In 2021, the last Goubuli Baozi in Beijing officially closed its doors, and Quanjude's last store in Tianjin was also closed, sparking discussions about whether the time-honored company was unsustainable.
In the first half of this year, Quanjude released a financial report showing that it has suffered losses for the third consecutive year. This can't help but make people sigh: whether another 100-year-old brand will be lonely.
In recent years, many time-honored catering brands have become more and more dependent on tour group tourists, because the brands are aging, the dishes are aging, and the services are not in place, which is difficult to meet the demands of the new generation of consumers. Many time-honored brands Xi are accustomed to living under the "golden signboard", and in the face of emerging brands catching up, there are deficiencies in innovation in products, services and marketing.
According to the survey data of the China Brand Research Institute, there are more than 16,000 time-honored enterprises in China from the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China to more than 1,600 now, and the survival rate is only 10%.
Because of the lack of competitiveness caused by aging brands and weak innovation, the market share that these time-honored brands can occupy in the face of today's fierce market competition is gradually shrinking, which is also a common problem of these time-honored brands.
According to the data, the average duration of time-honored brands is more than 140 years, and only 10% of time-honored brands are operating smoothly, 40% can only maintain breakeven, and 50% of them are struggling to maintain operations or continue to lose money.
According to the "Report on Digital Transformation and Innovation Development of Time-honored Brands" released by the Ministry of Commerce in 2021, the "old", "old" and "weak" problems of time-honored enterprises have hindered their digital transformation and development to a certain extent, and there are four problems: lack of brand awareness, risk of infringement, lack of innovation, restricting the long-term development of enterprises, difficulties in inheriting skills due to talent disconnection, insufficient protection, and poor business environment. Among them, the brand is the "soft power" of time-honored enterprises, but infringement incidents such as misappropriation and fraudulent use of time-honored trademarks and trade names are not uncommon.
How the century-old "time-honored brand" glows with "new" vitalityIt is a question that needs to be considered in the present.
Zhang Lihua, the author of the Huawei R&D series and an industrial innovation consultant at Tsinghua University, wrote in an article "Enlightenment for Chinese Enterprises from the Ups and Downs of Century-old Stores" that in today's American business circles, the American business community is reflecting on Jack Welch, who was once regarded as the world's No. 1 CEO, and his strategy is the reason for today's gloomy outcome for General Electric: if the business unit cannot achieve the top two in the market, it will be cut. This principle may be suitable for the pursuit of short-term performance in an industry that determines the development path and does not change, but in an unstable market environment that needs to be driven by leading innovative technologies and business models, and is full of difficulties everywhere, it will make enterprises lose the medium and long-term development opportunities led by R&D and innovation, and be helpless when the industry changes.
When GE replaces the growth driven by the company's own invention a hundred years ago with continuous purchases, especially the windfall profits obsessed with financial real estate (in some periods due to the lack of supervision is easy to obtain so-called speculative profits), GE is reluctant to invest in R&D and innovation as a hundred years ago, the latter is difficult to achieve results in the short term, and thus makes GE a large but not strong enterprise that has lost its endogenous growth and long-term profitability, and has also become an enterprise that is vulnerable to financial crises and has not strong anti-risk ability.
Looking back at the 100 years since GE was founded, the financial crisis and the impact of new technologies are the situations that enterprises must face from time to time. It is necessary to maintain the enterprise management system of R&D and innovation from time to time, so that the development of the enterprise is based on an inevitable success, rather than full of chance and trial and error, and continue to lead the technology and innovation through the growth of endogenous core competitiveness, so as to achieve the continuous growth of endogenous performance, which is the undefeated law of the past 100 years.
* It is believed that as a time-honored brand with the blessing of consumers' "feelings", it should recognize its own positioning, aim at market demand, and convey respect for consumer Xi while evolving its brand and products. In the fierce market competition, it is understandable for time-honored brands to improve their technological processes and promote new ideas to create differentiated products to broaden sales channels and increase profits, but they cannot ignore consumers' right to know and choose, and they cannot use so-called "consumer education" and other marketing means to change the original intention of product innovation to better serve consumers.
In "Ning Gaoning Management Notes: Five-step Combination Theory", it is mentioned that "people often envy century-old stores, but the core of century-old stores is not old, but continuous progress." The reason why a century-old store exists is that it can continue to evolve and metamorphose with the changes in the environment, so a good century-old store still makes people feel that it is a vibrant, young and energetic company. ”