Author: Nie Yiyao

“Aligning the market with customer needs is the key to business success in competition.”

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, international business strategy experts, in their book “Competing for the Future”, emphasized the importance of meeting customer needs in business competition. The automotive industry is no exception. Products that better meet user needs often dazzle people and are ultimately more recognized by users.

Changan Ford’s Focus is such a product. Six years ago, the Focus created a miracle in the domestic market for family cars priced around 100,000 yuan, becoming a “hot selling” and “phenomenal” model. Users were greatly drawn to its stunning appearance, the highest configuration in its class, and high value. Changan Ford’s Focus quickly became the benchmark for vehicles priced around 100,000 yuan for family cars, and gained over one million users within a few years after its market launch.

In May of this year, Changan Ford’s Focus broke through and was completely renewed. The new generation of Focus surpassed other cars in its class with high levels of trendy appearance, advanced configuration, and intelligence, causing a buzz in the market for “resetting the benchmark for vehicles priced around 100,000 yuan.”

Both the Focus and the new generation of Focus are an epitome of Changan Ford’s commitment to meeting user needs. Since 2020, Changan Ford’s classic models, such as Explorer, Edge, Focus, and Mondeo, that have undergone facelifts, have reflected the company’s market positioning toward younger, smarter, and more user-friendly cars.

This is also Changan Ford’s way and original intention of expressing better user-oriented solutions to China’s automotive market dedicated to being younger, smarter, and more connected.

Fierce Battle in Vehicles Priced around 100,000 Yuan

In China’s private car consumption market, it all started with cars and thrived thanks to joint venture compact cars. After 2000, private car consumption in China grew at a rapid pace of tripling every three years. Families purchasing cars for the first time overwhelmingly chose compact cars, making them the strongest demand.

Joint venture brands, which possessed both brand strength and product technology advantages, seized this market trend and launched a series of popular models of compact family cars. This not only made compact cars the largest segmented market in China’s passenger car industry but also established joint venture brands’ dominance in the compact car market.

Despite being hit by two factors, namely the surge in SUV sales since 2016 and upgrades to expenditure patterns, the sales of compact cars have shown signs of decline, and their market share has remained at around 30%. In 2020, a year affected by the pandemic, the proportion of compact car sales declined to 27.6%, yet they still maintained a solid first position in the passenger car market share.

The temptation of sales inevitably leads to fierce competition, with everyone trying to launch star models in the hope of creating a hot sale and earning consumer loyalty and brand recognition.

This brings us to Changan Ford, and its well-known two compact family cars, Focus and the Fiest.The former is hailed as the “sport giant with the strongest handling in the 150,000 yuan level”. Since its launch in 2005, it has accumulated 2.6 million fans.

The latter, as a ten-thousand-yuan-level joint venture family sedan, is the entry-level model of compact cars from joint venture brands. However, it became a hit immediately after it was launched due to its outstanding design sense including the “Martin face”, ultra-strong handling, and superior safety performance.

For a while, the Ford Focus was the focus of attention, quickly surpassing other joint venture brands’ products of the same level and changing the stereotype of “bland and conservative” for ten-thousand-yuan-level joint venture family sedans among Chinese people.

In recent years, as the compact car market continues to occupy the largest market share of passenger cars on the one hand, and sales are declining year by year due to factors such as downward pressure on the auto market and consumer upgrades on the other hand, competition in this market has become even more intense.

However, it is disproportionately cruel compared to the “New Four Modernizations” trend in the auto industry. The highly-praised intelligentization of cars has become a new trend in the upgrade of products in the traditional auto market. But this does not include the ten-thousand-yuan-level family sedan market.

In this huge subdivision area, the upgrading of product intelligence is slow, and leading brands seem to have reached an understanding and built a high wall of barriers together to resist the impact of new things and the attack of other brands.

But this is not unbreakable. Even the most solidified market structure will be reshuffled due to technological changes or technological revolutions. The ten-thousand-yuan-level family sedan market needs a breakthrough maker, and there will inevitably be more products leading the trend.

New Benchmark for Ten-thousand-yuan-level Family Sedans

Chinese consumers deserve better ten-thousand-yuan-level family sedan products and should enjoy more youthful, intelligent, and safe fashion and technological development in this niche market during the “New Four Modernizations” technological revolution in the auto industry.

When consumers choose products with this mindset, they will find that the new generation of Ford Focus from Changan Ford is breaking the inherent barriers of ten-thousand-yuan-level family sedan models such as the Volkswagen Sagitar, Lavida, Bora, and Astra. The new generation of Ford Focus not only has the high quality of joint venture products, but also has higher attractiveness, intelligence, and value than other products of the same level.

The debut of the first generation of Ford Focus brought users a refreshing product experience. The advent of the new generation of Ford Focus once again raised the bar for ten-thousand-yuan-level joint venture family sedans.

In terms of appearance, the new generation of Ford Focus features a low air resistance streamline design contour, along with a starry sky style “big mouth” front grille, which breaks through the traditional “Martin face” and better fits the current trend of youth. The full LED light source front headlights and taillights perfectly combine practicality with visual technology.

Inside the car, the unique 10.25-inch * 2 intelligent connected screens stand out among the ten-thousand-yuan level joint venture sedans, matched with the brand new design high-gloss central control black panel using laser carving technology, showing intelligent and fashionable style.

The deep space LED ambient light, delicate mesh-like metal decorative surface, perforated breathing style ambient light running through deep holes, flying-type gear shift lever, zero-heavy sense punching leather flight seats made of soft material with satin grey or saddle brown leather, present the strongest sense of luxury at the same level from every detail.

Intelligence is the most eye-catching feature of the new generation of Ford Focus. It is equipped with not only double intelligent connected screens that integrate instrument and central control screen design, but also a highly intelligent “Xiao Fu On-Line” vehicle intelligent information entertainment system.

The double intelligent connected screens can achieve the linkage between multimedia, navigation, and phone functions. The screen’s touch response speed is up to 0.2 seconds, which makes the touch experience more convenient.

“Xiao Fu On-Line” matches with independent driver and co-driver exclusive microphones. Even when the vehicle speed is up to 80 km/h, the voice recognition rate can still reach over 98%, and the wake-up time is as low as 0.67 seconds. Users can control air conditioning, entertainment, navigation, vehicle WeChat, and other functions through voice, greatly improving human-vehicle interaction experience.

“Xiao Fu On-Line” also comes with a “King of Glory” voice package, with two sets of voice responses of Li Bai and Daji. It is also equipped with rich applications such as QQ Music, Himalaya, and Mango TV, making the riding life more full of leisure and fun.

The high intelligence of the new generation of Ford Focus can completely join the higher-level product series. Its same-level leading high-strength cage body, front dual safety airbags and side airbags, side-curtain safety airbags, 6-way electrically adjustable flight seats, new air system + HE micro-level efficient filter and other intimate configurations make it more valuable than other ten-thousand-yuan level sedans.

It can be said that the new generation of Ford Focus has established a new benchmark for ten-thousand-yuan level sedans.

Game Changer – Changan FordCompact sedans have undergone nearly 20 years of development and competition, and have become a crowded field in the automotive market. Meanwhile, mid-size sedans with a price point of around 100,000 RMB are the most fiercely competitive segment in the crowded field.

Despite the intense competition, this segment has developed a conservative and stable mindset and consumer habits over the years. Headline models can attract a large number of consumers even if they lack unique characteristics, as long as there are no major flaws.

This rigid pattern has fostered complacency in leading brands, which opt for building cities with no major flaws that are difficult to defeat, when balancing costs, products, interests and other factors, and continue to enjoy market dividends until electric vehicles fully replace fuel cars.

As a result, product updates and iterations in this segment are very slow, with some models being sold alongside several generations of vehicles. Even global models are launched in China several years after their launch overseas.

Leading companies are even less enthusiastic about applying new technologies, despite the rise of automobile consumption in China and the technological changes and diverse demands it brings.

A brave disruptor is urgently needed for mid-size joint venture sedans, which increasingly suffer from a shrinking market share due to a growing number of individualistic users who find them uninventive. These users need products that break from tradition and offer more personalized, intelligent and trendy features.

Changan Ford has taken the first step toward “breaking the mold” by putting the user at the center, starting with the powerful new generation of Focus. The intelligent capabilities of this product demonstrate Changan Ford’s commitment to better understanding user needs and driving intelligent innovation, and accelerating the adoption of new technologies and the iteration of new models.

In fact, Changan Ford is leveraging Ford’s highly integrated fuel vehicle architecture to accelerate the application of overall vehicle safety strategies, smart cabins, autonomous driving, and whole-vehicle OTA technology in new models.

For example, Changan Ford has already achieved mass production application of cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) technology, becoming the first automaker in China to do so. In the future, the high-end mid-size SUV Ford Evos will connect to the smart city traffic system via OTA updates.

# Things develop in a wave-like manner, and the development of a car model or brand also requires a continuous process of exploration and summarization.

Changan Ford insists on market orientation and customer-centeredness, adheres to the management concept of “More Ford, More China”, and thus has achieved continuous breakthroughs. The breakthroughs of Changan Ford are not only to achieve continuous expansion of market share, but also to play a leading role in the new market pattern, leading users into a brand new era of automobile consumption.

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.