On the night of August 12th, the tire brand Prinx Chengshan held an online brand launch event called “Prinx Ideation Day”. Following that, an “Metaverse” interactive interview was also held on the 13th!
I originally thought that these trendy words like “Metaverse” and “User Co-creation” were ways for car companies to create marketing topics for themselves, but I never thought that I would see them all in a tire brand.
Brief Introduction to Prinx Chengshan’s History
Prinx Chengshan was originally called “Rongcheng City Rubber Factory”. This is a county-level city under the jurisdiction of Weihai City, Shandong Province, which is bordered by the Yellow Sea on its north, east, and south sides.
In 1990, the first Meridian production line in China was born in the factory in Chengshan. In 2005, Prinx Chengshan and Giti Tire began to produce tires in China through joint venture. Until 2013, when Indian company Apollo tried to acquire Giti, although the acquisition failed, the cooperation between Giti and Chengshan came to an end, and Giti eventually took away almost all of Chengshan’s passenger car business.
After separating from Giti in 2015, Chengshan began to move towards independent and self-development, on the one hand, expanding the upstream control (Thailand) production base, on the other hand, also entered the European market.
So far, Prinx Chengshan has three large production bases worldwide, with 225 patents, and serves more than 100 customers worldwide.
Prinx Chengshan’s Product Line
Prinx Chengshan has four tire brands:
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Chengshan brand, which has layout in commercial and passenger car fields, and ranks among the top three in the domestic TBR (Meridian Tire) market in the commercial field. The tire products in the passenger car field are mainly practical and home-use.
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Prinx brand, mainly for the research and development of EV models in the passenger car market;
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Austone brand, mainly for commercial use, with a good reputation in Europe and North America;
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Fortune Tire, mainly for commercial use, is a strong regional brand, with its main market in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
In addition to the traditional tire product business line, Prinx Chengshan is also committed to providing green and efficient freight solutions. They launched a service brand called “Zhianada” in China, which mainly detects the tire condition through the tire’s built-in chip, and reduces the operation cost of customer fleet’s tires as a whole while improving safety through active maintenance, leasing, and other service models.
Why do tire companies need user co-creation?
After sorting out Prinx Chengshan’s history, for a moment, I didn’t understand why a tire company would do publicity and marketing towards C-end consumers?One is to increase the volume, the other is to reinforce the tag.
In the tire industry, competition is relatively solidified, and the leading players are all century-old brands. With the rise of new domestic forces, China’s automotive supply chain capabilities are rapidly growing, and tires are one of them. However, tires also need to step forward, show their strength to consumers, understand user needs, and quickly surpass competitors by improving products.
At this press conference, Pulin proposed the development concept of GCE (Ground Contact Efficiency) electric tires. The core of GCE is based on user experience, extending the three major performance indicators of rolling resistance, wet skid, and noise specified in China’s tire labeling regulations to the six most important indicators for new energy vehicles and vehicle owners: safety, single-charge range, interior noise, total mileage, response speed, and driving comfort.
The internal goal of Pulin Chengshan is “four modernizations”, namely: internationalization, branding, greenization, and intelligence. I speculate that strengthening consumers’ impression of different brand positioning attributes is one of the reasons why Pulin Chengshan is promoting C-end marketing.
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.