On November 29, at the 2023 Ebang Future Retail Annual Conference, Deng Delong, Global President of Trout Partners and Chairman of Trout (China) Co., Ltd., delivered a speech entitled "The Era of Great Changes, Welcoming New Positioning". He shared his understanding of the competitive stage of the company and the experience of Trout in China and the United States, pointing out that companies need to understand their own positioning and business results in order to achieve sustainable long-term growth.
Deng Delong took flash delivery and other enterprises as an example, emphasizing that enterprises should clarify their positioning in the minds of customers, and define enterprises in a sentence or a word, which will affect the direction of product innovation and channel selection of enterprises.
In addition, he also specifically mentioned that in the era of traffic, it is easy for enterprises to fall into the fat and tumor growth brought by traffic without knowing it, resulting in scattered positioning. Enterprises should be vigilant against the growth of fat and tumor, judge the nature of the business according to the positioning, and realize the flow and growth of the muscle type.
The right way for enterprises to grow is to make their positioning stronger, he said, in the era of mind, it is not that products and channels are not important, but that positioning is more important. Taking JDB as an example, the company has achieved a growth from 100 million to 20 billion by constantly emphasizing the positioning of "fear of fire" and combining life scenarios with positioning.
Finally, Deng Delong also emphasized that enterprises should take a correct view of the tuyere and trend, pointing out that Nvidia also made mistakes, because of chasing the tuyere, deviating from its own positioning and entering the mobile phone chip market, encountering failure, and finally relying on sticking to its positioning, it finally ushered in the explosion of the artificial intelligence market. "The ultimate goal of an enterprise is to create the future, define the existence of the enterprise through positioning, and create a market of its own."
Tips: This article is a preliminary review draft of shorthand, and it is edited and organized by Ebang Power on the basis of not affecting the original meaning.
The following is a transcript of the speech:
Thank you Mr. Jia and Mr. Liu for giving me the opportunity to learn Xi. Seeing my old friend, Mr. Ren of Miaokelando, is very powerful, and it will take him a few years to create a new category under his leadershipAnd my old friend You Lin, your appearance has not changed from a few years ago, I heard a lot of good news about you, congratulations, and find an opportunity to learn Xi from you.
01 Competition enters the "mind" stage, and it is necessary to correctly understand the success of the enterprise
I would like to share a few points of view with you, hoping to give you some inspiration.
First of all, at what stage is China's economy and the global economy running?I would like to share with you my views from the perspective of strategic positioning. The development of enterprise competition, from "product" to "channel", is currently in the third stage: the "mind" stage. There are some special laws of the mind, and there are many unknown areas in them. Human beings have made great achievements in the study of the universe, but the study of the mind, the "inner universe", and the mind is still very limited. Trout has some experience through more than 20 years of exploration in China and more than 40 years in the United States.
Because of the time relationship, I would like to share five key points that deserve everyone's attention in practice:
The first is to correctly understand their own enterprises;The second is to correctly define the results of the enterprise;The third is to correctly pursue traffic and growth;Fourth, we should correctly tap the potential of positioningFifth, take a correct view of the tuyere and trend.
First, it is precisely because of the competition of business in the mindThe mind is the ultimate battleground. The first question is to clarify what is the position of each company in the minds of customers. This question is very important, as mentioned earlier, the first thing to do is to have a product, and then enter the channel, competition in the mind is relatively unfamiliar to everyone, and it is a little difficult to grasp. The product can be seen and the channel can be touched, but how to define the mind?Won't it be empty?
However, you can take a look at many phenomena that occur around you, and you will feel that this point is becoming more and more real, and the mind is more real than the product and the channel, and it is the commanding heights of the current enterprise competition. Any company needs to score very high in this position, even if a company has good products, channels, teams, and technology, but if you lose points in the mental area, it is easy to lose the leadership position.
We need to understand our company correctly and define ourselves in the minds of our customers. Here is a tool for entrepreneurs, with their own executive team, to see if they can describe our business or business in one sentence, or even one word. This word can lead the direction of innovation of our products, and the direction of innovation and product improvement of the whole company are based on this wordIt's more important than the product and goes beyond the channel. This word determines which channels we should enter and which channels we can't. Next, I will expand on the actual case. This is the first question, to understand your own business correctly.
This is especially important for many companies when they are very successful. We need to understand why we are growing so fast. Many companies fail quickly after their success, and a big reason is that they don't have a proper understanding of how they succeed.
A great philosopher I like, Mr. Li Zehou, once said, "Only by understanding and explaining one's own existence can one truly exist." "Entrepreneurs must correctly understand and explain their success in order to continue to be successful, and if you do not properly understand and explain your success, it is impossible to continue to be successful.
All of you here have successful companies, and this brings us to the first question, what is the reason for your success so far? It's about how to understand and interpret one's own existence. Defined in one sentence and one word, this word leads the direction of our future innovation and the direction of progress, and also answers the reason for our existence, the value and meaning of our existence in this society.
Second, because once you have a clear positioning, you need to define your own results. Including what key knowledge, key worthiness, key organization, and special value we need to design in order to establish such a positioning.
02 Three types of business growth: muscular, fat, and tumor, which one are you?
Third, we would like to remind you that while you make good use of traffic, you should also pay attention to the big problems caused by traffic.
Many companies have entered the growth of "fat and tumor". Here I want to tell you that it is the same money earned, but the nature is different. Growth can be divided into three types: one is to strengthen our positioning, which is called a muscular business. The second is the fat business, which no longer strengthens our positioning, and may weaken our positioning. Enterprises are allowed to have a certain amount of fat, but if there is too much fat, the company will lose the flexibility to act. The most dangerous thing is that after the fat reaches a certain level, it will develop into a tumor. The tumor-type business not only does not establish positioning, but also destroys positioning. In the era when traffic is paramount and algorithms are king, many companies are ruined here.
Not long ago, a president class walked into Trout to communicate with us, and a student asked a very interesting question, saying why it is difficult to build a truly sustainable brand, whether it is Tao brand or Dou brand. This is a good question, of course the reasons are complex and numerous. We're here to provide a perspective: companies don't make a reasonable distinction between these three types of growth.
From a positioning perspective, I would like to remind entrepreneurs to see clearly what kind of growth they belong to. Some companies that rely on traffic growth are all mud and sand, muscles, fat, and tumors are grasped, and they all grow, but there are too many fats and tumors, and bad reviews in the mobile Internet era are easy to spread, so after inappropriate business and toxic money come, it will cause bad money to drive out good money, which is very common.
Therefore, entrepreneurs should be vigilant enough about the growth of their business. Of course, there are also tests for entrepreneurs. It is not easy for you to resist short-term fat and even tumor growth. But we must know that there are these three types.
Give you an assignment: go back and take stock of our business, properly understand and explain our existence, and examine our growth according to our positioning. The CEO's job is to decisively cut off the tumor, shrink the fat with a tenacious will, release limited resources to strengthen positioning, and develop muscles.
Every targeting has great potential. Many enterprises have a good momentum of entrepreneurship at the beginning and have a good positioning concept, but after achieving a certain scale and encountering a certain bottleneck, it is easy to fall into a trap, abandon their martial arts, and destroy the potential of positioning. When the business hits a bottleneck, our advice to everyone is to properly explore the potential of positioning.
I'm going to use a case study for each of the following.
03 Define the enterprise in one sentence and one word, and make the positioning bigger
Point 1: Understand your business correctly.
The company is doing very well now, so we can easily talk about the mistakes it made in the past, which is inspiring to everyone. The real muscular growth of flash delivery comes from "one-to-one urgent delivery", which means that one order is sent each time. "One-to-one urgent delivery" correctly understands and explains the existence of flash delivery, which is the social task undertaken by flash delivery and the mission of the enterprise. This is the great thing about Mr. Xue, he led the team to clearly strengthen himself, understand his existence, and write it down in one sentence and one word. This is where he has done a lot of success, and it is worth learning from Xi.
However, he also made a mistake and paid a relatively large price. Flash delivery once entered the market of Meituan and SF Express, and got rid of one-to-one urgent delivery, and began to do one-to-many, rather than only sending this order. Because this market is too big, after the flash is sent in, the business will grow, investors will be happy, employees will have a shareholding system, there will be equity incentives, and they will be happy, and everyone is very high. But here's the problem: as soon as there is more fat and tumors, the enterprise is in danger.
Deviating from the positioning, leaving the one-to-one express delivery business, and entering the business field of Meituan SF Express, the competitiveness of flash delivery enterprises has been greatly weakened, the operational ability of enterprises has been greatly reduced, and the resistance and immune system have been destroyed. Because it is to grab the market of Meituan and SF Express, it is impossible to grab it without a large enough force.
There is a common thinking trap: for example, in the beverage industry, people often ask, how big is the market for Coke?The concept of "market" is relatively easy for entrepreneurs to grasp. How big is the market for Coke, that's the market for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, not ours. When entrepreneurs analyze the market, they often use a macro overall figure, which is actually easy to calculate.
"One-to-many" does not belong to the flash delivery market, and there is a price to pay for flash delivery, and this price is to have subsidies. At the beginning, the subsidy was small, but later the business got bigger and bigger, and the subsidy became more and more, like a black hole attracting enterprises. The entrepreneur doesn't feel right. At this time, the entrepreneur should have a kind of judgment, and feel that it is not beautiful and cool to continue doing this, so he immediately stopped entering the market of Meituan SF Express, removed the tumor growth, and did not want this business. Rethink your raison d'être and re-understand and explain why flash is there. Defined in one sentence and one word, that is, "one-to-one urgent delivery, specifically only to send you this order", so flash delivery is faster and safer, and now flash delivery is developing very well.
This story is very inspiring, and I hope that the entrepreneurs here can go back and think about our business without paying so much cost of trial and error, especially after achieving a certain success, to understand and study itWhy are we so successful, why are we alive today, can we define it in one sentence, one word, and then form a value commitment to the internal mission of the enterprise and external customers.
Point 2: Correctly define the results of the enterprise.
With so many giants in the e-commerce industry, such as Pinduoduo, Alibaba, JD.com, and so on, there is one company that dances with wolves and is very successful. It is "a ** company specializing in special sales" Vipshop, which occupies the word "special sale" and successfully reveals its existence, and in the competition between the heroes, they have a base: "special sale".
Vipshop has poached a lot of senior talents from Ali and JD.com, and when these talents came in and saw Vipshop, they felt that it was too old-fashioned, is this kind of play still useful?Therefore, it is necessary to learn from the model of Xi Ali and Jingdong and recreate a Vipshop, and this reinvention will slowly destroy the reason for the existence of Vipshop - "specializing in special sales".
Many companies will set a high goal for themselves, and in order to achieve this growth, they will easily blindly learn from the leading brands, especially the more successful big brands, and Xi this learning is easy to learn to become a "second-rate **" "third-rate Tmall", which is something that everyone should be wary of. The right thing to do is for Vipshop to return to the "sale" and develop a series of unique strategic titles around the "sale", so that it survived the competition and is still alive and well.
Point 3: Correctly pursue traffic and growth.
As I told you just now, in the current era of traffic, it is very easy to fall into the trap that the growth brought by traffic often forms tumor growth. Today, because Zhong Xuegao is not living well, they have dispersed their positioning and formed a tumor that engulfs muscles, which is a sad story, so we won't talk about it.
Point 4: Tap the potential of positioning correctly.
The reason why some companies can't resist the growth of fat and tumor is because they don't know how to pursue the next step of growth after encountering bottlenecks. We want to reject fat and tumors and achieve the right growth, and the approach we advocate is: make the positioning strong. This era is an era of the mind, not that the product is not important, the channel is not important, but it is not enough. From 100 million to more than 20 billion, JDB has not entered the cola market, the tea beverage market, and the pure water market, but has continuously carried out the positioning of "fear of fire" to the end.
JDB tells everyone that it is not only hot that will get hot, but also when you stay up late, and when you chase dramas, you will also get hot when you eat barbecue, hot pot, spicy food, and overtime will also be on fire. Enterprises used to think that it would be impossible to increase herbal tea from 100 million to 5 billion, and they could not see future growth. But in reality, we did more than 20 billion.
Point 5: Correctly view the tuyere and trend.
Nvidia is a very popular company now, but it has also made mistakes, chased the trend and trends, deviated from its own positioning, and went to Qualcomm's market to make mobile phone chips. Because at that time, everyone believed that the future of computing was moving, and this trend and trend could not be missed. Xiaomi's Lei Jun gave him a chance, and the Xiaomi Mi 3 used Nvidia chips, which turned out to be a disaster. At that time, Huang Jenxun said that he was a rice fan, which was not modest, and at that time Nvidia's market value was only a few billion dollars, while Xiaomi had three or four billion dollars.
Fortunately, Nvidia has such a failure in the mobile chip market, and if it succeeds this time, it will be even more dangerous. Many companies have short-lived success because they have deviated from their positioning, but this is actually the most dangerous time, because this success can actually destroy their foundations. Fortunately, Nvidia failed, so it had to return to its original positioning and continue to expand its GPU chips. At this time, Musk was still the founder of OpenAI, and Jensen Huang donated the first supercomputer to them, which promoted OpenAI to take off and promote the advent of the era of artificial intelligence.
If an enterprise wants to continue to succeed, it should not chase the outlet and chase the trend, but should create the outlet and create the trend. The best way to do the future is to create it yourself. The ultimate goal of positioning is to create the future, to create a market that does not exist in the first place.
In recent years, you can see that the liquor industry has overcapacity and is in recession, but the sauce boom has brought prosperity to the liquor industry. How did the sauce craze come about?To some extent, this prosperity comes from the continuous education of consumers by Qinghualang and Moutai, one of China's two major soy sauce liquors, which have positioned the soy sauce category and created the soy sauce wine industry, just as electric vehicles have stood out from the traditional automotive industry and brought new prosperity to the traditional automotive industry.
Looking back, you can see that in such a new era,I'm afraid we can't just focus on products, channels, algorithms, and traffic, and the first thing entrepreneurs should pay attention to is the positioning of the enterprise in the minds of customers.
Can the entrepreneurs here define ourselves in one sentence or one word, understand and explain why we exist, use such a positioning to lead the enterprise to define the results, distinguish the nature of growth, give full play to the potential of positioning, and finally create the future of each enterprise.
Thank you very much, thank you Mr. Jia for inviting me to learn Xi with you, thank you!
About this meeting::
The 2023 Ebang Future Retail Conference is one of the theme conferences of the 2023 Ebang Annual Meeting, which was held on November 29 at Pudong Shangri-La Hotel, Shanghai.
The 2023 Ebang Annual Meeting is hosted by Ebang Power, co-organized by Horseshoe Club and Ebang Think Tank, with the theme of "Perfect Strategy for the Shift Period". For the first time, the agenda of the annual meeting covers the whole cycle of enterprise digitalization: domestic e-commerce, brand globalization, and industrial digitalization. Through the traction of the theme of "Perfect Strategy", 64 heavyweight guests conducted in-depth research on 54 hot topics, actively sought responses to a series of key issues in 2023, and jointly explored the way of growth based on short-term reality and adhering to long-termism.