Author | Chu Wanbo
Editor | Qiu Kaijun
Wang Fengying, who just joined XPeng Motors, has set a big goal for herself.
According to an insider in XPeng, “Wang Fengying has set a target of selling one million XPeng cars within three years and increasing the market value of XPeng to tens of billions of dollars within five years.”
Wang Fengying has also been nicknamed “Millionaire Sister” within XPeng for this “initiative,” which is surely welcomed by car company bosses and is the fundamental starting point of “killing sales bosses.”
Wang Fengying’s joining XPeng is just part of a wave of personnel changes in the automotive industry from the second half of last year to early this year. Prior to this, a dizzying array of personnel changes had already unfolded wave after wave.
These personnel changes indicate that the new energy automotive industry, which appears shiny and attractive on the surface, is not all rosy but rather a mix of joy and grief for dozens of companies. For marketing directors who bear the burden of KPIs, it is difficult to meet their bosses’ sales targets internally, and externally, it is difficult to find effective marketing strategies after the transformation of automotive product attributes.
However, observing the marketing performance of intelligent electric cars in the last two years, is there any rule or trend that we can follow? Can we gain some inspiration?
Two Innovative Marketing Generals of Traditional Car Companies: Zhou Xin, Yu Fei
In recent years, many car companies like to hire “foreign monks.”
Some car companies directly cross-recruit marketing executives, such as Avita, which recruited Wang Lin, former vice president of marketing at InterContinental Group. Other car companies exclude traditional car company talent and instead attract marketing personnel from internet and consumer companies for mid-level or entry-level positions.
However, the results are often not satisfactory. Although automotive products have undergone some attribute changes, the heavy offline channel and service system are not something that can be easily handled by the logic of “focusing on online and disregarding offline.”
Instead, there are two marketing people in traditional car companies who have broken through the traditional pattern and achieved good results.
One is Yu Fei, who has created the “love women more” brand Ora. Yu Fei joined Ora in the second half of 2019 as Vice President of Marketing and later became General Manager of Marketing. With great efforts on non-automotive media and platforms, Yu Fei proposed the slogan “Wherever the user’s interests lie, Ora will be there.” He approached the target users, young women, through their interests and spread the word through cute pets, travel and beauty circles, helping Ora reach users and attract fans. In 2020, Ora’s monthly sales increased for 10 consecutive months, selling 56,200 vehicles in total, a year-on-year increase of 44.76%. In 2021, Ora’s cumulative sales reached 135,000 vehicles, an increase of 140% year-on-year.
The other marketing talent is Zhou Xin, who marketed the “divine car” Hong Guang MINI.The former manager of Changan’s sedan brand, Yu Fei, was appointed in October 2021 to be the head of Great Wall’s sedan brand. However, this motion was later abandoned by Great Wall and Yu Fei transferred to Landtu.
Another successful marketing case is Hong Guang MINI EV, which owes much of its success to Zhou Xin, an “85-after” marketing star. Zhou joined SAIC-GM-Wuling in 2011 and later rose to the position of Vice President of Marketing. In July 2020, Wuling launched the Hong Guang MINI EV, creating a pure electric A00 category.
Hong Guang MINI EV boasts an astonishingly low price and uniqueness, but its true charm lies in its portrayal by lifestyle journalists, beautiful internet celebrities, KOLs, and in its wide coverage on Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and social news, as well as cross-border self-media. It has attracted many followers and converted many young men and women who were not previously interested in car purchase into actual buyers.
As of January 29, 2023, Wuling’s Hong Guang MINI EV has accumulated over 1.11 million units sold, making it a phenomenal best-selling item and a classic marketing case. In July 2022, Zhou Xin joined Xiaomi Motors and became responsible for the marketing aspect of the company, reporting directly to Lei Jun, the Chairman of Xiaomi Technologies.
In this wave of personnel changes, these two young marketing leaders naturally found great new job opportunities.
However, it should be emphasized that prior to their innovative marketing, the product positioning and competitiveness had already laid a solid foundation. Ora targets women while Hong Guang MINI turns cars into young people’s “toys”; these are both very successful examples of product demand excavation and realization. Yu Fei and Zhou Xin created an equally innovative marketing model to promote a surge in sales.
Moreover, while online channels are innovated, offline channels still need to be built and operated honestly. The success of Hong Guang MINI EV is also related to Wuling’s very comprehensive channel coverage. This includes Ideal Auto, which had 290 stores by the end of 2022, with an average of 459 units sold per store, much higher than NIO and Xpeng’s 303 and 288 units respectively.## Products Reign Supreme, Marketers Take a Backseat
When it comes to the growing trend of intelligent electric cars, marketing stars like Yu Fei and Zhou Xi are rare. Super product managers are becoming more and more prominent.
Huang Mingming, the founder of Ming Chi Capital, who invested in Ideal Auto very early on, said that Li Xiang is a super product manager-type entrepreneur.
Tesla and Ideal Auto are both start-ups with super product managers. Over the past few years, Tesla and Ideal Auto have performed very well and have become leading electric vehicle companies. Although their sales in 2022 did not explode like BYD, the growth was still very steady.
Few people know who their marketing executives are, but Elon Musk and Li Xiang are both very well-known. Both founders are able to bring high attention to their brands and products through their own influence.
But it doesn’t stop there. Both Musk and Li Xiang are extensively involved in their respective products. Musk likes to call himself an engineer, “occupying 80-90\% of my time in the factory, design meetings, engineering meetings, and production.”
Former Tesla director Gracias believes that Musk should step away from administrative affairs so that “like a product manager, he can focus on the product, which is where his brilliance lies.”
Li Xiang is also known for his outstanding product management skills. Before Shen Yanan resigned, Li Xiang was responsible for organizing management and product strategies at the company and devoted a lot of time to product management. It is Li Xiang’s own experience in product definition, as well as his extreme requirements for product positioning, functionality, and user experience that have created popular models such as Ideal ONE, L9, and L8.
Since the car market has shifted from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market, the functions, experiences and costs that car products can provide to the target user group have become increasingly important. At the same time, with the advent of the mobile internet era, zero-distance and zero-latency transmission of information has rapidly spread product reputation, and brand recognition is no longer a high barrier.
With products such as these, marketing executives allocate more energy to channel management and expansion, and are not very visible. Its importance is no longer as high.## Smart EV Marketing: The Only Way is to Find Your Own Path
In times of change, simply relying on marketing strategies that focus solely on sales turnover is futile.
During times of high demand and stable production and supply, marketing heroes can rely solely on channel warfare to make their mark.
But during the popularization of smart electric vehicles, demand needs to be extracted and captured, technical products require constant iteration, production and supply need joint ventures, cooperation, or even self-research and production to ensure success, efficient channel expansion is necessary, and high customer satisfaction for service is key. Only when all aspects have been executed to perfection can sales surge.
However, one mistake in any one of the above links may lead to a decline in sales. This is why some believe that some marketing executives were fired, because their companies simply did not put in enough effort into their products, production, and supply.
Compared to traditional cars and other industries, many processes related to smart electric vehicle research and development, production, sales, and service are innovative, making it impossible to find “plug and play” talent externally. Instead of relying on external assistance, it is better to learn from companies like Huawei, New Oriental, and Ideal Auto, and recruit high-quality talent with the right basic skills to build an intelligent organizational structure, enabling the entire organization to acquire systemic capabilities necessary to deal with new business challenges.
To put it bluntly, in order to identify the true “experts,” instead of recruiting externally, creating a system that cultivates the right talent can allow the best to rise and take on major responsibilities.
Take a look at the busiest worker in China’s smart EV industry: Zhu Xiaotong. Although he is not Tesla’s global CEO, he still oversees all their factories worldwide.
How did he get there?
Zhu Xiaotong initially joined Tesla as the Director of their charging business in China. While working under well-known executives from luxury car companies and former Apple executives, he had the most effective implementation and efficiency. As a result, he steadily climbed the ranks to become one of the Musk’s trusted high-level executives.
That being said, past work experience is not as important, as the openness and potential for growth of marketing talent. Three, five years is not far away, let’s wait and see if Wang Fengying’s goal of producing one million cars and achieving a market capitalization of billions of dollars is ultimately achieved.
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.