Mafengwo Product Analysis

Many people yearn for poetry and distant places, and heal their body and mind through a trip in between busy work. The epidemic has brought unprecedented challenges to the tourism industry and promoted rapid changes in the industry. Whoever can grasp the changes in user preferences and accelerate the layout of new content will be able to overtake others.

Since I first came into contact with Mafengwo in college, it has accompanied me on all my independent travels. I will happily spend several days reading most of the travel guides for the destination, just to plan a satisfactory itinerary and leave unforgettable footprints. I am trapped in the suburbs where transportation is inconvenient every day. Perhaps only when I take a break from my busy schedule to read Fengshou Travel Notes can I get a glimpse of "poetry and distant places".

In 2020, the tourism industry ushered in its "darkest hour", and tourism practitioners experienced an unprecedented crisis throughout the year. But I firmly believe that crisis and opportunity coexist. This accident has also promoted the rapid transformation of the tourism industry. Whoever can grasp the new changes in user preferences and accelerate the layout of new content will be able to overtake others.

1. Product Structure

2. Market Analysis

2.1 Industry Background

With the improvement of domestic economic consumption level, the domestic tourism market continues to grow and tourism consumption continues to heat up. From 2011 to 2019, domestic tourism reception volume and revenue scale increased year by year. The 2020 epidemic dealt a heavy blow to the tourism industry. At the same time, it profoundly affected the development direction and competitive landscape of the tourism service industry, prompting the industry to accelerate its transformation. At present, the tourism industry has achieved remarkable results in its fight against the epidemic, but the epidemic has dealt a double blow to both the demand and supply sides. The reconstruction of consumer confidence, changes in tourists' behavioral preferences after the epidemic, and the continued pressure of epidemic prevention have all meant that the recovery of the travel services industry still faces considerable challenges.

The epidemic has brought new changes to the industry.

• According to independent research conducted by the China Tourism Academy, 21.7% of companies tried live streaming to sell goods during the epidemic; 43.4% of companies used platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu as their main marketing channels. When people themselves become channels, the era of personal branding is coming.
• The supply chain is showing a trend of decentralization and shortening, with more and more new business entities entering the supply chain.
• Market segmentation is the future of tourism, and the era of mass tourism is about to arrive. The portrait of each tourist is labeled with more detailed labels, and the motivation for each trip may become more specific. These personalized, segmented and professional market demands require travel service providers to meet them with more innovative and professional services.

2.2 PEST-Macro Analysis

2.3 Market Overview

Research data shows that the Internet has gradually become the biggest way for Chinese tourists to make travel decisions, and more than 60% of users' travel decision information comes from Internet-related travel decision-making platforms. At the same time, the online travel and vacation market maintained a stable and improving trend. In 2018, the scale of self-operated transactions in China's online vacation market was 84.67 billion yuan, an increase of 19.3% over 2017. With the further increase in mobile Internet penetration and people's growing willingness to travel, it is estimated that in 2021, the scale of self-operated transactions in China's online vacation market will exceed 100 billion yuan.

Figure 1 Data source: iResearch Consulting

After several years of "melee", the online travel industry's industrial chain has gradually been segmented. Major travel apps have already accurately covered various needs such as domestic and international travel, long and short distance travel, group travel or independent travel, etc. They occupy different ecological niches based on their own differences.

Figure 2 Data source: BiDa Consulting

Since Ctrip acquired a stake in eLong in 2015 and merged with Qunar, it has become the dominant player in the hotel industry, with its market share climbing to 89%. Its transportation ticketing revenue soared 96% to 8.8 billion yuan that year. Since then, Qunar and Tongcheng eLong have no longer posed a threat to Ctrip. Since 2015, the hotel and travel businesses of Fliggy and Meituan have emerged as new forces. Although their market size is still far behind that of Ctrip, judging from their development trends, they will have a great impact on Ctrip's domestic hotel business in the future.

This poses a threat to travel and outbound tourism business.

Figure 3 Data source: Analysys

3. Competitive Product Analysis

3.1 Identify competing products

Among travel service apps, we initially selected three competing apps, namely Ctrip, Fliggy and Qyer, for in-depth use and analysis based on comprehensive factors such as ASO, download rankings and business models. Ctrip is an integrated OTA company that earns commissions as a middleman. Fliggy is an OTP company known as the "Taobao of the travel industry", allowing merchants to join the platform and connect directly with users. Mafengwo relies on a rich and high-quality UGC community to provide travel guides and personalized planning. Qyer is also mainly a travel guide UGC community, but it is more inclined towards outbound travel.

3.2 Product Positioning

3.2 Number of active users of competing products

Figure 4 Data source: Analysys Qianfan

In the early "blue ocean", Ctrip gradually took the top spot in the travel app market by virtue of its rich travel packages, partners all over the world, and steady accumulation of users. From the picture we can see that after Ctrip acquired Qunar, it formed a scale effect and gained huge traffic. The platform's monthly active users successfully topped the list, and Mafengwo ranked second. The author believes that Mafengwo’s temporary lag in traffic is due to both industry factors and product positioning.

First, with the investment of Internet giants, the competition for tourism traffic has become increasingly fierce. Backed by Alibaba, Fliggy has Alipay and other Alibaba-related traffic sources, a complete membership points reward system, and linkage with other Alibaba-related apps, enabling it to maintain a relatively high level of traffic. Ctrip was founded early and has cultivated a large number of users who have developed usage habits. In addition, relying on continuous investment layout, especially after the acquisition of Qunar, it has become the leading company. In 2019, Mafengwo announced a partnership with Tencent's Tongcheng-Elong. The two parties will create a closed-loop model from UGC to a one-stop travel platform under the WeChat ecosystem to provide differentiated travel services. Although it has the traffic from Tencent, Mafengwo still has shortcomings such as a low variety of products on its e-commerce platform and an incomplete customer service and after-sales system, facing strong competitors with complete and mature systems. This undoubtedly limits its further development.

Secondly, Mafengwo focuses on travel guide community. When people are traveling for business, visiting relatives and friends, or working, the demand for booking train tickets, plane tickets, and hotels is strong and frequent. Mafengwo inevitably lacks competitiveness in the face of traditional OTA and OTP platforms. Although this world is not just about the immediate, but also about poetry and distant places, the demand for travel for the purpose of "poetry and distant places" is relatively small in the entire market. The scale of travel demand has affected the number of active users on Mafengwo to a certain extent.

3.3 User Retention Rate

Figure 5 Data source: Analysys Qianfan

According to the user next-month retention rate in June 2020 disclosed by iResearch Qianfan, Mafengwo was 22.9%, ranking first among all competitors. Unlike the relatively low number of active users on the platform in the industry, Mafengwo has achieved a breakthrough in user retention rate. To a certain extent, this shows that high-quality travel UGC communities can not only help users plan their itineraries, but also stimulate their willingness to produce and share content after their trip, and continue to pay attention to travel communities for interaction.

3.4 Community Experience

Mafengwo is an "online travel service platform" with "content + transaction" as its core business model, integrating content services, community attributes and transaction functions. Since 2006, it has been gathering travelers who love independent travel in the form of BBS forums. In recent years, OTAs such as Ctrip and Fliggy have also been actively stepping up their layout in tourism communities in order to increase user activity, enhance user identification and sense of belonging, and solve user travel planning problems. Among all competitors, Mafengwo is able to take the lead in the UGC field. In addition to its rich historical accumulation, what other outstanding features does it have? This paper compares the Ctrip community, which has begun to take shape, with Qyer, which also started out as a travel community, and explores some of the differences discovered by the author.

3.4.1 Mafengwo

The bright yellow main color of Mafengwo looks bright and lively, and the cute bee image is spread across every corner of the application interface, giving the overall feeling of being lively and youthful. Mafengwo uses the navigation mode of the social module, and the UI style of each module is consistent, making it easy for users to form a flow experience. The article layout and picture display give users an intuitive and clear viewing experience. There are numerous entrances to functions such as guides and shopping malls in the APP, allowing users to quickly and conveniently solve their needs at every stage of browsing and searching for guides. On the homepage, I found that the note content was displayed in a waterfall flow, which made browsing very efficient.

From community to data, and then to trading platform, Mafengwo has relied on its massive user accumulation in the early stage to obtain a huge amount of destination information and product data fragments, as well as a sufficiently comprehensive database of travel users. It is also able to convert complex and rich UGC content into structured data, and then feed back the data into trading scenarios to create customized products based on market and user needs. Mafengwo accurately identifies users’ browsing content, analyzes their potential needs and pushes them to the interface so that users can see dynamic and customized travel guides.

When browsing recommended travel notes, there is a "Related Reading" option at the top of the interface, which allows users to quickly browse more selected content about the destinations of interest. While guiding users to read more deeply, it also simplifies user operations.

In addition to inviting professional contributions from certified experts, Mafengwo also guides users to produce high-quality content: Mafengwo launched the "Fengshou Diary" to encourage users to share their travel experiences. By learning high-quality travel diary templates and official travel diary teaching, many users who love sharing have transformed from travel diary novices to travel recommendation experts. The wonderful and thoughtful Fengshou Diary is like the fine wine that the community provides to users every day. "I have a pot of wine, enough to comfort the dust." Ordinary people use each other's flashes during their travels to comfort the "poetry and distance" they desire. It makes every ordinary day feel like embarking on a journey, and it allows users in the community to have a common library of precious memories.

In order to increase the activity and user stickiness of the community, Mafengwo has segmented various circles so that users with various niche interests can find friends, communicate and share. In the public Fengfeng Square, everyone can speak freely and share what they see, hear and feel. If you want to join a small circle created by users themselves, you often need to be reviewed by people in the circle. The author believes that this closed, reviewed joining model, although there is a certain threshold that hinders the development of the circle, it is small and fine, so that the matching degree of interests and hobbies of people in the circle, the sense of belonging to the community, and the stickiness of users will reach a higher level. These high-quality core users and rich and active circles can lay the foundation for subsequent commercial monetization.

3.4.2 Ctrip

Although Ctrip’s content community has not yet taken off, Ctrip has already placed the community at the bottom-level entrance, hoping to create a one-stop platform to help users make all-round decisions. It also hopes to accumulate traffic and increase user stickiness.

Ctrip community recommendations are mainly based on high-quality travel notes, mixed with a small number of official accounts. After entering the destination area, there are some promotional accounts and short video marketing accounts for hotels and scenic spots. High-quality travel notes survive in the cracks, and the user experience is poor.

3.4.3 Budget Travel

Budget travel involves more overseas travel, and the travel destinations are all over the world. The official guide (corresponding to the strategies of other competing products) is more like a traditional guide book. In addition to travel strategies, it also covers knowledge content such as culture, history, and geography. However, a universal guide book can no longer fully cover the highlights of a destination, and it is difficult to meet users' dynamic needs for information in different scenarios. Some tips still have the problem of slow updates.

As an offline social function, Qunar’s “Biu Ban” can arrange travel companions or other activities, allowing users in the community to have more offline interactions and increase the activity of the community, but it also has certain security risks.

3.4.4 Community Experience Summary

In the travel notes section, all three can list basic information such as travelers, expenses, itinerary overview, etc. in detail at the beginning, and are equipped with a directory to help users quickly land on the content they are interested in. Qyer still uses forum elements such as posting, replying and floors. Ctrip still intersperses promotional information in community content, relying on signing high-quality authors to encourage users to create and enrich community content. Mafengwo relies on more useful product details, big data analysis, etc. to keep the community vibrant and with huge potential value.

4. User Analysis

4.1 User Type Analysis

Figure 6 Data source: Baidu Index

Figure 7 Data source: Baidu Index

Judging from the share of search index, the province with the most Mafengwo usage in 2020 was Guangdong Province, followed by Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu. Overall, users in these provinces generally have better economic strength.

In terms of the proportion of users by age group, the users are mainly young people aged 20-39, among which the number of people aged 20-29 is larger, accounting for 56%. Young people have vigorous and active energy and are eager to travel around the beautiful motherland. They have relatively less family and work pressure and have more time and opportunities to travel.

In terms of gender ratio, Mafengwo users are mainly male, accounting for 58%. Men generally serve as "navigators" during travel, need to plan all aspects of the trip, and have a huge demand for travel guides.

4.2 User Profile

Zhong Hang, male, 23 years old, Guangdong, independent photographer

Zhong Hang has been exposed to photography since his freshman year. With his hobby as the cornerstone, his photography skills have improved by leaps and bounds. He has formed an independent team of photographers to carry out travel photography business. Before traveling, think about your daily itinerary, how to quickly transfer between transportation, where the scenery is beautiful and unique, and where the flight seats are excellent and rare. He browsed through travel notes and guides one after another on Mafengwo, never missing any opportunity to polish his travel photography plans, and constantly communicated and shared new insights and new beautiful scenery in the photography swarm.

Luo Jun, male, 35 years old, Shanghai, business manager

Luo Jun is the business manager of a startup company, a pillar of society with a fighting spirit, and he always works overtime until late on weekdays. He works day and night and usually neglects to communicate with his family and children, which makes him feel very guilty. During the rare May Day and National Day holidays, he chose to spend more time with his family and children, hoping that the perfect trip would become a beautiful memory for the whole family. In order to save energy and make the travel meet the demands of his family, he often uses Mafengwo's customized travel service. He only needs to communicate his demands, expectations, budget and other information with the customer service in detail, and he can get a unique and comprehensive travel arrangement, which saves time, effort and satisfaction. Later, he recommended the customized tour business to his colleagues, and successfully made them fall in love with the thoughtful customized service.

Bi Xiao, female, 18 years old, from Chengdu, freshman

Bi Xiao looks back on her three busy and tiring years of high school. The Fengshou Diary, which she updates daily, is her greatest comfort during her breaks in high school. She longed to read thousands of books and travel thousands of miles, to visit the beautiful rivers and mountains of the motherland, and to be able to appreciate the frozen thousands of miles in the cold and remote frontier like the bees, to listen to the sound of camel bells in the yellow sand and hot waves, to feel the holiness of the world on the Tibetan Plateau, and to experience the endless green waves in the grasslands on the dam. The seeds of travel quietly take root and sprout in my heart. As a new college student, she lived frugally and used the saved living expenses as travel funds. She constantly searched for cost-effective destinations and accommodations discovered by student budget travelers on Mafengwo. She decided to write down her experiences and insights after every trip, firmly believing that one day she would have a travelogue that would become the first of its kind.

Stephen, male, 29 years old, Beijing, senior editor of a magazine

As a senior editor, Stephen’s biggest hobby is enjoying delicious food. He occasionally writes reviews and publishes them in the food column of the magazine. Having lived in Beijing for nearly a decade, he is a connoisseur of gourmet food and has already eaten at every street and lane in Beijing, earning him the nickname “the living food map”. In my spare time, I like to travel to nearby cities, both to explore different scenery and to taste the flavors of different cities. In the food circle, he is the most active face. He tracks down authentic old brands discovered by fellow food lovers and also uploads and shares the roadside restaurants that surprise him by chance.

5. Product Iteration Analysis

Some versions of Mafengwo were launched earlier, and some iteration records can no longer be found on the Internet and have low reference value. Therefore, in order to analyze the version iteration operation of Mafengwo and explore the product iteration logic, the core version iterations of Mafengwo from V6.0.0 to V10.3.4 are classified by function as follows:

In the initial stage of the product, Mafengwo focused its iteration on adding functions and optimizing the community experience. By adding basic functions to meet the convenience of users, the mall business is improved

In terms of community content, Mafengwo is constantly revising and innovating, from visual effects to UI style, etc., committed to allowing users to effectively acquire the travel experience they need, share with each other, and let users feel the beauty of writing and sharing. At the same time, it instantly grants users more content production rights, more reprinting forms, and a simpler process. It also launched the Fengshou Travel Notes and topic functions to guide users to participate in community discussions and content production. Buzz and Circles improve the convenience and depth of social interaction. The Footprints feature adds a sense of ritual and commemorative significance to travel for users. It is a recognition of the identity and experience of senior travelers, and it is also a positive way to encourage users to explore and always travel on the road. By adding filtering items, adding basic travel information to travel notes, and functions such as mentions in the text, users can better search and retrieve travel information, make decisions more time-saving and labor-saving, and make the process of making travel guides faster, more efficient and smoother.

In 2020, Mafengwo's attempts were mainly concentrated in the live broadcast section. The live broadcast entrance set up in the first-level directory of the homepage and the live broadcast recommendations in the discovery channel on the homepage are enough to show Mafengwo's attention. Through version iteration, we can see that since the live broadcast section was launched in March 2020, Mafengwo has continuously used user feedback and comparison with competitive products to improve its own functions: video sharing, playback records, broadcast reminders, live broadcast hanging goods, etc. Within one year, we continuously upgraded our usability and practicality, completed the construction from scratch, and strived to catch up with excellent live broadcast platforms, achieving the leap from traffic attraction to commercial monetization.

Separate channels have been opened for various travel types, such as parent-child tours, island tours, and self-driving tours, so that users' needs can be accurately matched. The launch of customized tours saves users time in travel decision-making and provides them with a better one-stop service experience.

In 2018, Mafengwo’s slogan changed from “Global Travel Consumption Guide” to “Global Tourism Consumption Guide” because travel focuses on transportation, while tourism not only means “travel”, but also means sightseeing and entertainment. Mafengwo has been constantly updating and upgrading its interface color scheme, using high-quality travel community content as a medium to drive the continuous expansion of its business and make it more comprehensive. All of this demonstrates Mafengwo's concept of focusing on the travel community and creating a pan-entertainment platform with a closed loop of content + business.

6. Functional Analysis and Optimization Plan

6.1 Core Issues

Figure 8 Data source: BiDa.com

The rich and comprehensive travel guides and active users are Mafengwo's most proud advantages, but "good wine needs no bush". According to Bida data, during the epidemic, users' consumption willingness and orientation have changed significantly, purposeful searches for travel information have decreased, and the number of grass-planting decisions caused by content consumption has increased. Xiaohongshu and Douyin have tapped people's travel needs through short content planting, and have become the main travel grass-planting platforms. The author believes that Mafengwo's biggest challenge is how to better transform UGC community content into a platform that inspires travel decisions, gain insight into users' real needs after digging deep into big data such as travel notes and guides, and structure content based on user interests, seasonal hot spots, etc., and collaborate with offline scenic spots and businesses to create one-stop services.

6.2 Footprint function optimization

Footprints automatically generates the places passed by after accessing the time and location of the photos and videos in the user's album. At each location, the user can add photos and videos near his or her location. The current Footprints feature meets the user's need to quickly check in after a trip, but it cannot achieve manual positioning or accurately record all the distances along the way. The author believes that what can effectively stimulate the creative desire of content communities is the sense of ritual and the satisfaction brought by being praised and recognized after sharing, so the footprint function has been optimized.

First, add the dynamic footprint function to the footprint interface. Dynamic footprints can dynamically draw the travel process based on the time and location of the footprint points. Starting from the first stop, each footprint point will be traversed in chronological order, and AI editing will be used to quickly generate video clips in the lower right corner.

Footprints should not only be something to reminisce after a trip, but also a useful tool to record the journey. Add real-time positioning to the map. During your travels, you can light up the check-in points you have been longing for on the map at any time, or turn on track recording to accurately outline every step of your trip. While traveling, you can sigh with emotion at "listening to the sad cries of monkeys in the mountain twilight and the rapid flow of the Cangjiang River at night" and appreciate "the remaining flowers gathered on the carved railings and the withered willows scattered on the carved windows". All your thoughts and ideas at that moment are worth recording.

The travel notes interface will display the footprints of the trip, and the introduction of the dynamic footprint function frees the trip from thin text descriptions, and uses the added time and space dimensions to give users a more intuitive itinerary experience.

The footprint sharing function has also been upgraded. Footprint sharing will no longer be a static coordinate map, but a new dynamic footprint. The author hopes that high-quality, convenient and vivid travel sharing can trigger social fission and help Mafengwo to develop into a short content seeding platform.

When users are browsing travel notes, some carefully planned itineraries only need minor adjustments to meet their needs, which can save users a lot of time. Therefore, the footprints can be converted into itineraries after intelligent recognition by the system and added to "My Itinerary", so that you can get the same itinerary as other Fengshou travelers with just one click.

6.3 Bee Flash

The entrance to Mafengwo's itinerary planning is in "My-My Collection-Place Collection-My Itinerary". The entrance is very deep and lacks sharing function. You can only add specific place collections but not collect any place or niche attractions mentioned in the travel notes.

Mafengwo's collection function is divided into location collection, content collection and product collection. The content collection function is to collect entire travel notes, etc. However, when making a travel guide, users often need to browse through a large amount of content. Faced with reminders, tips, shortcuts, recommendations and other fragmented information scattered in various places, they are unable to organize them into their itinerary in a timely manner. They often need to manually copy and paste them into document apps to integrate the flashes of ideas during travel planning. When I was browsing travel guides and making personal travel plans, I often had headaches because of the frequent searches and being trapped in the vast amount of fragmented information.

When users browse travel notes and guide questions and answers, they should be able to turn useful information fragments into "fragments" of travel planning at any time, so Fengfeng Shannian came into being. Fengfeng Shannian will be distinguished from the current content collection section. Fengfeng Shannian focuses on meeting the needs of formulating travel strategies, while content collection focuses on meeting the needs of users to collect their favorite content. During the browsing process, users can directly collect scattered travel information by long pressing the text, eliminating the complicated operation of repeatedly opening the travel guide content during the integration process. When you have a good travel idea, long press the wasp in the lower right corner to jump to the wasp idea interface, you can also edit the collected ideas.

When planning a travel itinerary, you often need to take everyone's feelings into consideration. In order to make the trip comfortable and enjoyable, I added a sharing function to my itinerary so that every travel companion can easily grasp the overall picture of the trip and know the trip well.

In the My Itinerary interface, you can plan your itinerary by adding flash ideas. Flash idea searches also include locations, scenic spots, hotels, etc. After constructing the "skeleton" of the itinerary, you will browse the useful information found in the travel guide and make notes to fill in the "flesh and blood" based on your planning ideas.

I hope that through the above construction, my itinerary function can become truly practical and a convenient travel planning and organization tool.

VII. Conclusion

After the epidemic, both the demand and supply sides of the industrial chain have changed. Tourists' demands have shifted from traditional group tours to independent travel, which is gradually becoming the mainstream of the market. Young tourists are paying more and more attention to the personalization and diversification of travel experiences. At the same time, product design in the tourism supply chain increasingly emphasizes individuality and innovation, and travel operators begin to pay attention to scenario-based marketing and the accumulation of private domain traffic. Mafengwo has a huge user base and a rich and active travel community. It is foreseeable that there will be huge incremental space for differentiated and customized travel in the future. How to use the rich UGC community content to assist in the planning of tourism products, study users' diversified, personalized, and scenario-based consumption needs through big data analysis, reduce users' decision-making costs and time costs, and create a pan-entertainment platform with a content + business closed loop is an issue that Mafengwo needs to continue to pay attention to.

At the end of 2020, Mafengwo launched the "Polaris Guide" plan. Each "Polaris Guide" will be jointly created by three providers: Mafengwo's professional guide team, official tourism agencies of global destinations, and many core content creators. The author hopes that the North Star Guide can truly simplify things, make travel planning as easy as "copying homework", and make tourism exciting and convenient.

Author: Wangzai7114

Source: Wangzai7114