Produced 丨 Tiger Sniff Car Group
Author 丨 Li Wenbo
Edited 丨 thoughtful
Head map丨 SAIC Audi Weibo
In the movie "Flying Life", Zhang Chi, played by Shen Teng, once said such a paragraph: "In today's society, some people live in style, some people live in human design, and I live in ability." ”
This passage aptly describes the situation of the German luxury car company Audi in China for 34 years: the Audi brand lives the human design, and the FAW-Audi life is the skill. Saic Motor Audi, on the other hand, is living with styling.
As a new car company that was directly pulled to the front of the full-level boss at birth, SAIC Audi fell into the extreme cold place of 300 units per month after a short hilarity of "Xiao Zhan's endorsement", becoming a model for the "multinational automobile company" to lose the Chinese case.
Build one, cool one
Jia Mingdi, general manager of SAIC Volkswagen's Audi marketing business, once set a target for SAIC Audi's first sales cycle: 3,000 to 5,000 units per month, and more than 50,000 units per year.
But the performance in the first two months of this year gave Jia Mingdi a thorough coolness.
January 2022 was the first full sales month spent by the domestic A7L, and the performance of 316 units made SAIC Audi questionable. You know, the more expensive imported Audi A7 in the month sold 380 units.
Do you think this is the coldest eye for the domestic A7L? No, because SAIC Audi handed over a report card of 258 units in February, 58 fewer than in January. For comparison, FAW Audi sold 62,738 units in January and 43,061 units in February.
How positive SAIC Audi was when it introduced the domestic A7L five years ago, how cold the consumer response is today.
Previously, in response to the first month of sales of the domestic A7L listing, saic oil Audi gave an explanation that "the A7L is still in the climbing stage, delivering only the 3.0T version, coupled with the insufficient number of stores, resulting in sales not as expected." ”
This explanation cannot be said to be reasonable, at least it is plausible.
In Tiger Sniff's view, the reason why SAIC Audi A7L is rarely asked is that it made three mistakes in the process of domestic production: giving up the soul, strange positioning, and FAW Audi backstab.
First of all, the imported Audi A7 is known as the "most beautiful Audi car" with frameless doors, sneaky back shape, and coupe body. In the process of domestic production, in order to increase practicality and business sense, SAIC Audi canceled the soul slip design and transformed a personalized coupe into a traditional sedan.
The biggest difference between the coupe A7 and the sedan A6L is reflected in the former's understanding of sports styling. Obviously, the coupe A7 pinches the scarcity between the sense of sport and the sense of luxury, which is the "white moonlight" of SAIC Audi's differentiated competition. However, in the process of landing, SAIC Audi compromised to the sense of business that everyone has, and the result is a large area of overlap with the Audi A6L.
Secondly, savoy Audi in order to avoid head-on confrontation with FAW-Audi, targeting niche market segments and China's special models, which is indeed reasonable from the perspective of business plan. However, since we choose a niche route, we should adhere to the tone, rather than stepping into the two "consumption pools" of sports and business at the same time. In the mainstream automotive consumer market, FAW-Audi is the king: Q2L, Q3, Q5L, A3, A4L and A6L, from compact to large, from SUVs to cars, the product is full.
Look at SAIC Audi, the A7L made "Audi A6L Plus"; the electric vehicle Q5 e-tron shell SAIC Volkswagen ID.6 X, Q6 shell SAIC Volkswagen Tuang. In the process of localization, the principle of SAIC Audi is: big, cheap, enough. Neither consider currying favor with Chinese consumers nor attracting distributors.
Finally, FAW-Audi has backstabbed a wave of new competitors: the imported Audi A7 Sportback is expected to return to the domestic market in the near future, with a quattro four-wheel drive, 3.0T engine, 21-inch sports rim, sports seats, carbon fiber interior and intelligent parking system. The most important thing is to bring the soul to slip on.
Is the rhythm of SAIC Audi's "push one, cool one", or the "four circles" that everyone knows? The answer is no, of course, everyone does not know these "four circles", because this is SAIC Volkswagen that makes a lot of money by "China's special supply" Langyi and Passat.
Directly operated, but it does not seem to be straight
"We are a new force with strong traditional offline capabilities and re-enter the automotive industry. This is not an empty phrase, compared with the traditional BBA and the new forces, we have the advantages of both. When Asked about the advantages of the "entity + e-commerce" combination model, Jia Mingdi often explained this.
In the context of SAIC Audi, the "entity + e-commerce" playing method is like this: users look at the car online, place an order in the APP, and then go to the store to pick up the car. However, repairs and maintenance throughout the life cycle since then have been completed within the FAW-Audi network.
The flaw is that the pre-sales and after-sales user experience is faulted and cannot be closed.0
Direct operation is a proven sales method in the era of intelligent electric vehicles. CEO Elon Musk said: "Tesla direct operation is to ensure that all customers have the best experience of the whole chain from the beginning to the end." ”
In China, NIO is a staunch direct-operated faction. Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of the company, frankly said that if it is not directly operated, it cannot be called a new force for car manufacturing. Direct sales aim at the relationship between brands and users, and the core of competition is the user's full experience. Qin Lihong believes that "the long-term relationship with users and the position of users in the entire brand are the keys to success or failure."
"As long as there are dealers, many things cannot be carried out. Because in the legal sense, the consumer is not a consumer of the main engine factory, but a consumer of a certain dealership. Qin Lihong said.
As a result, NIO repositioned traditional salespeople as fellow companions. Selling a car is only the beginning of the service, and these fellows will accompany customers for a long time and become "friends" in the cycle and scene of the all-use car.
After Tesla, Nio and Ideal, more and more electric vehicle brands have joined the direct phalanx: Volkswagen ID, Extreme Kr, Landu, Cadillac Lyriq and Ford Mach-E.
However, similar experiences are difficult to obtain in the fragmented SAIC Audi system. Limited by the intertwined forces of many parties, SAIC Audi can only give up the most core part of the "system competitiveness" in the era of intelligent electric vehicles - the contact points in the user car process.
When purchasing A7L, users will learn about the information through the "SAIC Audi" APP, make an appointment for a test drive, place an order and pay for it, and face the SAIC Audi system. However, when repairing and maintaining, SAIC Audi butler has become a chat box in the weChat of the enterprise, and the actual contact is the FAW-Audi system. Obviously, users will feel dislocated: Whose car am I buying?
Assuming that an A7L is open for 8 years, users will spend about 8 weeks to complete the purchase, and during these 8 weeks, they are SAIC Audi customers. But for the next 7 years, they became distinguished FAW-Audi customers.
For SAIC Audi, most of the current user contacts stay online: exclusive APPS, public accounts and mini programs. Offline contacts, including 4S stores, city showrooms, and after-sales service points, lag far behind FAW-Audi.
At its headquarters in Shanghai, SAIC Audi has only 3 sales stores: 2 in Puxi and 1 in Pudong. Relying on FAW-Audi's authorized after-sales service providers, there are 8. In Beijing, there is only 1 sales store, but there are 3 authorized after-sales service providers.
According to official data, as of February 2022, SAIC Audi has only one national Enterprise Hub, three Audi Cities, plus a total of 120 Audi stores. FAW-Audi had 284 stores in 2015 and nearly 700 stores in 2022. In front of the channel control of the North Audi full level, the South Audi is like a level 1 trumpet in the novice village.
Only by mastering online and offline contact points in a full dimension can we form a closed loop of user service. These contacts may be flexible according to the actual situation when they are executed, but the underlying logic and kernel of "holding the user firmly in the hand" will not change. The moat of the "user enterprise" is dug out in this way, and SAIC Audi gives up the offline contacts, which is actually shoveling soil for FAW-Audi.
All of this misalignment stems from the agreement signed the day before Christmas 2020.
1877 days of tug-of-war
On January 1, 2022, 12 car owners received their own domestic A7L car keys at the Audi Enterprise Hub, the only one in China and the second in the world, located on the ground floor of saic motor's headquarters building. They are the first saicid Audi owners in China and the first in the world.
At this moment, it has been 1877 days since SAIC and Volkswagen signed a strategic agreement in Wolfsburg, Germany, on November 11, 2016, and decided to establish a joint venture. It has been 1,780 days since FAW-Volkswagen Audi dealers issued the "Sanya Statement" that shocked the industry on February 16, 2017. It has been 97 days since SAIC Audi's first domestically produced A7L was driven off the production line of SAIC Volkswagen's Anting plant on September 26, 2021.
From the landing of the agreement to the opening of the delivery, SAIC Audi took more than 5 years. In the face of the current situation of always being one step slower, Jia Mingdi, general manager of SAIC Audi's marketing business, does not care, and in various public occasions, he often defines SAIC Audi as a "new force of luxury brands".
Let's take a look at what the real "new forces" are doing.
From birth to delivery, IT took 1283 days, Xiaopeng took 1643 days, and ideally took 1699 days. The fastest Weilai is 594 days faster than SAIC Audi. The slowest ideal is also half a year faster.
For SAIC and Audi, building a car has never been difficult. However, the biggest obstacle to the development of the joint venture between the two sides actually comes from FAW-Volkswagen Audi dealers.
On February 16, 2017, the Audi Dealers Association of the China Automobile Dealers Association issued the "Sanya Statement" to express three meanings: first, oppose the cooperation between Audi and SAIC; second, dealers lost 28 billion yuan in 3 years, who will fill the pit; third, if you want to start a new stove, you can first achieve the small goal of 1 million sales in 2020.
It should be known that three months before the release of this statement, Audi announced the suspension of cooperation negotiations with SAIC Group and sat down to hold several rounds of small-scale negotiations with investor representatives of FAW-Audi dealers.
But these closed-door meetings had little effect, and the FAW-Audi dealers who hugged the group directly took a tough attitude: do not smooth out the stall in front of them, and do not think about saic-Volkswagen. To quell the anger of Chinese distributors, Volkswagen Group directly dismissed Dietmar Voggenreiter, Audi's director of global marketing and sales, who was ineffective.
In 2018, the SAIC Audi project, which frequently reported "dissolution", "suspension" and "withdrawal", took a turn for the better: the German Volkswagen Group transferred 1% of its shares in SAIC Volkswagen to Audi.
But soon, the faint flame of hope was extinguished again. The SAIC Audi project entered a 24-month period of silence. Until the day before Christmas in 2020, Audi China, FAW-Volkswagen Audi and SAIC Audi finally reached an agreement on the dealer system and business model of FAW-Volkswagen Audi and SAIC Audi: SAIC Audi will not sell cars before 2022. After that, SAIC Audi can build cars, but the cars built must be placed in FAW-Audi stores for maintenance.
On the surface, all the parties involved have obtained the results they want: Audi dealers have obtained the right to sell all models entering China; FAW-Audi has obtained a 2-year window; German Audi has successfully rushed ahead of BMW and Mercedes-Benz to establish a dual joint venture in China; SAIC Audi is the most depressed, but at least the A7L production line has moved.
The distribution of benefits was even, and the progress behind was significantly accelerated: in April 2021, the SAIC Audi brand debuted, and the domestic A7L debuted; 5 months later, the first domestic A7L rolled off the production line; on New Year's Day 2022, the domestic A7L began to be delivered.
Since then, everything about SAIC Audi has gone fast, except for sales.
Write at the end:
In 2022, in the FAW-Audi 4S store, we can not only see the magic scene of saic motor Audi spokesperson and traffic star Xiao Zhan and FAW-Audi brand spokesperson Wang Yibo looking at each other in the air, but also see the lonely scene of cars, electric vehicles and SUVs with "SAIC Audi" tail tags gradually accumulating dust in the corner.
SAIC Audi's folding, to some extent, is a microcosm of the end of the era of multinational auto companies lying in China making money. In the era of intelligent electric vehicles, Weilai, which is known as "silly and good to users", has not yet made a profit, and sachine audi with blindfolded shells and buried heads is naturally not worthy of a good day.
It really can't work, SAIC Audi may wish to try to change Xiao Zhan to candy super sweet.