There are many discussions in the industry about why Tesla does not compromise, but they are all limited to the level of brand image and sales channel management. Tesla needs to maintain its brand image, so it is natural for Tesla and Pinduoduo to distance themselves.
●? brand dissemination
To a certain extent, Tesla's core competitiveness and core goods are not technology and cars, but brands. Technology, products, services and communication all exist to establish a brand image. Every model on the market and every technology developed are decisions made under brand positioning and strategic objectives. In fact, in most fields, the brand is the core of an enterprise with a certain premium ability, and all business of the enterprise is carried out around the brand.
So it's normal that Tesla doesn't want anything to do with Pinduoduo.
In addition, it is widely believed in the industry that Tesla hardly advertises. However, Tesla just does not advertise in the traditional sense. In fact, Tesla has spared no effort in brand communication. Whether it's elon musk and his own topic, or space exploration technology company? Bored? The company, Neuralink and other affiliated companies have brought huge brand effects to Tesla, and even the business behavior of "no advertising" itself is an excellent "advertisement". Tesla's "advertising" is essentially shaping its own brand value. Although we don't borrow traditional media, we also need huge investment. In other words, Tesla itself is an influential communication channel, and Tesla's "advertising" is only placed in its own system. Because of this, Pinduoduo "rubs" Tesla's popularity, expands its own communication through its brand influence, and even hopes to enhance its brand image by establishing brand association. What is more serious is to rob money directly.
Therefore, from the perspective of communication, Tesla will never let Pinduo rub his enthusiasm.
●? marketing channel
Tesla is almost the first mass-produced car brand to successfully achieve direct sales.
As a complex and expensive commodity, automobile has a long sales cycle and complicated delivery process. Especially in the era when comprehensive informatization has not been realized, the terminal car sales service can not achieve the national unified standard, and the car price can not be completely unified, so a large number of terminal sales personnel are needed to serve consumers. Automobile manufacturers can't build a sales team covering the whole market, so they must cooperate with dealers everywhere. Dealers can not only solve the problem of localized and differentiated sales service, but also share the pressure of capital turnover, commodity car inventory, spare parts reserve and after-sales service for automobile manufacturers, and even become a reservoir for automobile manufacturers to adjust their sales performance.
With the full popularity of the Internet, the world is becoming more and more flat, and the difference in time and space is no longer an obstacle for automobile manufacturers to expand the market scale and cover the terminal market. In addition, the electrified structure of the car also makes maintenance simple. In addition, because the price of automobile products is getting cheaper and cheaper relative to the disposable income of consumers, it is easier to buy a car. Therefore, the complexity of terminal retail and after-sales business is greatly reduced, which makes it possible for automobile manufacturers to realize direct sales. This can not only make their services more standardized and controllable, but also directly connect consumers through disintermediation, saving the cost of a large number of distribution channels.
Not only Tesla, Weilai, Tucki, Ideality and other new car-making forces also adopt direct selling mode, and even most traditional car companies are exploring their own direct selling mode. However, the core reason why traditional car companies didn't realize full direct sales right away is probably not whether the products they sell are new energy vehicles or traditional energy vehicles, but the biggest obstacle is to damage the interests of dealers who were in the same boat before.
These are the views that people generally know in the discussion of "Tesla vs Pinduoduo"-brand image and channel management. But is this really the case? Is that all? Let's analyze the logic behind it from the perspective of business layout in combination with other recent news from Tesla.
●? travel agency
Tesla controls the channel, in addition to protecting the direct selling mode, it is more important to firmly hold the users in their own hands. Because Tesla sells not only cars to users, but also a set of car-based travel services and other value-added services that are more imaginative in future travel scenarios.
According to the changing trend of main profit sources, automobile marketing can be divided into the following stages: the first stage, selling automobile products; The second stage, selling car services; The third stage is to sell tourism solutions; The fourth stage is to sell value-added services based on travel scenarios. At present, the automobile market is in the initial stage of transition from the second stage of "selling automobile services" to the third stage of "selling bank solutions".
As hardware, cars will have fewer and fewer profit points and lower profit margins. The essence of the demand behind users' car purchase is travel, and a series of services around travel are market opportunities for some time to come. In particular, the electrification changes brought by new energy vehicles have enabled OTA to be realized and gradually popularized. Cars are no longer simply defined by hardware, but can be upgraded online, keep the latest state, expand functional applications and even improve performance. The core profit of the vehicle will come from the new demand in a series of travel scenarios, such as system update, functional authority opening, performance upgrade, application purchase and charging service. And this is the model pioneered by Tesla.
Tesla is constantly reducing hardware costs. While gaining a comparative competitive advantage by continuously lowering vehicle prices, it has shifted its profit sources to OTA upgrade, home charging service package and super charging station charging service.
Therefore, Tesla must hold the entrance of the car and firmly grasp the users and their travel consumption. This is one of the reasons why Tesla wants to distance himself from Pinduoduo.
●? be self-drive
In the third stage of marketing competition, Tesla has achieved the first-Mover advantage. Other competitors also unconsciously entered the "script" written by Tesla under the leadership of Tesla. Moreover, Tesla has made a good layout and planning for the future: autonomous driving is the core and foundation of "selling value-added services based on travel scenarios" in the fourth stage of automobile marketing.
In the future, not only communication, including internet access, will become the basic rights of human beings, but also travel will certainly become the basic rights of human beings. Enjoying basic free travel service will be one of the possibilities of human social life in the future. From the point of view of improving logistics efficiency, releasing human transit time and liberating productivity, it is almost an inevitable development trend to realize automatic driving of automobiles. Therefore, the growing travel demand of human beings and a lot of leisure time on the way brought by automatic driving of vehicles will inevitably need to be filled with various services, which will be a huge commercial space.
Tesla actively promotes the autonomous driving business, the purpose of which is to seize this huge business opportunity first, and build a value rent-seeking space through the time difference of starting and the exclusive entrance of the car. In this way, even when competitors generally enter the third stage of competition for travel solutions, Tesla can still maintain its leading edge, eat the first cake in the fourth stage, and gain huge benefits through value-added services in travel scenarios.
With such an imaginative future opportunity, how can Tesla give Pinduo a lift now?
●? Product technology
"Function determines form".
The development of electrification and autonomous driving will change the shape and structure of vehicles. Although the current car is still in the transition stage from E era (electronic era) to I era (intelligent era), the new energy car with pure electric architecture represented by Tesla has made us see some changes: the wheels are distributed at four corners, and the batteries are arranged with a larger wheelbase; A-pillar moves forward to improve the utilization rate of effective space; Reduce the area of the air intake grille or even cancel it directly to obtain a better aerodynamic layout. ...
Not only the shape and structure, but also the production technology and materials have changed.
Recently, Tesla disclosed the molding process of integrated body: the integrated aluminum alloy body is manufactured by die casting process. Although it is only used to make models at present? Y's rear floor assembly, but the ultimate goal is to use it for the whole body except blinds and covers.
At present, the body is mainly produced by stamping and welding. In order to ensure the structural strength and stiffness of each part, it is necessary to carry out complex sheet metal structural design and a large number of repeated CAE calculations, which will inevitably lead to redundancy in structure and performance. If the die casting process is adopted, every part of the body structure can be designed "just right". Save space in the chassis so that more batteries can be placed. It can not only improve the safety performance, but also reduce the maintenance quality. In addition, there is no stamping welding process, which can save a lot of investment in molds, presses, fixtures, welding robots and other equipment, and reduce the development cost and manufacturing cost of vehicles.
In addition, Musk also evaluated the feasibility of using heat treatment process to achieve different colors of cold-rolled stainless steel. If this process can be realized on the outer panel of the car body, then the four major processes of vehicle production are basically concentrated on the final assembly, and the production efficiency will be greatly improved.
Recently, Tesla also disclosed a number of patents: high-performance computing chip (HPC) with 7nm process technology, short-range motion sensor, and new wiring harness layout architecture ... It is foreseeable that Tesla's future automobile products will be more intelligent, and the mechanical structure will be simpler, except for the necessary opening and closing components such as doors, luggage compartments and charging ports, and even completely packaged. These technical directions are paving the way for the realization of automatic driving and vehicle-mounted terminals. Tesla's future products will retain a certain degree of redundancy in performance, so as to make profits through users' paid upgrade and unlocking functions, or carry more functional car applications. This is also a necessary condition for the fourth stage of automobile marketing in the future-"selling value-added services based on travel scenarios".
Financial insurance
Another recent news from Tesla has attracted the attention of the industry, that is, an insurance brokerage company was established in China.
It is not surprising that Tesla is involved in the insurance business. UBI insurance, which has been called by the industry for many years, cannot be implemented, one of the reasons is that it is impossible to obtain the driving behavior data of car owners. On the one hand, there are many types of vehicles, and it is extremely complicated to analyze users' driving behavior through vehicle data. In addition, data, especially vehicle data, is the lifeblood of car companies and cannot be enjoyed exclusively. This is natural. Tesla has a natural advantage in this respect, mastering its own car data and having its own technical ability and feasibility to analyze the behavior of car owners. Although Tesla's insurance brokerage company can only represent insurance, it can have enough data resources to influence the insurance pricing of its partners. If Tesla can provide insurance based on driving behavior for its car owners, not only users can enjoy cheaper and more reasonable insurance fees, but Tesla can also have a cost advantage in related businesses with vehicles as the core, and even get a lot of profits in insurance.
In addition, although the above-mentioned body integrated molding process has many advantages, it is difficult to weld, poor in maintainability and high in maintenance cost because of the low elongation of aluminum alloy. However, Tesla's future insurance will take a route similar to Apple's "AppleCare+" to a certain extent, replacing maintenance with new ones. And the recycling rate of aluminum alloy is high. If Tesla can extend the recycling and remanufacturing business and cooperate with its own insurance services, the comprehensive cost will be greatly reduced.
Once the L5-level automatic driving is realized, even the steering wheel is cancelled, then the responsibility of the vehicle on the road is completely directed to the automobile manufacturer. Therefore, car manufacturers are likely not to sell cars directly, but only provide travel services. Auto insurance in the era of autonomous driving will be a huge market, and the competition will be more intense. Tesla has enough motivation to hold its vehicle insurance business in its hands in order to maximize its benefits.
intellectual property
As early as many years ago, Tesla announced that it would open patents for free use in the industry. No matter what the purpose of Tesla's move is, whether it is brand communication or promoting the development of electric vehicles, it is obvious that the real core technology will not be open.
The purpose of Tesla's patent opening is a bit like Naoko in "Three-body": to lock in the technological progress of the opponent. By providing free patented technology, some competitors can take the technical route of script design, limiting or even locking in the possibility of competitors' development. After all, free is the most expensive. Tesla will always maintain its leading position on the basis of these open patents, and it will bring additional benefits: the whole industry is based on Tesla standards.
Therefore, Pinduoduo rubs Tesla, perhaps just to borrow its brand influence. But from Tesla's point of view, it is not only the destruction of heat and channels, but also the foundation of its lofty ideals and beautiful blueprints, so it must not be compromised.
There is a saying: "The pole is long, the stool is wide, and the stool is not as long as the pole, and the pole is not as wide as the stool. The pole should be tied to the bench, and the bench should not let the pole be tied to the bench. The pole should be tied to the bench. " For hundreds of years, the binding movement between the pole and the bench has been pushing each other. I'm afraid the dispute between Pinduoduo and Tesla about sales channels will not come to fruition for a while. Then let's continue to pay attention. (Text/car home Big Data Analyst? Liu Xueshan)