What's wrong with Hujiang and its CCtalk?
From the point of view of being a comprehensive platform, Hujiang has shortcomings in qualifications and dislocation in marketing operation mode.
First of all, Hujiang started from language, but it lacks precipitation in other fields.
Moreover, although Hujiang is positioned as an online school with "large flow, large brand investment, high pricing and qualified products", it implements a "high pricing" strategy that is more suitable for offline, which leads to acclimatization. The dislocation of this operation mode makes Hujiang's products vulnerable to the challenge of other products with more cost performance, and the user conversion rate is low, which makes it impossible to form a follow-up word of mouth.
As a result, Hujiang has become an embarrassing situation of "large flow+high unit price+qualified products+few people", and its operation has fallen into a vicious circle.
Hujiang had a congenital deficiency in marketing, and later failed to make a breakthrough.
Hujiang has neither the deep reputation and vast resources of senior traditional education enterprises online, nor the continuous low-cost traffic that Netease, BAT and other big companies can import their own products. It can be said that there is a congenital deficiency in marketing efficiency; Judging from the obtained development, Hujiang's products failed to achieve the late-comer advantage like 5 1talk-quickly cut into the market from the teaching end through the Philippine teaching resources of "Internet geography overhead".
The data in recent years show that Hujiang's marketing efficiency is low and its cost remains high, which is much higher than the giants in the vertical field of education such as New Oriental Online.
Hujiang, whose competitive strategy is putting the cart before the horse, went to war in an all-round way but lost the game
20 16 is the year of education industry (financing) blowout, and various new teaching scene modes and new ways of playing are surging, with a total of 604 financing cases in the whole year. In the face of up-and-coming stars' indiscriminate bombing of products and brands, Hujiang, as an online learning platform, has accumulated brands for more than ten years, but it can't cope with it completely.
Under the great competitive pressure, Hujiang's strategy has put the cart before the horse.
On the one hand, Hujiang has expanded greatly for the purpose of card position. In that year, I invested in four education companies in one breath: italki (international language teaching trading platform), Haifeng Education (online one-on-one tutoring platform for primary and secondary schools), myOffer (international student learning borderless global cross-border service platform) and Seoul Education (Korean educational institution); On the other hand, from 20 15 to 20 17, the proportion of sales expenses in income was higher than the basic expenses such as content research and development, hiring faculty and staff, and renting office buildings, and it increased year by year.
"If you don't expand, you will die. If you don't expand well, you will die. Hujiang would rather die early. " Fu Cairui, the founder of Hujiang, said this on 20 16.
Hu Jiang, who is greedy for perfection, has no energy to do education, and most products only stay in passing. The competitors of Hujiang Online, such as new entrants in vertical fields such as ape tutor and VIPKID, are dedicated enough to make their products "good" or even "excellent". While rivals in various fields are sought after by capital, Hujiang, which is in full swing, is gradually dragged down in revenue.
The thin camel is bigger than the horse, but CCtalk, the last straw, has been pressing on the way to Hujiang market.
Hujiang's profit growth has been weak for more than three years. Under the pressure of listing, it chose to bet on CCtalk, a comprehensive platform of B2B2C. Telling stories to capital may be the right choice, but it is by no means a good choice.
CCtalk, launched on 20 12, is now a comprehensive online knowledge learning platform, which is taught by third-party educational institutions or network teachers who have settled in the platform. For Hujiang to consolidate its position in the online education industry and seize the emerging market of knowledge payment, it will be profitable within one year after going online. By the end of 17, the net transaction volume of CCtalk online courses was 240 million, with an average monthly activity of 230w and about 26 W paying users ... This is a glamorous report card. Telling stories with CCtalk is a correct choice.
2065438+At the beginning of March 2009, the news of Hujiang's gambling failure and mass layoffs attracted the attention of industry public opinion, which indirectly exposed many problems of CCtalk and its parent company Hujiang Online. Genetic defects, maternal fatigue, and all-round suppression have not made CCtalk a giant, but have turned it into a' four unlike'-everything is preserved everywhere. Telling stories with CCtalk is by no means a good choice.
The embryonic form of B2B2C platform model is B2C, which contains the genes of B2C and C2C business models. In both genes, advantages and disadvantages coexist.
In the C2C of "shopping mall mode", the platform is not the main business entity, but the matching of supply and demand information, and the content is more diversified, which is more likely to form scale effect; In the B2C mode of "e-commerce mode", enterprises, as the main body of operation, can focus on vertical fields, with high degree of product specialization and relatively controllable education quality. Under C2C mode, due to uncontrollable quality, uneven products and irregular trading activities, it is easy to swipe the bill and falsify data; Enterprises in B2C mode are limited to a single product line, so it is difficult to meet diversified needs.
Successful B2B2C platforms, such as Tmall from a big factory, can often learn from each other's strong points, while CCtalk from Hujiang seems to be unable to do this.
Although Hujiang has been involved in education for more than ten years, after all, Hujiang is not Taobao, and its C2C qualification is slightly shallow. The C2C gene is not strong enough for CCtalk platform to make up for the B2C defective gene, and the genetic problem has greatly affected the healthy development of CCtalk.
According to the report of 36Kr, a teacher taught in CCtalk. Ta said that the platform has developed well in terms of technical support (such as system, live broadcast system and extended functions) and can compete with platforms produced by big manufacturers such as Tencent Classroom. However, this person also mentioned that CCtalk has no small problems. Although the number of users and the flow of the platform are relatively fast, it has a large brush content; Moreover, the platform is still losing money.
Hujiang behind CCtalk is unable to support the severe B2B2C model.
In the business model, Hujiang online education can only do addition, not multiplication. In terms of "academic qualifications", they are not experienced enough, and because of the lack of precipitation in other fields in the language background; On the "online" side, it is not enough for the Internet (the marginal cost is almost zero), and it does not have the brand awareness and traffic advantage like BAT.
Hujiang's operational and technical capabilities are not enough to activate the heavy mode of the integrated platform, because the heavy burden distracts its energy in various business lines. The Shanghai River, which covets perfection, makes enemies everywhere. At the same time, it operates three business lines including CCtalk (the other two are Hujiang Online School and Hitalk), and the burden is extremely heavy. In 20 17, Hujiang spent about 590 million yuan on marketing and promotion alone, which was 4.5 times that of competitor New Oriental Online in the same echelon. However, it faces many other heavyweight competitors. The increase of business lines has not brought economies of scale to Hujiang, but it has made it difficult for the curriculum development of various categories of CCtalk to keep up with the pace of competing products.
The platform can't keep up with the development speed and personalized demand of the organization, and the high-quality webmasters who grow up will leave with the users, which has caused a great blow to the platform.
This is a borderless war. As a comprehensive platform, CCtalk in Hujiang is destined to face the competitive pressure from multiple dimensions. In addition to the cross-border pressure of the first echelon traffic giants, it is also facing competition from new and old players in various vertical comprehensive fields.
Similar comprehensive learning platforms such as Tencent Classroom and Netease Cloud Classroom are backed by major manufacturers, and their core competitive advantages are self-evident. The all-round suppression brought by these (such as traffic) is hard for Hujiang to confront; In the hot K 12 market, the study and thinking of ecological closed loop kept CCtalk out of the moat.
Search engine index can largely reflect the marketing effect of product brands. From the beginning of 20 16 to the end of March of 20 19, CCtalk has been suppressed by competitors of the same magnitude and super level for a long time: there is a big gap between the PC and Netease Cloud Classroom and Tencent Classroom, and no one cares about it on the mobile side. Whether it is mobile or PC, New Oriental Online, which is in the second echelon, is better than it most of the time.
In addition, CCtalk, which goes all out, also needs to face opponents from other fields. This is a borderless war, but the result seems to be a foregone conclusion.
CCtalk's slogan is "network experts gather in the world", which carries Hujiang's dream: to build a platform to connect content producers, educational institutions and students, empower both sides and enrich their limited curriculum systems.
As of the date of publication of this article, this dream has not been realized.
collateral reading
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