It seems easier to create a hot product.
traffic quickly gathers, eye-catching packaging, unique selling methods, controversial discussion content... can almost become a focus in a short period of time, thus igniting the market.
is simpler and more crude. It can also draw a beautiful curve in a very short time by relying on the pit of big anchors or self-casting streams.
But in contrast, these popular fried chickens are becoming more and more likely to be forgotten or disappear into a group of substitutes.
This cycle can be long. For example, the sweeper industry that countless people have been optimistic about has been weak after 2-3 years of bonus period, the growth is weak, the industry is inclined, and the glory is no longer there;
can also be very short, and all kinds of dazzling hot products on Douyin are still popular today, and maybe no one will care about it tomorrow. The market for
sweeper is very interesting: it was still singing all the way in the past two years, but this year it encountered a bottleneck period - competition intensified, and the rapid growth brought about by category innovation and technological dividends in the past few years cannot be continued.
According to data from Aoyun.com, sales of sweeping robots in the first half of this year fell by 28.3% year-on-year.
Industry insiders said that "the grand occasion from 2019 to 2021 is gone, and it is difficult to increase the amount of money in the channel."
Channel deployment, category innovation, and technical dividends constituted the methodology for successfully creating hot products at that time. But why doesn't it work?
User ceiling, price and parameters Inner volume , the rise of white cards... are all external reasons.
The reason for returning to the inner world - a number of sweeper brands only conducted category education and product iteration during the bonus period, and did not form a sustainable popular model, nor did they build a good mind and moat.
Let’s look at another track, new energy vehicle , the saying once circulated is “no worries that you can’t sell it, but I’m afraid you can’t build it”. Wei Xiaoli and others seized the strong position of “the only new energy vehicle in a certain price segment” by relying on their first-mover advantage, and their sales have been rising. However, with more competitors influx, sales have declined and price wars have begun in all price segments. The newly launched G9 model of Xiaopeng has suffered a public opinion in terms of performance and experience.
is visible, and the popular products are useless for a while. The replicable model is the weapon to survive and evolve in the competition.
So, how to continue to create hot products?
Take Xiaodu as an example. In 4 years, users have been driven from 0 to 40 million in the speaker track;
In the past 20 months, in a new market with relatively inclined and strong enemies, the market share has been reduced from 0 to 40%, becoming the first in the industry.
The essential reason is not the track or the opponent. When the smart hardware track was first opened, Xiaomi had supply chain and brand advantages, Tmall Elf held the ace channel, and there was no need to worry about losing money in price wars. Educational hardware products also include powerful players such as BBK , iFLYTEK , Youdao, and Byte.
The fundamental reason is to form a replicable hot product strategy. This Tuesday we announced the product methodology for the first time. Speaking of which, many people may think, oh, that's it. It seems that everyone understands the truth, but after studying it in depth, it is actually not easy to achieve or persist.
combined with the sharing of the press conference, plus a little thought of taro, it tells it from the three dimensions of product, marketing and brand.
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Product method
At the product level, Xiaodu summarized the methodology of hot products summarized by hot products in three points:
Challenge industry inertia common sense
Return to the original demand
evolutionary product power
challenge industry inertia common sense
breaking industry inertia common sense, meaning creating new product forms, rather than tinkering or desperately inclining in a certain direction.
In 2017, the smart speaker track was basically the same: there is no screen, the price is very low, and the market is played in the form of subsidies.
However, we have created a very different form - the world's first [ speaker with screen ].
After the first product was released, it turns out that -
A joke
Who is so stupid to install a screen for the speaker?
Then, in just a few years, this new form has become a big hit product that has entered 40 million families. Even during the epidemic in recent years, both sales and daily interactions have been growing against the trend.
breaks the rules and not only can the company pull out price wars and allow new products to gain natural attention and interest, but more importantly, it has won a longer window of time and an innovation dividend period for the company.
Why did the decision to "speaker with screen" at that time? We will put it in detail in the second method.
Back to the way of thinking that challenges industry inertia common sense, you can generally think from two perspectives:
. Product form changes, such as new consumer brands for personal care, many product innovations change the state of the product—solid toothpaste, spray body lotion, etc.
htt ml6
. Transformation of delivery formats, such as dine-in and take-out, finished or semi-finished products, purchase or rental, etc.
Mr. Xiong Dumplings, mainly raw food take-out (now retail for dumplings)
In the process of enterprise development, [challenging industry inertia] should continue, not just one time.
For example, the sweeping robot category mentioned above. In the period of rapid growth, the
sweeper brand is actually lying in the dividends of category growth and breaking the inertia. Only in 2019, Yunjing broke through the siege with the integrated sweeping and mopping and self-cleaning rags. After that, there was no more breakthrough product innovation. The product iteration speed was slower, and there were no more amazing changes, resulting in serious inversion between brands and a significant decline.
Of course, continuing to break the rules also means higher investment, risks, and paying industry education costs.
For this reason, some companies consider the risk coefficient and will use innovative small units or the second curve to try it to ensure the stable development of the first curve.
is correct, but the operation in practice is often:
- relies on refined traffic operation and micro-innovation to repair the first curve
- relies on luck or small The team bets on the second curve
Therefore, they fell into the dual dilemma of [ main product aging or severe involuntization ] and [ innovation unit development is too slow and insufficient resources are insufficient.
For this reason, the real way is: find breakthroughs in challenging industry common sense. As the company's top-down strategy :
- 's main product is not a minor repair, and some functions are added or reduced, but iterated from the new consumption and experience scenarios; if you face the growth ceiling, you must make up your mind to "overturn", "start over" and "challenge", and strive to tear a big hole in the industry ceiling.
- creates the second curve. In the early stage, the highest level must fully participate in decision-making so that it can use the company's internal competitive advantage resources to create attractive innovative products.
Return to the original requirements
What is the original requirements?
refers to returning to the lowest level of human nature needs — has existed for a long time and cannot resist .
Two examples:
The first is the coffee market. From 2018 to 2020, coffee freeze-dried powder began to become popular, attracting many coffee brand players to flock. However, there is a brand "Yongpu Coffee", which did not use coffee powder as its main product, but skipped this party and started making room temperature coffee liquid.
Why choose coffee liquid?
The underlying demand is to return to the original human "addiction" - Caffeine is an addictive drink. If the drinking habits deepen step by step, it cannot be easily got rid of.
For addicted people, if they want to drink coffee, they must be able to drink it immediately.
If you wake up early in the morning or work overtime late at night, you need coffee, takeout and coffee shops cannot help. At this time, you need to get a cup of coffee quickly. Coffee liquid is a faster solution than coffee powder:
1 only needs to tear it apart and pour it in. If you prepare a cup of water, it is a cup of American style; if you prepare a cup of milk, it is a latte. Wins in speed.
This short and faster action represents the immediate satisfaction of the original [addiction] needs, and also makes Yongpu firmly believe that liquid coffee liquid is the future trend.
The second one, go back to Xiaodu to make decisions with screen speakers.
Why do you want to make such a product?
Return to the original information exchange requirements:
When information output, the language is the most efficient. Commands can be communicated directly, better than touch screen and keyboard input.
When information is accepted, visual symbols are the most efficient, such as text, pictures, videos, etc. The same is true for human-computer interaction. The most efficient mode is:
understands it - directly command the command
Speaker with screen is based on this underlying demand model, through voice control of human-computer interaction, real-time feedback on the screen, to achieve more efficient communication. After
, the screen speaker products gradually iterated and evolved, from watching TV series, video calls, entertainment karaokes, intelligent control, to early education learning system for children, health management and monitoring of the elderly, etc. All are later stories.
Here, some people may have questions:
People's needs are ever-changing, and there are constant changes with the times. Why return to the most primitive needs?
The answer is very simple.
Because the amount of demand meets determines the height of the ceiling, the capacity and space of the market. If it is a new demand or is too subdivided, it means that the number of meetings is limited. Focusing on original needs provides a broader market space. Especially in the period of economic downturn and consumption cooling, people tend to suppress and converge demand unless they truly belong to the original and underlying demand motivation.
Here, I would like to make a special note that , a new consumer product that started with the online channel of , can often easily find the cut-out of segmentation demand, because the online people and goods yards of are almost unlimited, and support accurate matching with long-tail ; after transferring to offline, has limited shelves, and to achieve mass matching of people, goods and yards, you may often encounter difficulties due to demand scale issues.
Of course, in new scenarios, there will be new ways to satisfy the original needs, such as hoping that children will also study well, but in the new scenarios, AI tutoring may be used to replace some manual tutoring. Therefore, taking [original demand] + [new scenario] as a combination is an important hot product formula.
Recently, I found that various products were dazzling. It seems that each product has its own effects, but it is definitely not suitable to buy them all. Here, if you return to the original demand of [Discussion]: what the doctor provides is not a medicine, but a solution: has clear symptoms + drug combination + treatment cycle + precautions .
So, the health care product market should also give a set of solutions for various problems of [sub-health] - what combinations to eat, how to eat, how long, and what matters to pay attention to, rather than listing separate products, otherwise each product will be very substitutable in the competitive market.
Finally, let’s give you a small example. If advertising is a content product, to leverage sharing and self-dissemination, it is also necessary to make creativity based on the insights of the original people. This time Xiaodu’s commercial "Lao Du" touched many people, and the reason was that it discovered ancient and extensive feelings:
Lifetime love
Unforgettable nostalgia
Emotional "demand" is primitive, but people’s creative aesthetic preferences are constantly evolving. Therefore, bold and novel scenes such as heaven office, cableway descending to earth, asking for leave from heaven, etc., allow people to see and continue to watch, and be moved by resonance.
To sum up, reviewing the true human nature at the bottom is a key factor in the product becoming a hot product and continuing to hit product.
gives a small suggestion. When designing a product, you can imagine whether the corresponding demand existed 30 years ago or even 50 years ago, and what kind of products or services could meet this demand at that time.
Before entering the third methodology, let's make a small summary:
[Breaking the industry inertia] + [Return to the original demand] . The combination of these two combination factors is actually a new and an old, that is, a new form + an ancient demand.
This is not only a formula that can be copied and created, but also a combination of elements to test the vitality cycle and space of hot products:
The former means how long can the leading advantage in the competitive market, and the latter means how large the market space can be in the consumer side.
evolable product power
What is evolable product power? As the scale of the enterprise gradually grows and the scale of the enterprise's endogenous resources grows, the endogenous ability of products to continue to evolve.
1 Give two examples.
The first is Xiaodu's human-computer interaction capability. In the recent evaluation of the China Mobile Research Institute User Experience Center, Xiaodu smart speakers are in the top1 of similar products in terms of command feedback delay, wake-up sensitivity, mid-section ring sensitivity, and single-wheel dialogue semantic understanding accuracy.
translates into human language, which means responds faster, recognizes more accurately, and provides feedback more "smart" with feedback.Why can
form such capabilities? The reason is that the matching degree of artificial intelligence depends on the training of massive data, especially in various situations encountered in dialogue scenarios in daily life. It is difficult to replicate by laboratory simulation. Therefore, when the user volume increases and the number of conversations increases, the brain behind the machine is trained to become smarter and smarter, the response becomes more and more accurate, and the user experience is also better, so the brand choice preference is stronger. This forms a positive cycle and evolutionary product power.
Another example is Luckin , which you may be more familiar with. The two most important factors of Luckin’s methodology for hit products:
First, it is a firm "latte strategy" - compared with American style, latte is a coffee product that is more in line with the tastes of the Chinese market (and also returns to the original demand);
Second, it is big data decision-making and polishing "hot products": because it has a large number of private domain users and store resources, it can be sensitive. Sharply capture the trends and changes of taste, and data becomes the source of "inspiration" for taste research and development. The larger the data, the more accurate the inspiration; with the option of hot products, you can further judge the most likely "potential model" through private domain testing and optimize and debug it; once it is determined, the product will be quickly promoted with the user scale resources, and the new product becomes an Internet celebrity, and it will have the ability to break the circle to attract new people and increase the ability to repurchase old users, thus linking together, forming positive feedback and snowball effect .
For any company that is eager to grow and continue to create explosive products, it is extremely important to explore scale effects and effective connection and empowerment factors of explosive products: not only increase the competitiveness of content, but also become a moat for enterprises and gain an advantageous position in market competition.
marketing suggestions
After talking about the product, let’s talk about marketing briefly.
If you use marketing methods to promote popular products, in the "Full-link Brand Marketing Method" , there are two chapters that you can focus on:
Lecture 4, mainly talking about how to market from the perspective of products. According to the new and old levels of the product and the market, four quadrants are divided, and the methodology is given for the specific situation of each quadrant.
Lecture 6 focuses on promoting products, distinguish them based on the different brand awareness and the degree of demand, and tells how to create hot products.
Here, let me briefly talk about a few tips. Assuming that the hot products meet the three key elements of [Breaking the industry's inertia common sense], [Return to the original demand] and [Product strength can evolve] . How to amplify the advantages in marketing and promotion?
First of all; [Breaking the industry inertia] itself is the dissemination of influence and topic points. Once the product is launched, it can amplify this differential selling point - to talk about topics, lead the rhythm, hold high and fight high, and attract new people.
Secondly, the product or service [return to original needs] can be divided into two categories:
Firstly belongs to the silent perception of moistening things, such as the convenience of coffee liquid, which can only be tangible after experience. Therefore, these experience details should be placed in content marketing: community grass planting, private domain communication, live broadcast, etc., and penetrate through scene-based methods.
second can directly hit the pain point, and it can be understood as soon as you say it. Therefore, it may be used as a core selling point, plus the product function as a support, and repeatedly promote it in advertising, and occupy the mental position.
Finally, for [evolving product power], this is a capability that users are more difficult to perceive directly. How can they be passed on to users?
can be buried in the link for consumption decision-making and purchase.
If there is a relatively long decision-making link, consumers will usually compare competitors to weigh the trade-offs. Therefore, the advantages of continuous iteration at the product level should be fully demonstrated in the product comparison link (horizontal review content, product pages, etc.).
If it is a fast-moving consumer goods with low average customer price, the order is very fast and more easily affected by the public. Therefore, it should highlight the views of [everyone is using it], [hit again], and [the previous generation is very good] in marketing and PR, and continue to be highlighted in word-of-mouth marketing, so people believe that companies have the hard power to continuously produce explosive products, so they are willing to try it out.
Brand role
Last last, please don't forget that the underlying ability to support hot products is the brand.
There have been many discussions recently, such as new consumers come back to their senses and start building their brand, such as discussing how to weigh the current short-term sales and long-term brand investment, and how to measure the role and value of the brand. Because the stages of the industry and the company are at different, there may be different specific practices.
In the continuous creation of hot products, the brand has three meanings:
- Reduce risks
A new product, especially new products that break industry conventions, has a very high risk of listing. The resistance and controversy caused by "not admiration", the picky comments after trying it out, and even a storm of public opinion may cause a downturn. The popular popularity established by the brand can act as a "umbrella" and "lander" at this time, making it easier for everyone to accept new things, forgive imperfections, and restore trust faster.
- Invisible hints
The experience of many products is good or bad. In addition to objective quality, form, service, etc., there are also many subconscious and psychological hints that play a role in it. This effect is also a key point that is difficult for brands to quantify and measure. Many times, bringing the brand's favor and liking is like hearing a lot of praise from this person, and they will involuntarily put on the filter.
To give a counterexample, Adidas is facing a situation that has fallen share and a shrinking market. Its media director Simonpeel reviewed in a public interview, saying that it neglected brand building and invested most of the budget (more than 70%) into effect channels rather than brands, resulting in lower recognition and love for brands and its products, and repeated loss of people's hearts.
-Mind Lenovo
When a company enters a new track across categories or enters a new group of people, the brand is the basis for "rationalization". When all investments are used to grab volume through product dividend channels and ignore the communication of real brand value - the brand's intention is not high enough and does not continue to communicate with the public, it will confine itself to a certain sub-category. Make cross-category or new tracks “unable to accept emotionally and rationally”.
Of course, once you decide to innovate and change, you must lay the groundwork for a period of time to make the public truly recognize it. For example, the cooperation between Li Ning and International Fashion Week makes the "sports trendy brands" reasonable, Wuling Hongguang 's 100+ brand collaboration and fashion blockbuster make the "fashion items" reasonable.
Some people may wonder, then we have done one or two such things to lay the groundwork. What should we do if the splash is too small?
First, laying the foundation is to do it continuously and for a long time, just like an impression of a person. Even if you understand it through posting to your Moments, you can’t just post one or two posts, so that you can make people have an impression and know what kind of person you are. If you want to take effect faster and more people see it, you will inevitably have to spend money and energy to stand in the center of the stage.
Second, yes, the recognition accumulated by these national brands themselves also makes this "reasonable" come faster.
