"It can be expected that after this move, it is estimated that the entire domestic after-sales ordinary automobile service chain will have to be cautious when releasing any marketing strategy."

Author | Huang Can

Competitive advantage comes from the ability of enterprises to create value beyond cost for customers.

-Michael Porter, Competitive Advantage

For the automobile service industry, the biggest problem during this period is that Hu Tu released the powertrain 10 year warranty service plan. It means that as long as the vehicles that meet the relevant requirements go to any Hutu store for designated maintenance items, as long as they are maintained according to the specifications, they can enjoy the service of 10 for free.

For a time, it caused quite a shock in the automobile aftermarket, and many professional media after the automobile rushed to report it. In fact, in the industry, the scheme of paint lifetime warranty, such as Little Finger, Cheqishi and other paint-based automobile service chains, has been put forward as early as a few years ago.

Moreover, the powertrain should be the first to release the concept of 10 year warranty. Master rabbit announced the news more than a month earlier than Hu Tu, and also held a special press conference. But there seems to be no movement in the industry, but the careless release has caused such a strong shock, which reminds me of the joke of a reporter and an old farmer:

The reporter asked the old farmer: If you have two cars, would you like to give one of them to the country? Old farmer: I am willing as long as the country needs it! The reporter asked again: If you have two villas, are you still willing to dedicate one of them to the country? Old farmer: I am a brick of the country. I must be willing to work wherever I need it! Reporter: If you have two cows, would you like to give one of them to your country? Old farmer: This won't work? Reporter: Why do you want to have a car and a villa, but not a worthless cow? Old farmer: Because I really have two cows! Now the boss of the automobile service industry is roughly the same as the old farmer's thought. No matter he is Pinky, Che Qishi or Master Rabbit, no marketing action can stir their nerves, because in their eyes, these chain stores cannot have a substantial impact on their operations. Different from Togo, any marketing action of Togo is dangerous to the operators of traditional automobile service shops, and it is a tangible competitive pressure.

The greater the reaction of automobile service shops, the more it shows that brutalization has formed a competitive advantage for traditional automobile service shops. In fact, there have been many professional articles in the industry to comment on this incident these days, so I won't teach fish to swim here. Today, let's talk about how this happened and what thoughts it will bring to the operators of traditional car service shops.

Obviously, this butcher incident was completely stepping on the butcher to cross the river, only occasionally. In May this year, TUHU launched 68 yuan maintenance activities in Zhengzhou, which caused great psychological pressure to the operators of automobile service shops in Zhengzhou.

Coincidentally, the "68 Maintenance Incident" also kicked down the bridge on the basis of the so-called maintenance war of Zhengzhou colleagues. This kind of game, which is eclectic, can be collected and released, and copied quickly, is actually very difficult if it is a single store, but it can be copied and shone on you in a short time on the large automobile service chain of so many franchise stores in China. This shows that Hu Tu has not lost its elasticity because of the rapid increase of body mass. Brutalization is still developing rapidly. You can say that he imitated plagiarism, which is irrelevant. The key is whether it works or not.

Predictably, after this move, it is estimated that the entire domestic post-automobile ordinary automobile service chain will have to be cautious when releasing any marketing strategy. In case you think it's good to follow the trend immediately, it's better than catching up late in the morning. The useful tricks of racking your brains in the early stage are scrap iron, which makes people speechless.

However, it is still unclear how effective the marketing strategy that cannot be released publicly can be. At the very least, the operating expenses it generates cannot be recovered. Marketing is mainly to watch the excitement not too big, and the excitement is gone. What can I do to get better results?

Let's go back to four years ago. Togo was unknown at that time, roughly to the extent that we had to consider where the next meal was. How did this obscure small company develop into a fighting giant in the post-automobile industry in such a short period of three or four years?

Whether you see it or not, he's here, and he won't come or leave. You said there were internet genes in graffiti. Why did he have more Internet genes in Aribi at that time, but he didn't know anything when he was working on the Ali car terminal, and he took the first place in eating? Obviously, Togo's current success has little to do with Internet genes.

For excellent people or companies, jealousy has no meaning except hurting their hearts and lungs. The correct approach should be to learn the logic behind the opponent. Every successful entrepreneur is not accidental, but inevitable. Some key nature must have created the foundation for success. Often the simpler the most critical element, the harder it is for others to imitate this simple thing, just like Mao Zedong's On Protracted War. I have seen it many times, but I still can't beat the Eighth Route Army.

Success is inseparable from environmental factors. When times make heroes, choice is greater than effort. In fact, Michael Porter has hit the nail on the head: a successful company mainly depends on three points: first, the overall situation of the industry, second, the situation of competitors, and finally, human factors. It is meaningless to talk about success without the environment. So, what changes have taken place in today's business environment compared with before? Let's keep talking.

The former chief operating officer of Procter & Gamble once put forward a concept, which can be regarded as an objective description of the current new business form. This word is pronounced Wuka in Chinese and called VUCA for short in English, which is the first letter of the variability, uncertainty, complexity and fuzziness of English vocabulary. I believe many car service shop owners are a little confused when they see this: Does this have anything to do with our car aftermarket?

In fact, this is not only related to the automotive aftermarket, but also closely related to any industry. If you want to know some dazzling stories in the automobile aftermarket in recent years, you really need to jump out of this industry and stand at a higher level to observe, and maybe you can find the answer.

At present, it is an indisputable fact that there are more and more competitors in the automotive aftermarket, the competition is becoming more and more fierce, and the industry profits are becoming more and more transparent. This is the normal competitive logic of the industry. Most car service shop owners actually understand that this will not bring pressure to car service shop operators. What really brings pressure to the operators of automobile service shops is the anxiety of facing the rapid change of business environment. What they are afraid of is not the lack of business, but the panic in the face of the unknown future.

Because people need goals and order, people get courage from goals and a sense of control from order. It was in the era of VUCA that the operators were deprived of both, the goal became a joke, and the order became a loss, but some people who completely violated your recognized business common sense succeeded. Isn't this scary?

From ancient times to the present, every profound social change will be accompanied by sharp social contradictions and even wars, from farming age to navigation age to industrial age.

Among them, the war in the industrial age was even bloodier. In the direct two world wars, social change will not only bring war, but also promote the substantial improvement of human productivity. The social changes brought by the industrial age have improved the productivity of human beings almost geometrically, but strangely, when we enter the new century and switch from the industrial age to the present information age, there are almost no large-scale wars.

The main reason is that the popularity of information makes it easier for people to accept new knowledge. With the continuous development of science and information technology, human knowledge is getting richer and more enlightened. Independent thinking ability is getting stronger and stronger, and it is naturally not easy for people to launch a large-scale war, but contradictions will not be eliminated and wars will not disappear, but will become more moderate, and the place where they appear is not the battlefield, but between businesses and companies.

A company is a collection of people, and the organizational structure of a large company is actually no different from that of a country. Since the war of social change from the industrial age to the information age is not a battlefield but a war between companies, and companies are made up of people, how to make people in companies play their strongest fighting power has become the key factor to win the war. You must not lose and win everything.

The information age not only brings us more powerful productive forces than the industrial age, but also brings us two most direct contradictions: first, the smoothness of information makes it more and more out of reach for people to fight alone like Don Quixote; Second, the smooth flow of information makes it more and more difficult for people to organize and cooperate effectively.

To put it simply: cooperation is becoming more and more important, but how to cooperate is becoming more and more difficult.

Cooperation in the industrial age is very simple: people are a screw on the assembly line, and the boss invites workers' hands, not brains. Moreover, the boss is afraid that workers have brains, and management serves capital. Even though frederick taylor originally wrote the book "Principles of Scientific Management" to improve the wages and treatment of front-line workers, he did not expect it to become a tool for capitalists to squeeze workers until his death.

At that time, if a company wanted to have a competitive advantage, it had to treat people as machines, and decompose a complex process into simple enough so that anyone could be competent after simple training. Later management theories were based on this.

Nowadays, a large number of pheasant business schools have mushroomed, just talking but not practicing, and interpreting these management theories of the last century in their own way, which has made a large wave of operators in the automobile service industry eager to change the status quo biased, which is really embarrassing. In the circle of WeChat friends, there are many such articles, and most of them are forwarded according to the traditional management mode, and they don't review their own problems, but say that others are not under the control of the boss.

In addition, there is a wave of bosses who directly adopt the policy of people living in poverty. Apart from reading the Three-Character Classics and reciting the Disciples' Rules, they left nothing of the golden mean. They use moral kidnapping to restrain employees' behavior and completely reverse history, but they don't know that these traditional things can't build a powerful China, and naturally they can't save a decadent enterprise.

Managing a team requires power, strictly speaking, the power to make a group of people willing to be managed by you. This power is called information in the industrial age: if you have information sources that others don't know, others will be managed by you willingly. And where does the management power in the information age come from? This involves two key rules. I think it's important to have a strong adaptability like Togo, and there are two rules:

1, alliance rule

When information is everywhere, an enterprise that treats employees as children has no future. For an enterprise, whatever the relationship between people is, the most important thing is to drive people to create wealth. The most important relationship that drives people's work in the future is not organizational relationship, but alliance relationship.

You have the resources and need the ability, I have the ability and need the resources, and everyone has the same goal, so make an alliance. When the goal is achieved, you get what you want, and I get what I want. Finally, the alliance ends until a new alliance is established.

In an alliance, the boss is not the boss, but the customer, the customer of your employees. If the resources you sell him are worth it, then he will use his ability to buy your resources and pay the price of obeying you, and vice versa.

In an alliance, the most important qualities are mutual respect and adherence to contracts (rules and regulations). Don't have the illusion of staying out just because you are the boss. Are the rules important? It's very important, but without the consent of employees, all the rules are worthless, because you don't respect your customers and naturally you can't get their support. A person who obeys your rules unconditionally has other motives or poor ability. If most employees in a car service shop listen to their boss, the enterprise will be hopeless.

The most important mentality of the alliance is to go all out and not specialize. What we should fight for is who works harder, not who is lazier. If Elon Musk doesn't work 120 hours a week, Mr. kazuo inamori doesn't work as hard as anyone else, but as some pheasant business schools have said: The highest level of management is to be a shopkeeper. How can he have such high achievements?

So far, Zong has visited dealers for more than 200 days every year. Traveling by plane alone in the middle of the night was not only photographed once or twice by others, but also photographed. As a car service shop the size of sesame seeds in front of them, who gave the boss the courage to be a shopkeeper? Fish Leong?

The excellent stores around me are hardworking and practical. Mr. Ouyang Fan, the operator of Zhongxiang Tengda Automobile Repair Factory, is a young man in 1988. He can achieve a monthly turnover of 550,000 without any accident. He arrives at the store at 7 o'clock every day and is the last to leave. However, no matter how busy you are, you will still find time to participate in new management and marketing methods.

In the future, I will have the opportunity to tell you in detail how Tengda Automobile Repair Factory increased its monthly turnover from 350,000 to 550,000 in two years. There are many such examples around me, which may give me the illusion that it is not difficult to run a car service shop, right?

2, the law of evolution

The law of evolution is the law of nature and the most important law of company development. In fact, the author of Evolution also mentioned it in a previous article, and mentioned it again because it is extremely important.

Evolution is to quickly adjust the state because of environmental changes and competitive pressures between species. In order to better adapt, IBM evolved from being a printer to being a smart city, and Amazon evolved from being an e-commerce to being a cloud server. Similarly, Togo's transformation from a single online platform to an offline store is also an evolution. What is the struggle of evolution? It is speed. The faster the evolution, the bigger the living space.

Because whether in nature or in business, competition is everywhere. Business competition comes not only from horizontal competition (between peers), but also from vertical competition (between upstream and downstream) and inter-bank competition (Tmall, Beijing Automobile Association). In the face of such competitors, what I fear most is not standing still, but getting harder and harder. What I fear most is degradation, that is, the so-called development to a strange place.

For example, robbing employees of their jobs: some car service shop operators often like to do something to cover up their lack of ability in the face of competition. They don't follow the path of employees, leaving employees with no way to go. After that, they said I was busy and I worked hard! This is not evolution, this is degeneration.

What's more, the culture that graduated from primary school has just learned how to use the internet, no matter whether it is solid or not, it has only learned a mouth. If you don't talk, your mouth is B2ABCDEFG. Looking at the simple use of mobile APP, I think development and maintenance is also a simple matter. Others can, so can I. This is not evolution, but also degeneration.

Evolution is to change oneself to meet the needs of market and development. Small steps of trial and error, rapid iteration, not necessarily suitable for small companies. Smart pig game may be the best choice. Innovation is not a problem for big companies. If the innovation of a small company has no core competitiveness, once the big company imitates it, it will only die faster. Even Togo can do this. As an ordinary car service shop, why not?

Know yourself and know yourself, and you will win every battle.

So much for today's topic. If you have any better suggestions, please leave a message in the comments section to correct me. I am Huang Can, and I thank the people of the whole country for their support to Wuhan and Hubei. I wish you good health and all the best!

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