Nearly 20 years since its establishment, this is the fifth drifting in word of mouth.
Wen 丨 Shen Fangwei Guan Yiwen
Editor丨Guan Yiwen
"LatePost" exclusively learned that today (March 22) AutoNavi held an internal meeting to announce the official merger with Ali's local life in-store business. In the future, all of Alibaba's local life-to-store businesses will be integrated at the entrance of Amap.
At 10 a.m., Yu Yongfu, partner of Alibaba, president of the life service segment of Alibaba Group, chairman of AutoNavi Group, and CEO of Local Life Company, Guo Ning, COO of AutoNavi appeared at the live broadcast meeting.
Yu Yongfu said that organizational adjustment is only a means, and the purpose is business development. Don't mention "you" or "you" after the merger, it's all "we Gaode", one participant felt that Yu Yongfu especially emphasized "together" to do a good job in the store business, "Even if the 'military uniform' worn by everyone is different now, solving the problem is the first." ”
Alibaba's big president likes to emphasize that he is a science and engineering man who pursues rationality to win and win, and in today's online meeting, he said that his management style is "rational thinking, emotional decision-making".
Yu Yongfu has his own unique discourse system, and the "541 formation" led by him is a classic football defensive formation; He also likes to quote classic wars from history to illustrate the situation facing the business today; In the Ali Life Services segment he oversees, Ele.me and AutoNavi are called two "land products" by him – home delivery and store users.
Although today's meeting was twice as long as the original 45 minutes, there was still no mention of specific issues such as how to house the word-of-mouth team after the merger and how AutoNavi will conduct in-store business. According to a number of attendees, this is more like a pledge meeting announcing the merger of the two businesses.
"LatePost" learned that in the next quarter, the two teams of AutoNavi and Koubei will explore how to integrate together, and after the 3-month running-in period, the key direction of business and organizational adjustment will be determined. We understand that Zhang Liang, head of word-of-mouth business, will report to Guo Ning, COO of AutoNavi
At present, the contract subject, rank, salary, etc. of word-of-mouth employees have not changed for the time being, and the stock does not involve adjustment for the time being. HR in terms of word of mouth said to employees that many adjustments are still uncertain, "listen to the unified arrangement of AutoNavi ".
In response, relevant staff of AutoNavi responded that as an "open service platform for going out for a good life", AutoNavi Map has been committed to providing users with "familiar anywhere" destination services, and the addition of the new team will help AutoNavi provide users and ecological partners with better destination services.
In the 15 years since Koubei was acquired by Alibaba, it has experienced four stages of development: Taobao (Taobao), Paypay, Hunger (Ele.me), and Gaode (GaoDe), which can be regarded as one of the most upheaval-dispersed businesses within Alibaba.
A local Ali life person believes that "entering the high" may be the best destination for word of mouth in Ali at present - "Taobao and Alipay lack the scene and mind of the store, only traffic; Ele.me did not arrive at the store mentally, no traffic; AutoNavi traffic is a little better, serving destination consumption. ”
But most of the industry people we interviewed hadn't cared about word of mouth for a long time. Someone also asked, "Is Word of Mouth still alive?" ”
They focused on Douyin's local life and Meituan's competition. A super platform that today has 700 million daily activities, occupies a lot of Chinese time, wants to become a universal entrance to the mobile terminal and the old local life service platform that accesses the most merchants and users in the in-store business, the fire of both sides is also spreading to the takeaway field.
Will it be a good choice for Ali to use AutoNavi as a unified entrance to the local life to store business? This is a question that only time can answer.
Nearly 20 years since its establishment, the fifth drifting in word of mouth
Looking back at the history of word-of-mouth, this product has a longer life and more tortuous life than most products on the Chinese Internet today.
In the nearly 20 years since its birth in 2004, Koubei has gone through five stages: acquisition by Alibaba, Taobao, Alipay, Ele.me and the latest entry into AutoNavi.
In 2004, Ali's former employee Li Zhiguo founded Koubei.com, which was acquired by Ali 4 years later, and successively merged into Yahoo China, passed on to Taobao without obvious results, and the product was hidden by Ali.
After that, Alibaba continued to explore the local life business, and Lu Zhaoxi, then CEO of Alibaba, launched the Taobao city project "Taodian" in 2013, using multiple promotions such as Double 11 and Double 12 to divert users to the Taodian project, but it was weaker than Meituan and Ele.me in terms of offline merchant expansion and service quality control. In 2014, Taodian lagged behind both in terms of market share, user activity, and urban coverage.
Local life has been hindered again, so Ali tried to restart word of mouth. In 2015, Alibaba and Ant Financial jointly invested 6 billion yuan to restart word-of-mouth, and the Taodian team and the offline business team of Ant Financial (later renamed "Ant Group") jointly injected word-of-mouth. Xinword-of-mouth was given the task of countering Meituan and helping Alipay promote offline payments.
During this period, Ali once debated whether to adopt a horse racing mechanism, which not only supported word-of-mouth takeaway to compete with Meituan, but also competed with Meituan through the acquisition of Ele.me. "LatePost" previously reported that Ali's investment department supported the latter at the time, and Fan Chi, who was the CEO of Koubei at the time, and Peng Lei, then chairman and CEO of Ant Financial, supported the Koubei team to do it themselves.
In the end, Ali chose to invest 1.25 billion US dollars to buy Ele.me in April 2018, and six months later, Koubei and Ele.me jointly established Alibaba's local life service company, and the data of word-of-mouth began to continue to decline.
The importance of word-of-mouth in Alibaba's local life was once on par with Ele.me, but the deep binding with Alipay also buried hidden dangers for its development. Wang Lei, then CEO of a local life company, once said: "From the perspective of the time, word-of-mouth must support the battle of payment, [which also determines it] it is difficult to become another platform alone." ”
At the beginning of 2022, "LatePost" exclusively reported that the word-of-mouth catering business shrank from 40 cities directly operated in the past to 11 cities (now less than 10 cities), focusing on first- and second-tier cities. The idea of contraction is to operate directly only in profitable cities, and the rest of the cities will switch to a service provider model. Catering is the most important business of word-of-mouth, contributing about seventy percent of its transaction value, but it is in a loss-making state.
Word of mouth has been hindered in the layout of Alibaba's local life, but Gaode, which was originally on the edge of Alibaba's business system, has grown step by step, becoming one of Alibaba's brightest businesses in the past few years.
AutoNavi has steadily exceeded 100 million yuan and has reached a new stage of expansion
The rise of AutoNavi began in 2015 when Yu Yongfu took over, when AutoNavi was fighting with Baidu Map, the two sides chose two different development routes, Baidu Map to do the O2O platform, but AutoNavi Maps retreated to the map tool, Yu Yongfu cut the O2O business after taking office, allowing AutoNavi to focus on more LBS (location-based services) products.
A year and a half later, the daily activity of Amap, which was originally in the downside, began to surpass Baidu, and Baidu Map continued to lose money due to continued investment in O2O, and poor user experience led to a large number of users switching to AutoNavi due to its continued investment. Since then, AutoNavi DAU has grown from 30 million to more than 100 million in 2021, steadily becoming the first in China, ahead of other map platforms.
In July 2021, Alibaba will form a life services segment based on three major businesses based on geographical location services, namely AutoNavi, Local Life and Fliggy, which will be unified by Yu Yongfu.
At the Alibaba investor conference at the end of that year, Yu Yongfu elaborated on his plans for the life service sector. Yu Yongfu believes that maps are the best carrier of the entire real world, and he hopes that AutoNavi can use one map to carry food, clothing, housing and transportation, connect all destinations through the map, and let users not only refuel and recharge on the map, but also find food destinations and book hotel tickets.
Yu Yongfu judged that the dividing point of the local life market is who can reach 300 million daily lives, and the market will shift from the pursuit of scale to the pursuit of efficiency. At that time, Alibaba's entire life service segment and Meituan's daily active users were around 100 million, which was still far from this dividing point.
LatePost learned that there was once a "121 theory" within AutoNavi that explained the three stages of development of AutoNavi products:
- "1" refers to 1 million DAUs (daily active users), at this stage AutoNavi can only do one function;
- "2" refers to 20 million DAU, before that, AutoNavi should focus on doing a good job in product experience, after achieving this data indicator, AutoNavi can start to consider making a platform;
- The second "1" refers to 100 million DAUs, at which stage AutoNavi is able to do distribution and can start doing something else.
At present, according to QuestMobile data, the average monthly DAU of Amap's has been stable for 24 consecutive months to exceed 100 million, reaching the stage of being able to do distribution. Meituan's average monthly DAU has also stabilized at more than 100 million since July 2022.
Aggregate ride-hailing and local life services are "something else" chosen by AutoNavi to do.
In February this year, the average daily order volume of AutoNavi Aggregation Taxi once reached 8 million, which is undoubtedly the second place in the ride-hailing market; Just yesterday (March 21), AutoNavi also officially launched the Starbucks coffee "pick up along the street" function, AutoNavi self-driving users in AutoNavi order Starbucks, passing through the store without getting out of the car, can directly pick up coffee on the side of the road. The service was first launched in 150 stores in Beijing and Shanghai, and will be rolled out to more than 1,000 Starbucks stores nationwide in the future.
Autonavi's approach to "destination services" starts more from the B side than the C side. On the ride-hailing network, AutoNavi started by gathering low-end transportation capacity that was cleared by Didi, and grasped the gap where Didi was removed from the shelf to grow rapidly; In the hotel business, AutoNavi also has access to platforms such as Fliggy, Qunar, Tongcheng, and Ctrip, as well as third-party merchants, encouraging multiple channel providers to bid at AutoNavi and allowing consumers to choose the merchants with the best prices to place orders.
Nowadays, word-of-mouth has been merged into AutoNavi, and the breakthrough that AutoNavi can seek in the in-store business may also come from the B side, as a low-commission LBS matching platform to help small and medium-sized businesses on the B side solve problems such as traffic and payment. If you start from the C-end idea, word-of-mouth will directly face the problem of mismatch of user minds - the mainstream mind of most users is not to open the map to find restaurants, play and buy food - the decision-making path through the map has become longer.
An industry insider believes that it takes longer for AutoNavi to grind the minds of users to the store, but this is also what AutoNavi under Yu Yongfu is good at. When AutoNavi first tried to enter the taxi field in 2017, users were not used to hailing a taxi on the map. However, through a series of strategies such as subsidies, online ride-hailing bidding and low-price taxi, and public transportation navigation conversion users, AutoNavi has helped most users gradually develop the habit of taking a taxi at AutoNavi through a series of strategies.
Catch the fiercest competitive year of local life in stores
Although many Ali people commented on us, the merger of Koubei and AutoNavi and the support of the latter's 120 million daily active and more product strategies may be the best opportunity that Koubei has encountered in the past few years, and AutoNavi traffic is more in line with Koubei's business than other products in the past.
The current battle is that word-of-mouth will face the fiercest competition with a single-digit share of the in-store market. The biggest variable comes from Douyin, a super product with 700 million daily active lives that is putting more resources into the battlefield of local life, and even beginning to affect the status of Meituan, the number one in the market, 2023 will be a year of fierce competition for local life.
As early as 2019, when Douyin was still competing with Kuaishou white-hot, the Douyin management team believed that it should return to the positioning of the product itself - "see and connect", and the connection is not only about information and people, but also about services.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, put forward his own suggestion at that time to "go deep in dining, shopping, and travel". Zhang Nan, CEO of Douyin Group, later imagined that Douyin would become a universal entrance to users' mobile terminals, and Douyin's daily activity should be as high as its monthly activity, and it can become an inseparable product in users' lives. Users can open Douyin to brush content, which can also be used to shop, choose restaurants, make travel plans, buy air tickets and book hotels.
"LatePost" once reported that Douyin began to promote local life business in 2021, and the turnover of local life in 2022 was close to 90 billion yuan, and at the beginning of this year, it set an aggressive goal of achieving nearly 400 billion yuan in real turnover of local life in 2023.
Douyin's entry into the hinterland of Meituan started from low prices, the former chose to list a batch of catering group buying packages with lower prices than Meituan, cultivating a group of users who will actively search for restaurants and milk tea shops on Douyin and place group purchases. Since then, Douyin has begun to adjust its product structure, encouraging merchants to make better video content to improve consumption conversion rates, and also adjusted the platform algorithm and recommendation mechanism to give more recommendations to videos created by high-quality merchants.
At present, in addition to catering, Douyin has also successively launched investment promotion in the fields of comprehensive and wine tourism, and Meituan will carry out from local competition with in-store catering as the core to comprehensive competition in the entire local life business.
Several Meituan people told "LatePost" that Meituan noticed Douyin's rapid group buying action last year when it arrived in the store, and the response action on the business side simply stopped at trying not to be more expensive than Douyin, giving merchants a certain amount of traffic support, and encouraging merchants to put on the shelves a larger number of preferential packages.
Last year, Meituan's in-store business focused more on refined upgrades and cost reduction and efficiency increase, such as improving the accuracy of matching internal algorithms with users; Desire for a greater degree of sinking; Expand the scale of users and attract new ones, etc.
A Meituan source said that the more common thing within Meituan last year was that Douyin was more efficient and more rewarding in doing live streaming e-commerce business, compared with the cake of local life that was more complex and had lower returns.
Meituan is more on the sidelines, and the company spends more time understanding the logic of both businesses and realizing the threat of Douyin. It is understood that Meituan has long expected that Douyin will definitely do local life and make some rapid breakthroughs with traffic, but when the opponent arrives, the business development is faster than Meituan imagined.
However, Douyin's competition has also inspired Meituan's determination to fight and change internally. A Meituan executive recently said internally, "Small success depends on friends, and big success depends on opponents." ”
At present, some of Meituan's production and research support departments have received clear signals that the number of targets of Meituan's top decision-making body, S-Team, has increased compared with last year, most of which are aimed at supporting the demand for in-store business. Meituan will continue to reduce costs and increase efficiency this year, but it will relax cost restrictions for investment in in-store business and do its best to support in-store business.
"LatePost" learned that Meituan has clearly concentrated its superior resources to deal with the attack of Douyin, including but not limited to investing in the construction of the content ecosystem, giving more preferential policies to merchants, and investing more subsidies to attract consumers.
With Douyin and Meituan increasingly competitive, AutoNavi has increased its investment in local life, and it will be a troubled year.