The underlying logic of auto marketing has changed!

Author | Mr. Art of War

来源 | 营销兵法(ID:lanhaiyingxiao)

If you want to say that the car traffic in the first half of this year, it must be Xiaomi SU7 -

Since last year's warm-up, the "revelations" about Xiaomi cars have always become the object of discussion among the public, and they can be on the hot search almost every once in a while, and the new product launch conference has attracted more than 10 million onlookers.

In addition to the eye-catching traffic, Xiaomi cars have also brought a wave of "surprise attacks" to the entire industry with sales, from "20,000 units in 7 minutes" and "50,000 units in less than half an hour", to "2,500 units were delivered in a single week in the second week of listing, ranking first in domestic pure electric car sales", these data have also made more and more people who have "sang" Xiaomi begin to rethink: has the underlying logic of automobile marketing really changed?

01. The stock era of competing minds

Traditional automotive marketing is gradually becoming ineffective

In recent years, new car-making forces have emerged, domestic traditional car companies have opened the road to brand improvement, traditional luxury car brands have gradually explored the price range, and the domestic automobile industry can be described as a fight between gods and goddesses. In the context of unprecedentedly fierce competition, the growth rate of automobile sales has gradually slowed down, and it is an indisputable fact that cars are becoming more and more difficult to sell. How to dig deeper and create user value has become a problem that all car companies should pay attention to in marketing.

First, the automotive industry has entered the stage of stock competition. The development path of most car companies has experienced a variety of dividends, such as demographic dividends, traffic dividends, consumption dividends, etc., which is essentially a process of continuously filling the blank market. In the stage of horse racing, large and wide indiscriminate communication can indeed attract many potential consumers, and the "professional media-consumer group" communication path is also the only way to connect consumers.

However, in the stock market, where every inch of land is contested, such a method is gradually "ineffective". After all, the popularity of the vast majority of brands is also saturated among the effective population, and at this time, no matter how many times the exposure is increased, it is difficult to influence the decision-making of consumers, and if you can't change the "mind" of consumers, it is difficult to harvest real conversion.

Second, consumer structures and communication preferences are also changing. A basic consensus is that most of the automobile consumption in first-tier cities is the demand for additional purchases and replacements, and more new purchases are from third- and fourth-tier cities. The biggest change in the consumer structure is the surge in female consumers, according to the Accenture report, there are nearly 400 million female consumers aged 20-60 in China, and the overall consumer market exceeds 10 trillion. At the same time, the proportion of female car owners is also growing, and the survey shows that the proportion of women in car purchase consumption has risen to 35%, 82% of women believe that buying a car is a necessity of life, and 80% are willing to recommend a car to friends.

In a fragmented media environment, the public's attention is already complex and changeable, and it is difficult for the voice of car companies to be efficiently delivered to everyone through the previous channels. At the same time, the new main consumer force of the online generation will also value the experience, emotional release, and even lifestyle recognition that the product brings to them in addition to the functional value of the product.

02. Product exposure or value giving?

Meet all-round needs with diversified content

Although many car companies have gained insight into new opportunities for marketing increment, they will still face the challenges of traditional marketing inertia in practice. For example, the inertia of traffic thinking, attaching importance to traffic delivery but ignoring communication; Obsessed with attracting traffic to the traditional private domain, it will soon face problems such as difficulty in retaining; It's hard to jump out of the box in terms of content, and so on. It is this kind of inertial thinking that makes many people "sing" about Xiaomi and other trams in the early stage, because their communication ideas are indeed too new, and they can't learn the essence even if they learn.

When Lei Jun announced the creation of a car, perhaps many car companies did not expect that compared with the technical skills of the product itself, what consumers talked about was the appearance of Xiaomi cars and the story of Lei Jun himself. If you just discuss automotive technology, car companies can still use traditional ways to deal with it, but when the fire of communication burns to the end of public opinion, everyone is a little caught off guard. Although many people have analyzed the marketing ideas of Xiaomi cars, the core idea is actually one sentence: replace exposure with value.

On the one hand, Lei Jun, who is quite entertaining, has changed the inherent perception of entrepreneurs from the outside world and released the value of personal IP with a more down-to-earth image of the chairman. Just like Steve Jobs and Apple, Musk and Tesla, their growth stories and every move will eventually become part of the communication. Just like at the delivery ceremony of the founding version of Xiaomi SU7, Lei Jun, who is worth 100 billion, personally handed over the car to the first batch of car owners, and the topic of shaking hands with car owners, taking photos, and opening the door for car owners has also become the focus of the whole network, which is a typical example of personal value empowering brands.

On the other hand, Xiaomi's story will give the product a value beyond functionality. In the eyes of many people, Lei Jun is very good at "packaging" products, such as spending a lot of time at the press conference to tell the story of polishing the technology behind a product, is it interspersed with interesting stories and pressure from the work of the R&D team. Some people feel that this is deliberately guiding consumers to buy their own products through some new words.

In fact, from another point of view, this kind of storytelling method is easy to poke some points of consumers from a certain angle and trigger the emotional resonance of the public. After all, consumers of the online generation have watched too many advertisements, and they will already look for a copy of their active "consumption" among many contents. Here I would like to give you a very impressive example, for example, in the issue of "Thirteen Invitations" Xu Zhiyuan and Fei Xiang, there is such a scene, when they took a car to the next place in Beijing late at night, Fei Xiang naturally said to Xu Zhiyuan: "The first car my dad bought was Volvo. After having a child, I bought my first car, so I'm here to help you advertise, but it's not an advertisement. This is true because he feels that Volvo is safe. In this case, the connection point of emotional value is found in addition to the functional value of the product, "safety".

Write at the end

In the market environment where industry competition has become fierce, the development trend of automobile marketing is very obvious, not only the one-way value transmission of brands, but also the process of continuous understanding of each other between brands and users. The marketing of car companies should form trust and recognition with consumers, and ultimately achieve brand value enhancement and promote sales growth.

In the process of content competition, car companies should also actively transform their roles - brands need to face not only competition from peers, but also content that needs to be imitated and borrowed is not only content launched by peers. In this era of extreme fragmentation, the real adversary for brands is native content on all major social platforms. Only by "fighting your way out" in these native content can you really make consumers shine.