Whether domestic or global, consumer technology has always been the vanguard of brand development.
Compared with the categories that focus on spiritual and cultural attributes with a longer development cycle, the functional consumer electronics and consumer technology brands have indeed had a more direct and far-reaching impact on the consumer scene in recent years.
From 3C to diet and daily life, the deep combination of technology and consumption has profoundly changed our lifestyle, and has also given many traditional consumption fields greater imagination.
However, this does not mean that the innovation of consumer technology can be unbridled in the wild, and the integration of technology that is divorced from reality or blindly pursues advanced technology may not bring a warm response from the market, but an embarrassing situation that cannot be implemented.
This can't help but make people think deeply: how to grasp the distance between users and at the same time, truly achieve user-centric, not only not limited by the appearance of demand, but also to tap and promote product innovation with substantial value?
In the recent New Wave activities, Zhang Zhou, Managing Director of Binfu Capital, and Li Wenjun, the founder of Jiaquan, Sunny, the co-founder of Birdsong Flower Pet, and Yun Shan, the founder of olayks, had an in-depth dialogue on this topic.
"Actually, consumers have always been there, it's just that we used to look at them with a lot of filters. As Li Wenjun said, in order to break the filter and face the most real consumer needs, some of them insist on going to 50-100 families every six months, some will add friends of every brand user, and some insist on doing a good job of live broadcast to close the distance with users.
It is these seemingly "stupid" but effective methods that have opened up the gap between brands and users. Although everyone comes from different tracks, a core consensus has been established when discussing product innovation:
Solid technological innovation and product hard power at the rational level are the foundation, and insight into the cognitive stage of users at the emotional level is equally important with the real emotional value.
Don't be a bigger chicken in the flock, but become a completely different crane, make a product 0.5 steps ahead, and be a consumer-perceivable innovation...... Not only consumer technology, but also their ideas can also bring benefits to more consumer product innovation.
Edit | Ichi-cho
Zhang Zhou: Hello everyone, I'm Zhang Zhou of Binfu Capital.
Zhang Zhou, Managing Director of Binfu Capital
Our fund has invested in a total of 780 projects, of which 20 are cases related to the upstream and downstream of the technology consumption and consumer digital industries, and fortunately, about 7-8 of them have now exceeded 1 billion yuan in a single year, and we have also invested and accompanied them at an early stage, including technology/smart hardware, innovative raw materials and digitalization-related, as well as innovative companies that provide solutions.
Today's topic ("User-centricity, multiple models of consumer tech growth") is very interesting, because there have been many highlights in consumer technology in the last 2-3 years, and many new products have emerged.
Moreover, consumer technology integrates technology on the basis of traditional consumption, which is also in line with the guidance of the capital market and policy.
I will give you more time to introduce your brand first.
Li Wenjun: I am Li Wenjun, the founder of Jiaquan Spring, and I have been making water purification for more than ten years.
Li Wenjun, the founder of Jiaquan
Jiaquan is a product brand, relying on high-tech products as a whole, taking the high-end route, with an average customer order of 4,000-10,000 yuan.
We focus on "water", which is a rigid market, and our product is also very simple, that is, mineral spring machine. You don't have to go to the ice fields of the Alps and Colombia, or to the polar glaciers, you can enjoy the mineral water of the Tianshan Mountains, snow-capped mountains and glaciers at home with one click.
And our products can filter around 12,000 bottles of mineral water, making it a more environmentally friendly solution.
Our mission vision is simple, we hope that in the future, all mankind will no longer use plastic bottles, because it takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to complete degradation. At the rate at which humans are discarding plastic bottles every year, by 2050, there will be more plastic bottles in nature than there are fish in the ocean.
We don't move water, we just provide a fresher, healthier solution. In addition, we also want to give more care to nature and less plastic bottles. That's what we're doing.
Sunny:我是鸟语花香宠物联合创始人Sunny。
鸟语花香宠物联合创始人Sunny
The song of birds and flowers sounds like a special word for beauty, but in fact, we are a technology company that makes pet smart products. At present, our products cover six categories: smart feeding, cleaning, nursing, travel, home and toys, basically covering all aspects of everyone's daily pet raising.
云山:我是olayks云山。
Olayks founder Yun Shan
The category we are doing now is small kitchen appliances, which are very popular. But based on the understanding of the new era, new people and new consumption patterns, we have made some innovations, and now we have achieved a little bit of success.
The kitchen appliance industry is too volatile, and in general, the value we can provide to consumers now is divided into two parts: first, there is design aesthetics, and the product will have more emotional value. Second, we are also doing exports, which is equivalent to providing customers with high-quality, high-standard, and cost-effective products.
Zhang Zhou: Everyone is very humble and only shares a little achievement, but if you look at their stores, you will find that they have achieved the leading position in their respective segments.
Next, let's talk about some cognitive issues.
First of all, we are all in the 2C market, and the perception and insight of users must be a very key part of it, especially in the past 2-3 years, the overall macroeconomic changes are so fast, and the living conditions and preferences of consumers of different generations are different.
So, how do you quickly and consistently gain insight into consumer changes when your company's operations or strategy is being formulated?
Li Wenjun: Actually, I feel that it is more about the changes of entrepreneurs, and everyone has gradually recognized the real and core demands of consumers.
In the past few years, new consumption was a very hot topic, because a large number of entrepreneurs poured into this track, and everyone was discussing at that time to seize the new opportunities brought by new consumer demand. But after the big waves, the entrepreneurs who stayed behind became more pragmatic.
Looking back on this journey, I have a feeling that consumers have always been there, but we used to look at them with a lot of filters.
I feel that the overall consumption situation is polarized at the moment.
One pole is the so-called low-order, strong substitutability of rigid demand products. Anyway, the quality is not bad, consumers want to pursue cheap, and the competition in this dimension will inevitably become more and more volatile, and then a series of terms such as "consumption downgrade" have been derived, which is essentially a return to real life for consumers.
On the other hand, there are high-quality and high-priced products, and the demand for this part is also rising, but in fact, it is still returning to the essence of life. When we realize that the money should be spent in a more worthwhile place, we will not choose, or we will choose a product with better quality, which is an obvious "consumption upgrade".
The media environment has also changed, whether it is Douyin or Xiaohongshu, more users are willing to see the real life status, usage habits and needs, instead of thinking that beautiful photos are the imaginary life as in the past.
Chinese consumers have entered the stage of "truth is beauty", but it may also be because we have made up too many dreamy things for consumers in the past and ignored the essence of their needs, not that they have changed.
As for how to gain insight into the essential needs of consumers, it is very simple, that is, to really enter their families.
Jiaquan will insist on going to 50-100 households every six months, including users who have already purchased, users who have purchased competing products, and users who have not bought similar products.
In this way, you can see their living environment, habits, products and consumption decisions, and communicate directly with them, which are very real.
Don't just sit in the office and look at the data, be sure to come to life, which is a very stupid but very effective approach that we take. The core selling point of the current Jiaquan products is not created, but directly told to us by consumers.
Secondly, I will also insist on streaming on my own. Everyone says that it is easier to make money with founder IP, but the core reason for my insistence is that I want to communicate directly with consumers.
The founders of consumer products are generally product managers, and I am no exception. I think the role of a product manager must be close to the consumer, and you will know where their needs are if you experience how sales sell products, including which words or which selling point of the product impressed consumers, how they make decisions, and what questions they ask.
Live streaming provides us with an interface to communicate face-to-face with consumers, so this must be done.
Sunny: Mr. Lee just talked about some very universal and core principles. For the track of pet smart hardware, we actually only did three things to adapt to the changes of the times.
First, always insist on making good products. The essence of the consumer goods industry is to create products and imagination around people's emotional appeals, so no matter how the industry environment changes, everyone hopes that every penny they spend can bring about an improvement in the quality of life. Therefore, always make products that can really benefit consumers.
Second, we pay special attention to the bad reviews under the sales pages of competing products and other similar brands, and observe why users are giving bad reviews, and why this bad review did not happen to us, whether they did something right or did nothing wrong.
So we will not only look at ourselves and competing brands, but also look at larger categories, including maternal and infant categories, because in essence, pets are another type of baby.
Third, stand with the user. Regardless of the methodology that other brands have in terms of operating users, I will only say one, and we will add friends to each brand user.
This action sounds very simple, but it requires a lot of time, money, manpower, and even effort, but it is the cornerstone of our product research, market trend insight, and user demand mining.
Yunshan: Consumption can't bypass user needs and create value.
Mr. Li said that she would broadcast live by herself, and I often do so, because the most important thing for a C-end brand is to be closer to your users.
The essence of business is value exchange, after the brand creates value, users use currency to exchange with us, and the essence of market economy is the problem of competition. If you can stand out from the encirclement and get closer to the user, you can naturally succeed.
From my point of view, I would like to share two points.
First, if you want to make a new brand of kitchen appliances or living home furnishings, you must include product aesthetics at the company's strategic level.
For example, when we are discussing whether consumption is upgraded or downgraded, I think that consumption must be upgraded all the time, why do we choose to be poor if we can live a better life? We might as well discuss the change of consumption mode and consumption concept.
In the future, the importance of emotional value will gradually exceed the use value, especially in categories like ours that are highly integrated into home life and do not have too high technical thresholds.
For example, if you want to make a rice cooker now, it is difficult for you to find out the unique value, so how to break through the competition? Our solution is to sell kitchen appliances as household products.
We also observed an objective phenomenon that young consumers are far more likely to open small stoves than large ones, and the frequency of ordering takeout is much higher than that of cooking in person. Therefore, we often ask the question of whether Olayks can let users order less takeout after the product is launched.
There are just over 200 people in our company, and there are more than 30 engineers in the processing plant of the Product Innovation Center alone, who are responsible for the industrial and structural design of the products.
Based on the above thinking, we will take into account the emotional value when developing the product, and think about how to let users get some better and more convenient experience when opening a small stove.
Even if he uses it sparingly, the product can play a certain decorative role in the home space.
Second, everyone must treat live broadcast at the level of company strategy.
Before better technological innovation, from the perspective of the C-side, the consumption and shopping experience of live broadcast will be excellent. Because Taobao and Tmall essentially belong to shelf e-commerce, they are more likely to convey brand value to users through pictures, while live broadcast can provide an audio-visual experience.
We've done really well among the brands on Douyin, and most of the growth last year came from live streaming.
This is not as difficult as everyone thinks, because retail is nothing more than "people and goods". The surviving consumer products must still be able to survive, that is, they have unique value, if you want to do a good job in live broadcasting, the core lies in the anchor and the scene.
From the perspective of user consumption experience, I don't think the future will be content e-commerce and interest e-commerce, and live broadcast should be presented in the form of shelf e-commerce. Because consumption must be inseparable from the shelves, for example, why girls like to go shopping, is because the dazzling shelves will make them feel refreshed.
When everyone is using green screen live broadcast, we are the first in the home appliance industry to spend a lot of money to decorate the exhibition hall to do live broadcast, and the effect is very good.
After many people followed up, we were the first to do a live broadcast of the exhibition, and this year we also went to the live broadcast of foreign exhibitions such as Japan and South Korea, and the sales volume of a single event was at least 10 times that of the daily live broadcast in the company.
Because users not only value the unique value of products when they consume, but also want to feel. The value can only be true if the user perceives the value you want to provide to them, otherwise it will be greatly discounted.
Why aren't a lot of offline retail formats not afraid of online? Because they can make the most of the experience. Many multinational retail brands even standardize scents, smells, music, and shelf displays.
Taking ZARA, a fast fashion brand, as an example, it is new every week, and the standardized display will be quickly and strictly implemented in each store, and everything is focused on the user experience.
So I personally feel that shelf-based live e-commerce will bring a better buying experience.
To sum up, if you are doing a more traditional industry, you may want to include emotional value in the company's strategic level. Secondly, no matter how difficult it is to re-roll the live broadcast, we must find a way to do it well, otherwise it will be difficult to grow in such an environment.
Zhang Zhou: You shared a lot of user insights and market research experiences, so how to implement these results into daily strategy and product design, and how to do product innovation?
Li Wenjun: Making new products is a systematic project, and in our company, it will be divided into two parts: "rational brain" and "perceptual brain".
The "rational brain" part:
First, we will look at big data, that is, how big the track is, how fast the growth rate is, and what the current trend is changing. One of the most important things to do is to step out of your own board and watch the game.
For example, when we look at the domestic online market, we will look at the offline market, when we look at the domestic market, we will look at overseas markets such as Japan, South Korea, and the United States, and we may have to push forward 20 years to look at the market across time and space.
Of course, it is also necessary to jump out of the chessboard to look at the different tracks in the market. For example, we are making water purifiers for household appliances, which are essentially replacing bottled mineral water, so I will look at the trends of food and beverages, which are all to be pulled through.
Second, "looking at the geographical advantage" is to see how you are different from others and think about how to compete.
Household drinking water has undergone 4 innovations.
The first innovation was tap water, which could be drunk by turning on the tap, instead of having to go to the river or well to fetch water.
The second innovation is the bottled and bottled water made by Nongfu Spring, which is actually a cross-category innovation, not to make a faucet on the original basis, but to make a plastic bottle to bring higher quality water from nature to the home.
The third innovation is the water purifier, which no longer needs a complicated handling process, and no longer needs to spend 90% of the cost on plastic bottles, and only needs to open the water purification product to drink artificial clean water.
The fourth innovation is what Jiaquan is doing, we put natural ore into the product, first purify the water and then reduce it to natural mineral water, so that consumers can really drink natural spring water from distant polar glaciers. Of course, this is not just talking, our water is the same as the national standards of Evian water and Baisui Mountain.
We have a very solid technological innovation behind us, and this technology is also unique to Jiaquan. We spent tens of millions of dollars just for this formula, and we have monopolized nearly dozens of patents on mineralized ecological compound technology, including 4 invention patents.
That's our core strength.
Don't be the bigger chicken in the flock, but be a completely different crane, that's the difference.
Therefore, the "rational brain" is the choice of the track and what kind of product to make.
Part of the "perceptual brain":
You have to go to the minds of consumers, because their decisions are not so rational, they are just instinctive, based on their existing knowledge of things. When consuming, they are immersed in the emotional value of "what is good and what is bad", so we need to analyze the emotional value of users.
This part needs to be emotional, there needs to be a team to get in touch with consumers, and then grasp the keywords of their emotions, and they need different points for different products.
Anyone who does marketing knows the word cloud, that is, what words consumers like to say, and we take it out and graft it into product innovation to define the next generation of products.
To sum up, first, we must jump out of the industry to see and then make a choice. Second, be sure to do something that stands out from the crowd, not just a big chicken. Third, when communicating with consumers, we must gain insight into their true emotional value.
Sunny: In fact, in the line of product innovation, we have an internal principle, which is "don't bring too new products to users".
This is not only from the perspective of commercialization, too new products are often not easy to be accepted by the market, but also because consumers' perception is often based on inherent understanding, if the product is too different from others, it is difficult for consumers to agree, and the cost of market education will be very high.
Therefore, when we do product innovation, we tend to divide it into two types:
One is a product that is 0.5 steps ahead based on the existing product level and consumer cognition.
We will tell users that this product is easier to use, does not cost too much extra money, and does not take too much time to get started right away, but it can bring a clear quality of life improvement, and users will be more receptive to such a product.
For example, in the conventional cognition, the product keyword of the pet drying box is often drying efficiency, because many people think that buying this product is to quickly dry the pet.
But in fact, most of the pet drying box is not liked by pet owners, because the vast majority of pets in the state of the drying box are resistant or even crazy, and the intuitive feeling is that the hairy children at home do not like to use this product.
In other words, if your baby uses a diaper and immediately cries there for a day, will you choose this brand again? No.
Therefore, we will focus on the somatosensory dimension of the pet in the drying box to create a user experience upgrade, including noise, temperature, wind speed, as well as the space and angle where the furry child can lie down, lie down, and lie down when leaning inside, etc., which is 0.5 steps ahead. Of course, we also guarantee the rigid standard of drying efficiency.
We also often ask ourselves two questions: first, where is the bottom line of users? Second, where is the bottom line of the brand?
We tend to pay special attention to the gap between the two bottom lines, because many times brands will make some path decisions that deviate from the bottom line of users and the bottom line of the brand's original intention in order to make profits, growth or some other subjective factors, and we will be especially vigilant about these things.
On the other hand, there is actually a bottom-level logic on how to make differentiated products, that is, to do technical pre-research. Although we are only making products that are 0.5 steps ahead, we are also stockpiling new products that are 5 steps ahead, 10 steps ahead, and maybe even 10 years later.
The technical reserve behind it needs to be carried out in advance, which is why we do the layout of intellectual property rights in the world. It may be hard to imagine that Birdsong is still a very small brand that is not widely known in China, but it has applied for and reserved intellectual property rights in more than 30 countries and regions around the world.
There are some front-loading actions that need to be pushed from the top down, and I'm sure the founder of every good business can understand.
Yun Shan: I would like to share two points:
First, if you want to make a product that is popular in the market, you must first understand what the target and main consumer groups are.
After the 80s, China's largest wave of baby boomers occurred in 1987, and this wave is also the current senior middle class. Therefore, the company's product managers and planners need to have people of this generation, because they will better understand the thoughts, lifestyles and consumption views of this group of people.
Second, we need to innovate the value that users can perceive.
How to make it easier for users to perceive? Sunny just said that when consuming, the user's perception is greater than the truth. One is paying for one's own cognition, not for the facts, and of course we certainly cannot use cognition to distort the facts.
In our own case, the kitchen appliance industry is very difficult to innovate, which forces us to incorporate emotional and aesthetic values into our products. Of course, because kitchen appliances are consumer-resistant, everyone will still consider its practicality and quality when buying.
For example, in the past few years, when users bought a pot, they were most concerned about the coating, and when various brands were still fighting at this level, we took the lead in using "ceramic glaze" in the coating, and many big brands began to imitate us in the future.
The name "ceramic glaze" was also given by me, and my colleagues who were doing product development at that time were going to name it ceramic coating, although material innovation is valuable to users, but it is difficult to be perceived, and users have to ask what it is.
Whether it's retail, live streaming or shelf e-commerce, the time customers give you is actually very short. Why do many e-commerce people not do well in retail now? It is because they have not experienced the cruel scene of saying the wrong word offline and the customer turns around and leaves.
That's why I named it "ceramic glaze" at the time – ceramics, glaze triggers natural associations.
In my opinion, talk less about product innovation and more about product strategy. Innovation is important, but it must also be matched to the right strategy, otherwise the R&D cost is not low but the product is unsalable, and the capital turnover will be difficult.
Our company's explosive product rate is very high, and basically 3-4 explosive products for e-commerce brands are already very powerful, and we have 20. Because when we are doing product innovation, we will try our best to make the innovation point better perceived by the user, for example, the content delivered may be something in his subconscious, so that he will immediately have a sense of the picture.
To sum up, we must first find a product manager who understands the lifestyle of the main consumer group, and secondly, make perceptible innovations.
Zhang Zhou: Only a team with strong cognition can retain and become the head brand of the market segment in the face of macroeconomic changes. Thank you again!