Zhou Hang | Director of Humanities and Economics Society, founder of Easy-to-use Car.
The Internet has always spawned a lot of "big talk". O2O, VOD and * * * enjoy the economy, and so on. These "big words" have become the industry gimmicks that the media are competing to comment on, and have become the basis for capital to compete for "telling stories". Xiaoyan of Sequoia launched an interesting question that day: "Is it personalized or efficient to enjoy the economy?" Before I say discuss? First make clear the difference between O2O, VOD and * * * enjoying the economy, and then discuss the issue of "* * * enjoying the economy".
O2O, as its name implies, is the diversion from online to offline. The core problem it solves is how offline businesses find users online. In the past, offline service enterprises mainly relied on brands, word of mouth, natural geographical passenger flow formed by user habits, advertising and repurchase to "get customers". Now O2O has brought them online passenger flow. In this field, the most typical model is the traditional "group purchase".
Really? On demand is another concept. It is more of a service to meet people's demand for speed (efficiency). Both car use and "on-site service" belong to this category. Compared with the traditional commercial service, this model first abandons the previous shelf model that starts with products and merchants, and instead takes the user's needs as the starting point to meet the user's service experience through intelligent matching. At present, there are many door-to-door services in the market besides car use, such as door-to-door housekeeping, door-to-door car washing, door-to-door manicure, etc ... But the problem is that in addition to services with high timeliness requirements such as "car use", a large number of long-tail life services have low requirements for matching speed and timeliness, but higher requirements for personalized selection. This may be one of the reasons why no big companies other than cars were born on demand.
* * * The biggest feature of enjoying the economy is that individuals use idle resources to provide services.
Speaking of "* * * enjoyment", I want to start from? Let's talk about the supply side, consumer user experience and platform business model.
1, power supply side
As far as the economy is concerned, its supply side is undoubtedly very individual. Because it organizes a large number of individual and idle resources, these resources have their own characteristics and vary widely. Different resources have their own "personalized" attributes, which are non-standard, non-uniform and non-standardized, and it is difficult to be "managed" in the traditional sense. Just like we can't ask only drivers who wear white gloves, black suits and drive Passat on the platform (but we can expect to experience Magotan, Tesla, A6L, Bentley and Bugatti ...). Due to the extensive connectivity of the Internet, it is very convenient to organize and supply resources, forming a powerful "flexible supply network" in the cloud. Increased demand stimulates more supply; When demand weakens, supply will automatically decrease. * * * Enjoying the supply of the economy presents a very obvious "cloud economy" feature.
2. Consumer user experience
The user experience on the consumer side is a very challenging issue in the enjoyment economy. As we mentioned earlier, because the supply side is nonstandard, flexible and irregular, it becomes more difficult to provide a standard, unified and predictable user experience on the consumer side. Looking at this issue in the larger background of the times, the public's aesthetics and interests have long been deeply educated by the standards of the industrial age. Our ideas and behaviors will naturally tend to be a logic of "industrial modernization"-expecting to get standard, unified and predictable services. For example, McDonald's and Home Inns anywhere in the world will provide consistent products and services (even if they are not good), but we are used to this more reliable, but almost rigid, inflexible and impersonal experience in the industrial age. At present, * * * enjoys the new challenges brought by the economy to the industrial age, just as the industrial age challenged and reformed the traditional agriculture and handicraft age many years ago.
Products and services before the industrial age were all small-scale manual operations, and only a few rich people could obtain more exquisite, spiritual and artistic products or services. In the industrial age, the standard and reproducible production mode and production scale determine the cost ability, and large-scale production has a greater desire for large-scale market. Therefore, the industrial age provides a more equal and consistent mass consumption experience, but it also makes users lose the fun of customization on demand. The creativity of the whole society is suppressed. The most typical example here is the famous "Chaplin film" in the industrial age, which mostly reflects people's ridicule and anxiety about the monotony, rigidity and loss of individuality in the industrial age.
If we think that * * * enjoys the economic future, it will be the general trend. So as a practitioner, how should we create a new experience of enjoying the economy? And let this experience transcend the standardization of the industrial age, and let users form new expectations and standards in their concepts and behavior habits? This is the key to the real success of all our related entrepreneurs.
In my opinion, this requires us to establish a new experience standard of enjoying the economy and advocate a new civilization of enjoying the economy. ? This experience must first be full of personality, surprise and expectation. Among them, the relationship between consumers and suppliers is equal, which is different from the concepts of "I respect customers" and "customers are God" in the industrial age. Consumers and suppliers need to respect each other, and the service should be sincere, emotional and personalized, so that users will ignore the small problems caused by the "non-standard" attribute of * * * resources and devote themselves to an emotional, surprise and expectation experience. In this process, although the supplier's service is not standard, it is full of sincerity of "I try my best to give you the best". In this regard, Airbnb and many inns in China have done a good job, making people willing to abandon monotonous hotels and choose homestays full of surprises. Abandon stereotyped writing "standard" and enjoy the surprise.
With equal relationship, reasonable platform mechanism makes strangers willing to trade based on trust relationship; Only suppliers can truly serve sincerely, on the contrary, users will understand and solve the problems in service with an inclusive attitude.
I only believe? We should establish and advocate a new civilization of equality, trust and tolerance, and let sincerity, individuality and surprise become a new experience of enjoying civilization. Only in this way can "enjoying the economy" become a brand-new era completely different from traditional industrial civilization.
3. Platform business model
Besides,? The business model of the platform is also a very challenging issue in the enjoyment economy. First of all, compared with the industrial economy, enjoying the economy is more like an "informal economy". It is not so much an economic form in the form of a company as an individual as a business entity. In order for users to accept non-standard services, * * * economic services must have a price advantage over "regular" services. Only in this way, users will "buy" if they are willing to try, and also create an opportunity to experience the new characteristics of the economy different from the traditional economy, so as to get a sense of surprise, accept and promote this way. Therefore, the "low-price strategy" is the basis for * * * to enjoy the economy from niche, early adopters, serving young people and sensitive people to the whole people and mass services. Low price is an important feature of * * * enjoyment economy, and it is also the first-class rocket for * * * enjoyment economy enterprises to quickly move towards scale.
And can the "low price strategy" make low prices become the norm through sufficient scale without subsidies? This is no small challenge, and I believe many enterprises also hope so. At present, some platforms hope to master pricing power after monopoly, and then raise prices, but this idea is unrealistic. Because it deviates from the basic principle of enjoying the economy-that is, making cheap and low prices the norm. * * * After enjoying the economic low price, it will form a certain scale, and it will be connected? Scale amortization and network effect gradually reduce costs. But it may not be possible to reduce the cost low enough to maintain long-term low prices. This result will lead to "endless subsidies and drugs can't stop."
Therefore, enjoying the economy still needs other forms of business innovation to support the implementation of low-price strategy, and "innovation" can also adopt the mode of cross-border cooperation. In this process, economic products enjoy their own density, scale and flow effects on other cross-border products or services, and make long-term low prices possible by using value transfer. If scale effect and value transfer can be well combined, long-term low prices can be guaranteed; At the same time, the platform can also gain benefits through cross-border. Especially for internet companies, it has the characteristics of light assets. When an enterprise has a certain scale effect and maintains a stable and reasonable business income structure, the cost will not expand. Enterprises can form a stable business model.
Speaking of cost, we need to pay attention to some "? Pseudo * * * enjoy the economy "form. What these platforms provide is essentially just. Online service, the way to organize resources still depends on fixed assets and B2C model, but it has packaged itself into a new * * * enjoyment economy. This model will make enterprises fall into a strange circle-the heavier the assets, the worse the marginal effect. Because the acquisition cost of assets is fixed, it does not have the flexibility of "* * * enjoying resources". Enterprises can't guarantee that every fixed asset is in a benign working state under the ideal mode in real time, and the service density of fixed cost will inevitably have an extremely sparse time period. The growth of supply and demand is not linearly synchronous, so it is easy to fall into the "bullwhip effect" in the supply chain. Therefore, these enterprises will gradually fall into the trap of larger scale and greater losses. Not to mention their management mode, to make an image metaphor, "pseudo-enjoying economy" will force employees to compile and control like assembly line workers in the industrial age, and even turn "service" itself into an industrialized product. This in itself violates the character and humanity of today's times.
The real enjoyment of * * * needs to "get rid of the false and keep the true".
* * * Enjoying the economy is spreading charm, but it is also full of challenges. These charms and challenges are especially reflected in the user experience and business model. This is also a never-ending journey. Entrepreneurs who enjoy the economy need to be more diligent, harder and smarter, and solve it with innovation. Let's work together, for a more efficient allocation of social resources, a warmer service experience, and a sincere, trusting and inclusive social state, * * * will welcome * * and enjoy a bright new economic future.
Originally published in the author's official number: don't raise your hand when you talk, welcome to pay attention.