Translation

Author: Nobody

Compared to many traditional brands that start going downhill right after they launch new models, LI L9 is already a legendary car that seems out of reach.

Within 72 hours, over 30,000 orders were placed, and considering each order deposit of 5,000 yuan, LI has already earned 1 billion yuan from L9 pre-orders alone.

Well, not all of those deposits will end up being non-refundable, but judging from consumers’ real feedback, LI L9 is highly likely to have a good start. When it starts delivering in August, LI’s factory in Changzhou and its supply chain will face a lot of production pressure, let’s hope they can handle it.

LI L9 has an undeniable ability to break through people’s preconceptions about cars, and within car enthusiasts, it has become the car that people can’t help but talk about. As a male in his 90s who owns a hatchback, I was not the target consumer for LI L9. But after reading countless discussions about it with mixed reviews, I also have some views that I would like to share with fellow car owners.

Unexpected Attraction

I myself am a typical fan of gasoline cars. Even though I have worked in the field of new energy vehicles for a few years and I now drive a Model Y as my daily commute car, whenever I drive my own Ford Focus ST-Line back home, I still find the driving pleasure of gasoline cars irreplaceable.

I never expected that even I would be fascinated by LI L9 for several days after its release. Apparently, my values about cars have changed without me knowing it.

To traditional car enthusiasts, LI L9 is a bulky car with too many screens and no faith. It is priced at 500,000 yuan? Why not buy a used Prado, with a 3.5L naturally aspirated engine and a V6? That’s what a real car should be!

But for me, who has grown up in the Internet age, I never had much faith in the so-called big-displacement, naturally aspirated engines. And, I prefer to enjoy the convenience brought by technology when I go out in my car. In this regard, LI L9 is definitely more appealing to me than a used Prado. Even though it has only a small four-cylinder engine and a large battery that a petrol head would sneer at, even though it doesn’t even have an analog dashboard, it can allow me to play games on a large screen in a cool car under the scorching sun in summer, travel with my girlfriend like moving homes with relatively reasonable fuel consumption, and most importantly, have an advanced driver assistance system that can make driving long distances tireless. Not to mention that its absolute power is more powerful than those gasoline cars that only have oil faith.

Therefore, let’s not only consider the Ideal L9 as a car designed for middle-aged men. In fact, many of its configurations cater to people of all ages and genders. However, the combination of these configurations and the natural greasiness of the 6-seater layout give it a unique value for middle-aged men.

This is my personal view, and it may also be the value of many contemporary car consumers. The authority of the traditional automobile quality evaluation system will soon disappear in the third decade of the 21st century dominated by new technology as the main evaluation criteria. We cannot deny that under the automobile evaluation standard dominated by new technology, the Ideal L9 is infinitely close to the title of “best family SUV under 5 million yuan”.

I have another reason for liking the Ideal L9, which comes from the social values.

The definition of a successful man in China is singular. Take clothing and appearance, for example. Even if you spend tens of thousands of yuan on clothes and wear a BOY LONDON outfit, people tend to avoid you when they see you. But if you dress like a high-ranking official and drive a Toyota Camry, then you are undoubtedly a stable man. If you want to be a successful person, either you have a smooth career path or you fight on the battlefield of business. Of course, you also need a beautiful wife and two or three cute and obedient children.

Many promotional videos prepared by Ideal for the release of the L9 all depict this kind of life.

Although middle-aged men’s lives often have many regrets, as they gradually age, their friends who used to play games and watch sports have gradually become parents. I have also begun to yearn for a stable middle-aged life, and my attention to cars naturally expands from cars with playful attributes, such as the Volkswagen Golf, Cadillac CT5, and BMW 3 Series, to more life-oriented vehicles, like the Ideal L9.

Of course, as a newcomer’s second mass-produced car, the Ideal L9 will inevitably have many shortcomings, and driving such a huge SUV in the city will not be easy. However, at this price point and for this age group of target consumers, buying a car is rarely just to please oneself, and caring for the family in the back seat has become the most lethal selling point of the Ideal L9, no wonder it has attracted so many people’s attention.

Capturing Human Nature > Capturing Demands

The explosive attention Ideal L9 has received has nothing to do with material accumulation. After all, Chinese automakers have long been familiar with this game strategy, and even the most heavily accumulated vehicles, when they begin to accumulate, are called experts in this field.Marketing is not necessarily important. When it comes to brainwashing, two companies in Shenzhen can be regarded as world-class. The crazy operations they have done are not as influential as the Ideal L9.

That is to say, with the screens on L9 and Mr. Li’s words alone, it could not have brought in 30,000 orders for Ideal.

Since Li Xiang is a loyal follower of Apple, let me try to explain what Ideal has captured by using the case of Apple. In 2009, the iPhone 3GS was launched. In the same year, Motorola released the flagship model of the Android camp, the Milestone. At that time, many aspects of the iPhone, such as screen size, camera resolution, battery life, etc., were not stronger than those of the Android flagship phone, and some parameters were even lagging behind.

However, this did not affect the historic status of the iPhone 3GS in the history of smartphones. It was not the most powerful, but the easiest to use, which made it a better choice for most people who are not interested in playing with technology products, not to mention the fashion color and the Apple logo. The Milestone, released by Motorola in the same year, was quickly surpassed by new Android phones with better performance and experience, and now only exists in the memories of a few mobile phone enthusiasts.

The difference in competitive power between Apple and other brands never comes from performance but from their attitude towards technology and the market, that is, what Steve Jobs called “the intersection of technology and the humanities“. Only by combining technology and humanity can products resonate with people.

When promoting the Apple Watch, Apple would delve into how they collaborate with professional athletes to build more accurate motion tracking algorithms, invite medical professionals to endorse health monitoring functions developed for them. Apple hopes to convince you that the Apple Watch you purchase is not just a smart watch equipped with leading chips and screens but also a mobile health management tool that embodies the professional achievements of professional athletes and authoritative medical institutions.

Therefore, we can see later on that no matter how powerful the performance parameters of smartphones in the Android camp are, it is difficult to grab a share of Apple’s high-end market. Apple has been the most profitable company in the mobile phone market for so many years.

First-class companies can plan their products rationally and enable their products to find a foothold in the market.Top-tier companies don’t rely on finding a position, but on rooting themselves in the easiest-to-“invade” places in consumers’ hearts, making them feel like they need the product. Even if it’s not perfect, there will still be demand.

During the development of the SEV and ONE stages, the ideal was to become a typical first-class enterprise and a savvy businessperson.

At the time (should be called “Car and Home”), based on their policy predictions for the low-speed electric vehicle and shared leasing industries, the ideal decided to start with low-speed electric vehicles and began development for the overseas market compliance work. Later, in response to changes in market policy and competition, the ideal decisively terminated the SEV project and focused on the extended range electric SUV.

The R&D work for the SEV stage of the ideal’s product was obviously policy and market demand-oriented. Wherever there was a need, there was a place for the ideal to situate itself. The later ideal ONE was mainly oriented towards user demand. Today, there are almost no models that can directly PK with the ideal in all aspects at the 360,000 yuan price point, demonstrating how accurately the ideal grasps user demand.

With the launch of the ideal ONE, the company’s operations have entered a normal track and the ideal began to show its capability to evolve from first-class to top-tier product concepts.

The ideal’s brand mission is to “create a mobile home, create a happy home,” and “family” and “happiness” are high-frequency key words used in their product and brand promotions, even appearing in the introduction of core technology. The ideal’s promotional posters and videos also rarely show the traditional high-end SUVs where one person drives and dominates the streets, but rather feature warm images of two-child families.

This kind of operation is typical of selling a “persona”. Those who approve of ideal cars are inevitably those who approve of the brand philosophy, and what they want to pursue from ideal cars is not just a vehicle, but a lifestyle upgrade for the whole family.

Although the ideal car may not be the foundation of your harmonious family, the ideal has always used various means to make users believe that the lifestyle promoted by ideal is the life they will soon be able to enjoy. An ideal insider (can’t remember who) once said on Weibo that the ideal L9 video deliberately used older child actors, perhaps out of consideration for the authenticity of the promotional video.Grabbing the demand can offer a chance for companies to take the upper hand in market competition. However, no product of any enterprise can be perfect, and in the current public opinion environment, consumers can easily obtain an analysis of the pros and cons of a product. So, the risk of being replaced by competitors is also high for companies and products that simply follow user demand.

Grasping human nature and making users resonate with the brand is the key to giving companies a chance to win every battle. Because when people truly need you, the basis for making purchasing decisions is no longer rational analysis.

Simplify the way of thinking before grasping human nature

Grasping human nature is not easy, especially for enterprises like carmakers, which have a generally large organizational structure.

From R&D to production, and then to sales and after-sales service, all work decisions at every link involve a large amount of game theory. Can the cost of standard laser radar be controlled properly? Will extended-range hybrid power be disqualified from a green license by future policies? If an enterprise cannot make all professional departments always focus on a goal, it will be difficult to achieve the high-difficulty behavior of “grasping human nature”. Because once any part of the process goes wrong, consumers not only do not recognize you, but may also feel that they have been tricked.

As the author is not an ideal employee, it is recommended that everyone read the report on LatePost’s internal management. Here, I will discuss the ideal product strategy in detail and how to reflect its “simplicity” of thinking.

Take car audio as an example.

As we all know, the audio equipment of luxury brands has always been an expensive optional item. Over time, improving brand premium through audio customization has become a business model, so some carmakers that want to strike at the middle and high-end image have also followed suit.

Of course, there are very few car owners who will really pay for audio equipment individually. This is not because everyone does not want a better audio system, but it looks like being taken advantage of to spend one or two thousand or even six or seventy thousand yuan just for that.

The logic of the ideal versus traditional carmakers is completely different. They believe that if a product has only a few hundred sales, the development cost allocated to each product will be very high, which also leads to high pricing. If Ideal could produce 100,000 cars with one configuration, the fixed development cost would naturally be spread very low.

This applies to audio equipment, car refrigerators, rear screen gesture recognition and interaction… All the features that can impress family users on the Ideal L9 are based on a differentiated business model. If any of these features require additional options, the reputation of Ideal L9 may be severely impacted.# In the modern Chinese family life, the pillar’s brainpower will be exhausted by countless household chores, and everyone hopes to do their best to provide the best life for their family. People have long been tired of the ubiquitous social hierarchy and want to create rare equality and simplicity in family life. The middle class imprisoned by the urban concrete jungle urgently hopes to move towards natural release of the pressure while avoiding the heat, humidity, and mosquito bites of nature.

Compared with traditional car companies that expand their profit margins through complex SKU and pricing strategies, IDEAL has chosen a unified standard configuration business model, leaving users no chance to refuse. For families with two children, the elder child can watch cartoons on the rear seat screen, and the newborn can drink warm milk at any time. The whole series is equipped with a high-power 21-speaker audio system, and dad and mom no longer argue about whether to spend another tens of thousands of dollars for better music experience.

This is IDEAL’s strategy for building user loyalty, simple yet ultimate.

One hundred years ago, Henry Ford had a very practical business philosophy:

“Only by cultivating a consumer class with purchasing power can the produced products have a market and sales.“

Guided by such a business philosophy, Henry Ford devoted himself to producing affordable cars for the working class and invented the assembly line production process, which realized the revolution of the automobile manufacturing industry.

In that era, making cars was similar to selling cola, without so many restrictions. More than a hundred years later, when cars have already spread to every corner of human civilization, the business philosophy of the automobile industry has become more and more complicated. New cars must be divided into several stages according to industry conventions when they are launched, and car prices must be divided into N configurations. Luxury car companies that want to maintain face have to come up with a bunch of optional packages… Do users really like it? Can car companies really make more money?

Thanks to Tesla, IDEAL, and other new forces with simple minds, seemingly reasonable things have revealed flaws, and unsatisfied consumers for a long time have met their dream car and dream life that the whole family loves.

Conclusion

In 72 hours, IDEAL received 30,000 orders. It was released in June and delivered in August. IDEAL L9 hopes to create a legendary speed at its price of up to 460,000 yuan.

Considering the order conversion rate and various uncontrollable factors, it will definitely take a long time to achieve a real delivery volume of 30,000. Whether Ideal can deliver on time in August will also test its ideal supply chain management ability. But compared to many traditional brand new models that begin to decline as soon as they are released, Ideal L9 is already a legendary car that seems out of reach.

To be honest, I have been a little tired of Ideal these days. I don’t want to reach middle age and only have one or two cars that can make the whole family happy. But it is undeniable that Ideal has its unique value that can quickly catch people’s attention and make users feel secure enough to spend money. Don’t underestimate the 5,000 yuan. How many middle-aged men with both sons and daughters can easily take out 5,000 yuan as pocket money?

I hope that the product teams of major car companies, when benchmarking Ideal L9, not only focus on the car itself, but also study the entire process since the launch of this car, to see what mentality the company used to develop products and manage teams. Only in this way, can we crack the wealth code of Ideal L9 becoming a hot-selling product in one day.

As for whether this wealth code can be used for one’s own benefit, it depends on the accomplishment of the company’s bosses. There are not many companies now that give employees space to offer advice and suggestions.

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.