The ideal collision with the Chenglong heavy-duty truck has finally come to an end. Just last night, our Yangma spent 13 minutes on two financial commentary programs, reviewing the Ideal i8’s marketing turmoil from beginning to end. There was no nonsense throughout the whole process, and all three parties involved in the incident were approved, and finally pointed the finger at the exaggerated marketing atmosphere in the current cycling circle.
There is a sentence in it that I particularly like: Marketing is not acting.
Looking back at the statements of all parties involved in the past week, we do feel like we are watching a big drama.
First, the Ideal i8 flew past the front of a Chenglong truck at the press conference, attracting overwhelming skepticism. Later, Ideal and Chenglong arranged to have an offline live broadcast to collide, and at the same time they were angry about the testing process of China Automotive Research Institute.
China Automotive Research Institute then responded to the question and issued a joint statement with Ideal and Chenglong two days ago.
As for what went wrong, it may be difficult to find answers at the moment.
The answer is obvious.
As Yang Ma said, the problem is the current almost pathological marketing environment in the automotive industry.
As the biggest culprit of excessive marketing, Brother Ning has written many articles criticizing the marketing of car companies in the past two years. For example, they exaggerate the ability of intelligent driving, give strange names to configurations, and play tricks on engine thermal efficiency & drag coefficient, etc.
What these behaviors have in common is that in order to make their products the number one in the industry, car companies choose to pretend to be confused and choose not to tell the truth.
The reason is that if others are doing this, honest people will suffer.
Think about it. Although there are a dazzling array of new models, the product points are highly homogeneous, and the underlying technology does not have much barriers.
If you want to outperform rivals in publicity and become the first model that people think of when buying a car, an iconic gimmick is very important.
Ever since, we began to see the emergence of the best XX promotions within XX million, and subsequently evolved into various first-tier, industry-leading, etc. These terms may seem deceptive at first glance, but most of them have too many attributive attributes and vague definitions.
Even if it cannot be falsified, it cannot stand up to scrutiny.
More abstractly, however, this line of thinking seems to be useful. Now as long as you say which is the best car within 5 million or 10 million, I think everyone should be able to tell it immediately.
For this reason, in almost all brand promotions, similar extreme words will basically become standard, and some will pop up from time to time.
Over time, everyone has become the industry benchmark in their own words, and simple extreme words have lost their ability to be remembered at a glance.
Car companies are in urgent need of a new way to stand out, which has also made the concept of event marketing popular.
And this is the direct cause of this collision incident.
The so-called event marketing actually refers to using an eye-catching activity to make people inside and outside the circle quickly remember a brand or model. Various challenges that have been common to us in recent years actually fall into the category of event marketing.
Compared with the ultimate word of saying that you are the best and strongest, there are many ways to play event marketing.
As long as the creativity is good enough and the effect is explosive enough, event marketing can be almost universally known. For example, Schumacher drove a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG onto the ceiling of the tunnel, and Jean-Claude Van Damme did a cross between two Volvo trucks, etc.
In order to pursue better communication, car companies have gradually begun to let themselves go in event marketing.
All kinds of abstract challenges began to spring up like mushrooms after rain, such as lifting a car into the sky and dropping it on the ground, making a car fly across the sea to the deck of a ship, etc. What's more, they even came up with such unnatural operations as letting the tank run over the car body and shooting the battery pack with bullets.
However, at this point, I feel that the event marketing environment still has a bottom line.
Because you can say that the car companies are trying to gain attention, or you can say that this challenge is meaningless, but at least it truly demonstrates a certain aspect of the car's performance.
What can really be called pathological is, I think, event marketing that has only recently become popular, disguised as a so-called test.
They have a greater impact on the user's mind and are also more dangerous.
The characteristic of this type of marketing is that it relies on testing processes provided by professional organizations in professional venues to draw seemingly professional conclusions, thereby proving that one is relatively objectively ahead among its friends.
Including collisions of various drill trucks, intelligent driving tests on public roads, tests of drag coefficient and engine thermal efficiency, etc.
Because everything looks professional, this type of event marketing can easily give people the illusion of being endorsed by a professional organization. But in fact, most of what they conduct are non-standard tests without systematic standards.
For example, everyone will understand that the China Automobile Insurance Industry Association (also known as China Insurance Research Institute), one of the most authoritative crash test institutions in the country, has developed a set of extremely detailed and strict testing procedures in order to horizontally compare the collision safety of different models.
Each model participating in the test must not only have the same speed at the time of collision, height of the object struck, and angle of impact, but also the amount of fuel remaining in the fuel tank, the amount of coolant remaining in the pipeline, and even the temperature of the car body during the test.
Only under such extremely strict variable control can the test results have reference significance.
This is why the collision safety test of China Insurance Research Institute has been the most valuable system in the industry for so many years, almost without exception.
On the other hand, several recent test marketing campaigns by car companies and third-party organizations have not only failed to follow industry-recognized standardized testing procedures and strictly controlled variables, but have also failed to prove the relationship between the models participating in the tests and the production versions.
In the introduction of some testing institutions, it is even stated in black and white that they are on the same side as the car companies and can customize experimental projects to meet the needs of the car companies. Of course, you can also create some more exaggerated experimental images for marketing effect.
I also know that many laboratories that have undertaken testing projects have received clear demands from car companies, saying that if the ideal results are not obtained, the project balance will not be paid.
Is this really true?
For this reason, in the eyes of industry insiders, such non-standard tests are indeed not much different from the acting described by Yang Ma, and the results are often laughed off.
But the problem is that non-professional consumers do not have the time and energy to understand the ins and outs. Compared with long and complicated real professional tests, tests that can tell the good and bad at a glance are obviously more interesting and easier to understand.
Therefore, like the earliest best models priced under XX million, the results of these non-standard tests have gradually become widely recognized among the user group, and have gradually affected people's daily driving habits.
A while ago, led by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Public Security, relevant departments carried out a wave of rectification on the exaggerated propaganda of smart driving marketing. The source is that car companies have over-promoted intelligent driving capabilities, which has led many users to use assisted driving as autonomous driving.
Even if they encounter danger, they will habitually blame the AEB emergency braking system instead of raising the awareness of careful driving. This has also led to a significant increase in accidents caused by smart driving recently, even causing serious casualties.
Intelligent driving, which is not yet widely accepted, will have such serious consequences. So if safety, which everyone says is the most important thing when buying a car, is also biased by event marketing, will it make people who don’t know the truth have the illusion that no car can hit me on the road?
And this is what I think is the most morbid part of car company marketing today.
Exaggerated marketing of wind resistance coefficient, power consumption, battery life, and thermal efficiency will not affect people's car experience for the time being. But are underlying capabilities such as collision and intelligent driving that are directly linked to life safety really suitable for event marketing?
If a product requires the user’s underlying security to attract people to buy it, is it really worth trusting?
Is this kind of marketing idea with the ultimate goal of attracting eyeballs really going on?
The good news is that I think starting from the Ideal i8’s marketing overturn, the marketing trend in the car industry may really usher in a cooling off period.
On the one hand, this is because Zaiyang Ma’s qualitative criticism is equivalent to giving an eye-opener to the marketing activities of the car circle, and the communication environment will most likely become more stringent in the future.
On the other hand, a similar story has actually happened once in the digital circle.
Young friends may not have experienced the digital marketing of about ten years ago. At that time, the domestic mobile phone market was just like today's new energy vehicles. Although there was a mixture of players, the gap was not big. Therefore, it can be said that it is a necessary link to suppress competing products and engage in abstract marketing at new product launches.
Countless memes, such as the friend’s business name is XX, sell the goods when they are available, etc. were also born at that time. But in the later period, people discovered that digital marketing seemed to be developing in an abstract way, just like cars today.
Things that are thinner than a one-yuan coin and have a longer game life than the Switch are beginning to appear. Although they are indeed very memorable, they are actually more counterproductive to the brand because they are too anti-intellectual.
For this reason, after suffering losses, although there are occasional abstract players in the marketing of the machine industry, marketing behavior is still mostly driven by rationality. For example, it can benchmark against the iPhone in all aspects, be more compatible with the Apple ecosystem than its competitors, and so on.
And this time the i8 overturned, I think it was a wake-up call for the marketing trend in the car industry.
Because as I said before, many previous conclusions of event marketing are not easy to be falsified because the fields involved are very professional.
However, the Chenglong truck that was overturned this time can be said to be beyond everyone's understanding. Whether it can have a publicity effect is not discussed, but in hindsight, it has already caused the same damage to the brand as the machine circle back then.
Even if car companies don't want to calm down, it may be time for the market to calm down.
And having said that, are there really so many things in our cars worth marketing?
I still remember that at the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra launch conference, Lei Jun said when introducing the tire noise cancellation system that this thing is actually a silent cotton added to the tires. It's very simple, very funny, and it's in sharp contrast to the marketing of friends.
But the result is that people are more accepting of such vernacular propaganda, and it has become a very out-of-circle meme.
Although he didn’t say anything, he achieved better results than many event marketing. Combined with this Ideal i8's overturn, car companies should have a deeper understanding of future marketing.