A few days ago, Huawei teamed up with Nai Xue's tea to develop "quick applications and meta services" to provide a more convenient consumption experience for new tea users.
This has led to a discussion in the industry about "innovation", so, what is the essence of innovation? In the current era of involution, how to define innovation?
This article will analyze innovation from four directions, aiming to provide a perspective for brands that have fallen into homogenization.
Let's take a look.
Issue 1622
Text | Zhang Dong
4 directions of innovation
Which one are you?
The light business in March and April, including the calmness of the turnover after May Day, and the anxiety of entering the hot summer, made many hot pot owners have a headache, and they rushed to find solutions, doing group purchases, low-cost packages, sending vouchers, and finding experts to visit the store...... All the methods that can be used are used, but the pommel horse is still cold in front of the door.
It has long been a consensus in the industry that low prices do not attract customers, but hurt the brand (affecting the image of the brand in customer cognition), but the hot pot bosses who are desperate and have no direction use various means to make customers enter the store for consumption.
◎ Passenger flow is a problem
In the era of great material abundance, customers are accustomed to all kinds of food, and it is difficult to buy people's hearts by relying on low prices.
The price war has caused the hot pot industry to fall into involution, however, one of the important ways to get rid of involution is to create scarcity, that is, innovation.
From the root point, there are four types of innovation: first, from scratch; Second, from existing to excellent; Third, redefined; Fourth, cross-border integration.
Combine these 4 ways to compare your brand and see which one it belongs to.
Let's analyze them one by one.
The first one is made from nothing. This is the origin of innovation, it is too difficult to create a new thing out of thin air, and because it is a new thing, there are big problems with public acceptance and recognition, and it is difficult to trace the source, but the groundbreaking cannot be questioned.
For example, screws, not to mention practicality, but it cannot be traced back to the person who invented screws and the brand that first produced them.
Back to the hot pot, for example, the various scene styles that are prevalent at the moment cannot be traced, you can recall carefully, can you accurately say the first brand that uses the style of the market, the stall, the nostalgic style, etc.?
It is difficult to make something out of nothing, and there is resistance to it being remembered and accepted, unless it is a pioneering contribution to the process of human development, such as papermaking, printing, etc.
◎ Market style hot pot restaurant
If you think in the opposite direction, the memorable "innovation out of nothing" is impressive because it refers to two words: "efficiency".
Like papermaking, human beings were freed from the shackles of turtle shells, tree bark and bamboo slips, making writing lighter and easier to carry; Like the steam engine, which pulls human beings directly from the agricultural era into the industrial age, human travel is more convenient, machines replace people, and become more efficient and more productive; Like Alipay, it makes it more convenient and fast for the public to pay, so that a person who has money in his card and electricity in his mobile phone can travel all over the country without a single banknote.
The second is from having to being excellent. When there is something in the world, and then optimize, it is a little simpler, because there is a direction.
Like mobile phones, Motorola invented the world's first mobile phone, and when it came to Nokia, it was carried forward, but Nokia only improved in quality (resistant to falls, no different from bricks), and did not improve in efficiency, so the moment Jobs swiped the Apple screen with his finger, the whole world was shocked.
Abandon the cumbersome physical keys, full touch screen, and you can download a variety of software, so that people can save the steps of using the computer, simple and convenient.
Speaking of hot pot, the pioneer of various scene styles, it is difficult to trace the source, but there are many brands that optimize scene styles, and similarly, if there is no direct point to efficiency, the optimized scene, even if it is played again, it cannot be regarded as real innovation.
From there to excellent, in the hot pot industry, my small bench neighborhood hot pot is counted as one.
◎ Inside Koita
The self-service model and semi-self-service model in the hot pot industry have been around for a long time, but they have always been tepid, and the popularity of my small bench neighborhood hot pot is inseparable from the innovation of its optimization model.
From the semi-self-service mode, to the one-card checkout, to the "red light stop green light line" guest checkout (see "Long queue for trial operation, there are 3 black technologies!") The top of the hot pot in the past is back! All the points are fighting for efficiency, including the efficiency of the kitchen staff, the efficiency of the front desk cashier, the efficiency of the service, and the convenience of customers to eat.
There is also the main product of Chongqing Tangsao Food, "Tangsao Hot Pot Three Treasures", like Chongqing Laopao Hot Pot Base, which selects 1% of good raw materials - selects the first-layer raw materials of precious product brands to serve 1% of customers who have extreme requirements for taste. It is a kind of innovation from existing to excellent.
Like Tangsao Ageless Oil, which is the industry's first hot pot functional red oil, it can perfectly present the flavor of old hot pot when added appropriately, and isolate the risk of food safety; Adding soup treasure is a special and original "functional" hot pot soup to help the hot pot continue to boil for more than 2 hours and still continue to be fragrant with the mechanism logic of the five flavors of the ingredients.
The latter two are innovations from scratch.
Redefine and combine
Get rid of involution
As mentioned above, the way to get rid of involution is innovation, creating something out of nothing and from having to excel, both are innovation, and must point to "efficiency".
If the first two can't do it, you can also redefine and integrate across borders.
The so-called redefinition is to extract the advantages of products (including models) that others do not have, and achieve differentiated effects to avoid direct competition.
Like Xiangpiaopiao milk tea, it redefines milk tea, allowing consumers to get rid of the time and space restrictions of milk tea shops and sugar water shops, whether at home or in the company, as long as there is hot water, there is milk tea, which is very convenient.
◎ Milk tea, I love fragrant fluttering
got rid of the restrictions of the bubble tea shop scene, and Xiang Piaopiao went further, so that it sold hundreds of millions of cups a year and circled the earth many times, and as for the later loss of money, the main reason was that the efficiency did not evolve.
In the hot pot industry, there are many brands that have redefined and innovated, and President Lu is one of them, introducing sweet drinks into hot pot restaurants, saving customers the trouble of going to sweet drink shops; There is also Banu, which redefines the product and uses a large number of landmark ingredients, so that consumers can eat special deliciousness without going to Tiannan and Haibei.
There is also the invention of the intelligent fire boiler on the intelligent kitchen industry, with a fire boiler that can automatically change the temperature of the frequency conversion, saving customers and waiters the trouble of adjusting the induction cooker, improving the operational efficiency of the front hall and back kitchen, and also a redefinition of the induction cooker. (See "Don't be scolded if you raise prices!") Follow Michelle Bingcheng to learn to do sinking business)
Of course, there are also games that redefine play, such as having a steak hot pot, allowing customers to use knives and forks to eat hot pot, the purpose of the Chinese invention of chopsticks is to improve efficiency - only need to use two fingers to eat without having to put both hands together, abandoning dexterous chopsticks and using bulky knives and forks, which can be described as redundant.
There are also various "hot pot +", which is also deviated, for example, hot pot + barbecue, it does not save customers the time to go to the barbecue restaurant, but increases the difficulty of choice - customers want to eat barbecue, the first choice must be the brand that makes barbecue professionally, and if you want to eat hot pot, the first choice is the brand that does hot pot well, because the brand that makes the ultimate product must be a single product to win the world, which is equivalent to you pushing your prospective customers to the barbecue restaurant and other hot pot restaurants.
◎ Grilled shabu-shabu in one
There is also hot pot + KTV, which is also a redefinition of deviation, eating hot pot and singing, just the yearning in the movie, the real situation is that customers prefer to sing after eating hot pot - the transition is fresh.
If an innovation doesn't improve efficiency and makes it easy for customers, it's undoubtedly a failure.
Coming to the fourth dimension, cross-border integration.
In this layer of innovation, Guoquan Shihui is a leader, expressing "hot pot and barbecue" in a retail way, with the support of nearly 300 supply chain enterprises behind it, whether it is from the brand's own efficiency (cost reduction and efficiency increase), or from the customer's perspective of efficiency (fast and convenient), it has achieved disruptive innovation.
◎We offer a plan to eat at home
There are also some fast food brands, tea brands and satellite stores of catering brands, which improve the speed of store opening, reduce costs, improve human efficiency, and are also an innovation.
Some hot pot brands do cross-border combinations, which are cross-border for the sake of cross-border, and are marketing-oriented, not efficiency-oriented.
All innovation is for the sake of efficiency, if you can't improve efficiency, the innovation made is of little value, and it is easy to be imitated.
It is difficult to point to efficiency, but the direction must be correct, because human beings will always go to a convenient and fast place, just like a car, which appears to facilitate travel, and the emergence of unmanned driving is convenient for drivers.
The ultimate meaning of improving efficiency must be to make the "main person" more convenient.
Of course, for the collision of ideas for hot pot innovation, we have to look at the centering force conference of the China Hot Pot Leading Tide Summit on July 17, when thousands of hot pot people from all over the country will gather together to bring a big discussion about the industry.
On the 3rd floor of Zhengzhou Greenland JW Marriott Hotel, let's wait for the wind to come.