Text |Finance and economics Xiao Tian.At the beginning of 2024, Chen Zebin, the eldest son of Chen Kaixuan, the founder of Liby Group, was appointed as the new chairman of Liby Group. The second-generation head of Liby, who entered Liby 14 years ago, finally passed his father's assessment for many years. At the age of 37, he took over Liby in an all-round way.
Chen Zebin also has a label of "good person in Guangdong", * it is reported that he is "also an enthusiastic public welfare person, helping the poor, supporting education, caring for children, and leading enterprises to donate more than 500 million yuan".
According to the official introduction of Liby, in 2010, Chen Zebin "gave up the art road he wanted to take and began to join the brand department of Liby", that is to say, from the first day of work, Chen Gongzi donated at least 9 percent per day on average for 14 years780,000 yuan - this is estimated to be the annual income of many migrant workers.
This is obviously a "good person in Guangdong" that ordinary people "look up to".
In the past 30 years, from a small brand that struggled to survive in the cracks, to a leading brand of local daily chemicals, from a single category to multiple categories, from small washing to large washing to large daily chemicals, and then to today's large platform ......Liby Group has indeed achieved a series of enviable achievements.
According to the data, Liby has 8 major production bases and more than 30 subsidiaries in China, and the sales volume of detergent ranks first in the country.
1. It is the fourth in the world, with well-known brands such as "Liby", "Good Dad" and "Blue Sky Liubizhi", as well as cutting-edge domestic brands such as Xiaobaibai, Qingyi and Miss Miss, as well as ...... cutting-edge domestic brands
However, as the saying goes, "It's hard to start a business, but it's also hard to keep a business."
In the field of daily chemical products in China, the market competition in the current track is far more fierce than that at the beginning of Liby.
Taking the laundry market as an example, from laundry detergent to laundry detergent to laundry pods, generations of new kings have replaced old kings, international giants such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever, and domestic brands such as Blue Moon and Aomiao are trying to compete for more market share.
China's daily chemical market is ushering in a fierce new change, how to actively solve the difficult problems and hand over the high-score answer sheet, which not only brings more tests to Liby, but also to the new head Chen Zebin.
1. Follow all the way instead of leading all the way"In the past 30 years, how can Liby stand out in the fierce market competition? Not long ago, Chen Zebin gave a standard answer in an exclusive interview with Xinhuanet - "The core is innovation." ”
In his opinion, "my fathers have many innovative breakthroughs in business models, for example, we are the first daily chemical company in the industry to carry out OEM production;In terms of operation, we are the first to 'break the game' and break the industry's triangular debt;In terms of sales, we are the first to create 'rural areas surrounding cities', 'franchise sales', 'chamber of commerce system' and so on. ”
Objectively speaking, Liby has been able to achieve today's achievements because of these actions.
For example, when Liby was first founded, Chen Kaixuan, who was poor and white, found that consumers in the market snapped up laundry detergent that was cheaper and better than soap, so he earned the first pot of gold through "OEM production" and almost "white wolf with empty gloves".For another example, in order to avoid the direct competition of foreign brands, they chose decisions such as Wahaha and Dali, adopted the strategy of surrounding the city from the countryside, and laid out their own marketing network in a corner.
However, combing the history of Liby, it is found that the most important link is missing from these so-called innovations of Liby: product innovation and category leadership.
Looking at the laundry and daily chemical market, the industry has gone through four stages from laundry soap, laundry detergent to laundry detergent and then to laundry pods.
At the stage when laundry detergent was dominated by the market, Liby was most well-known to the outside world when he invited Chen Peisi, an actor in the Spring Festival Gala sketch, to shoot an advertisement for "smuggling" laundry detergent. The reason why the advertising slogan "washing clothes clean, does not hurt hands" can directly bring fire to Liby comes from Chen Kaixuan's adjustment of the composition of laundry stain removal.
For another example, after more than 10 years of icebreaking, the high concentration of detergent products represented by laundry pods has become the general trend, and laundry pods introduced into China as a foreign product are expected to become mainstream products.
In recent years, while researching how the "membrane" of laundry pods can better melt when exposed to water, Liby has launched the Liby brand for young users, which has won certain market recognition.
On the surface, laundry detergent, laundry detergent, laundry pods, and Liby have achieved good sales, which is a success. However, from a deep point of view, Liby is not good at 'from 0 to 1' original technological innovation breakthroughs, so it is difficult to build its own unique advantages, which lays a time bomb for future development.
In the book "The Innovator's Dilemma", which is regarded as the "bible" by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the author Clayton once divided innovation into continuous innovation and disruptive innovation, in his view, continuous innovation cannot solve the fundamental problem of long-term development of enterprises, and they have no power to fight back in the face of disruptive innovation.
Taking laundry detergent as an example, Blue Moon first launched laundry detergent in 2003, although it had a limited impact on consumers who were still accustomed to using laundry detergent, laundry soap and other products in the early stage, but with a keen insight into consumer demand and the market, it insisted on creating this category, and finally launched the flagship laundry detergent in 2008, and ranked first in market share for 11 consecutive years since then.
According to the prospectus, at the end of 2019, laundry cleaning products represented by laundry detergent contributed to Blue Moon 876% of the operating income, reaching 61HK$7.8 billion. Blue Moon has also become synonymous with "laundry detergent".
In the competition with Blue Moon on laundry detergent, Liby has always been in a weak position despite launching a variety of products, including Liby Master Fragrance, a high-end cleaning brand focusing on fragrance, Liby Weishi, healthy and clean natural sterilizing laundry detergent, and Liby Royal Marine Essence Laundry De, which focuses on marine PDE bioactive enzymes.
In other words, if Liby's follow-up strategy is not inappropriate in the period of high market growth, and even because the business risk of product testing and market education is reduced, Liby can quickly rush to the same height as the imitated brand through continuous innovation. After all, this method path has already been verified by a number of snack food giants such as Wahaha, Dali Food, and Master Kong.
However, the problem is that with the changes in the external environment and consumption trends, the domestic daily chemical market has basically entered the saturation period, and there are more and more products and brands for consumers to choose from, and Liby's playing style is easy to fail.
2004 was an important turning point for Liby to become a large daily chemical brand.
In this year, Liby began to expand its M&A nationwide. At present, Liby has six well-known brands: Liby, Blue Sky Liubizhi, Hehe Baby, Good Daddy, Yileyuan and Qingyi. However, because Liby has never been a leader of innovation, but a follower, this directly leads to the fact that some of Liby's products have always been unpopular.
2. Chen Zebin, who took office behind the "virtual and real" behind digital re-entrepreneurship, should solve the problem of how to change Liby from a follower to a leader, but his focus is on the digital transformation of the enterprise.
This is related to Chen Zebin's experience.
In 2010, Chen Zebin joined Liby and started his grassroots training as an intern in the brand management center. Since then, he has successively served as Brand Manager, Deputy General Manager and General Manager of Brand Center, and became CMO of the Group in 2017 and President of the Group in 2019.
It has been mentioned in many reports that Chen Zebin was aware of the importance of the digital wave to the transformation and upgrading of traditional enterprises for the future because he led the group's e-commerce sector in the early days.
He himself has mentioned more than once that externally, digitalization is profoundly changing consumer behavior, reshaping business forms, and driving enterprises to adapt to change. Internally, digitalization is profoundly changing the way enterprises operate, from process efficiency to R&D decision-making, from cost reduction to efficiency improvement.
Therefore, since 2017, Liby has carried out digital transformation and upgrading, and entered a new stage of strategic development. A year later, in 2018, Chen Zebin began to lead the company's digital transformation and proposed the "1+2" strategy.
What is the "1+2" strategy? In short, it is to use a brand-led brand cluster to empower the development of a data middle platform and a business middle platform, and link brand owners, manufacturers and service consumers by the two major platforms of 2B and 2C.
Of course, in the era of mobile Internet, the path of information dissemination has increased greatly, and consumption has also entered the digital age, which forces enterprises to shift from "product-centric" to "consumer-centric" era, otherwise they will be ruthlessly eliminated by the market.
In response to that, for enterprises, if they do not do digitalization, they may capsize, and if they do digitalization, they may have the opportunity to turn over in the future.
But "digital transformation" means a change in the management of an organization, and in this process, the strategic issue is at the forefront, because strategy determines the process of the enterprise, and the business decisions in the process require the use of digital data. Therefore, without a clear strategy, there can be neither successful "digitalization" nor successful "transformation".
According to public information, Liby's digital transformation is to change from making products and brands in the past to developing industries and platforms now, which is regarded by Chen Zebin as a re-entrepreneurship of Liby.
Perhaps it was also an attempt by Liby to get rid of the role of follower.
But obviously the difficulty is not small.
Because in this strategy of Liby, we did not see how Liby changed its thinking from "product-centric" to "consumer-centric" in the past. In fact, Liby's digital transformation is even strengthening the "product-centric" approach.
Take the channel changes of Liby in recent years as an example-starting from 2019. In 2021, Liby took the lead in the industry to do Douyin Super Product Day, and in the past two years, Liby and Douyin have become more and more popular.
Up to now, Liby's channels are mainly divided into three major sections, in addition to focusing on the construction of traditional e-commerce channels, such as Tmall, JD.com, Vipshop, Suning and Pinduoduo. Xiaohongshu and Station B are laid as content sections, while Douyin Kuaishou is singled out as the focus of the Doukuai section. Even Chen Zebin will appear in the live broadcast room from time to time to bring goods and post jokes on the short ** platform.
In this process, it is rare to see Liby's insight and thinking on the current cutting-edge consumer needs, and some of them only use the linkage of head anchors and traffic artists to harvest sales.
Becoming an international enterprise is Chen Zebin's goal in the future. As the new head of Liby, the burden on his shoulders is not light.
3. The prisoner's dilemma of the second generation "You can't stop doing business, you must be an entrepreneur who will always maintain vitality, constantly absorb new knowledge, and keep up with the development and changes of the times; We must dare to try new things, have the courage to try and make mistakes, and embrace new changes with an open mind. Chen Kaixuan said.
In 1994, Chen Kaixuan and his brother Chen Kaichen started their entrepreneurial journey in three rented offices. Through a series of innovative measures such as borrowing chickens to lay eggs, breaking the triangular debt of the industry, and surrounding the city from the countryside, it has gradually won a place in the competition.
But now Chen Zebin's Liby is very different from the Liby held by his fathers.
On the one hand, affected by the impact of energy and raw material supply shocks in recent years, and the increasing labor costs, the cost of daily chemical enterprises is increasing, and profit margins are constantly being squeezed.
On the other hand, in this fully competitive daily chemical market, whether it is a local company or a foreign-funded enterprise, there are many brands for consumers to choose from. Consumers' demands are because of the initial pursuit of product efficacy, to the diversity of product segmentation, and then to the segmentation and personalization of different groups of people in different scenarios.
All this also means that it is difficult to succeed in the market by relying on the hard work and hard work of the original father's "being the boss during the day and sleeping on the floor at night", and ultimately relies on forward-looking high light and strategic choices.
The future market will not be able to succeed continuously because you are the first generation, nor will you be merciful because you are the second generation.
As a "second generation", Chen Zebin also realized that he once said that the environment and challenges encountered by each generation are completely different, "one generation of entrepreneurship has the difficulty of one generation of entrepreneurship, and the second generation of entrepreneurship has the difficulty of the second generation of entrepreneurship." ”
The second generation starts a business on the basis of the first generation, and what needs to be solved is to innovate on the basis of the original. The challenges are both those brought about by the status quo and the uncertainties of the future. For this reason, he prides himself as "the number one reformer in the enterprise" and hopes to make Liby become a "world famous brand and a century-old Liby" through "change".
In the face of the fierce involution, it is a long road and a road full of challenges for both Liby and Chen Zebin.