In the most popular travel field, the situation is different. From the United States to China, large car rental companies have firmly controlled the travel market by providing customized services. Therefore, when the American aunt Robin Chase founded the company in the early 21st century, When Zipcar set off the first wave of travel innovation, car rental companies were able to effectively fight against it. Although Zipcar, which advocated the concept of sharing, was successfully listed, it was eventually absorbed by the car rental giant Avis-Budget. Today, without the Nobel-level giant that Diao Ye calls Uber, no matter how many Lyft, GetAround, Silvercar or Flightcar are there, they will still be insignificant.
Recently, the frequent efforts of transportation management in various parts of China can be regarded as a signal: the rough era of Internet travel is over. Only after the wild growth and the emergence of a group of heroes, a truly mature business model will settle down. From the perspective of business formats, China's private car landscape in the future is likely to be a battle between two schools: own vehicles and self-driver Shenzhou Private Car VS Didi and Uber models.
The battle for special cars has reached its climax.
Marketing
From a marketing perspective, even if most Chinese companies miss out on the Nobel Prize, they definitely have a chance to be nominated for an Oscar. It is also full of creativity. In the past, Double Eleven was just a duo event between Alibaba and JD. Now, retail giants such as Suning and Gome have also evolved rapidly. In the milk tea incident, Suning was able to say, "He deleted you from his world. But you deleted the whole world for him." Such a magical finishing touch. In the travel market, the two earliest Internet car rental companies in China are also mid-level experts. eHi Car Rental has just hired the big mouth Yao Chen as the spokesperson, and China Car Rental has meaningfully launched Edison Chen. But compared with today’s excitement, these are just travel The origin of marketing.
Didi’s entire advantage in mobile marketing is due to its parasitic growth with WeChat. The public account’s reading volume of 100,000 can be used as a footnote. In the short window period when mobile payment tends to mature, with the help of With the aura of Tencent's investment, Didi quickly caught up with WeChat payment and became the initiator of the proliferation of red envelopes. Moreover, Didi's red envelopes were early accessed to WeChat's advanced interface and were able to obtain user avatars and nicknames, which presented a very unique effect in communication. With strong virality, Didi red envelopes today have achieved four modernizations: platformization, channelization, micro-amount and normalization. They can bypass users' psychological fear of induced sharing and become popular in the circle of friends. They are also popular in WeChat business. Today, when people are deeply disgusted, the tenacious survival of Didi red envelopes, which say "no matter how small a fly is, is still meat" is shocking.
Didi’s driver marketing relies entirely on some stories with overloaded imagination, such as the famous “Earn 30,000 yuan a month, sleep until you wake up naturally”, this copywriting is a good inheritance of the fables of the pre-Qin philosophers. Marrow, such as "Zhuangzi" says, "There is a fish in the North Ming Dynasty, and its name is Kun. It turns into a bird, and its name is Peng. It is unknown how many thousands of miles there are on the Peng's back. Peng migrates to the South Ming Dynasty, and the water strikes three Thousands of miles, soaring up ninety thousand miles!" The core of this type of story is to use overwhelming, highly contagious language and extended imagination space to persuade the audience. Behind it is a theoretical possibility that cannot be verified in reality. God
Logic.
What Didi’s driver system nourishes and domesticates is a profit-seeking culture. Passengers enjoy the game of red envelopes that are better than nothing, while drivers are immersed in the ubiquitous “positive energy” of creating wealth. See too much It will generate adrenaline and hormones. The superposition of the two images creates a marketing myth, and the connotation and value of the service are evaporated.
Uber, which is considered unsociable, is actually another form of marketing giant. In terms of creativity, Uber is not inferior to Didi and Kuaidi, which are backed by Tencent and Alibaba, similar to Tong Dawei. Beauty control gimmicks, as well as Guangzhou and Shenzhen’s Ice Cream Day, Mom’s Car, Princess Pumpkin Car, Masturbation and other extremely popular activities and products are emerging one after another. Uber’s marketing never lacks professionalism and entertainment spirit, but it lacks communication media. This makes its creativity less effective than Didi’s, which is deeply rooted in people’s bones and entertains them to death. Similar to Yidao Yongche, the frequency of the latter’s various cross-industry cooperation and coupon distribution activities is staggering, but Vertical diffusion is limited by the bottleneck of the membership base, and horizontal diffusion is limited by the resources of social platforms. After Baidu invested in Uber, the traffic support obtained by Yidao also has a tendency to be marginalized. The sponsor Ctrip has no interaction with Yidao Yongche. Optimized, but nothing more.
The late arrival of Shenzhou Car Rental provides a completely different sample. At that time, China Car Rental successfully controlled the self-driving travel market by launching a simple and effective advertising campaign on building TVs, airports, high-speed rail and other channels. The service has also been connected to Yidao Yongche, which has accumulated consumer demand. Unlike Didi and Uber, which rely on marketing, Shenzhou Private Car is more concerned about the organic growth brought about by the service itself. Since its launch on January 28, Shenzhou Private Car did not use the means of boosting rankings. The Apple store ranking quickly led Uber, No. 1 Private Car and Yidao Yongche. This shows that it is more concerned about the rapidly expanding download data than the rapidly expanding download data. User quality reflects the marketing values ????from physical enterprises, that is, they have deep confidence in their own business.
Uber, which has always been negotiated, has been aggressive in marketing recently. After March 2015, its Apple store ranking suddenly soared, and even reached the top of the list on May 8. Many people I thought it was the power of marketing. In fact, activities like Tong Dawei’s street sweeps had started as early as October 2014. At that time, the divine article titled "Warm Man" was sweeping the circle of friends, but the appearance of Tong Nanshen except Apart from causing some madness among Shanghai aunts, it did not provide any real boost to the business. Uber’s miraculous performance in the rankings is entirely due to the large number of offer wall ads with poor conversions and the concentrated outbreak of negative news. This is a bit of black humor for Uber, which was previously down-to-earth and hardworking. The same situation also happened to No. 1 Special Car. Its Apple store list had always been outside the 30th place, but after May, it suddenly ranked among the top three.
What made Uber and No. 1 Private Car abandon their established marketing strategies and instead vigorously launch download impulse ads? The X factor can only be Shenzhou Private Car. Uber and Yihao Private Car are not afraid of any entrepreneurial competitors, but they have to be wary of Shenzhou Car Rental, which is already on the market and has tens of thousands of license plates in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou. , in fact, this is also the reason why Didi Private Car suddenly emphasized "ten private cars, eight Didi" in the red envelope communication.
Operation
Internet travel is an industry that dances on a tightrope. It swims in the middle ground between law, policy and market. What it requires is balance beam skills, steely nerves and perseverance. With a fighting spirit that never gives up, even in the United States, where the entrepreneurial environment is relatively relaxed, among countless travel innovations, only Uber can truly be called a success.
Idealistic ridicule of the system is meaningless in inhibiting innovation. It is more practical to firmly adhere to the creed of Uber founder Travis Kalanick of "fighting against the sky, fighting against people, and having endless fun." From taxis to private cars, from the United States to China, from Uber to Didi, the key to success in travel innovation is to use bottom-up market changes to relieve the accumulated pain of travel, supplemented by light-capital Internet technology reconstruction. While it was well-received and well-received, it was almost a complete business model.
But there are two ambiguous elements in this business model:
The first is cost control. Many people think that Uber or Didi, which enjoy car sources, are better than self-purchasing. The Shenzhou private car fleet is more in line with the capital-light spirit of the Internet.
In fact, listed companies like China have always had a strong say in centralized vehicle procurement, which is enough to smooth depreciation within a two-year operating cycle, and liquidating used cars will not cause asset writedowns. The just-released first-quarter financial report shows that China Rental car sales have achieved a gross profit margin of 4.3, while Uber or Didi acquire vehicles from small car rental companies or individuals that do not have this cost advantage. Of course, they have to pay high subsidies (the latter are neither fools nor charity), how much advantage would this cost structure have on a single order basis?
The second is the ability to attract money. Uber’s daily global orders are about 1.2 million (excluding data from China), and Uber takes a commission of 20%. This alone is enough to enjoy the myth of valuation, but The situation in the Chinese market is very different. As the competition between Didi Express and People's Uber becomes more and more fierce, the average order amount of Uber and Didi has dropped to the 40-50 yuan range. The subsidy per order remains high, making it difficult to make profits in the short term. , not to mention the Sword of Damocles hanging over its head, so Didi can only focus on the corporate market and desperately expand horizontally product lines such as ride-sharing to maintain its capital myth. Shenzhou Private Car is also giving out coupons, but its 100-recharge-100-free activity targets stable and long-term demand, rather than occasional early adopters.
Business-wise, private car service is an industry with a clear model but difficult management. Online experience places high demands on UED and technical teams, and the operation part involves operations research and revenue management. The huge The driver team requires the human resources system to master the management skills of a labor-intensive organization. China Private Car has at least an advantage in the latter two, while Didi switches back and forth between different roles, because most Chinese Internet companies use the Thirty-Six Strategy A master who is best at making things out of nothing and going up to the house to take out the ladder.
Back then, Didi and Kuaidi taught their buddies how to play with smartphones almost step by step. When the latter was thankful that he could make money easily and was in awe of the Internet, the Didi friends who had completed their primitive accumulation suddenly went to the house. The emergence of private cars quickly pushed my friends to the opposite side of innovation. Almost at the same time, another group of takers who "earned 30,000 a month and slept until they woke up naturally" appeared. This was a group of private cars, carpooling and P2P car rentals. The groups competing for the same, driven by various marketing methods, flooded with subsidies and fake orders. They created a supply chain that appeared out of thin air, and all kinds of incredible ways to use private cars were developed: there are rich and handsome people going on blind dates, There are rich and beautiful women fishing for rich husbands, one-night stand-style hookups, boss recruitment, and white-collar job hunting. In the history of business, there has never been a group of people with such complex composition, such impure motives, and such loose management who have successfully built a successful business. Have a service!
If Uber and Didi indulge in the false prosperity created by excessive marketing and parasitic demand, Shenzhou Private Car may launch a counterattack by relying on the stable services of its own vehicles and drivers.
Technology
For Internet travel, the pioneer of technology-driven products is undoubtedly Uber, and it also started by imitating traditional companies. For example, UPS has equipped its operating vehicles with sensors for a long time. Through data analysis, it has required all vehicles to implement a right-turn strategy at intersections and try to avoid left-turn routes since 2011. By 2012, this improvement had reduced UPS's mileage by 48.28 million kilometers. Save 10 million gallons of fuel. This is the power of technology. If you have used Uber in the United States, you will find that it is pursuing the same strategy. Of course, this is not very effective in China due to the dual constraints of irritable passengers and road conditions.
This optimization idea metaphors the core purpose of travel services: problems that can be solved with technical systems and big data must avoid decisions made by individual terminals. For example, the Uber dispatch process does not inform the driver of the purpose The system automatically sets prices by analyzing the order value to ensure a balance between the interests of drivers and passengers.
The technical optimization of Shenzhou Private Car has another perspective. First, it continues the dynamic pricing that started with car rental. Under the mechanism of Shenzhou Private Car that prohibits rejection of orders, how to accurately dispatch orders will have a significant impact on revenue. Especially important, its operations team has long used Monte Carlo simulation methods to study how to accurately grasp the uncertainty and randomness of demand in order to establish corresponding relationships in a real operating environment. Based on many years of experience in operating car rental businesses, China Private Car There is also research on demand response and service capacity configuration, such as using Poisson distribution to calculate the probability of random events per unit time in order to allocate transportation capacity in the most scientific way. China's car rental and private car businesses are currently promoting the popularization of OBD, and conduct forward-looking analysis by acquiring and integrating important data such as driving trajectories and driving behaviors.
The O2O trend has given many startups the opportunity to parasitize and plunder physical enterprises. However, this is not the era of e-commerce startups. A large number of physical enterprises have successfully transformed, and the best among them are Shenzhou Private Car and e-bag washing. , the financial backers behind them, China Car Rental and Rongchang Laundry, are two giants in the industry. It is smarter to realize that "it is better to do things sooner or later." Instead of waiting to be subverted, how can we subvert ourselves? With this kind of openness mentality, will naturally be a strong opponent of Internet companies.
Didi has also been trying its best to package its technical team recently, and there are a lot of articles on the official account. However, the examples listed are far-fetched and lack logic. For example, when Didi’s big data is mentioned, users will be labeled separately. The label of diaosi or local tycoon means that the focus of coupon distribution is tilted towards diaosi. This is a highly questionable business decision. The characteristics of Diaosi users are that they come from coupons, are born from coupons, live by coupons, and leave without coupons. This is not a solid foundation for establishing a business model. Subsidy to these users actually devalues ??the service and dilutes it. Brand connotation cultivates a low-value-added consumer group that has no loyalty at all and migrates at will like quicksand.
Internet companies, including Uber and Didi, tend to focus only on online experience and ignore offline services. The large number of new customers won through fanatical marketing and coupon distribution are left to loose The driver management system will erode and collapse. This is not a benign and renewable business model. They have forgotten the famous saying of management guru Frederick Reichheld: "As long as there are 5 repeat customers in the service industry, profits can be doubled." They have also forgotten the teachings of another management guru Philip Crosby. : "Quality management must be done right the first time, there is no chance for correction!" If things go on like this, the short-term advantages that Uber and Didi have established through technology and marketing are likely to sink in the negative experience that continues to explode in offline services.
The future battle for the private car landscape will not be the marketing battle Didi hopes for - customers won with subsidies will eventually be lost due to poor service; nor will it be what Uber hopes for Technology battle - services that rely on people ultimately rely on high-level offline management, unless driverless driving becomes popular overnight; the winner in the end must return to the origin of travel services and be able to satisfy people's travel needs in safety, comfort, economy and convenience products and services needed.