Text |Han Han (the author is the founder of Blue Media Exchange).
Ideal, it's really a bad start to the year.
Just after a bumper harvest in 2023 and just about to make a big splash in 2024, its newly released MEGA pure electric MPV was poured cold water on the head.
According to market news, the car has been listed for 72 hours with a large order of about 3,218 units, while the number of unsubscriptions is 10,297 units, which largely reflects that the response to this car may not be as expected.
At the same time, the company has always been keen to announce its sales results, but it has not released sales figures so far.
Compared with when MEGA was listed, Li Xiang was full of confidence, and this time it may really be Waterloo.
What's especially unlucky is that based on the design of the rear of the car, Mega has also been ridiculed as a "coffin car" by many good deeds, and then one passes ten, ten passes hundred, regardless of whether it is intentional or not, judging from the results, it seems to have become a stalk on Mega.
It's really bad luck, and it's not easy to wash.
After all, this directly affects the user's mind, and is still in the domestic customs, once this generation of MEGA is labeled as a "coffin car", this basically announces the end of this car in the market.
No matter how sorry it is, no matter how unhappy it is, for the ideal, we can only face reality. Perhaps, it's time to stop the loss in time and give up this generation of MEGA.
Judging from the current situation, it is difficult for Ideal to reverse the label of MEGA "coffin car", which is ridiculed by users.
Obviously, public relations, marketing, legal affairs, etc. are all trying to figure out how to do it, but there may really be no place to reason about it.
Aesthetics vary from person to person, it is very subjective, some people think it looks good, some people think it is not good-looking, it is normal. Some people think the shape is cool when they see the mega, and some people think the overall silhouette of the rear is like a "coffin" shape when they see the mega.
Of course, there are indeed people with a rhythm who are interested in p-plotting, so that the incident will deteriorate and escalate.
Ideal also issued an infringement notice letter, requiring the responsible party to delete, block, and disconnect the relevant content, in an attempt to get the MEGA image back on track.
However, the spread of Internet viruses and the popularity of meme culture still involve more taboo points, so as long as there is this statement in the market, it will be difficult to recover.
For example, many friends in the WeChat group around me are discussing this matter, and basically all of them have affected the user's mind, even if they don't feel much like it, as long as someone says it is like, it will inevitably be associated with this aspect.
And as long as you think about it, it is placed in the domestic customs, and it basically announces the end of this car.
Just imagine, MEGA itself is facing a large family of wealthy consumers, and who in this group would be willing to accept spending more than 500,000 yuan to buy a car to serve the whole family with such a label?
No one can turn a blind eye to this outside eye. Even if he is rational on the lips, he must be muttering in his heart, so he simply doesn't buy it.
For the ideal moment, it is better to stop the loss in time.
On the one hand, the current MEGA sales are not as good as expected, and it has encountered this major image crisis, and then invested a lot of manpower and financial resources to try to reverse the situation, which may not be effective.
It is better to choose to give up, deal with the slots and controversies encountered in the launch of this generation of MEGA, quickly realize the iterative upgrade of the product, and then launch the new generation of MEGA into the market.
On the other hand, the current image crisis of MEGA will gradually affect the ideal main brand itself.
It can even be said that if the MEGA car sells more and more, running on the road, it will be witnessed and ridiculed more and more times.
"Coffin car" may also evolve from ridicule on the Internet to ridicule in reality, or even expand. For the interests of car owners, for the ideal brand itself, the impact is huge.
At the same time, the market does not allow ideal sunk costs.
Every product of no company can guarantee success. At the critical moment, the test is the courage of the enterprise to dare to make trade-offs.
Besides, MEGA is the first product to shift from range extension to pure electric track, and the reason why MPV is chosen to enter the niche market may be the strategic weight of the internal product, and it also tends to be a transitional product.
In other words, the price of giving up this generation of mega will not impact the ideal basic disk, not to mention the loss, the ideal can also afford to lose.
However, in the final analysis, the ideal has been eaten up by traffic.
In fact, MGEA is not the only one that has been given a similar title in automotive products.
For example, when ZEEKR 009 was launched in 2022, it was also "gifted" with the same title as mega......However, this information has not been fermented in a big way. But the ideal mega is different, and it has been sent to the forefront.
It can only be said that traffic is a double-edged sword.
In the past, the ideal and Li Xiang called for wind and rain in traffic, and also achieved the explosive myth of the L series, Li Xiang himself even had the title of the king of Weibo, like the car product manager who understands the value of users best in the market, and also mouthed up, commenting on friends from time to time.
The backlash is also ferocious, and this mega image crisis is thought to be a boomerang if there is a voice.
There have been so many rumors in the market of Xiaomi cars recently, isn't it also a typical example.
Of course, for Li Xiang himself, there is another layer of meaning.
Li Xiang is not a god.
From a personal point of view, from the perspective of a product manager, his vision and insight have been proven in the L series. But this does not mean that if you follow this inertial logic, you can continue to repeat success on MEGA.
You must know that the controversial shape of mega, according to market reports, the decision-making is exactly what Li Xiang needs to pro-board.