Why is Lei Jun so busy with Xiaomi NOTE?

[[133904]]

Have you noticed? Many of Xiaomi’s laws are changing starting with NOTE.

for example:

1. Xiaomi has tried to keep each generation of its products as single as possible. However, Xiaomi NOTE is different. From the regular version to the goddess version, to the Zhang Jie version, and then to the top version, new models have been released continuously in the past few months.

2. Xiaomi used to pay more attention to enthusiasts, but now it also pays attention to the fashion circle, entertainment circle and high-end people. Lei Jun did not attend the IT Leaders Summit or the Boao Forum this year, but participated in the Beijing Film Festival and performed with Huang Xiaoming.

3. In the past, Xiaomi insisted on online sales, and e-commerce channels were the guarantee for the lowest prices. However, the top-end version of Xiaomi NOTE can be purchased directly from the offline channel of Xiaomi Home.

Some changes are happening to Xiaomi and Lei Jun. Why did Lei Jun make so much effort on Xiaomi NITE this year?

After the release of the top-end version of Xiaomi NOTE, we slowly began to find the answer - after five years of rapid development, Xiaomi has abandoned its original intention in order to cater to the market. NOTE will help Xiaomi find its original intention and help Xiaomi get out of the brand dilemma after rapid growth.

There is no doubt that the launch of the top-end version of Xiaomi NOTE has received more praise from the market.

"I tested this phone in both China and the United States, and I found that it has become a strong rival to both the top and the latest models of Apple and Samsung with its high-end quality and beautiful appearance, while the price of Xiaomi NOTE is much cheaper." -- This is the evaluation of Xiaomi NOTE by Dr. Mo, one of the most popular technology reviewers in the United States. Yes, most people who got the new phone at the first time gave such positive feedback.

However, "a beautiful and fast" mobile phone is not the most important role of Mi Note, it represents much more than that. For the Xiaomi brand, Mi Note is not only a flagship product with high expectations, but also a return to the core value of the brand and a reunion of the core Mi fans.

As the low-end smartphone market gradually becomes saturated and local manufacturers are rushing to move up, what strategy has Xiaomi chosen? Lei Jun's answer is: make the product popular again and reunite the core Mi fans. Restart the social brand building process when Xiaomi established itself in smartphones from 0 to 1, so as to complete its foothold in the high-end market and increase the brand added value.

Lei Jun has been constantly innovating and coming up with new ideas on NOTE this year, and has also "dedicated" himself to the entertainment industry. When the top-end version of Xiaomi NOTE was released, it was a series of unconventional measures. It can be seen that Xiaomi is eager to return to the original intention of the brand, and it can also be seen that Xiaomi is eager for the high-end market, and it can also be seen that Xiaomi is worried about slowing growth.
Divergence: catering to the market and a crisis of faith

In fact, from Mi 3 to the launch of Mi Note, Xiaomi and its fans have been facing a "crisis of faith."

Mi 3 is a slightly awkward model. If we only look at the sales volume, Mi 3 is not a small number. But compared with Mi 1, the "founding hero", and Mi 2, which became a true arcade machine and maintained its vitality for a very long time, it seems to lack some breakthroughs.

What is even more disappointing is that the Mi 3 is a model that cannot justifiably say that it is "made for enthusiasts". The simplest example is that Xiaomi did not launch Qualcomm's latest CPU in China for the first time, and later it was involved in an unclear "U-changer" scandal.

It was also in 2013 when Xiaomi 3 was launched that a large number of competitors such as Honor and Nubia, which also took the route of Internet brands and high cost performance, began to appear. Xiaomi's previous success was largely due to its effective surprise attack in a different business model dimension (the so-called "Internet model") before its competitors reacted. But now others are also following suit, and Xiaomi has to face close combat with Huawei and ZTE.

After Mi 3, Mi 4 was released in 2014. Mi 4 is even more of a "rebellious" product: it is so beautiful and elegant that even Luo Yonghao praised it highly. Mi 4 caters to the needs of a large number of general consumers, making Xiaomi a truly mass brand. It is completely different from Mi 1 and Mi 2, which "have no design to speak of", and it also wipes out the ridicule brought by Mi 3, which was called "ugly Nokia". Therefore, Mi 4 naturally won the favor of the market and was considered to be a new generation of "arcade seeds" that could surpass the legend of Mi 2.

But what about the hardware configuration of Mi 4? Xiaomi no longer mentions the word "fever" at this time.

Although Xiaomi has continued to hit new highs in sales figures over the past year or so, it has begun to be shrouded in a shadow. That is, an identity crisis: What kind of company is Xiaomi? What kind of people are Mi fans?

Xiaomi’s brand building process is as follows:

MIUI gathered a group of geek users (the earliest Mi fans) → completed social marketing through the mouths of opinion leaders among these enthusiasts → after the phone was launched, novice users saw a super cost-effective model recommended by almost all "forum masters"... In short, the impression of the Xiaomi brand in the minds of the general public (core reputation) is this: 1. Unique and super cost-effective, at least in the Android camp, the price can be cut in half that of Samsung with the same configuration; 2. There are many "masters" among the users, and using the phones recommended by them is affordable and also appears to be knowledgeable.

However, a series of events that occurred after the Mi 2 era and before the Mi NOTE era are actually deconstructing the image of Xiaomi that has been well known to the public:

1. Mi 3 and Mi 4 did not continue the technological excellence of Mi 1 and Mi 2, but only maintained a certain degree of cost-effectiveness. However, now is an era where Internet brands and high-cost-effective mobile phones are everywhere. Xiaomi is not the only manufacturer that has an absolute cost-effectiveness advantage over Samsung, and even among the manufacturers holding high the banner of "cost-effectiveness", it can only be considered the leader.

2. Although the Redmi series is an independent brand, it still gives people the impression that "Xiaomi is sinking into the low-end mobile phone market."

3. If the general public is not sensitive enough to the configuration changes of Mi 3 and Mi 4, then the core "Mi fans" who have been following Xiaomi from the beginning can see it. At the beginning, it was because they "understood" that they were able to agree with Xiaomi's extreme route; it was also because of "understanding" that they were able to do reviews and give analyses, so they were respected as "gods" and played a backbone role in social marketing. But now, Mi 3 and Mi 4 have given them a sense of identity crisis: Is this Xiaomi still the focused and extreme Xiaomi that attracted me at the time?

In fact, if you think about it carefully, the strategy of Mi 3 and Mi 4 is also inevitable: in the process of Xiaomi's rapid expansion and attracting huge social attention, it is inevitable that the main audience (in terms of quantity) has become ordinary users, or even "novice users". At this time, if Xiaomi does not "cast a wide net" once or twice to capture a large number of users, then Xiaomi may always be a niche brand. So Xiaomi could not wait. For Mi 3, no matter how difficult the supply chain is, it must first release a large-screen mobile phone to occupy the market; temporarily put aside the extreme hardware and make the appearance more beautiful to wash away the bad reputation of "ugly mobile phone".

Xiaomi is now a first-tier brand, and the public recognizes its brand image of "super cost-effective, people who know it choose it", and this image comes from the word of mouth of hardcore users. So if the strategic adjustment of the Mi 3 and Mi 4 products makes hardcore users lose that sense of "extreme", how can Xiaomi maintain its image?
Upgrading: Brand reconstruction and market breakthrough

It is not difficult to find that there is only one core contradiction in Xiaomi’s dilemma: on the surface, it is the contradiction between the mass route and the geek route; in essence, it is the contradiction between the ambitions of a giant and the extreme feelings.

To realize the ambition of a giant, it must take the mass route. It is almost impossible to create another "Apple". However, taking the mass route, launching a better appearance, and giving up the ultimate cost-effectiveness to ensure the profit space necessary for expansion will inevitably lead to the collapse of the previous brand building and social marketing foundation - Xiaomi will gradually lose the halo of "the king of cost-effectiveness, born for enthusiasts". In the already fierce and homogenized cost-effectiveness war, it will lose its first-mover advantage.

In order to retain core users and maintain word of mouth, it is necessary to release enough emotions. However, this is actually quite difficult after Xiaomi has become a first-tier manufacturer, at least it is not the same as when it was first established: and in this era where everyone is selling extreme hardware, competing for cost-effectiveness, and adopting Internet models, it has to pay a much higher price to regain the effect of standing out from the crowd like in 2011.

This is actually the problem that successful niche brands in any field will inevitably experience after gradually attracting attention and users to become mass brands: with more customers, it is naturally difficult to satisfy everyone; if you want to meet the needs of novice users, it is inevitable that the core leading users will feel that you are losing face; but the needs of core users are inevitably "heavy" or inexplicable to ordinary people. What's more, the smartphone market is a bloody sea. Every right step will be followed by countless people, and any wrong step will be immediately trampled underfoot.

How to break through? Xiaomi NOTE, in terms of brand image, has returned to the extreme, and its benchmark has also been raised to high-end phones from Apple and Samsung, re-finding a safe position in the current competitive environment.

In fact, for the construction of Xiaomi's entire brand, the strategy of Mi NOTE is also a return: when Xiaomi was from 0 to 1, it relied on attracting opinion leaders to cultivate word of mouth, and then attracted general users to break through the entry threshold of the mobile phone industry. In the Mi 3 and Mi 4 era, the strategy of directly targeting general users was adopted as an emergency measure to consolidate the rapidly growing Mi fans.

When the low-end market was saturated and it was time to re-enter the mid-to-high-end market from scratch, Xiaomi chose to return to its most familiar rhythm: re-gathering hardcore Mi fans and letting them charge forward. Then, it gradually eroded the high-end market through the good reputation of the top-end version of Xiaomi NOTE among the "great gods".

There is only one reason why they must be at the forefront: in the mid-to-high-end market, only pretentiousness can break pretentiousness. Only the masters can break the pretentiousness of the nouveau riche ("You have money, I have intelligence"). Only the "reputation of Xiaomi by the forum masters" can break "Jobs' distorted reality position". In fact, think about it, isn't the construction of the Apple brand the same? The reason why Apple products have always given people a cool impression is not because the core users at the beginning were cool hipsters and DJs?

Xiaomi faced severe market challenges in 2015: on the one hand, the market growth rate was declining, and on the other hand, there were more and more competitors, including warriors like Zhou Hongyi. It was too difficult for Xiaomi to maintain rapid growth and not lose market share. There were two directions to choose from: one was to enter the high-end market, and the other was to enter the overseas market. Undoubtedly, both of these required NOTE-level products.

The biggest gap between domestic mobile phone brands and Apple and Samsung is not hardware configuration, but brand premium and user loyalty. Fortunately, we see that major domestic manufacturers are working hard to build their brands, consolidate their reputations, and make up for this shortcoming. Specifically for Xiaomi, using the product "return to the extreme" to complete the reconstruction of the brand and the die-hard fan team is undoubtedly an attempt with unlimited potential.