Meizu can return to small and beautiful?

As early as last month's Meizu PRO 6 conference, Meizu has repeatedly mentioned this year's plan in its interviews. "Stable growth and profit creation" have become the main axis of this year. In the past 2015, Meizu succeeded in influencing the Thousand Yuan Machine market with the Charm Blue series. Regardless of “re-defining,” whether it was intentional or not, Meizu also accurately grasped the market and created a miracle of Meizu's 350% annual growth. . But behind the miracle, Meizu is still only a small manufacturer. In 2015, the shipment of the Meizu only reached 20 million units.

In contrast, Huawei claims to have shipped hundreds of millions of dollars, and Xiaomi has repeatedly lowered its expectations. The final shipment is set at 70 million units - and implies that there are problems with the number of your friends' shipments first, but it is ironic. However, Lei Jun said this in March, but with the release of third-party statistics in the first quarter of 2016, Xiaomi has long been beyond Huawei's position. Between millet and Huawei, according to different statistical standards, it may also squeeze into Oppo, Vivo and other manufacturers.

Market, market. The market seems to be the real factor: In 2015, Meizu faced the last door of the transition from functional machines to smart machines and from 3G to 4G. And next, before 5G came, it seems that there is no longer such a good time. In terms of products, Meizu’s three consecutive press conferences in April grabbed the front of the domestic mobile phone release this spring. The entertainment of the conference was still first-rate. The guests from the concerts, such as Xu Yi, to the trend, such as SNH48, successfully publicized the popularity of the product, but the popularity of the concert also became the tragedy of being shopped. With the continuous launch of new friends and merchants, it seems that Meizu has put a heavier burden on it: a system that has been stalled, a low price-performance ratio, and a reputation crisis among core users.

Industry and products, both pressures were added to Meizu's shoulders. Meizu in 2016, after entering the “new normal” of the stock market in the mobile phone industry, Meizu can rely on originality and design advantages to compete for users from other manufacturers. However, in reality, Meizu has become struggling. This is not just a problem for a company in its industry. From the growth market to the pain of stability, they are always there.

Multi-brand strategy is weakened, Charm Blue is no longer a brand

With a tone, in 2016, 2016 will be a year of life and death for pure Internet brand mobile phones and the Internet sub-brands established by the separate portals of traditional big manufacturers. Here Luo Yonghao once did not give a clear data: In the mid- to high-end mobile phones such as the hammer T series calculation, to maintain a small manufacturer such as a hammer normal operation, the need for four or five million annual sales.

The concept of this number? After the 1 plus 1 shines, last year, one plus 2 and one plus X sales are bleak. The annual sales amounted to about 2 million, of which the domestic market accounted for only a quarter, but it is not in the security line. Inside - Luo Yonghao said that this is under the premise of maintaining a healthy profit margin. Internet brands, under Xiao Mi's and later LeTV's joint efforts, have far better gross margins than hammers. The Internet brands with smaller sales volume are in dire straits: bankruptcy, or return to the original owner, and become a special product line, such as ZUK. Although ZUK Chen Xudong mentioned that the cost of the mobile phone industry is not like making money or even losing money. Millet LeTV said that high.

For Meizu, the Charm Blue brand and products at the end of 2014 are the highlights of the domestic mobile phone industry in recent years. Millet's 1999 flagship mobile phone is the beginning of the Internet mobile phone, while Charm Blue is the origin of the thousand yuan model of Internet. As a result, Red Rice has also achieved Xiaomi's shipment record, and Huawei's first entry point for glory is the new millennium machine brought by traditional brands. In such an environment, the operator customization system represented by China Kuaidi was completely broken down, and the fast-responding Huawei streamlined its product line to only the high end of the P series, while the remaining three companies are still stuck in low-quality machines. Only by relying on the residual channels of offline cities, can they live in markets in less developed regions abroad. And Huawei’s foreign main battlefield has already been spread to Europe.

Put aside the glory that has become half of Huawei, with the main brand under the force line, the main positioning of more than two thousand yuan. Now, these low-cost sub-brands and Internet brands represented by Red Rice Charm Blue are already not the brand-new and thunder-changers of the year, but are considered as the lowest-level products for each brand. Line - Shipment of heavy burdens, low profits, poor repair rates and word-of-mouth, but in the face of an undisposable group of consumers, it has to quickly iterate, hoping to extract poor profits from low-end consumers. All of the words are displayed and tasteless. Food tasteless, abandoned pity.

Rethinking the Charm Blue Product Line - The Middle-End Product Crisis on Xik

Whether it's the promotion of Internet mobile phones or the sale of terminal mobile phones as offline channels, the issue of the Charm Blue product line is far more than simply "chicken ribs."

To a certain extent, Charm Blue, especially the Charm Blue Note and the latest Charm Blue Metal, are all squeezing the sales space of Meizu's own more advanced products. Meizu MX product line micro, which must have the impact of the charm blue. Meizu has never provided accurate MX series shipment data. We cannot compare the sales of MX4, MX4Pro and Charm Blue MX5 before Charm Blue.

With Charm Blue Note and Metal - the two product line positioning is almost identical - during the release of four models, the MX product line has only an MX5 update, and the processor used is even more than half a year ago Charm Blue Note The core of the same generation of MediaTek Helio X10, this kind of renewal rhythm, will really make consumers willing to choose the higher end product line? We can see that the MX5 release has not been updated for nearly a year now, and it is close to the retreat state. The existing market will be handed over a thousand-dollar charm blue and a PRO series of more than 2,500 yuan. These two product lines will be in parallel. From a strategic point of view, the only problem is that the PRO series doesn't seem to be worth the number. The following is a discussion of this issue.

The division of Meizu's product line seems to be of secondary importance, but more is the improvement of craftsmanship and functionality. Contrary to Xiaomi, the red rice note tries its latest function—fingerprint recognition, metal fuselage, and so on—but it classifies the absolute performance of the machine. There is nothing wrong with the difference between the two, performance-oriented and process quality-oriented, is the different styles of the two mobile phone brands. But what needs to face squarely is that the Internet model of mobile phones, the market is educated by the millet model.

Regardless of the strength of the Meizu offline channel, the only other point that needs special attention is to push the market offline, and consumers' first impression of the mobile phone is very important. In a recent offline channel visit, I as a consumer personally came to the mobile phone store in the county of Wuxian County. In the introduction of the salesman with the mobile phone, I could clearly feel the attractiveness of certain machines under the offline experience, and Does not come from performance, system and camera details, but it is to get the feeling of the phone, the first time the screen is lit. Deep in this road Oppo, Vivo and Huawei, etc., will be more than 2,500 yuan price of the midrange machine (of course, for the Oppo is considered a flagship) and 2,000 yuan, 1000 yuan side by side phone comparison, when consumers can be intuitive When you feel a penny and a piece of goods, you can impress consumers to choose a better machine.

Charm blue? A new charm blue, polycarbonate shell technology will not really feel the short board, the line under the channel charm Blue and MX two machines together to pick? MX will lose, did not have to say. Of course, the Charm Blue Note and Metal series have a special deterioration on the screen, and the saturated and grayish, low-brightness screen is a difference that can be seen at a glance compared to the mid-to-high-end series of AMOLEDs.

Brand image and promotion determine the Meizu user base and ceiling

Analysts have begun to claim that “it is a mistake to emerge from the appearance of an Internet mobile phone that is now exhausted”. In fact, there is no need to make such a case afterwards. Instead, it is critical to analyze more closely the risks it faces and the pace of the future. More importantly, the current mobile phone market has already had some "traditional market" tastes. The problems mentioned in the analysis are actually common problems in the existing consumer electronics industry. It is far more than just a small mobile phone. Is it online? It's as simple as buying a store.

Say Meizu back. Meizu brand's own literary and artistic genes may be derived from the MP3 era solitary temperament. After a comprehensive transformation into a mobile phone factory, it has maintained a small and beautiful posture, but in the Ali stocks, YunOS blessing charm blue and shipments led many factors under the rapid expansion of the current Meizu.

However, Meizu's top-down advertising and sales strategies remain unchanged. For the Internet mobile phone brands, the initial brand image establishment, the maintenance of the publicity channel and the spontaneous dissemination of fans are the focus of publicity. This is totally different from the traditional sense in which operators and offline sales channels rely entirely on advertising. Therefore, a brand's “personality” rather than “operational” determines how far it can go – it is certain that in the eyes of consumers, “Oh, this is a new brand that seems to be very cost-effective” is totally untenable. For example, Coca-Cola, iuni and ZUK, and so on.

The early Meizu people inserted this benchmark very positively: they are positioned in the high-end market and care more about quality consumers. Therefore, Meizu’s consumers have been promoted downward by the first-tier cities rather than by the countryside. The same goes for the Charm Blue brand. The two product lines did not achieve differentiated competition with different orientations. Instead, they were all targeted at different people in large cities, "youth" and "mature consumers". In fact, they were "disadvantaged and small Wenqing". "Little Wenqing who is not so short of money."

Is this not the case, they discovered the Meizu's limitations? Fine brand temperament, down his own ceiling. Just like the original Android taste and the pursuit of the hammer, it can only be a small and beautiful company to take the single-plank bridge, and once there is an expansion of ambition, it will naturally easily reach the top.

The conflict between exquisite craftsmanship and the deterioration of word-of-mouth: chasing the price/performance ratio is no turning back.

I had previously made a joke that there are three types of companies in the world: focus on quality or professional performance that cannot be understood and approved by the public; price-performance is used to making it impossible to launch high-end products; Apple.

For the Meizu, they swallowed the bitterness twice. Before the Charm Blue series and the Charm Blue series, the opposite was true.

The most prominent of the moment is the line-up problem of Meizu's high-end product line PRO series this year. Meizu, trying to bring technology and texture to a higher level, took the annual flagship as an obvious step backward in the eyes of the old Meizu users - MediaTek's processor is far from Qualcomm or Samsung's flagship attractive, the price has exceeded Millet, LeTV and even ZUK's Snapdragon 820 model; memory, flash memory structure, and so on, the final conclusion, PRO6 is not worth its price. Consumers' concerns have quietly changed: from the high standards required of system aesthetics and design processes to the pursuit of small changes in a certain hardware.

For Meizu, this may be one of the most dangerous signals, but this problem has not left behind. Once a company begins to take a cost-effective route, it will take several times as long to transition to high-end. Similarly, this is not a mobile phone industry at all, and it is not even a problem for the consumer electronics industry. Tiger sniffers have written a few years ago that Coach has spent only three years reversing this concept simply because of price reductions and brand image damage.

The Meizu’s so-called “stable growth and profit creation” relied on the tactics of the sea to share the attractiveness of different markets in the overall stagnant market. The precedent was Nokia and HTC. Then they faced the impact of smart phones and Internet mobile phones. The consequences were actually everyone. All clear. The Meizu now leave new suspense beyond the device: ecology and service. In the 2016 prediction of the mobile phone industry, Tiger sniffing former colleague K mentioned that mobile phones are cost-effective and rely on software revenue. This is not feasible in principle. Pursuing users with cost-effective and inexpensive mobile phones is naturally difficult to become high value in terms of ecology. User.

Small and beautiful Meizu, can go back? Meizu's answer seems to have been very obvious: cutting meat bleeding, streamlining products, or completely attached to giants such as Ali to become a pure hardware entrance, it is morning and evening.