming" the most in our time, and they are also the "dream people" of all new energy brands.
In addition to looking for "dream people", shopping mall experience stores can also establish a "high-end" brand image, worthy of the pricing of more than 300,000 brands such as Weilai and Ideal.
Compared with those centuries-old traditional car companies, the brand awareness of new energy vehicles is low, and shopping malls known as "offline traffic collectors" can shorten the contact distance between new energy brands and consumers - which is why new energy brands often occupy the first floor of the street, close to important positions such as shopping mall entrances and escalators.
If you only count the ping effect, the high rent in these places is certainly not cost-effective, but as Shen Hui, the founder of WM Motor, said in an interview with the Economic Observer: "The rent of commercial supermarkets is high, and half of the rent may be spent as advertising (fee). Most of the supermarket stores do not make money. ”
In short, new energy vehicles compete on the first floor of the shopping mall, and what they care about is not "selling goods", but other indicators such as passenger flow, user retention, and the number of test drives - these indicators have a common name: planting grass.
Here may be mentioned by the way, in fact, shopping malls are also quite welcome new energy brands to settle in, in addition to their money, but also because they have a face, can attract a variety of user groups (especially male traffic) to stop, but also make up for the shopping mall "food, clothing and housing" of the all-round format.
In this way, shopping malls and new energy are really fulfilling each other.
But they will eventually leave
So the next question is: when new energy vehicle companies collectively drive to shopping malls, will the traditional 4S store model disappear?
My answer is: absolutely not, because the "experiential" sales model is only a transitional stage in the early stages of the development of new energy vehicle companies.
At present, new energy vehicle companies are in the stage of brand war, and each company is rushing to send money to the shopping mall, so as to plant grass for consumers. None of them are short of money, and they can expand their stores with less consideration of cost, occupying market share and user minds as much as possible.
But in the future, when the smoke of new energy is no longer pervasive, the market pattern is settled, and the entire market cake is getting bigger and bigger, more and more maintenance services are needed, and the 4S store model with lower operating costs is bound to return to the mainstream.
At that time, the brands are bound to dynamically adjust the number of experience stores, their strategies will become "snobbish", the conversion rate will become an important indicator again, the stores with high conversion rates will continue to remain, the conversion rate is not high, and the stores with poor cost performance will be ruthlessly closed.
In fact, Tesla, which was the first to drive its car into a shopping mall in 2013, has begun to turn first. According to media reports, Tesla is currently planning to close the experience stores in the core business circles of first- and second-tier cities, and open more experience stores to peripheral business circles and suburban business circles.
Some people believe that "this is a strategy to reduce operating costs and expand the reach of people when Tesla has established a brand advantage." At the same time, Tesla cars have more ownership than other new energy vehicle brands, need more after-sales service, Tesla has also begun to open a central store with 4S functions in the traditional car business district. Compared with the model of 'shopping mall experience store + service center', the operating cost of the central store is half lower. ”
Well, Tesla is the first to come to the shopping mall, but also the first to go, one day in the future, other new energy brands, will eventually follow the footsteps of this top stream, slowly leave.
Presumably, at that time, China's new energy market has already made the cake bigger, and the new energy vehicles that once represented the "new forces" will gradually bid farewell to the "dream-making" function, and they will slowly retreat from the first floor of the shopping mall, thus leaving their position to the "next" dreamers.
Just as people always think that "the future has come", they do not know that there is a long list of updated futures in the distance.
The articles appeared simultaneously in 36Kr, Tiger Sniff, Titanium Media, The Paper, People's Network, Zhongzhong Network, Interface, Blue Whale, Chuangyebang, i Dark Horse, 21 Finance, DoNews, iResearch, Pintu, Yiou, Snowball, Flush, Oriental Wealth, Futu Niuniu, Tiger Securities, Yunpao Finance, Sina Finance, Zhenghe Island, Observer Network and dozens of other media.