In addition to marketing, where is the core competitiveness of the blue factory?
Text / Liu Fan Liang Yupeng in Xiaomi, Glory, OPPO have announced "into the high-end" and "benchmark Apple" in recent years, blue factory vivo seems to have not kept up with the rhythm of friends, not only cut the high-end brand NEX series, in the price of 10,000 yuan folding screen market has also been lacking action. Recently, Vivo released two of its high-end new machines, Vivo X Note and Vivo X Fold, both of which are new brands that have been enabled. The former started at 5999 yuan, while the latter was 8999 yuan. Prior to this, vivo only X 70 series of high-end new machines on sale, as the saying goes, "it is difficult to support alone", and now the release of two new machines can also be regarded as completing the product line, keeping up with the rhythm of Xiaomi, Glory and OPPO. Today, these four mobile phone manufacturers have basically formed the same high-end product line - that is, two straight mobile phones and one folding screen mobile phone. Apparently, Vivo was the one who came the last.
There are two ways to say that the big screen is difficult to become a selling point "late", at best, the pits that the predecessors have traveled through, and the thunders that have been touched, can be actively avoided; at worst, the predecessors have occupied the market almost completely, leaving few opportunities for the latecomers. In the exceptionally homogeneous mobile phone market, Vivo's situation is both. Xiaomi has always been a master of "stacking materials", and in the past two years, with the Xiaomi 10 and Xiaomi 11 series, it has initially gained a foothold in the high-end market. Although OPPO and Honor currently have a low market share, their product strength is not bad, such as OPPO Find X5 Pro's self-developed NPU, Honor Magic 4 Pro supports high-frequency dimming, etc. There is really not much room left for vivo to play. As a result, we saw an extremely rare vivo X Note with a 7-inch large screen - trying to compete with the differentiation of large screens. First of all, regardless of the product strength, vivo X Note has at least made a clear distinction from other high-end machines in terms of screen size. After all, in the phone called "Note", the most famous large-screen mobile phone Samsung Galaxy Note series has basically not reached this size. However, the actual performance of the "7 inches" may not be as "shocking" as this number seems. Nowadays, mobile phone screens are generally more than 6 inches, and the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, as the successor of the Note series that "leads the trend of large-screen mobile phones", has also reached 6.8 inches. The iPhone 13 Pro Max also has a 6.7-inch. The Vivo X Note's 7 inches, while bigger than them, didn't go beyond that much. Therefore, for users who really like large-screen mobile phones, the large-screen advantage of vivo X Note is not obvious. For ordinary users, the 7-inch vivo X Note has greatly increased the width of the phone, which is more inconvenient in the use experience. In addition to this large screen, in addition to a larger area under the screen fingerprint unlock, vivo X Note in other configurations and the current Millet, OPPO (including one plus), honor is not much different.
Overall, the vivo X Note seems to be unflattering at both ends. Therefore, rather than saying that vivo X Note is "differentiated competition", it is better to say that after the mobile phone market is rolled to the extreme, Vivo is one of the few choices: what Vivo needs is not a large screen, but the differentiation of the high-end market. 7-inch large-screen mobile phones used to appear on low-end mobile phones, so large-screen mobile phones often have the label of "silly big and thick". The high-end market is only Huawei's Mate 20X released in 2018, this mobile phone market response is general, many people have never even heard of it, and huawei's high-end product sequence has not yet ushered in a follow-up update. Therefore, how to reverse the brand disadvantage brought by large-screen mobile phones is also a problem that vivo X Note needs to overcome.
From 2020, various manufacturers have secretly competed to point to the high-end market. After the glory of the independent Magic series benchmarking iPhone; OPPO began to develop its own chip and let OnePlus return, jointly impacting the high-end market; Xiaomi directly shouted "benchmarking Apple". But vivo is the "lowest-key" of the four "Rongmi OV". Although vivo started early on the road of high-end, it lacked follow-up and lacked brand stability. After cutting the Xplay series and NEX series in succession, Vivo has never come up with an eye-catching flagship product. Although vivo has made great efforts in the image system in recent years, the left hand micro-gimbal, the right hand ZEISS joint name, but it is always "thunder and rain and small". According to Counterpoint's statistics, vivo's share of the global high-end market ($400 >) in 2021 is only 3%, and Huawei, Xiaomi, and OPPO are all higher than vivo.
Vivo, which has strong marketing, has not gained a foothold in the high-end market, but in the strong marketing of TV advertisements, variety shows, festival evenings, etc., it has been labeled as "heavy marketing and light technology" for a long time. Compared with the high-end flagship series of "Rongmi OV", Xiaomi is the digital series, MIX series and folding screen series; OPPO is the Find X series, oneplus digital series and folding screen series; and the honor is the digital series, magic series and folding screen series. Vivo's two consecutive aircraft this time are obviously just keeping up with the footsteps of their peers. Previously, Sun Yanbiao, president of the First Mobile Phone Industry Research Institute, told ZAKER Technology that the high-end of domestic mobile phones requires a lot of time and capital investment, and the high-end layout takes 5 years and 10 years to plan and adhere to it, and it is possible to succeed. Therefore, for vivo at this stage, whether these two new machines can be "popular" in the high-end market may not be the most important, and more importantly, do not let them enter the fate of the Xplay series and NEX series.