Text/ant bug
In the past two years, the domestic smartphone market has undergone great changes. Xiaomi’s upward momentum has been blocked. A dry Internet brand has closed down, and the VO brothers have risen rapidly. Another company that has achieved greater growth is the old-fashioned Meizu. Before 2014, Meizu’s sales were so small that even it was embarrassed to announce it. The outside world can only speculate a rough idea from various clues. But since 2015, Meizu has opened a soaring model, and at the same time has become confident and brave enough to announce sales. According to the data released by Meizu, it achieved sales of 20 million units in 2015, an increase of 350% year-on-year. Last year’s sales were 22 million units.
To be able to achieve this result in the fiercely competitive domestic market, it should be said that Meizu’s performance is still very good. However, it is worth noting that under the bright data of sales growth, Meizu has experienced the phenomenon of brand aging, and the recent excellent performance cannot hide the hidden worries of future development.
Meizu’s sales are improving, but the brand has begun to age
The so-called brand aging refers to the decline of a brand’s popularity and reputation in the market competition, sales shrinkage, and market share. These conditions may not necessarily occur together. One of the most prominent manifestations of brand aging is high visibility and low awareness. It is said that Meizu’s sales are still rising slightly, which seems to have little to do with brand aging. But in fact, various signs show that Meizu has already shown the characteristics of brand aging:
1. Brand positioning is becoming increasingly blurred
In the minds of most people, Meizu in 2015, regardless of its sales, still gives people a small and beautiful brand perception, and even some people will put the pursuit of the ultimate, craftsman spirit and other reputation words on it. But now all this is no longer, the original Meizu brand perception has changed a lot, and even to the other side.
It turns out that Li Nan can also justifiably say that Meizu’s users are highly educated and promising young and successful people. What is Meizu’s product positioning now, and what are the target consumer groups? Maybe they have a clear plan internally, but in the eyes of the outside world, Meizu’s product positioning is not as clear as before, and the target users are even more vague.
Although Meilan has played the banner of youth good products to win the support of young users, it has not been able to attract many young people with spending power. On the contrary, students, the elderly, ordinary working class and other groups with lower spending power are its real users. If Xiaomi was the first smartphone for young people, Meilan became the first mobile phone for low-spending people. When smartphones entered the stage of market segmentation competition, Meizu returned to the shrinking middle market.
2. The product loses its original characteristics and is obsolete from the market
Thinking back to the Meizu M8, M9 and other models of the past, they required quality control, appearance, and performance, representing the top level of domestic smartphones at that time, which could be called a classic. But now that people mention Meizu, the first impression is that the price is cheap, the others are fine, and then there are no more.
In the past two years, Meizu has released many models, and even released one every month in many cases. At the same time, the sales volume is a star product that has come to the ground, but has not left a deep impression on consumers. The results of the top ten ZEALER brand mobile phones in 2016 show that Meizu failed to make the list in the selection of the top ten flagship phones, the top ten thousand yuan machines, and the top ten camera mobile phones. If we talk about the evaluation of flagship phones and camera mobile phones, Meizu can barely find the excuse that the CPU is not Qualcomm, but in the thousand yuan machine, Meizu, which accounts for more than 70% of the total sales, has also been wiped out, which is really puzzling. The sales of tens of millions of units can’t find a bright star product. It can only be said that now Meizu mobile phone products have no own characteristics and are not in the market.
3. Poor user reputation and declining brand reputation
With the growth of sales in the past two years, Meizu’s branding impression has been greatly improved, but with it, its reputation has declined significantly. Many consumers have reported Meizu’s poor quality on Weibo and the community, mainly focusing on serious battery heating, fragile screen, poor signal, and poor quality accessories. Among them are new users and angry old coal friends. Some consumers even spontaneously formed a rights protection group and set up a special website.
Meizu used to be small in size, and the supply chain has the voice over not much. It is true that the quality control has not been advantageous, but fortunately the product cycle can be slowly run-in to solve the problems. Now that the shipment volume has come up, the product cycle has been greatly shortened. At the same time, users are no longer mainly senior fans, but mostly ordinary users. In this mobile social era where everyone is self-media, they usually do not choose large-scale tolerance like senior fans when facing mobile phone quality problems. Although mobile phones are not FMCG products, the time for replacement is shortening. Poor reputation has led to a decline in reputation, which means that the proportion of users choosing Meizu when changing phones has been greatly reduced, which is very unfavorable to the future development of the brand.
The reasons for the aging of the Meizu brand
Everything has its reasons. The reason why Meizu’s brand is aging is mainly due to the following reasons:
1. Lack of a clear long-term business strategy
For less competitive industries or regional markets, the importance of a long-term strategy may not seem great. But in the highly competitive smartphone market, if a company does not have a long-term strategy, it is easy to fall into a state of blind attack, wasting resources, and possibly leading to a dead end.
In these years, Meizu’s performance has no long-term strategy at all, and it has been repeated in the twilight and twilight. In 2015, Meizu’s goal was to boost sales, and it tried its best to make the market at any cost, losing 1 billion yuan in one go. In 2016, it learned from the VO brothers to do marketing and held concerts frequently. Then the KPI assessment suddenly turned into trying its best to protect profits, completely ignoring what it just said to vigorously expand offline channels. In 2015, it began to recruit employees on a large scale, saying that it wanted to become bigger and stronger, and then it laid off large-scale employees for the IPO.
In terms of product marketing, Meizu is also chaotic and chaotic. Yesterday, it was still advertising to emphasize the configuration, saying "if you are not satisfied, you can run a point", and the next day, you can "forget the parameters" to promote the new product. You can directly shout the slogan "Born to kill" and fight bayonets with friends, or you can make a 180-degree turn after that, singing "Make Love No War" to defend world peace, and at the same time play a secret war, sending bulletproof helmets printed with the words "Born to Kill" to the media and guests. All kinds of forced rubbing hot spots and all kinds of face slapping, such unstrategic playing methods can indeed increase the popularity, but make the brand perception in the minds of consumers become more blurred, and also greatly damage their reputation.
2. Alibaba’s investment in shares brings pressure and variables
In the history of Meizu’s development, Ali’s investment in shares at the beginning of 2015 was obviously an important event. At that time, Meizu was in domestic and foreign difficulties, with tight funds, marginalized markets, and low morale due to brain drain, so Huang Zhang took over Ali’s olive branch. Ali not only brought 690 million US dollars in funds, but also valuable traffic resources and technical support. Meizu’s full firepower in 2015 and sales reached 20 million units were inseparable from Ali’s support.
But at the same time, Ali has also brought unexpected pressure and variables to Meizu. It is reported that Huang Zhang and Ali signed a performance betting clause, and Ali required Meizu to ship 20 million units in 2015. If not, Ali will obtain the right to further acquire Meizu’s equity. Although the news was denied by Meizu, Meizu raised its expected target to 20 million units after Ali’s investment, and in 2015 also happened to complete 20 million units, which seems to reflect that the betting rumors are not groundless.
Regardless of the existence of the betting clause, the objective fact is that after Ali’s investment, Meizu completely bid farewell to the mid-to-high-end boutique strategy and replaced it with a simple and crude sales-only theory. In terms of systems, YunOS and YunOS-based Flyme models have increased. In the product library of Zhongguancun Online, there are as many as 16 models of both, which are basically concentrated in the Meizu series. In other words, the low-end Meizu is likely to be due to the pressure of Ali, and Meizu has to do it.
According to reports quoting old Meizu employees, the actual sales volume of Meizu mobile phones in 2016 was only 19.90 million units. If the Meizu series is not included, Meizu’s sales volume is less than 3 million. In the past two years, Meizu’s huge sales volume has greatly diluted Meizu’s original mid-to-high-end brand value. The cost-effective Meizu has replaced the original Meizu and become the basic image of Meizu in the eyes of consumers, which also means that the Meizu brand will be pulled from the mid-to-high-end to the low-end. To a certain extent, it can be said that Ali has achieved the market expansion of YunOS system by sacrificing Meizu’s brand perception.
3. Poor quality control and inadequate after-sales service further overdraw brand value
After the sales volume increased sharply in 2015, the general response from users was that the quality of Meizu’s products had declined. While making up for the shortcomings of marketing, Meizu unknowingly relaxed its requirements for quality control and after-sales. If there is a problem with quality control in production, companies can also check for users through after-sales services. However, Meizu’s after-sales services are precisely the most criticized by consumers. After-sales personnel have a rough attitude, fail to fulfill warranty terms, and long processes, which are not in place, so that users cannot receive due protection services.
Speak with data: China’s quality Wanlixing complaint platform public data show that in 2015 the platform received a total of 6,229 mobile phone-related complaints, of which Meizu mobile phone 787 cases ranked fifth. Mobile phone 315 online complaint data show that in 2015 Meizu complaints 312 cases second only to Samsung. According to IDC data, Xiaomi, Huawei, Apple’s shipments in 2015 were 64.90 million, 62.90 million, 58.40 million, while Meizu released 2015 shipments of 20 million. Calculated by the number of shipments and complaints, Meizu mobile phone complaint rate is much higher than Xiaomi, Huawei, Apple and Samsung.
This shows that the quality control problems reported by users are not isolated cases, but indeed insufficient. In November 2016, Meizu even landed on the black list of Jiangsu Provincial Bureau of Industry and Commerce due to product quality problems. Meizu’s poor quality control and after-sales services are not in place, which seriously overdraw the brand value and accelerate the process of brand aging.
To avoid brand aging, changes must be made
On May 9, 2017, Meizu released the latest news of the adjustment of the organizational structure. Meizu, Meizu and Flyme respectively established business units, and Li Nan was promoted to senior vice president of Meizu Technology and president of Meizu’s business unit. This move shows that Meizu is also aware of the chaotic situation existing in the Meizu brand and has started to solve it.
However, separating sub-brands and operating independently may not necessarily be successful. Without an effective coordination and management mechanism after independence, it will result in a waste of resources and a situation of left-right hand competition. This is how Lenovo’s multi-brand strategy failed before. Although Xiaomi basically has the strength to operate separately, it has not yet made any independent sub-brands, which is likely to consider the synergy of resource allocation and management. Huawei implements independent brand operation because its own team, funds, channels and other resources are rich, which can fully support the operation of two independent teams. Coupled with a clear long-term development strategy and good execution, Huawei’s dual-brand strategy has been successful.
However, after Meizu has experienced many key talent losses, its technical team is not thick, coupled with weak capital reserves, and limited resources, independent sub-brands will cause resource dispersion, which is not conducive to their respective development. If the internal collaboration management mechanism fails, Meizu’s launch of 2,000 yuan products will overwhelm the fading Meizu in the market with a large number of products. The aging process of the Meizu brand may be accelerated, and it will be completely reduced to a thousand yuan machine brand.
The real problem of Meizu lies in the backward management of the enterprise and the lack of core competitiveness. Meizu first breaks the confinement of the family business, establishes a modern enterprise management system, and gives full play to the enthusiasm of managers and employees. Then it formulates a clear long-term strategy to strive to improve the comprehensive strength of products, technology, services, marketing and so on. This can effectively improve productivity, make products more competitive, and thus get out of the trap of brand aging.
First published in the June issue of Business Review
[Author introduction: Ant Bug, technology critic, columnist. WeChat official account: Ant Bug (miniant-cn) ]
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