In May 2009, Edifier's new M3plus and e20 products won the award at the German Red Dot Design Award at the same time. This was the first time that a domestic multimedia speaker product won this award. A company that dominates the world with one product can only become rich overnight. Only by building a brand through design can it become a century-old store. How Edifier relies on design to build its brand; does the Red Dot Award mean success? Why is industrial design the last trump card in corporate competition? To this end, our editor-in-chief Sun Ding had an in-depth exchange with Edifier chief designer Xie Xiaoguang.
Inevitable choice
Chinese enterprises have taken a development path from scratch to something, from something to good, and from good to excellent. Brand is an inevitable choice for the long-term survival of enterprises. How to build an irreplaceable brand? Chinese companies still need to make up lessons.
Sun Ding: It took Edifier chairman Zhang Wendong three years to successfully "persuade" you to serve as chief designer. Before that, you already had your own design studio and enjoyed a certain reputation in the industrial design world. Why did you choose Edifier, a relatively small company?
Xie Xiaoguang: When I joined in 2004, it was a period of confusion for the Edifiers. At that time, Edifier had become the leader in the domestic multimedia speaker market, but the market environment was relatively harsh. There were many manufacturers in the low-end audio industry with amazing production capacity, coupled with homogeneous products and exclusive distribution channels, etc., eventually As a result, most brands are struggling in the quagmire of price wars that give up development and just strive for survival.
How to break through? Chairman Zhang Wendong thought of building a brand. How to break through from the brand? He chose industrial design. This idea coincides with mine. In my opinion, most Chinese companies that emerged from OEMs lack brand awareness. Without brands, companies have no support and are as fragile as castles in the air.
Sun Ding: Edifier’s confusion is also the epitome of many Chinese companies. In your opinion, what path have Chinese companies taken in brand exploration?
Xie Xiaoguang: In general, it is a development path from scratch to something, from something to good, and from good to excellent. In an era when material needs are extremely scarce, the market determines the fate of Chinese companies. As long as they produce, they will make money. All brands are easy to sell, and most of them are huge profits. Later, similar products gradually increased, and consumers began to choose products with good quality and good service. Companies also began to pay attention to product quality and improve after-sales service from becoming rich overnight.
Now, the market has become saturated and homogeneous competition is serious. Especially with the financial crisis sweeping the world, many companies are facing life and death. In such a situation, brand has become the only way for an enterprise to survive and continue to grow. This is the transformation from good to excellent, establishing a brand and finding the spiritual support behind the brand. Unfortunately, many Chinese companies still need to make up lessons on this road.
Sun Ding: In fact, brand building runs through the entire process of the enterprise. In your opinion, what kind of branding is successful? Why do Chinese companies need to make up lessons?
Xie Xiaoguang: Forward-looking companies begin to pursue brand building from the very beginning. However, Chinese companies have taken a completely different path. In the stage of starting from scratch, many companies relied on a product to become rich overnight, thinking that gaining popularity meant establishing a brand.
In 1997, Aiduo VCD won the advertising title of CCTV with 212 million yuan, which was also the most prosperous year for China's VCD industry. However, spending money on advertising does not mean building a brand. Whether to choose technological research and compete with Japan's Sony and other companies on DVDs, or to choose to extend downward and open up channels through price, Aido General Manager Hu Zhibiao chose the latter. Later, we saw not only the collapse of Aido, but also the comprehensive counterattack of the Chinese VCD industry by Japanese DVD.
This lesson has to make us think deeply, what is a brand? It is irreplaceable, a fascinating and memorable sales.
For example, Porsche targets customers who are obsessed with "driving wisdom and riding technology". It has maintained a high-end brand image for many years and insisted on drawing a clear line from the low-end. The position in the hearts of consumers is irreplaceable. This is the essential meaning of the existence of the brand. The stronger the irreplaceability, the higher the brand value and the stronger the vitality of the enterprise.
Special path
Building brands is the only hope for enterprises to break through homogeneous competition. Chinese enterprises are facing this difficult road to break through from low-end to high-end.
Sun Ding: You just mentioned that Chinese companies must have the courage to give up on their current situation. What difficulties do Chinese companies face in brand breakthroughs?
Xie Xiaoguang: It is easy for a brand to move from high-end to low-end, but it is difficult to break through from low-end to high-end.
For example, Toyota’s brand strategy. Although it owns economical car brands such as Corolla, Toyota uses high-end brands such as Lexus, Crown and Reich to enter the Chinese market first. The purpose is very clear, which is to try to establish its high-end brand image and lay the foundation for the entry of more products in the future.
These are high-end brand strategies. Through high-end strategies, consumers will have a deep admiration and longing for the brand, thus forming irreplaceable spiritual support. After accumulating a certain amount of potential energy at the high end, and then sweeping across the middle and low end, there will be an unstoppable force, thus achieving victory across the board.
On the contrary, Chinese companies have chosen the path of breakthrough from low-end to high-end. This is determined by history. We have always been at the lowest end of the industry chain. It is very difficult to start from the bottom up, but it is not impossible, but the time and energy spent will be much greater. This is because it is too difficult to change the inherent impression. The brand is the imprint, and it takes a long process to subvert the previous image.
Sun Ding: How did the Ramblers break through on this road?
Xie Xiaoguang: In the first year I came to Edifier, I basically didn’t do much. I was just thinking about how to break through into high-end brands. We have identified a differentiated market, which is the field of multimedia audio. At that time, the audiophile audio hifi market was becoming increasingly saturated and began to decline. MP3 was rapidly rising. How to fix MP3 at home and spread it through audio? This was an emerging market. Later, the popularity of computers brought about multimedia audio. explosive growth.
Focusing on this differentiated market, Edifier chose to use industrial design as a means to make high-end breakthroughs. To some extent, industrial design is the last trump card in corporate competition.
In 2007, we participated in the CES held in Las Vegas for the first time in the United States. At the booth, foreigners arrogantly ordered us around, and they entered the ring before we had even mastered our kung fu. As a result, Just punch someone back. In 2008, after a year of dormancy, we struck again, and two products won the German IF Design Award; in 2009, Edifier was finally proud and won two German Red Dot Awards.
Winning awards in international competitions objectively proves Edifier's brand philosophy and values, which is the value orientation of sublimating simple material needs to spiritual needs.
The last trump card
Industrial design is the last trump card in corporate competition. Excellent brands must have the ability to design the future.
Sun Ding: As you said, Edifier has frequently won international design awards since 2008. For a company, winning awards is recognition of its design, but it is not a sufficient condition for its success. Do you think that one or two award-winning products can drive the transformation of an enterprise?
Xie Xiaoguang: Winning awards and branding are two different things. It is our honor to receive unanimous recognition from various international awards and judges. But as we have repeatedly emphasized: the existence of a brand lies in creating irreplaceable value for its target customers. In other words, making our target customers proud of using Edifier products is the highest honor we pursue.
In 2003, when faced with how to defeat Chinese manufacturing, all walks of life in Japan expressed their opinions, among which the "Five Aces" of the famous Japanese news agency Nikkei BP were the most famous.
In the view of President Hisao Yoshimura, as long as the Japanese manufacturing industry works hard in five aspects, it can definitely win in the confrontation with Chinese manufacturing. These five aspects are: advanced production methods, timely response to customers, patented technology, quality brand, and product design and development.
"Product design and development" is the basis of the five trump cards. If the other four items are "city-defending cards", then "product design and development" is the "city-building card". Without this card , other cards cannot be attached. On the journey of branding, industrial design has become the last trump card in corporate competition.
Sun Ding: So, is it feasible for Chinese companies to introduce design into their brands and lead corporate transformation through design?
Xie Xiaoguang: The limitations are relatively large. First, the company's own understanding of design. Taking the audio industry as an example, the mainstream products of most domestic audio companies still remain in the form of products with pure functional performance, and they still have little regard for design. Based on the superficial understanding of appearance, this is also the prejudice of many companies towards design.
Second, resources are limited. It only took 10 years for Korean design to rise. The Korean government provides various financial and technical support for industrial design through the Design Promotion Institute. In contrast, China's design environment resources are really limited, and it lacks a platform for the continuous production of new products.
Sun Ding: You just mentioned the limitations of corporate awareness of design. So, what do you think is the essential significance of design in shaping corporate brands?
Xie Xiaoguang: Let’s look at Apple. Before the advent of the iPhone, no one would have thought that a mobile phone would have only one button, and no one would have thought that the interface could be controlled by sliding the screen with your finger. Apple thought of it, and it designed the future for us. Mobile phones, a manufacturer that has never made a mobile phone has led a revolution in the mobile phone industry.
This is the meaning of design, designing life for consumers and planning the future for consumers. Therefore, enterprises must have strong foresight and advanced implementation capabilities.
We have seen that Apple and Samsung often break through technical difficulties at all costs to turn design drawings into reality. Especially for Steve Jobs, the product molds were ready, and he overturned all his ideas and started over the day before mass production. This was not only a dedication to design, but also a judgment of the future, because they knew that every time they added a bright spot to the product, they would It can throw the opponent an extra hundred kilometers.
Interview notes
All-rounder
Before interviewing Xie Xiaoguang, I had an in-depth exchange with Zhang Wendong, chairman of Edifier, who was called "Xie Xiaoguang" by Zhang Wendong. The designer "Master" has a very high status in Edifier. He lives in simplicity and does not have to work, but he is a participant in the company's strategic decision-making. His joining has opened the door to Edifier's high-end products.
What kind of designer is this? It seems that he should be unsmiling and have long hair with the temperament of an artist.
The interview was about two o'clock in the afternoon. We arrived half an hour early and were chatting with the Edifier marketing manager when we heard a man walking in saying "Sorry, I'm late!" "Master Xie" is very "youthful", wearing a black T-shirt and black pants, which is a bit "cool"; "Master Xie" is also very bold, full of witty remarks, and laughs unabashedly everywhere.
In that era when academic performance was the benchmark, Xie Xiaoguang, who loved painting, said that he had been restless since he was a child and had never been favored by his grandma. In the early 1990s, after completing his solo exhibition, Xie Xiaoguang entered the audio industry that he was obsessed with. He opened his own company to "tinker" with audio, from design to production to sales. In 1996, he quit the business and went south to Shenzhen to open a design studio to design corporate images. Before joining Edifier, Xie Xiaoguang was a well-known designer in Shenzhen's industrial design community. It took Zhang Wendong a lot of effort to recruit him to Edifier.
In the conversation, Xie Xiaoguang rarely talked about design itself, but looked at design from the perspective of corporate strategy.
He said that design itself is a process of constant search. Only when the brand has life can the design have inspiration. Why can Xie Xiaoguang stand at such a height? Over the years, his experience as a "jack of all trades" has given him a different perspective on design and business. No wonder, Zhang Wendong would rather “work” for three years before inviting him to join Edifier, because design is not a castle in the air. Only by going deep into corporate strategy can design be given real meaning. (Text/He Yuan)
President’s sentiments
Insisting on high-end products
On the first day he came to Edifier, Xie Xiaoguang told Chairman Zhang Wendong that he must achieve Breakthrough at the high end and dare to give up the low end. Xie Xiaoguang's persistence in high-end products stems from his own experience in audio production.
In the early 1990s, Xie Xiaoguang, who was obsessed with audio, established Gospel Audio Technology Company. With an art background, he did his own design and marketing, and insisted on hand-made products. At that time, the hifi market was already heating up, and many large companies had achieved large-scale mass production. How could a "workshop" with only a few dozen people win the market?
“If we don’t have enough production capacity, we can only insist on product value.” Xie Xiaoguang said. In 1992, Gospel launched a top-end audio system with a price tag of 240,000 yuan. It was handmade and distinguished from appearance to material. At the 2nd International Audio Exhibition, the little-known gospel became an instant hit.
“High-end brands attract the attention of thousands of people and have irreplaceable uniqueness.” Xie Xiaoguang, who is accustomed to bloody price wars at the low end, firmly believes that breaking through from the high end must be a shortcut to building a brand.
However, breaking through from the high end means subverting and denying oneself, enduring loneliness, and betting one's fortune and life on product development and design. "The more you cling to the little sense of security you have, the easier it is to be swallowed up by the torrent of competition." Xie Xiaoguang said.
Rambler chose this path. Although Xie Xiaoguang has repeatedly emphasized that winning awards for one or two products cannot represent the success of high-end breakthroughs. However, when domestic speakers and internationally renowned speakers appeared in top audio stores in the United States for the first time, and when Chanel’s design director purchased two Edifier M500s at one time in Paris, we knew that there were such companies in China that were using design Keep moving forward on the road to breakthrough brands. (Text/He Yuan)