On October 14, the 11th China Real Estate and Pan-Home Furnishing Industry Cross-border Conference was held with the theme of "New Trends, Big Brands", hosted by the China Building Decoration Association, hosted by the Material Application Branch of the China Building Decoration Association and China Ceramics Network. The Industry Summit and the 2021 "Top Ten Brands of Architectural and Sanitary Ceramics" Awards Ceremony were grandly held at the Sofitel Foshan Louvre Hotel.
At the summit, Mr. Xu Honghu, founder and CEO of Yidoutang APP, known as "Dianping Network in the Home Furnishing Industry", gave a wonderful speech titled "Content Marketing and Consumption Insights".
The following content is a compiled transcript of Xu Honghu’s speech (not reviewed by me):
Dear guests, hello everyone! I am the founder and CEO of Yidoutang APP. Yidoutang Home was established in 2009 and received strategic investment from Tencent in 2015. It is the largest home consumption decision-making platform in China. Nowadays, Yidoutang is more than just an APP. Our company includes four major sectors: Yidoutang APP, Cube Tang, Polysaccharide and Shutang. In these 12 years, we have accumulated a lot of experience and insights. Today I will share these experiences in conjunction with the ceramic industry.
Thinking model and business outlook
Through many years of contact with the home furnishing industry, I have discovered a problem, which is that "people in the home furnishing industry always like to run and don't like to think."
Why do you say that?
Many people wait until their own business is not doing well and ask Lao Zhang, Lao Wang, and Lao Sun next door, only to find out that everyone else’s business is not doing well. Some bosses will travel around the world to talk to people from all walks of life about this industry, and discover that there are actually many ways to play. During this period, their knowledge will also increase as their circle of friends expands. To put it nicely, our thinking is also undergoing changes at some level along with the industry.
In the past two years, I was invited by several international first-tier companies to visit and inspect. At that time, my point of view was: 7-11 cannot become popular in China because China has food delivery and Meituan; and IKEA China can only have a small number of shopping malls, and China has not given birth to its own "IKEA" because we have customized home furnishings. I think entrepreneurs need to communicate and think outside the box across industries and dimensions, so as not to stereotype what is good and what is bad.
ActualOn the other hand, there is another problem in the home furnishing industry, that is, "I like useful learning and hate useless learning."
What does this sentence mean?
“Useful learning directs your hands, and useless learning inspires your brain.” This is what a friend who once studied at Tsinghua University and Stanford told me. At that time, I asked him what he learned after working in Israel for so many years. What he said is that what is talked about every day in Israel is useless learning. So can today's useless learning inspire the "brain" of the ceramic industry?
We all know that people have three outlooks - outlook on life, world view and values. So besides the three views, do you have a business view?
First of all, let me recall the worldview in the Three Views. Our worldview has actually undergone five changes. Gaitian in the first stage said that it was in an era of hunting. At that time, the radius of dependence of ancient humans was about 50 kilometers. What they thought about every day was where their prey and natural enemies appeared. In the second and third stages of geocentric theory and heliocentric theory, human beings established basic laws such as "a year has 365 days" and "a year has four seasons". The theory of time and space and the theory of relativity in the fourth and fifth stages created the subsequent industrial revolution of mankind, as well as all the current Internet-related and atomic-related inventions.
Going back to what a business perspective is, it is actually the dependence conditions of an enterprise and its ecological niche.
From 2000 to 2010, the ecological niche of ceramic companies was production; in the next 10 years, the ecological niche of ceramic companies became channels; after 2020, we gradually entered an era of consumer brands, so now ceramics What is the ecological niche of the enterprise?
The era of consumer brands is coming
The underlying logic behind the birth of consumer brands is that due to the homogeneity of product competition, companies have to win through channels. As channel competition intensifies, companies are forced to start brand competition. This is a forced behavior. When our products and channels do not have outstanding advantages, consumers ultimately make decisions through the brand.
Why has there never been a consumer brand in the ceramic industry?
There have always been several misunderstandings in the ceramic industry. It is believed that ceramic tiles are due to low frequency consumption, low attention, and products without logos, resulting in the birth of no consumer brands.In fact, this logic does not hold true.
Brands can be divided into functional brands and social brands. The former works before consumption and the latter works after consumption. Take two examples - air conditioners and cars. The brand logo of an air conditioner plays a role in consumer decision-making, but loses its role after you buy it home. But it is different for cars. It is not easy to spend money to buy a Rolls-Royce or a BMW. The value of this brand logo lies in the process of use. Ceramic tiles clearly belong to the former.
In fact, there is only one reason why consumer brands have not been born in the ceramic industry: business is too good. When business is doing well, no boss will be willing to spend time and energy building a brand because it is unnecessary. Ten years ago, a company built a production line, gave the brand a name, and hired a few marketing personnel, which was sufficient for operations; today, the produced ceramic tiles are piled in the warehouse, and the terminal stores are opened and closed before the company is We are forced to embark on the road of building consumer brands.
Compared with the home appliance industry, they have also gone from production as king to channel as king, and now, there are only a few consumer brands that everyone can name. This is also the inevitable logic for the development of all industries: market—— Channel – Consumer. I personally believe that in the next five years, the top ten consumer brands will be born in the ceramic industry, and they will occupy more than 80% of the market share. These leading companies will be Midea, Gree, and Haier in the ceramic industry in the future.
It is said that the ceramic industry is forced to enter this era of consumer brands, so for the brand directors of ceramic companies, the current situation is both an opportunity and a crisis. Because if they have the ability to build consumer brands, they are likely to be promoted from brand director to vice president in the future. If they do not have this ability, they may be killed by their bosses tomorrow and find talents from other industries.
How to build a consumer brand
There are two logics in building a consumer brand, the first is advertising and the second is content. You know, advertising is mostly about consumers being forced to accept brand messages, and the era of this kind of advertising is over. Today, brand communication relies on content. The power of content communication has led to the rise of many new brands, such as Huaxizi in the beauty industry and Heytea in the catering industry.
Content=planting grass. Grass planting covers a very wide range, but it also has three major misunderstandings. First, planting grass does not mean posting junk ads. The way many companies grow grass is to send a lot of customer service to send junk ads.No one can read the content; secondly, growing grass does not mean becoming an official account. Many companies have put a lot of effort into creating official accounts, such as official accounts and Weibo accounts, but very few consumers actually pay attention to these accounts. ; Third, planting grass does not mean incubating employee accounts. Even if a certain account is successfully hatched and its fans grow to tens of millions, the conversion rate it brings will be minimal.
As for how to grow grass, Yidoutang’s experience gained over the years is to “plant three grasses.” The first one is called Touching Cao, which uses tonal content to attract attention; the second one is called Xingdong Cao, which uses the content of product reviews to strengthen confidence; the third one is called Action Cao, which uses the content of user cases to accelerate decision-making.
For example, one day a user saw a successful man driving a BMW on the Internet and was deeply touched, but he would not immediately spend hundreds of thousands to buy the car. Two grasses - Heartbeat grass. When users think that they need to spend 800,000 to buy a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW to live the life of a successful person, they will immediately enter a state of rational thinking, and they will look for professional evaluation content to dispel all their concerns. However, users who have been planted with touching grass and heart-moving grass will still not make purchases. At this time, action grass is needed. Users will search for the reputation and evaluation of this brand and product, and finally get the idea of taking action before they truly enter the consumption decision-making process.
In the past, the decision-making path for ceramic tile consumption was actually very simple, that is, choosing a style at a home building materials store, then comparing prices across the city, and finally bargaining for a deal. As for today's post-85s consumers, when buying ceramic tiles, they definitely don't go to the store for the first time. Instead, they search on their mobile phones and the Internet, and then choose their favorite style based on their lifestyle. After locking in the style, they check word-of-mouth, and finally lock in the brand. Check out the store.
Therefore, products that focus on decision-making must be online decision-making and offline transactions. On e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, the total of all decision-critical products does not exceed 2%, because more than 80% of decision-critical products are traded offline. So for the ceramic industry, the Internet ≠ e-commerce, what we have to do is to use the Internet to plant three grasses and guide users to name and purchase.
However, not everyone will plant these three grasses. In order for the three grasses to be planted into the minds of users, four means must be used: user insight, content productivity, content strategy, and content distribution.
///////////
Finally, let me tell you a little story. The protagonist of the story is a group of ants. The initial way for the ant group to capture food was through large-scale operations. That is, after a group of ants discovered a prey, they used team strength to carry it.Such large-scale warfare has brought ants to the brink of extinction. Later, lazy ants spawned from the ant colony. After discovering prey, lazy ants would go back and notify the organization to come and transport it. Because of the emergence of this lazy ant's job, the entire ant race was saved.
Today, we are in the era of mobile Internet and content. The company team should be like ants, deriving a small team to do testing, and then notify the organization to enter on a large scale after the test is successful. If we do not follow the example of lazy ants, but choose to fight on a large scale, it will only be a matter of time before we are on the verge of extinction.
