Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 hot micro-comment, author | Wang Xinxi
A few days ago, a topic about "4 years after 00 do not change the machine" caused a lot of consumer resonance and hot discussion, on Weibo and other social platforms, the topic of "why young people are reluctant to change mobile phones" once rushed to the second place in the hot search list, but also caused a large number of netizens to complain.
Why are young people no longer keen to change mobile phones?
There are probably several reasons.
The first is that mobile phones are now selling more and more expensive, and in the face of more and more expensive mobile phones, consumers delay the reason for changing the phone, and the answers of netizens are almost all "no money, shy in the pocket".
According to the Canalys 2021 Smartphone Market Analysis Report, the average selling price of smartphones in 2021 will increase by 10% year-on-year.
Counterpoint data shows that the average selling price of mobile phones in the Chinese market has increased from 1500 yuan to 2000 yuan in the past to 2700 yuan to 3000 yuan.
In fact, mobile phones are expensive to sell, consumers do not buy it, in addition to economic reasons, and the change of consumption concept has a certain relationship.
In the early popularity stage of smart phones, the flagship mobile phone of a head brand comes with its own brand and recognition on the grid, which has a certain social blessing attribute, that is, the mobile phone can highlight its "new wave" identity and status.
But today, this identity blessing effect of smart phones has long weakened, and most consumers have been unable to save money for a few months just for a new mobile phone.
Many consumers are more pragmatic, which even leads to a decrease in the rigid demand for high-end mobile phones.
CCTV commented that in the eyes of this young people, mobile phones no longer carry the function of "earning face". After returning to the roots, people pay more attention to the practicality of mobile phones.
The weakening of the attribute of social blessing has a certain relationship with the lack of transformative innovation in mobile phones. Some netizens said that in the past two years, mobile phones from Apple to Android, it is difficult to let people feel the feeling of being bright. The various blow-up configurations are not as attractive as a 3.5nm headphone jack.
From the iPhone to the Android camp, at present, more new products stay in the processor, endurance, hardware optimization and other squeezed toothpaste upgrades, almost all mainstream mobile phone brand products are rolled on the road to image capability upgrade, whether it is to change the screen, play with the color matching color and image ability of the upgrade, there is no desire to change.
When the iterative upgrade of smart phones does not highlight the obvious gap and value of the old machine, when the value beyond the mobile phone itself is diluted, the cycle of changing the mobile phone is also lengthened. Around 2014 and 2018, consumers changed on average once a year or every two years.
However, according to the data released by Counterpoint, the average replacement cycle of users has exceeded 31 months.
Of course, from another point of view, the lengthening of the mobile phone replacement cycle also means that the service life of Android mobile phones is improved, the basic performance is getting stronger and stronger, and the caton phenomenon that was widely criticized earlier has gradually been solved now.
Consumers do not change the machine, and the economic environment under the epidemic is related to the tightening of consumers' expected income, more consumers are beginning to tend to save money, and the tendency from advanced consumption to downgraded consumption is quite obvious.
Some netizens also said that I have not changed for three years, and now every month I am tired and tired of running logistics to earn that little money, pay off the mortgage plus the family must spend which has spare money to buy a new mobile phone, not willing.
Of course, there is also an unexpected reason that many people do not change the machine because the cumbersome data and data import of the machine change process are too troublesome. Login records and passwords of various APP must be re-entered. The longer the use time, the more data precipitation, and the higher the cost of replacement.
From the current user discussion, it can be seen that the summary is: the current mobile phone is more and more expensive, but the experience and performance level is difficult to feel the substantial improvement, the current mobile phone can meet the daily work and life needs, the current epidemic uncertainty is too much, the economy is not very good, the power to buy new mobile phones is less and less.
At present, the unstable economic environment under the epidemic, coupled with the negative news of the stock market plunge, the layoffs of major companies, and the real estate downturn, the consumption mentality and consumption habits of ordinary consumers are undergoing subtle changes.
Spring River Plumbing Duck Prophet. From the perspective of mobile phone dealers, many dealers have also felt the chill, mobile phones have gradually failed to sell, and shipments have declined.
According to the mobile phone report released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, in February 2022, the domestic market mobile phone shipments were 14.864 million units, down 31.7% year-on-year, and the shipments of domestic brand mobile phones were 12.783 million units, down 34.7% year-on-year. In other words, domestic mobile phone shipments fell by more than 30% in February.
CINNO Research's statistics are far from it, but it also reveals an overall downward trend.
According to its data, the sales of smartphones in the Chinese market in February were about 23.48 million units, down 20.5% year-on-year and 24.0% month-on-month, and contracted year-on-year and month-on-month.
According to GFK data, the annual sales of mobile phones in 2021 are 310 million units, which is at a low ebb. The downward trend will continue throughout 2022.
The industry's leading manufacturers naturally feel the atmosphere of cold winter.
The first is that the head manufacturers from Android to Apple are cutting orders. According to media sources, Apple plans to cut the annual shipments of the iPhone SE 3 this year from 25 million to 30 million to 15 million to 20 million (more than 20% of the orders).
Tianfeng International analyst Guo Mingxi said on social media that major domestic Android mobile phone brands have cut about 170 million orders so far this year (accounting for 20% of the original shipment plan in 2022), of which more than 70% of the orders use MediaTek chips. Due to low consumer confidence, orders are likely to continue to decline in the coming months.
In addition to cutting orders, some domestic mobile phone manufacturers even reduce the specifications and configuration of mobile phone products. Apple, on the other hand, has played the iPhone hardware subscription service model.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is preparing to launch subscription services for hardware such as iPhones and iPads, and the hardware will be provided to users in a similar form of leasing, that is, just like using Apple's iCloud cloud storage, users can get the right to use the device in the form of a monthly subscription fee. Unlike installment payments, this hardware subscription service supports replacement to the latest equipment during the rental process.
The so-called subscription service is actually essentially hardware rental.
When the industry is discussing what considerations Apple has based on to start launching hardware subscription services, whether this will change the smart phone hardware business model, behind this, in fact, Apple also feels the chill of the mobile phone market, the momentum of iPhone sales is not good, and some new measures need to be taken.
Obviously, from The cook's actions, the essence of subscribing to the iPhone is that Apple is thinking about lowering the threshold for users to use the iPhone and expanding the user base to cope with the increasingly weak smartphone market.
Winter is coming, how should the cards of domestic manufacturers play?
An important reason why Apple can continue to stand in the high-end market in the Chinese market is that it has always been familiar with the sensitivity of Chinese market demand and consumer psychology (especially the high-end market) than other manufacturers.
Apple's action is actually a symptom of market changes, and how domestic mobile phones respond to Apple's commercial action of launching iPhone hardware subscriptions is worth thinking about and laying out in advance.
Today, the market environment has changed, the national income is unstable under the epidemic, the expectation of future income is lower, and the consumer psychology and price expectations are changing.
Domestic manufacturers need to realize that sprinting to the high end is a long-term strategic goal, not a short-term quick success, let alone a wishful idealization goal regardless of the current market environment and consumer economic income level.
This is also why, after Xiaomi shouted out xiaomi's goal of benchmarking Apple in an all-round way, the public did not buy it.
From the collective action of manufacturers sprinting to the high end, we find that mainstream manufacturers have gradually abandoned the refined cultivation of the low-end market, while Apple is making more preparations for its popular attributes, and deliberately erasing the high-end label and labeling the iPhone as a popular.
The launch of the iPhone subscription service is actually to further pave the way for this kind of popular label. This diametrically opposed action is actually what domestic mobile phones need to reflect on.
For domestic manufacturers, of course, it is necessary to fully enhance the brand premium, but it is also time to adjust strategic thinking and playing style, and high-priced mobile phones are not equal to high-end paintings.
In special periods, to counter the popular path of the iPhone, in fact, products and pricing that meet consumer psychological expectations are often more likely to capture the user's good feelings.
In fact, if we look back at Huawei's high-end brand building process, we will know that Huawei's brand premium upward node is exactly one year after the release of the iPhone X series (September 2017), when the iPhone X became the most expensive iPhone in the history of the iPhone - the high-end version sold for more than 10,000 yuan.
In the second year, when the industry generally believed that the domestic flagship would follow the pace of the iPhone price increase, the Huawei Mate 20 series in 2018 set the starting price at 3499 yuan.
The phone is not inferior to the iPhone in terms of wireless fast charging, taking pictures, screen ratio, communication performance, dual CARD experience, etc., and is equipped with graphene liquid-cooled double heat dissipation, 3D facial recognition and on-screen fingerprint recognition, matrix multifocal imaging system, the first commercial 7nm process processor, 1.4Gbps LTE cat.21 baseband, reverse wireless charging and other black technology with certain points of view, through the product force performance beyond market expectations and lower than expected price, harvested a large number of high-end market users, Driving the upward trend of the brand premium.
The lack of domestic manufacturers in these years to rush to the high-end, but also stems from the pricing of their high-end products has far exceeded the user's psychological expectations, high-end products more from product strength and innovation, rather than pricing, after all, the pricing power is in the hands of manufacturers, but whether consumers buy it, it is up to consumers to decide.
For ordinary consumers, the brand impact on the high-end market is a strategic demand, but it is difficult to escape the consumer's intuition and feelings about the real experience of the products behind it.
In today's market environment, appropriate pricing that meets consumer expectations is supplemented by black technology innovation that exceeds expectations, in order to truly cater to consumers' expectations for mobile phone products in the cold winter, and then gain favor from the brand level and leverage high-end strategies.
Therefore, on the basis of reasonable pricing, manufacturers also need to come up with product innovation that promotes consumer replacement.
At the hardware level, technology should return to user experience services, when stacking materials and fighting images has become a standardized action and triggered consumer aesthetic fatigue, in fact, it is more and more testing of the manufacturer's differentiated underlying innovation ability, as well as the ability to solve potential pain points that have not yet been discovered in consumers.
An important factor is that the iterative upgrading and technical background of new products are not enough to mobilize the desire to change machines. From today's point of view, many manufacturers try to prove their underlying chip capabilities through ISP customization chips.
But in fact, the outside world attention and heat caused by the custom image chip is still limited, the controversy is quite large, after all, the ISP chip and the SoC chip have an essential difference, the latter is to confirm the fundamental of a manufacturer's underlying chip technology capabilities, and the SoC chip itself has integrated the implementation of ISP functions.
Therefore, repeated customization of an ISP chip, landing on the experience level, has not brought intuitive improvements, and it is difficult to become an innovation point that attracts consumers to pay for high prices.
However, having said that, the development of this product form of mobile phones to today's maturity, to come up with revolutionary, leap-forward innovation, is not in line with the law of hardware iterative development, continuous innovation is still a major trend.
And the hardware performance of the mobile phone is spelled out, and eventually it needs to return to the software.
We know that many consumers believe that the trouble of changing the machine is that the various data, accounts, APP and social accounts of the original old mobile phone have precipitated a large amount of data and information, and it will be very troublesome to re-migrate this information.
In essence, this puts forward requirements for the cloud service capabilities and software innovation of mobile phone manufacturers.
If the mobile phone manufacturer can do the replacement process can quickly and synchronously migrate APP data and data with one click, or have a better data migration solution, it is a differentiated highlight and innovation in itself.
Thinking further along this perspective, at this time, manufacturers need to think carefully about the path of software service profitability.
In the past for a long time, domestic manufacturers still rely on hardware to make profits, and the current business model of iPhone hardware subscription + content service actually has a certain inspiration for the profit path of domestic mobile phone software and hardware bundling.
At present, the mainstream manufacturers of domestic mobile phones have their own app stores, and have formed a profit model of software services such as advertising revenue sharing, recommendation ranking, and in-app search.
In the case of the slowdown in the growth of the hardware stock market, in fact, we can think about cooperating with third parties to provide massive content to occupy more user time and achieve a wider range of brand precision reach, and a feasible path is to consider cooperation with content manufacturers.
For example, big factories can cooperate with online music products including iQiyi, Youku, Tencent Video, Tencent Music, NetEase Cloud Music, etc., Himalaya Audio, get APP and other knowledge payment products to establish a software cooperation model to sell mobile phones by reducing hardware pricing and packaging content service membership annual fees.
For many users, the membership of a number of content platforms is actually a kind of just need, but in the economic downturn, all kinds of rigid demand membership fees are also an additional burden.
For Internet giants, the growth expectations of membership revenue are getting lower, and they are also looking for a new business model to break the game.
If you bundle with the new machine sales of mobile phone manufacturers, reduce hardware pricing, and bundle the annual fee of platform members to promote consumer purchases, it is actually a good way to break the game.
epilogue:
In general, in the economic downturn, consumers live within the limits of the epidemic environment, consumers' concepts have changed, rational economic people have become more, with a more rational, more economical, more cost-effective product sales method may be able to better capture their demands.
How to promote the vitality of the business model, predict the trend in advance, and capture the real consumer psychological needs, based on this real demand, make innovation and change in line with consumer expectations, may be an important idea to survive and live well in the trough period.
From the current point of view, compared to Apple, smart phone manufacturers do not have many cards in their hands, how to play next, depending on the manufacturers' high-end strategy is to be more based on the user's actual needs and interests to consider, or more from the perspective of their own interests, the two modes of thinking, may have different futures.