Written by / Wang Daye
Edited / Mao Shiyang
On April 15, Cui Jian's first online concert was broadcast on the video number. The concert, titled "Continue to Sprinkle Some Wild", lasted nearly 3 hours, and Cui Jian sang a total of 20 songs, attracting nearly 46 million viewers to watch, with more than 110 million likes and more than 2 million comments.
As the exclusive title sponsor of this online concert, the Jihu brand has been given an unprecedented brand exposure opportunity. A person familiar with the matter told the "Finance world" weekly that the reason why Beijing Blue Valley Jihu Automobile Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Jihu) encountered a hit is because Jihu has always been Tencent's advertising customer, and the video number is a key project recommended by Tencent.
In fact, the Polar Fox behind the Polar Fox brand is greatly increasing its marketing efforts. In 2021, the marketing expenses of the Jihu brand were 400 million yuan, but in the same year, the brand only sold 4993 vehicles, completing 41% of the set sales target. If roughly flattened to each car sold by Polar Fox, the cost of bicycle marketing exceeds 80,000 yuan.
To continue to support such "local tycoon"," the parent company of Jihu, Beiqi Blue Valley, is under pressure. According to the financial report, from 2019 to 2021, the company's operating income was 23.589 billion yuan, 5.272 billion yuan and 8.697 billion yuan, with obvious fluctuations; the net profit attributable to the mother in the same period was 0.92 billion yuan, -6.482 billion yuan and -5.244 billion yuan, respectively.
As for the reason for the huge loss in 2021, the official explanation given by Beiqi Blue Valley is "due to the company's sales volume not meeting expectations and continuous research and development investment and continuous marketing" caused. Among the various expenses, the sales expenses of Beiqi Blue Valley's advertising and operation were as high as 1.7 billion yuan.
No wonder some people in the industry said that Cui Jian let the polar fox fire, but it is difficult to say how long this fire can burn.
46 million people watched Cui Jian, can the Extreme Fox catch it?
"A few days ago, I saw the advertisement for Cui Jian's online concert and quickly booked an alarm clock reminder." After watching the performance, a post-70s audience member said to the "Finance and Economics World" weekly with excitement: "Listening to Lao Cui's voice, hearing the loud trumpet, hearing the urgent guitar, hearing the drum beat on the heart, hearing the cymbal cymbal that came out of nowhere, seeing the hat of the old Cui five-pointed star, it feels like time has flowed back." ”
46 million hits have increased the exposure of the exclusive title company Polar Fox. According to the Weekly Magazine of Finance and Economics, the WeChat index of Jihu on April 15 was 7.8 million, an increase of 747.45% over the previous day's attention. Gifts from the audience in the live broadcast room will be marked with the words "Extreme Fox Car". In addition, at the bottom of the concert program list and on the forwarding page of the circle of friends, there will be ads for extreme foxes.
According to the statistics of Baizhun data, the peak of the concert appeared at 9:20, and the average growth rate of the number of viewers reached 180842/minute, while the peak increment of the number of viewers reached 370,000.
A person familiar with the matter revealed that the data on the night of Cui Jian's concert has exceeded the expectations of the brand side. According to the calculations of the third-party service company, the cost of the concert is around seven million.
"More than 40 million people have seen it, and 1% of them can remember the polar fox, and the effect is very good." People familiar with the Polar Fox brand commented that this is the first successful case in the history of the Extreme Fox marketing team.
In fact, "there must be a voice in the market" is an order issued by the top management of the Jihu brand to the marketing company in 2022. But the real driving effect of a Cui Jian online concert remains to be seen.
"There are plenty of test drive spots." On April 18, the sales staff of a flagship store of the Jihu brand in Sanlitun told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that the store was not ready to cooperate with the promotional materials for Cui Jian's concert, and after a weekend, not many consumers came to consult by phone because of Cui Jian's online concert.
In the view of a person familiar with car marketing, Jihu can work harder to ensure the conversion rate, and the current sales lead conversion method is very traditional. Clicking on the advertisement will redirect the user to the registration page of the extreme fox to see the car test drive, which is no different from the traditional diversion advertisement. Although the brand side gave concert customization benefits at the bottom of the page, including 48-hour test drive, Tencent Video membership card, etc., these are basically only "standard".
"Of course, Cui Jian's concert was successful, but Cui Jian's connection with The Extreme Fox is actually not enough." An auto industry analyst told Caijing Weekly, "A lot of people don't know who Polar Fox is. If Jihu wants to rely on Cui Jian's concert sponsors to achieve a breakthrough in brand volume, it needs to have the next combination punch. ”
Image source/Visual China
Marketing speed up, extreme fox difficult to give birth
Before meeting Cui Jian, the last time the well-known Jihu encountered such an "eye-catching" opportunity was through Huawei.
In April last year, the new HI version of the Polar Fox Alpha S was officially unveiled at the Shanghai Auto Show, but in addition to the Pole Fox's own platform, the car was also placed on huawei's booth.
Before the auto show, Huawei released a road test video of the autonomous driving solution, which caused a sensation. In the video, the above model is equipped with three lidars to complete the automatic driving in various road conditions. On September 26 of the same year, BAIC BJEV announced that it has signed a comprehensive business deepening cooperation agreement with Huawei to open up online and offline sales channels. As soon as the news came out, Beiqi Blue Valley rose and stopped for several days, closing at 13.48 yuan per share, and the total market value rose by more than 6.4 billion yuan in two days, reaching 57.8 billion yuan.
Relying on the popularity of "cooperation with Huawei", Yu Liguo, then president of BEIC Jihu, said that he would complete the delivery target of 12,000 Jihu by the end of the year. However, the Polar Fox also did not catch huawei's heat.
The delivery time of this model cooperating with Huawei has been pushed back and forth, and Jihu originally planned to be officially delivered at the end of 2021, but it was postponed to March this year, but as of now, the mass production model is still "difficult to produce". In the end, the cumulative sales of the 2021 Polar Fox were only 4993 vehicles, which was far from the annual sales target of 12,000 vehicles.
"The product development process is intensive, we've done a lot of testing, and now the cars we're running on the road are doing generalization tests, inviting different groups of people to test." On April 6, Liu Yu, chairman of Beiqi Blue Valley, said in an interview that for this "intelligent enough leading" model, it is not a long time to warm up a year in advance, but when it is ready to mature, it is still unknown, "The more we feel that we have to test again to deal with more unexpected problems." ”
For the listed company Beiqi Blue Valley, the Jihu brand is a backwater battle for its C-end market and high-end strategy.
In the new energy vehicle market, Beiqi Blue Valley once had a very high starting point, before 2019, its BAIC New Energy had the highest annual sales of more than 150,000 vehicles, and it was the top seller in the electric vehicle market for 7 years. But all the halo disappeared in 2020, and BAIC BJEV plummeted, with only 26,000 vehicles left in BEIQI Blue Valley by 2021.
Behind the decline of BAIC BJEV, the brand has long relied on low-end cars with a price of 100,000 yuan to hit the market, and when the consumer group of electric vehicles changed from a travel company to an ordinary consumer, baic bJEV's reputation and brand power declined sharply.
In the few years that BAIC BJEV has also led, it is not that it has not reacted to the high-end market. In 2016, BAIC BJEV officially released the "ARCFOX" brand in Sanlitun, Chinese the name of Jihu, and set up a large-scale experience center in Sanlitun, a trendy place in Beijing, where new owners play high-end and face Tesla competition. At that time, it was also the year when the domestic hot new car brand Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng started.
But an eye-catching concept car was exhibited again and again, and ARCFOX has not been mass-produced. Until the end of 2019, BAIC BJEV held a "Born to Break the Boundary" press conference to announce the rebirth of ARCFOX Polar Fox.
In October 2020, THE FOUR-YEAR PREPARATION FOR BAIC NEW ENERGY HIGH-END BRAND ARCFOX JIHU FINALLY LAUNCHED ITS FIRST MODEL, THE JIHU ALPHA T, AND THE ARCFOX JIHU ALPHA T, WHICH STARTS AT 241,900 YUAN AFTER SUBSIDIES, IS EQUIPPED WITH HUAWEI'S MH5000 5G CHIP.
Half a year later, BAIC BJEV launched the "first Alpha S equipped with Huawei's high-end automatic driving system", positioned as a new energy car of 300,000 yuan, which is not much different from the Tesla Model 3 in the mid-to-high-end category in terms of price.
Unfortunately, the Pole Fox's ability to clear the level is relatively weak. As the earliest attempt to impact Tesla's independent high-end, ARCFOX does not have any sales and word-of-mouth accumulation, so that after the brand is "resurrected", ARCFOX does not pay much attention to market awareness and user operation, sales burst points, and service system construction.
Due to the small volume of the brand and the short establishment time, the pricing of Jihu bicycles is basically more than 250,000 yuan. At this time, there are already many powerful competitors in the market, coupled with the reputation of the parent company BAIC BJEV is not good, it is doomed that the high-end road of these brands will not go too smoothly.
Since the launch of the two cars, the sales of the two cars have been extremely dismal, and since their listing in October 2020, the highest month has sold more than 500 vehicles, and the cumulative total sales volume is only 4,000 vehicles. The second model, the Alpha S, just launched by Jihu last year, did not open the situation, and the total sales volume since its listing was only 3590 units.
Image source/Visual China
With a loss of 10 billion yuan in two years, how long can Beiqi Blue Valley's large-scale marketing last?
The Polar Fox is very slow, but the Beiqi Blue Valley is difficult to wait.
On March 25, 2022, Beiqi Blue Valley released its annual report in the evening, showing that the company achieved operating income of 8.697 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 64.95% over the same period of the previous year, but the net profit attributable to the mother was -5.244 billion yuan, and the net profit attributable to the mother in 2020 was -6.482 billion yuan, and the two-year loss of Beiqi Blue Valley has reached 11.726 billion yuan.
For the reasons for the huge loss in 2021, Beiqi Blue Valley said that in order to achieve the transformation of products to high-end, fully promote the ARCFOX Jihu brand promotion and channel construction, the company increased brand communication, advertising and operation and other sales expenses increased, the impact on the company's performance amounted to 1.7 billion yuan, specific to the Marketing expenses of Jihu 400 million yuan.
Some time ago, the BAIC BJEV million corruption case was hyped up. It is reported that Xu Feng, then assistant director of BAIC BJEV Marketing Company, sought improper benefits in a number of projects such as "EU and EX", suspected of amounting more than one million, and was tried and sentenced to seven years in prison for accepting bribes and bribery. In addition, Cao Bin, then director of the company's marketing communication department, was also dealt with in a separate case, and Lu Hao, who was the deputy general manager of BAIC BJEV Marketing Company and the general manager of the Jihu Business Department, was also taken away by the Shanghai police for investigation.
"High-end electric vehicles not only focus on products, but also need to find their own lifestyle and even spiritual resonance from the brand core." This is something that needs to be dug deeper. These also make the marketing of Jihu quite challenging, and it is the real beginning for marketing to reach customers. The above-mentioned industry insiders told the "Finance world" weekly.
In order to change the "backward" situation, BAIC is trying to make changes. At present, BAIC Group has made a series of major adjustments to the new energy business, changed the organizational structure within the company, and pushed the pole fox. In addition, BAIC Blue Valley is building a luxurious team, Dai Kangwei, who was the director of BAIC Researchers, is the general manager of BAIC New Energy, and Liu Yu, known as the "firefighting captain", serves as the chairman of BAIC Blue Valley.
In his 2022 BAIC New Year's speech, Dai Kangwei said that he would strive to achieve the goal of total sales of 100,000 vehicles in 2022, which is almost four times that of the previous year.
However, Huawei's cooperation in the automotive industry began to blossom everywhere, and the Baiqi Polar Fox, which first jointly built cars with Huawei, the Huawei aura above its head is slowly dissolving. As more and more Chinese consumers consider buying new energy vehicles, competition from major car companies for potential market windows is intensifying, with direct competitors coming from another huawei partner, Changan Avita.
"I believe that for people who really want to buy a car, Huawei is definitely more influential than Cui Jian. But Huawei and Changan's model Avita has already landed, mass production this year, and is the first car of the clear Huawei Inside. An auto industry insider told The Finance and Economics Weekly: "Although the Polar Fox HI version is also created and promoted in this way, it has not been mass-produced until now, and it cannot be taken out of the Huawei HI version of the car. ”
The above-mentioned industry analysts believe that at this stage, for Jihu, whether it is to borrow Huawei or rely on its own channel network, it is the key to put the Alpha S Huawei HI version model into the terminal channel as soon as possible.