48 hours for success or failure, 72 hours for life or death, has almost become a new game rule in the automotive industry. Under this set of rules, entering 2024, The competition for traffic and attention has already become another effective means of promotion for automobile enterprises in addition to price reduction.
Even Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Auto, who has the title of "the king of microblogging", started to suffer from traffic anxiety more or less within two months after MEGA was released. At the Beijing Auto Show, Li Xiang took Lei Jun to experience the newly released ideal L6, and talked with Wei Lai and Li Bin'ao about "high-end pure electricity". Li Xiang, who used to show his face in auto shows, is now forced to "market himself".
But the traffic of auto show is not everyday. Instead of waiting passively, Li Xiang should take the initiative to become the source of traffic. In this regard, Learning from other leaders and entering the live broadcast room as soon as possible is undoubtedly a shortcut for Li Xiang to learn from. After all, Zhou Hongyi, who does not have a driver's license, has been promoted to the top by driving live.
On April 18, Zhou Hongyi released a video saying that he would sell the Maybach 600 that has accompanied him for nine years and replace it with a domestic intelligent network connected new energy vehicle. Subsequently, major automobile manufacturers came to Zhou Hongyi to "send off". So far, the "798 Small Auto Show" has been quietly held below the headquarters of 360 Company in Jiuxianqiao, Beijing. Rows of new energy vehicles are waiting for Zhou Hongyi to test drive them.
However, Zhou Hongyi ran to the Beijing Auto Show on April 25, and various Internet platforms followed up his experience of "changing and selecting cars" through live broadcast and video. More interestingly, after the photo of Zhou Hongyi sitting on the roof became popular on the Internet, netizens jokingly said: "This is the last car model at the 2024 Beijing Auto Show".
Behind the whole network attention caused by Zhou Hongyi's car change incident, the automotive industry is setting off a new wave of traffic competition.
A
The ideal car is not no traffic, but negative news occupies the whole social network.
Before the listing of MEGA, Li Xiang was called the "king of microblogs". As long as he posted a microblog, he would surely be able to occupy a place on the hot search list. But after the MEGA incident, Li Xiang began to keep a low profile, and the traffic of the ideal brand also went down.
Today, there are still many puzzles about this event: Is it the ideal that made a mistake? Or is it caused by malicious competition from friends?
According to the latest report of Caixin, the police in Hengshui, Hebei Province, found clues related to the ideal MEGA when investigating the related cases of the water army company and the public relations company. According to Caixin, during the listing of MEGA, three to four auto companies were suspected of participating in the crackdown. The report also mentioned that a middle-level employee of Xiaopeng Automobile is cooperating with the investigation.
After the microblog "closed", Li Xiang once wrote a long article in his circle of friends, in which he said a classic line "light strikes back against darkness". The ideal of "bright", the big probability is to use sales results to prove themselves. This is why Ideals recently announced a price cut, because only by raising sales, can we have the confidence to fight back against "darkness".
On April 22, the official micro blog of Ideal Auto announced the new prices of the 2024 ideal L7, ideal L8, ideal L9 and ideal MEGA: the price reduction range of the 2024 ideal L7, ideal L8 and ideal L9 is 18000-20000 yuan. The new price of ideal MEGA is 529800 yuan, down 30000 yuan from the previous price. At the same time, it is ideal for the owners of 2024 L series and MEGA to make up for the price difference.
The ideal official demotion was released on the fourth day after the launch of the ideal L6. It's hard to say that this has nothing to do with the ideal order performance of L6. You should know that the Interworld M5, one of the ideal direct competitors of L6, only took 12 hours to get 10000 orders after opening the pre-sale.
At the press conference on April 23, Yu Chengdong announced that the new M5 series standard lidar of Interworld had been upgraded in appearance, seats, audio and chassis control. Compared with the old smart driving model, the price of the new M5 is reduced by 30000 yuan to 249800 yuan, which is the same as the ideal L6.
In March this year, with the hot sales of M7 and M9, Interworld achieved a monthly delivery of 31000 vehicles, exceeding the ideal 29000 vehicles. Ideally, the slowdown of sales growth in the first quarter has affected the promotion of annual sales.
On March 21, Ideal released an announcement at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that, because the sales order was less than expected, the company now expects its vehicle delivery volume in the first quarter of 2024 to be 76000 to 78000 vehicles, which updated the delivery volume forecast of 100000 to 103000 vehicles previously issued by the company. At the previous investor meeting, Ideally, the year-end sales guidance has been adjusted from 800000 to 640000. However, even if the expectation is lowered, the ideal is still to achieve 50% - 70% sales growth.
This still returns to the problem of traffic volume - the fastest way to boost sales volume is to boost traffic volume.
B
"As a CEO and founder of an enterprise, the influence of microblog and friends circle alone is very limited, and we need to learn how to express and communicate with the public in new ways of short video and live broadcast." Since the beginning of the new year, Zhou Hongyi has mentioned the importance of short video and live broadcast more than once in public.
Wei Jianjun, Chairman of Great Wall Motors in his 60s, launched the first live broadcast on April 15. He personally drove the vehicle, from the complex "six crossings" in the center of Baoding, Hebei Province to the narrow streets, and carried out traffic light recognition and intersection turns, obstacle recognition and flexible detour, lane change and lane line management in the whole scene.
According to the live broadcast room, the 16.6km live broadcast brought 1109000 people to watch. Then, Wei Jianjun struck while the iron was hot. On April 18, he connected with Lei Jun in the live broadcast room and talked about the Xiaomi SU7 and the Great Wall's tank 700. The final data of Lei Jun's live broadcast shows that 33.943 million people have watched it.
In the current car market with such fierce competition, it is not only necessary to roll technology, price, and new models, but also the founders and leaders of the car enterprises should come out to roll traffic. Traffic can not be directly converted into sales, but can gradually be converted into brand awareness and reputation.
Since July 2023, a total of six auto company bosses have gone live next to promote their own products, including Li Bin, founder of Weilai Auto, He Xiaopeng, founder of Xiaopeng Auto, Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi Auto, Zhang Yong, CEO of Nezha Auto, Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Auto, Yin Tongyue, chairman of Chery Group, and Li Shufu, chairman of Geely Holding. In addition, there were two Internet founders who invested in the automotive field. Li Yanhong and Zhou Hongyi appeared in the Jiyue Auto and Nezha Auto broadcast rooms respectively.
In fact, there have been two factions in the marketing of automobile enterprises: one is conservative, mainly traditional automobile enterprises, who prefer to use traditional media channels to spread brands and products; One group is the online celebrity group, which focuses on the new force of car making. They use the founder's staff to carry out marketing and communication work. But now, the boundary between the two factions is gradually blurred.
Especially after the entrance of Xiaomi and Huawei, the conservatives of traditional automobile enterprises began to transform into online celebrities. This Beijing Auto Show is a good example. On the first day of the Media Day, Wang Chuanfu from BYD and Wei Jianjun from the Great Wall had an interaction with Lei Jun, which caused a heated discussion in the media. The next day, Chery invited Lei Jun and Zhang Chaoyang from Sohu to the booth, and the popularity really exploded.
However, the original online celebrities have been greatly impacted, and the Ideal Car is one of them. Perhaps the best way to compete for traffic is to let Li Xiang enter the live broadcast room as soon as possible.
It is worth mentioning that, Li Xiang, who entered the studio again, may need to learn the live script in advance to avoid another rollover.
In 2022, when Li wanted to introduce the new car L9 live, when asked by the host "why is there a small table on the right side of the second row of L9, but there is no small table on the left side", Li wanted to answer: "The driver is in the car. If there is a boss, the driver is a low level, low status person." Although Li wanted to express the complete meaning at that time, he did not want anyone to interfere with the driver. However, some bloggers have maliciously edited and distorted the original video, leading to negative public opinion.
After this event, the appearance in informal occasions or private interaction seemed to be a good way for Li Xiang to ease his traffic anxiety.
C
The automobile industry used to be keen on inviting stars to speak for it, but this way not only burns money, but also has a low input-output ratio. This time, stars such as Jin Chen and Wang Feng also showed up to attract people, but the effect was far less than that of Lei Jun and Zhou Hongyi walking twice around the booth.
Moreover, once the star overturns, the negative risk to the car brand is also great. In the era of fast traffic, how can traffic pain be alleviated? From the perspective of the short development history of new car making forces, there will be three types of traffic explosion points:
The first is to bet against each other.
As early as 2013, Lei Jun and Dong Mingzhu bet that if Xiaomi's turnover could not exceed Gree within five years, he would lose 1 yuan to Dong Mingzhu. Dong Mingzhu responded with arrogance, "Don't mention one yuan. If you want to bet, you can bet one billion yuan."
The wind of gambling has long been blowing in the automobile circle. In 2018, Li Bin and He Xiaopeng made a high-profile bet on whether Weilai could deliver 10000 vehicles by the end of the year: Weilai won, and He Xiaopeng would buy an ES8; Wei Lai lost, while Li Bin wanted to buy a G3. Weilai won the bet. When Weilai announced the delivery of more than 10000 vehicles in 2018, He Xiaopeng wrote in the circle of friends that "although he lost the bet, he was still very happy." Xiaopeng completed the alignment with Weilai in terms of traffic by this bet.
The second is by touching porcelain.
On the third day after the official launch of Xiaomi SU7, the official Xiaohongshu account of Cadillac opened with the words "Sorry, after 120 years of marketing, I suddenly lost my ability", and attached eight posters of "Coconut Tree Wind" to directly pay off a friend. As for who the friend is, the netizen said bluntly that he had to report the identity card of Xiaomi SU7.
Cadillac has tried everything possible in the marketing circle to play this trick against the hot spots. Soon, the topic of "Cadillac posters alluding to Xiaomi SU7" hit the Weibo hot search list for more than 6 hours. Cadillac has a clear appeal, which is to tell people that Cadillac Pride will meet everyone at the Beijing Auto Show.
Cadillac officials also responded without hesitation, "I didn't expect that this time it's my turn to dump traffic!"
At the Beijing Auto Show, Cadillac still didn't give up touching porcelain Xiaomi. Near the exhibition hall of the auto show, Cadillac directly wrote a sentence on the poster, "The world should not be a large-scale copy and paste", implying that the design of Xiaomi SU7 borrowed from Porsche Taycan.
But if you touch the porcelain well, it is flow; if you don't, it is quarrel.
The third kind is to fight to win the position.
At the launch conference of Zhiji L6 on April 8, Zhiji executives teased Xiaomi cars many times in the conference, from flashlights, external atmosphere lights to smart driving and other aspects. But if it's just a joke, it's not a big problem. Zhiji's mistake is to write a little wrong product parameters of Xiaomi SU7 when comparing the final products.
This mistake directly provoked the spokesperson of Xiaomi Company to send three statements in the middle of the night, asking Zhiji to apologize publicly. In the end, the incident ended with Zhiji reporting "organized cyber violence and traffic bullying".
But such a quarrel between Xiaomi and Zhiji has made more people know the brand of Zhiji. Although it is presented in the form of negative news, there is a popular saying in the circles that "black powder is also pink".
At the Beijing Auto Show, Li Xiang achieved the goal of drainage by interacting with Lei Jun, Li Bin and others, but this is obviously not a long-term plan. In the long run, the ideal car will still face some traffic anxiety.
Ideal is also learning the marketing method of Xiaomi recently, publishing a series of articles "Answering popular questions of netizens" through the official account, so as to narrow the distance with users. However, judging from the practices of other friends, CEO live broadcast is the most effective way to face users directly, at least at this stage.
Li thought that if he really wanted to communicate with users sincerely, he should go into the live broadcast room earlier. Sincerity is the greatest must kill skill.
