In January this year, the global sales of electric models ranked first with 37,000 vehicles, surpassing Tesla (22,000). This is the first time that Wuling Hongguang MINI EV has won the global electric model sales crown.
As if overnight, Wuling Motors, which had been misunderstood as "not high-grade" and "low-end" because of its low price – you can buy a Wuling car for less than five thousand yuan – became an Internet celebrity brand. Not only did the phrase "what the people need, I will build it" gain popularity, but sales also continued to rise along with this slogan. Soon, it was called the "People’s God Car" because of its high cost performance, high sales, and ubiquity.
But the question is, everyone’s curiosity about Wuling Hongguang lies in: there are so many cheap cars, why only it has become the "people’s magic car"? Why can sales increase by leaps and bounds in half a year?
It is undeniable that the important reason for this is indeed because – Wuling Hongguang is cheap but easy to use, but studying Wuling Hongguang’s road to fame will find that in addition to being cheap, more importantly, this old car company is well versed in the brand of the new era.
01
Card strategy, create a hit
Product is 1, marketing is 0. If the product itself is not competitive, then how much marketing promotion is just a waste. So before analyzing Wuling Hongguang’s brand, we must first look at its product strategy and strategic card position.
What is Wuling Hongguang’s knock-out product? At this year’s Shanghai Auto Show, in addition to Tesla, which was caught in the whirlpool of public opinion, the protagonist of another auto show was the convertible launched by Wuling Motors.
"Island blue" color body, "sunset red" color electric folding soft top, with the iconic anti-roll frame of the convertible, and two-color wheels… This design is left to young people, and it is an infinite imagination of the ideal life.
Such a car born for a beautiful trend is that Wuling wants to capture the hearts of young people, lowering the threshold of convertible cars while meeting more personalized travel needs of young people.
In fact, before this "young people’s first convertible", Wuling had created a number of popular models, typically "one fire and one fire". In addition to Wuling Hongguang, the "autumn famous mountain car god" who became famous in World War I, Wuling Motors is also a leader in the field of new energy vehicles.
The birth of the "National Car" Hongguang MINI EV is due to Wuling Motors’ profound insight into the widespread congestion, parking difficulties, and high fuel costs in Chinese cities, as well as people’s real needs for practical and convenient travel tools.After perceiving the market gap, GM Wuling quickly launched this "people’s scooter" and opened up the scooter blue ocean market – this is Wuling’s earliest and accurate strategic card position. Wuling is not the only one in the small electric vehicle market, but only Wuling has targeted the target group with the most accurate positioning, and the low-cost, mass-market card position has achieved the most extreme.
The guide price of 28,800 – 38,800 yuan, no high purchase tax, and no need to draw a license, which is very attractive to the "young people in small towns" in the fourth and fifth tiers, or the "trendsetters" in the first-tier limited license cities.
So soon there was feedback on sales, and Hongguang MINI EV won the new energy sales championship in China four months before it went on sale.
After the fire of the Hongguang MINI EV, Wuling was not satisfied with this, and was on the road to building a hit.
On April 8 this year, based on the needs of the "people" for more fashionable and safer vehicles, the Hongguang MINI EV Macaron Edition came into being, directly targeting the tastes of female car owners.
What’s more, Wuling also joined forces with Pantone, the world’s authoritative color research institution, to release "Wuling Spring" under the deep insight into the fashion attitude of young consumers, and took a unique approach to let lemon yellow, avocado green, white peach powder and other color schemes "get on the bus".
The results from the user request are obvious, Hongguang MINI EV Macaron once again detonated the market. The data shows that the car opened the scheduled 10-minute order exceeded 1,000, the 24-hour order exceeded 10,000, and the 10-day order exceeded 45,000.
You will find that Wuling Motors is firmly standing on the strategic card position of people’s needs, and the product strategy continues the logic of low price and insight into user requests.
02
Make your brand an Internet celebrity
Wuling Motors is very smart. It cleverly labels cars under 50,000 yuan with the mind and brand symbol of Wuling Hongguang. Consumers can easily buy it for a low price. From the strategic position of "People’s Car", Wuling Motors’ branding road began with the launch of different products.
It is hard to imagine that Wuling Motors is an established car company since 1996. Because the 25-year-old brand not only lived itself as a young brand, but also gradually developed a methodology to become an "Internet celebrity".
A brand that makes itself an Internet celebrity means that it can have its own social assets, its own fans, traffic, as well as private planting and repurchase channels, and a public opportunity to speak for itself at any time.
In addition to lower-cost customer acquisition in a shorter time, becoming an Internet celebrity brand also means an infinite extension of a business. For example, Xiaomi has everything from mobile phones to smart homes, Wuling has everything from cars to "I will build what the people need".
Internet celebrity is more of an attribute. It can be linked and shaped. It is an ability to own content and use content and social media to obtain traffic. And when this ability is combined with a brand, content is a product and becomes the core of an Internet celebrity brand. Whether it is online communication or offline activities, a brand is to create a scene, including content, interaction and the output of its own culture. Its purpose is to be able to truly penetrate into the hearts of users.
At the beginning of last year, a sentence of "what the people need, Wuling will make what" opened the way for SAIC GM Wuling to build itself into an Internet celebrity brand. From Wuling masks and Wuling snail powder at the beginning of the year, to street stalls that satisfy the world’s fireworks, to new cars that are constantly innovating, although Wuling Hongguang is an old brand, it has truly grasped the dividends of this new round of consumer goods brands and refurbished itself into a "new Internet celebrity". Having traffic and fans also has influence, which in turn translates into conversion rate, purchasing power and even retention rate.
From the perspective of the automobile market, Wuling’s past models are actually not understood by mass consumers – people will equate Wuling with vans and goods. But why has it been so popular in the past two years?On the one hand, from the perspective of the brand, it constantly creates hot searches and has a lot of content output on various social platforms. When its content is amplified by a public presence such as Weibo, it will easily gain popularity.
On the basis of the hot search, Wuling launched masks, stall cars, etc., and constantly consolidated its "I will make what the people want" label, becoming a vivid Internet celebrity brand. When new products and new topics enter the public’s field of vision, Wuling already has a hot search physique, which has positive benefits in terms of customer acquisition and overall market volume.
What is the result of such a set of Wuling operations? In China, the Wuling Shenche is almost a household name, and there is even a legend that everyone who does business owns a Wuling. We rarely see advertisements for the Wuling Shenche, but we are deeply impressed by it. This is the charm of the brand.
03
Find your social niche
Although Wuling Motors is well-versed in branding and has the strategy and product characteristics to build itself into an Internet celebrity, different social media are very different, from the disk of traffic to the specific content form. The first step to becoming an Internet celebrity may be to choose a platform that suits your brand.
For a brand like Wuling Motors that wants to become an Internet celebrity, Weibo is still the best sound field and the best amplifier. Because Weibo’s own three-tier ecosystem makes it a natural traffic field, and it is also the best field for brands to do marketing and grow grass.
The first layer is its traditional media ecosystem, which can also be said to be the public opinion field; the second ecology is its search and hotspot ecology. For ordinary users, if they want to know about daily events, the first reaction is to open Weibo and take a look. Weibo’s trending topic list represents the current search engine, which is also the ecology that allows it to become an amplifier; the third layer is its self-media content creation ecology. A large number of high-quality creators on Weibo involve a wide range of vertical categories, and its KOL and fan ecology are very complex.
Weibo is characterized by "big, comprehensive, many and deep", and Wuling also deeply understood the language and culture of Weibo before using it well. Its main secret may be to do everything possible to get itself on the hot search.
From the beginning of the epidemic, Wuling Motors launched a series of brand activities on Weibo.
The first step is to bind the label.During the March 8th Women’s Day, Wuling launched a short documentary film "The Craftsman" to pay tribute to the anti-epidemic Muse. Not only was it supported by the traffic of Weibo’s anti-epidemic channel, but it also accurately reached the people who had been fans of Wuling masks before. Further, this short video and topic strengthened the label "People’s Wuling", letting users understand that Wuling is always on the front line of people’s needs on the basis of masks.
The second step is to create an image.At the beginning, Wuling Motors carried out a new brand logo, and the logo was upgraded from red to silver on Weibo for the first wave of topics to warm up; then, Wuling initiated the Weibo topic #Today Wuling has one more color #, which was forwarded by multiple circles of KOLs. The CEO of Weibo also acted as tap water when he came and went, and the forwarding caused secondary onlookers.
The third step is to strengthen the personnel design.At this stage, users have identified with Wuling’s Internet celebrity identity. Users like snail powder, so Wuling crosses the border to produce snail powder. As soon as the topic of #Wuling snail powder seeks arrangement #came out, the Internet celebrity attributes that come with snail powder were diverted to the brand, further deepening the label of "People’s Wuling".
The fourth step is to draw powder out of the circle.When the popular product Wuling Hongguang MINI EV was launched, Wuling joined hands with major fashion brands to hold offline cross-border exhibitions in Shanghai business district, which not only conveyed the trend attitude of young and fashionable models, but also created a social carnival with the help of Weibo’s field influence. There is no doubt that Wuling’s cross-border and out-of-circle are also on Weibo’s trending topic list.
Nowadays, the number of discussions on Wuling Motors on Weibo has accumulated more than 330 million. Summarizing, it can be found that in this four-step series, Wuling has linked multiple circles of KOLs such as food, health, cars and even fashion in the field of Weibo. Based on the characteristics of Weibo as a gathering place for young groups, combined with Weibo ecology to form a public opinion field and an interest circle, and then become a hot spot and radiate to the whole network.
Strategic card positions, building brands, and becoming Internet celebrities, the user’s mind of "People’s Wuling" is passed again and again through masks, street stalls, snail powder, and people-friendly convertibles, thus establishing the deep-rooted brand communication slogan of "What the people need, Wuling will make".
In this way, Wuling Motors has not only gone out of the "stereotype" of the public, but also gained a new user circle and found new product channels. Under this combination, Wuling Motors has also grown from an old IP to a "new brand" with sales, word-of-mouth and brand perception deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. Its case also tells us that to have the physique of Internet celebrities and hot searches has nothing to do with the age of the brand.
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