This article delves into four key issues in product management: category, consensus, pricing, and channel. Through the analysis of these issues, companies can better formulate product strategies and achieve market breakthroughs and business success.
The development history of an industry is the product functional feature interest, the development history is the product functional feature interest, the differentiation history of the product is the industry, and the industry is the product
For enterprises and organizations, no matter how much business you have, it should essentially revolve around one thing and one thing. From the perspective of the organization and from the market side, every business should be part of the market value and customer value.
The resources of enterprises are always relatively limited, and no enterprise can have so many resources that it does not need to be focused. Focusing on one thing and one thing is to focus on enterprise resources and concentrate on doing big things. So what is the so-called one thing or one thing?
The answer to this question still goes back to the basic question, the basic concept – what problem we want to solve, what value we can bring, instead of simply doing addition and subtraction – adding business segments when it is good, subtracting business segments when it is bad.
What problem we want to solve is actually the ultimate question about the meaning of the existence of the enterprise. For Jack Ma, it is called: let the world have no difficult business; Musk said he wanted to liberate all mankind.
What problems we want to solve is a choice made based on the current capabilities, resources and endowments of the enterprise, and what problems we can solve is based on what problems we want to solve.
On this basis, whether the business can be reorganized and how the business is presented, in the final analysis, the business can think about it when the problem of the product is clear. Whether the business of the enterprise is full of threads and the departments have their own interests, whether they can be merged into a line is not only a thinking at the business level, but also an iteration of cognition.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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As a business owner, you need to pay special attention to those – key minority decisions in your business decisions.
Only when the depth of thinking about the key few decisions is enough that other decisions can be made with ease – even self-defeating. On the contrary, if we don’t think deeply about the key few decisions, then we are always solving the problem, not solving the problem – what problem are we going to solve? What problems can we solve? How do our businesses fit together? How are our products presented?
01 Category starting style
First of all, start with the category and find the general pattern of the business:
The problem of category is not only a problem of products, but also a problem of the market and a problem of business “bureau”. The starting point of a business should point to a big market, and only then can there be big business in a big market – a big market is the foundation and premise of big business. Without this premise and foundation, the more we do it, the more stretched it will be.
When I was stretched, I realized that the mistake was wrong at the beginning – it was easy to be vigorous, but the mistake was silent. For the same product, the concept of its category will be different, and the market boundary will be different. Sometimes this difference is not the difference between 1 and 10, but a tragedy in the sky and underground.
For this reason, when I ask me how to make a product, I usually say what your category is and what you think your category should be. Many times we don’t think enough about products and categories, far from enough, or even wrong.
Create a category or occupy a feature, whether you create a category or occupy a feature in a category. There are two kinds of businessmen in this world, one is to understand business and do business. They believe in laws and know that business is only in progress, not in the past tense, and there is no finished tense.
What kind of cognition is what kind of behavior, so they know what happened in the past means. There is also a kind of doing business for business, in fact, they don’t understand what business is, and simply treat buying and selling as business, and make buying and selling into business.
What is business?
Whether you created a category or occupied a feature in a category. If you still don’t understand what a category is and what is a characteristic, I suggest you stop and think about it, don’t rush to buy and sell, but slowly discover the beauty of business. For example: If there is already a leading brand in this category, can you occupy different characteristics?
02 Mobilize cognitive consensus
Secondly, start from the concept to mobilize consumer cognitive consensus:
After the relationship between the product and the category is smoothed out, the next step is to start with the concept, with the aim of finding the basis of audience cognition. The concept here must not be a concept that you plan, invent, and innovate behind closed doors: the concept of chewing and eating is essentially an obscenity for consumers and audiences.
Starting from the concept, it is to start from the cognition that the customer already knows, and find the concept of the audience’s cognition, that is the force. Only by finding this force can concepts and cognition be equated. Otherwise, it is a concept imposed by the enterprise, or even a fabricated concept.
Whether it is from top to bottom or bottom-up, almost all new consumer brands’ business has put differentiation points at the beginning of entering the market, perceivable product functions, attributes, and benefits brought by them, which is not only the unique selling point of the product.
Instead of other emotional demands, this point from the earliest sleepy, tired, drinking Red Bull, to sugar-free sparkling water Yuanqi Forest, to raw milk, sugar, lactic acid bacteria, the others are without Jane Eyre, without exception they all choose simple, direct and effective appeals.
When there is a category and no brand (creating a new category), consumers use product experience to cognition and evaluate brand tonality
Brand tonality is not a set of gorgeous adjectives, but a perceptual cognition based on function and experience
At this stage, the functions of the product and the specific interests of consumers are the biggest differences of the product
At this stage, useful, effective, and informative is more efficient than fun
- During the market introduction period, the single point focus is mainly on product selling points (0-1)
- Market growth period, amplifying product selling points + scene demands (1-10)
- Market maturity, product selling point + scene + brand (10-N)
03 Pricing determines life and death
Third, start with pricing and find the reason for support: pricing is not a simple number, pricing is first of all positioning, and only with positioning can there be a price support point. Who do you serve, show whom, and sell to. As a consumer, you have a budget in mind before buying. And this budget is your lock in the market and customers.
First-class entrepreneurs will set prices, and pricing is a kind of manifestation of the entrepreneur’s business penetration, and it is also a judgment of market trends. 19.8 or 39 is a reason to buy in the final analysis, and this reason for buying comes from the understanding of positioning from beginning to end, and the price war of third-rate enterprises.
Let’s look at a math problem: What does it mean for a company to be able to raise the price of its products by an average of 2% if sales and costs remain the same?
- Amazon’s corporate profit will increase by 276.2%
- Honda can increase profit by 65.2%
- HP’s profit can increase by 37.9%
In the 4P of marketing, products can talk about packaging and visual hammers; channels can talk about dividends and large penetration; Promotion can talk about content and KOL, but when it comes to price, it seems that there is nothing to talk about, and often the more obvious it is, the more undiscovered it is.
Genuine, high-quality and cheap, good goods are not cheap, cost-effective, these familiar words are all about price, an entrepreneur’s top ability is the pricing experience, first-class enterprises will price, second-rate enterprises do promotions, third-rate enterprises Pinduoduo.
04 The channel should be fine and deep
Both: surface penetration (channel penetration + mental penetration): around the origin crowd, penetrate the origin channel, do the origin market, and establish a base area.
Laoxiang Chicken opened more than 400 stores in Anhui before it felt at ease and boldly walked out of Anhui, focusing on Changsha, and at its peak, it can be said to be a store in ten steps. After the Changsha market is fine and deep enough, Chayan Yuese gradually walked out of the base area like Laoxiang Chicken.
Chayan Yuese in Changsha store is 2.2 times that of CoCo and 1 point, and 2.7 times that of Shuyi Shao Grass Fairy and Mixue Bingcheng. The total number of stores in the three administrative districts of Tianxin, Yuelu and Furong is 142, and the number of stores in Tianxin District has reached 63, making it the administrative district with the largest number of stores.
In commercial wars, the advantage often belongs to the side on the defensive. Without absolute strength superiority, it is difficult for the attacking side to take advantage of the defenders. To win, you must deploy at least three times the number of troops at the attack location – “Business War”
For example, the big kiln
On the channel side, Dayao typically fights flank battles. First enter from the catering edge market to lure them. Large catering and chain catering have high thresholds and high costs. In the early days of Dayao, single stores, mom-and-pop shops, barbecue restaurants, and fly houses were chosen. This type of store has a low threshold and is easy to talk to.
Of course, good talk is only superficial, and the most important thing is that your products can make money for these restaurants – judging from the current data of Dayao’s own data, its main sales force comes from these small restaurants, accounting for 80% at the highest.
It is also about selling goods, it doesn’t matter who sells goods, what matters is who sells more money and makes more money. After all, the profit of catering and beverages is still an important part of catering revenue. In terms of catering channels, Dayao is ahead of Yuanqi Forest, and Dayao’s hundreds of thousands of restaurants are exactly the backhand that Yuanqi Forest wants.
In 2019, e-commerce platforms accounted for only 3.4% of the sales channels of China’s beverage industry. Offline channels accounted for 96.6%
According to 7-Eleven data, consumers aged 20 to 40 account for 88% of convenience store consumers.
There are currently about 6.8 million mom-and-pop stores in China, with 800-1,500 SKUs and 2-3 brands for each type of product.
In the vast Chinese market, mom-and-pop stores, grocery stores, retail stores, restaurants, and tobacco hotels still account for a large share. Make brands in first- and second-tier cities, and collect profits in third, fourth and fifth-tier cities. Make a brand in KA stores, make money in mom-and-pop stores, grocery stores, and tobacco hotels, and do it finely and deeply.
——This is the eternal business logic
