Author: Zhang Yi
The best upward development opportunities in the automotive industry often come from the changes of the times, and each turning point is an opportunity. In the automotive market, new forces have seized the opportunity of new energy and flourished. Traditional brands are also trying to grasp this upward swing and see the scenery at a higher place.
Dongfeng (Voyah) has already seen it, SAIC (Zhi Ji) is about to see it, and Great Wall (Aweita) is ready to see it… Regardless of the good or bad scenery, who doesn’t want to taste the taste of “looking down on all mountains”?
Chery has also seized the opportunity of new energy and reached a high point in its brand history. However, just like a swing reaching its highest point, it suddenly falls back again. After reaching the peak, Chery quickly declined!
In 2020, Chery bet on the “Big Ant” and attacked the high-end market of pure electric vehicles! However, just like the familiar story people have heard, at the beginning, it was magnificent, but in the end, it failed!
The above is the overall sales of Chery’s new energy vehicle models since 2022. It can be seen that Chery’s new energy sales mainly rely on QQ ice cream and Little Ant, and the contribution of Big Ant is almost negligible.
In fact, not only in 2022, since the listing of Big Ant, its sales have been sluggish, with a maximum of only 492 units. Most of the time, it was only a hundred or dozens of units. Last month, its sales were even as low as 9 units.
Now, under the impact of rising raw material prices and the chip crisis, the price of Big Ant has been raised from 168,800 yuan to 183,800 yuan, and there is only one model left in the entire series. With a price increase and only one product left, the future of Big Ant is neither optimistic nor clear!
In the context of the landing of new forces in Normandy and the frequent failures of traditional brands, the high-end road of Chery’s new energy seems particularly unpopular! Under the waves of controversies in the new energy market, Chery’s new energy has almost no topic. Even if occasionally mentioned, it is almost QQ ice cream and Little Ant, which almost occupy the A00 market.
Why did Chery end up like this? Is it because the brand has been low and unable to rise or the product cannot meet users’ requirements? As a mature enterprise that has been cultivating the market for 25 years, Chery has its solid technology and stable users. But why has Big Ant been neglected by the market?
Chery Chairman Yin Tongyue said: “Today’s Chery must have a thinking of ‘Breaking the Circle’ and innovation.” However, under the rolling tide, in order not to be killed by some unknown giant waves on the beach full of corpses, who is not desperately innovating!
Name is the first problem
Name may be the first stumbling block on the road of Chery Ants’ breakthrough.
Although naming cars after animals is very common, covering flying animals, running animals, and swimming animals, the images chosen are all revered by Chinese people, such as horses, tigers, leopards, etc.
However, naming a mid-to-high-end car after an ant is unprecedented. Chinese people might associate ants with words like “small” and “fragile”. “Little Ant” can have a cute meaning and evoke the user’s affection, but “Chery Ant” is a difficult name to have a good association with.
It also creates inconvenience for users when searching. When the journalist from “Electric Momentum” first searched for “Big Ant,” all the related information that came out was about ants, only when searching for “Chery Big Ant” or “Big Ant Car” did relevant information come out.
After forming the search habit, “Big Ant” will directly show the car. So the name of “Big Ant” sets a barrier for users to understand “Big Ant” invisibly.
“Big Ant” actually originated from Chery New Energy wanting to continue the heat of Little Ant while isolating it from Little Ant. However, they may have forgotten that heat will cool down, what happens after it cools?
The name “Big Ant” is completely incompatible with the tone, demands, and image of customers in the 150,000 to 200,000 yuan market. Customers in this level often belong to the middle class, have some career successes, love cars and life, pay attention to quality, and have their own social circles. How can Chery New Energy impress them to buy a “Big Ant” that doesn’t sound glamorous and dynamic compared to the more fashionable and powerful automatic driving XPeng P5?
Therefore, the problem with Big Ant is not just a simple deviation in tone caused by its name, but also a problem of contradiction between positioning and users. Thus, it leads to another problem, how to market it from the tone of “Big Ant”?
First, let’s take a look at how Little Ant is marketed.
Simply put, Little Ant takes off from the point of “Female main is a good girlfriend” and focuses on the female life scene, aiming to create a romantic lifestyle for “her”. It visualizes the scene by collaborating with market trend brands such as “Yuanqi Forest” and “Zhongjie 1942” to evoke female consumer emotions. From the cute name of Little Ant that appeals to women, the colorful appearance design to the excellent driving performance, Little Ant has connected numerous boundaries from products to life.Then let’s take a look at XPeng P5’s marketing approach.
XPeng P5’s biggest highlight in marketing is the scene-based marketing. That is, XPeng P5 has a variety of intelligent spaces in different scenes such as sleep, entertainment, life, outdoor, and DIY, which means that users can set different space modes according to their different scenes to meet their own needs, breaking down the boundaries of time, location, people, and environment.
Finally, let’s take a look at how Da Ma Ant markets its products.
First, it takes advantage of the popularity of Xiaomaha. As mentioned earlier, Chery New Energy wants to continue the popularity of Xiaomaha and launch Da Ma Ant. However, if Chery New Energy wants to make Da Ma Ant its flagship product, but still wants to continue the popularity of Xiaomaha, the starting point is upside down!
Second, unlike XPeng P5’s versatile intelligent space, Da Ma Ant chooses its all-aluminum body and handling performance as its marketing selling points. But as a new energy vehicle, Da Ma Ant uses the selling points commonly used in fuel vehicles, which seems a bit outdated.
Based on the above, we find that one of the root problems of Da Ma Ant in marketing is the unclear positioning, which leads to a series of problems such as high-end but derived from low-end, user psychology mismatch, and unclear marketing selling points.
Highlight strengths and avoid weaknesses
Highlighting strengths and avoiding weaknesses can achieve differentiated marketing, but Da Ma Ant chooses to highlight its weaknesses.
Da Ma Ant has a wheelbase of 2830mm, while XPeng P5 has a wheelbase of 2768mm, GAC AION Y has a wheelbase of 2750mm, and BYD Song Pro Dm-i has a wheelbase of 2712mm. Therefore, Da Ma Ant has a very obvious advantage in space compared to its peers.
Starting from the space advantage, Da Ma Ant can make a lot of marketing articles, such as meeting the space needs of families with two or three children, being able to hold more tools for outdoor travel, and increasing the comfort of rear passengers and the owner’s sense of glory.
However, unfortunately, on the official website, the space description of Da Ma Ant has only four words “surpassing space”, and there is no relevant marketing on other platforms.
Da Ma Ant gave up its most selling point of space advantage and turned to focus on the points where it did not have obvious advantages or even weaker than its peers, such as intelligence, safety, and three-electricity.
In addition, the handling is also a highlight. Although Da Ma Ant’s suspension uses front MacPherson and rear multi-link, there is no particular advantage among its peers. However, Da Ma Ant’s rear-wheel drive drive method can easily set itself apart from its peers in the sea of front-wheel drive same-level cars.The rear-wheel drive can provide extremely good handling performance for starting, climbing, turning, and other aspects of driving. Compared with front-wheel drive, users can also feel a more obvious sense of acceleration when driving, which can give users abundant driving passion.
As a traditional automobile brand, Chery has its own heritage in handling and tuning advantages beyond new forces. For users who pursue handling or like sports cars, the rear-wheel drive of the Ant model will be a very attractive point.
However, the Ant model still lacks a unique selling point in terms of handling.
Therefore, another serious problem with the Ant model is that it does not provide users with an experience that can stimulate their senses and nurture their emotional needs. The advantage of the Ant model still comes from the characteristics of Chery’s traditional fuel vehicles and cannot form unique characteristics and selling points that belong to the Ant model as an intelligent car. This has caused the Ant model to gradually become mediocre in the increasingly fierce competition in the new energy vehicle field.
Product strength needs to be improved
The fundamental problem with the Ant model is that it lacks unique characteristics and selling points as an intelligent car, and its product strength is insufficient!
First of all, from a design perspective, although the design of the Ant model was designed by Pininfarina, who has designed supercars such as Ferrari and Lamborghini, the final appearance is criticized for being a combination of Porsche and Lynk & Co.
In addition, compared with the front-end design of other brands in the same class, the design of the Ant model appears too complicated, which contradicts the design concept of “less is more” for intelligent cars and still retains the traditional aesthetic of fuel vehicles. Moreover, the three-layer structure of the Ant model cannot allow users to recognize the most iconic part, and users cannot remember this car as quickly.
Maybe “an outsider would be able to recite the Buddhist scriptures,” but even if recited very well, it would be in vain if it is not what the local “believers” want to hear. Therefore, Chery cannot blindly pursue the so-called master’s design, but needs to start from the points of new energy and intelligent cars and make designs that meet users’ imagination of intelligent cars.
Secondly, let’s talk about the issue of design again. If the exterior design of the Ant model is too complicated, then its UI interactive interface is too simple. Compared with cars at the same price as the Xpeng P5, the interactive interface of the Ant model is still full of the style of traditional fuel vehicles.
Although it is concise and powerful, it lacks the technological sense and futuristic sense that intelligent car users pursue, which cannot show the value and basic experience that a user should have when buying an intelligent car, and naturally loses users’ interest in the Ant model.
And now let’s talk about the smart system issue. With a facial recognition that responds in milliseconds, intelligent voice control from iFLYTEK, in terms of smart interaction experience, the big ant is not bad compared to other competitors. But what’s fatal is that the big ant does not support remote OTA upgrades. If users want to upgrade, they have to go back to the after-sales service center, which means more time and energy cost compared to other cars at the same level that almost all support OTA upgrades.
So, we can see that the big ant is more like an ordinary engineer. It has remarkable mechanical skills but unfortunately lacks emotional intelligence and fashion sense.
The Electric Power Has Something to Say
Now, at a micro level, users’ tastes are becoming higher and their understanding of cars is becoming deeper, leading to more competition between brands. At the macro level, prices of bulk materials are rising again, the chip crisis continues, and economic pressure is gradually increasing. Therefore, for Chery’s new energy brand striving for better success, being surrounded by rivals may be an understatement.
Chery Chairman, Yin Tongyue, stated that the company needs to prioritize innovation and management, and increase innovation investment, research and development, and transformation at the current stage.
Certainly, for the current big ant, it needs to increase research on empowering the smart system to bridge the gap with competitors, and it needs to really understand what users want by designing emotional attributes that could satisfy users’ senses and feelings.
Moreover, the existence of the big ant has become increasingly redundant for Chery’s new energy team, as it has neither sales volume nor good reputation. Therefore, Chery must seriously consider its necessity and value.
In fact, many traditional low-to-mid-end fuel brands, when trying to capture new energy market share, have established a new sub-brand with a brand-new image to overcome users’ inherent bias. Such as Geely’s JiKe, Xiaokang’s Sailius, and Chang’an’s Shenlan. Even when the mid-to-low-end fuel vehicle brands are striving to enter the high-end market, they set up a new sub-brand, such as Great Wall’s WEY, Toyota’s Lexus, and Nissan’s Infiniti.
Chery has launched many sub-brands during its journey to high-end fuel vehicles, such as Ruiqi and Veil in 2009, Xingtu and Jietu in 2018. Although some of these brands have had a hard time, it is still important to keep moving and avoid unnecessary pitfalls before reaching the shore.If Chery New Energy truly has the intention to develop and establish a brand new high-end new energy brand, create an independent and new marketing system, then starting from scratch is necessary. However, if Ant is just a trial of Chery’s opportunism, and if the focus of Chery is still on seizing the low-end market with Little Ant and QQ ice cream, then it is another story.
Breaking the circle requires both the sword of breaking and the pen of drawing to be held in Chery’s hands. Chery needs to not only be a good player but also a good referee!
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.