Inscription: On September 19, 2021, the inauguration ceremony of the new campus of The North China Development Institute and South South University Chengze Garden was held, and the Alumni Association of Peking University Development Institutions, the Communication Center of the National Development Institute and the Bimba Business School jointly invited the professor team and alumni of the Bimba Business School of the National Development Institute to hold a celebration sub-forum with the theme of "Management Reform in the Era of Deep Digitalization". This article is based on a speech by Ma Yin, a student of Peking University and founder and CEO of Aranya.
Ma Yin, a student of Peking University and the founder and CEO of Aranya
The Aranya project was the one I took over eight years ago, and that year was my first year of official entrepreneurship. When I took this project, it was mainly to buy land and sell land to make a difference, and as a result, this land could not be sold, and it was smashed in my own hands, and since then, I can only climb out step by step from the trough, and finally climb out today. Among them, there are not only the potential of people after being forced into a desperate situation, but also the time, location, people, especially the practice and summary of the whole process, which is also the main content to share with you today.
In the post-pandemic era in which we live, life has changed dramatically, and the three most important phenomena are:
First, our living world has exploded with information, and information is becoming more and more fragmented;
Second, the epidemic has caused very little real communication and interaction between people, although the connection is everywhere, but our lives are becoming more and more lonely;
Third, after everyone is affected by information and trivial things, the meaning and value of life itself are ignored.
In this context, how should business change?
In the past, business mainly considered products or consumption upgrades from the functional level, often ignoring what people's internal needs were. In addition to functional needs and material needs, can commercial brands make people's lives more valuable and meaningful? What is it that allows everyone to really find happiness? What exactly is happiness itself? This is the core point of our constant thinking.
Whether as a developer, manager, or operator, for so many years, I myself have been more like building a big platform for a business ecological environment, so that more people can live together on this big platform, operate and serve in this place.
In this process, we first build an ecological environment platform, which connects people and integrates them. Based on integration, greater value can be created in the future. The key words I distilled from this fusion are: "group", "scene" and "content".
What is a group?
Professor Wang Dingding of the Peking University Development Institute once said, "The greatest pain of our time is that our way of life is Western, but our emotional way and psychological structure are still Eastern. ”
When we build a house, we also find one of the biggest characteristics, that is, all houses are limited to the house itself in the process of development or upgrading, including how the house can be built better and better, the landscape is getting better and better, which is mainly limited to the upgrading of functional and material needs, ignoring the needs of the two dimensions of emotion and psychology.
This aspect of the emotional dimension is especially evident in life in a big city: we all live as familiar strangers. I myself have this feeling, I live in the community, I don't know who lives at the door, even if I walk into the elevator, I will bow my head and pass. Relationships between people have become very strange, and the concepts of fathers and countrymen, "distant relatives are not as good as close neighbors", seem to have disappeared in big cities.
I grew up in the alley when I was a child, hanging a key around my neck and going to school, the neighbor's kitchen door can be pushed open and entered, and leftovers can be picked up and eaten. In fact, the intimate relationship between neighbors is exactly what we need in our hearts, because Chinese willing to live in the warm veins of the world.
Nowadays, although living in a big city, we can hold a new ID card, have a house and a car, but we find that we live alone and have no sense of belonging. Back home, the sense of belonging felt is irreplaceable by these substances.
Can a house or community meet the needs of the emotional dimension more, or can it bring greater added value beyond material functions to meet deeper needs?
Based on this, we will think about a particularly important thing in the Aranya project, that is, to build a community of acquaintances from the emotional dimension, so that everyone can find a sense of security and belonging. We hope to find the intimate relationship between people, to find the intimate relationship between the neighbors when we were young, and to meet people's emotional maintenance needs.
Aranya's community building, from the beginning, has been building various types of communities, such as building online communities (groups), and also doing a lot of offline gatherings, including my own frequent dinner. After everyone comes back, we want to try to make all the owners mature. Chinese society is a society of acquaintances, and after everyone becomes a mature person, they can solve the emotional relationship, sense of security, and sense of belonging between people.
Of course, before building a group, we will consider the consistency of values. Different communities are essentially platforms that aggregate values. Although values sound particularly vain, they are extremely important, because only when people who hold common values are gathered in a group, can they really develop public life and interact, otherwise everyone is still "chicken and duck", and communication is meaningless.
After the establishment of the group, how to live a good public life? Aranya has not come to this point with a strategy or product drive, I call it a customer complaint driven model. In the community, customer complaints are of great value.
In the early days of community operation, my promise to customers is: I am always in the group, everyone has something to find me directly, guaranteed to reply in half an hour, and solve within 24 hours. In fact, my greatest value in this process is not to solve any problems, but to always have insight into customers and observe the problems of products and services. Sometimes, when I go back to Aranya, it's an illusion, because the staff says that Ma is always coming back, and everyone should pay attention, but in the community I can feel the most real state of everyone.
The management of the Aranya project relies on customer complaints to solve problems, and we use the way to solve problems to make up for the shortcomings in management. Even today, we continue to solve the problem of the development of today's projects in this way. Through group wisdom and continuous discussion and interaction, you will find that many of the original management concepts are wrong.
The power of group wisdom is too great, and I myself have benefited greatly from the community, and Aranya has continued to grow rapidly through the community grafting the wisdom and power of all the owners. Not only our projects, but also managers and owners grow together in such a public life, which is particularly meaningful.
Therefore, I also think that the future of commercial brands must be able to provide unique value to a certain type of customer group, and must be based on emotional and spiritual attributes to create a unique value, not just the material level; values are actually the soul of a commercial brand, the community is the bearing form of the commercial brand, values and communities determine how far the commercial brand can go. This is also my deepest experience in Aranya's management and operation over the years.
To create a brand or lifestyle, we also have to think hard about what the scene is.
All public lifestyles need some space and scene bearing, including emotional life and spiritual life. Moreover, behind the consumption upgrade must be a design upgrade, especially an aesthetic design, and aesthetics will become the core competitiveness of many products. Many emerging companies can quickly get to the current position, which is to harvest the aesthetic dividend. Especially after the 90s young people, culture, art, aesthetics and even their first needs, these young people have not thought about food and clothing since they were born, after 60, 70 are hungry grown up, after the 90s growth memory is not hungry this thing, they will naturally think about self-realization, but also accept a better culture, education and training, the degree of attention to aesthetics is particularly high, and aesthetics can be transformed into value.
To this end, Aranya has built a large number of public buildings, the purpose is to let everyone gather and communicate, especially many spiritual buildings, such as auditoriums, art galleries, concert halls, gymnasiums and so on. Aranya has done a lot of spiritual architecture, on the one hand, hoping that people can find emotional resonance in it, and on the other hand, they can carry out a lot of cultural activities.
What is the concept of spiritual architecture? What is poetic architecture? If the functional needs of a building are less than the spiritual needs, it can be called poetic architecture.
Our understanding of architectural space in the past was that all buildings meet functional needs, and when spiritual buildings appear, you will find that the need to meet functions in such spaces is almost last. Spiritual space has a huge soothing effect on people's hearts, which will make emotions and spirits satisfied.
The scene has a relationship with values, what kind of values have what kind of lifestyle, how to believe in how to live. Aranya also has its own values.
In the past, the common values of real estate projects or cultural tourism projects were wealth and wealth, and their implicit values were the worship of money, power, face, and consumerism. At that time, the luxury housing project must be built according to such values, otherwise the house will not be easy to sell.
Times are constantly changing, and now that the satisfaction of material needs has slowly come to a ceiling, people are beginning to pay attention to their own internal needs, and they no longer have to wear the brand logo on their chests. The brand's values shift to the spiritual level, emphasizing a return to nature, a return to the family, and a return to the original self.
The brand values of the new era emphasize the return at the spiritual level, and the simplicity of quality and the abundance of moderation at the level of life. After this definition, we also build scenes, services and buildings with these values. The result of practice is that people who like it like it incomparably, and people who don't like it have no feelings. We actually use values to aggregate a group of customers and then serve them well.
We hope to build all the cultural buildings, spiritual buildings and public spaces in the community into the study and living room of this era, and hope that the artistic life will be dailyized and the daily life will be artistic.
The ubiquitous state of artistic life is the beautiful life that Aranya hopes to rebuild.
Nowadays, Aranya has transformed into an operator and a service provider, so in addition to real estate revenue, we need to invest more in services and operations. If it were not for the epidemic this year, we expect service-oriented revenue to exceed 1 billion yuan, that is, the income from hotels, homestays and restaurants brought by the community. Slowly, we will also completely transform the business model, that is, to turn the one-time money-making model of real estate into a long-term sustainable money-making model, and after selling the house, it is the beginning of the service to make money.
As for what the content of the service is, we do not set a fixed answer, and constantly explore and think. One thing we believe is that spiritual culture and artistic content will surely become the just needs of future social life. Culture and art have also brought great transformation to Aranya over the years, and both owners, visitors, and ourselves have been greatly enhanced.
How will we innovate in the future?
Innovation is a particularly difficult thing. Where does innovation come about? Sometimes by intuition. But where did the intuition come from? If you continue to ask questions, it is closely related to culture and art. Culture and art are particularly good, because they can help us open the boundaries of the business world and fill in the blanks in the rich mines of the business world. Many people believe that the business world has limited space, and when it is full, there is no opportunity. This is not the case, but culture and art are particularly important ways to open up cognitive boundaries, and it will let people know that the space of the business world can have various possibilities for extension. Culture and art can also constantly stimulate people's curiosity, creativity, and sensitivity, and these things are extremely important to entrepreneurs.
I often have a worry that people will not be able to grow up after reaching a certain age, for example, older men will fall into a closed state of mind and will become more and more self-sufficient, while women, on the contrary, will become more and more selfless. Looking back at many lighthouse-like figures in the 1980s, I also find that it seems that they stayed at a certain time and stopped growing. If people do not continue to innovate and transform, it is easy to enter such a state, that is, all the things they learn only confirm their own views, and those that are contrary to their own views cannot be accepted, so they cannot absorb and grow. It's a terrible state, and I'm afraid to get into that state myself.
Culture and art can indeed bring imagination, creativity, curiosity, and cultural content can also make people feel the importance continuously. We can't do anything before we think things out very clearly, plan for the long term, and then start again, and the result is likely to be either to give up, or not to have a chance, or to start and then fall into the old way of thinking and not get out. When I feel importance or creative impulses, my experience is to execute first, and then continue to revise, summarize, and look back to see if I really understand. Simply put, if you feel that a thing is important and the result is controllable, you will do it first, and then dynamically adjust it in the process.
Aranya can do more than a thousand events a year, from music festivals, literary festivals, poetry festivals, equestrian festivals, to book clubs between owners. All visitors to Aranya can participate in various types of events, as well as plays, music and other performances and art museum exhibitions. We continue to organize such cultural and artistic events because we believe that cultural and artistic content is a solution for the future.
Aranya has also done a variety of community festivals, such as the coming-of-age ceremony and the family history festival, and we encourage owners to write family histories to see if they can find a sense of new hometown, know where they came from, and know their ancestral heritage. Living together is the beginning of a new hometown.
We also want Anaya to be a place where owners cultivate aesthetics for their children. More importantly, through these cultural and artistic contents of love, we hope to keep everyone in a state of good life.
Life can be more beautiful, everyone can live their own life, and the beautiful state of life is not given by others. We also help everyone live their new life by providing a detailed, serviced, clean and beautiful community life. In this process, we will cooperate with various cultural institutions to create a seaside art house.
To sum up, our business not only to solve the problem of living, but also hope to meet the needs of more people from the emotional dimension and spiritual dimension, when a house, a community can meet people's material, emotional, spiritual needs at the same time, it will be more valuable than other people's houses and communities. In uncertain times, with the power of culture and art, we swim until the sea turns blue and swims to the other side of people's hearts, which is also the direction we are trying to explore.
Organizer: Wang Zhiqin | Editor: Wang Xianqing