3 laws of hit products!

In the post-mobile Internet era with the implementation of 5G networks, backed by the short video trend, the live streaming economy represented by internet celebrities such as Li Jiaqi and Wei Ya created one sales miracle after another in 2019. Behind the slogan "Buy him!" are "hot products" that are snapped up and out of stock for a long time.

What exactly is a hot product? Does selling well mean it’s a hit product? How to produce a hit product? These questions constantly torture the product, marketing, and operation people...

Kaohsiung Yong is the developer and practitioner of Xiaomi's popular products, former vice president of Xiaomi TV, and former senior staff officer of Xiaomi Group's General Staff. In his new book, "I'm Making Hot Products at Xiaomi," he sorted out and reviewed these soul-searching questions from his unique perspective of more than 20 years of experience spanning the Internet and traditional industries, combined with his personal experience at Xiaomi.

First of all, what is a hot product? Does a product that sells well mean it’s a hit?

A product that sells well is not necessarily a hit product; it just meets one of the conditions to become a hit product.

In traditional concepts, everyone believes that as long as a product sells well, it can be called a hot-selling product. However, the meaning of the new generation of hot-selling products is richer, with three levels of meaning: traffic, topic, and sales volume . We call these three items the “three elements of explosive products.” Only when the product has these three elements at the same time can it be called a hit product.

Before developing a hit product, you must go back to the users and make it clear: users are willing to pay for technology, users are willing to pay for fashion, and users are willing to pay for cheapness ( remember, I said cheap, not cheap. Cheapness is relative, it is what users think is cheap)

Based on these three principles, Xiaomi has determined the three laws of Xiaomi products, which are called the Three Highs Law within Xiaomi: high technology, high appearance, and high cost performance .

Law 1: High technology is not a gimmick, it must be perceived by users

Although users like technology, we should not misunderstand technology and should not make it seem too high-end.

Some technologies are really cool, but they are too far away from our daily lives. However, these practical technological innovations are often wrapped up by companies in a high-sounding coat, leaving users confused and unable to understand.

Real high technology should not be a gimmick, but should be understandable to users. The reason is simple: users are willing to pay for technology that they can understand. From another perspective, users all want to be smart .

There are too many such cases in life. If there are some new products with very low learning costs, or no learning cost at all, then such products are very easy to succeed.

As a high-tech product, the iPhone has exploded in popularity in a short period of time. One important reason is that it is too easy to use!

No matter which page you turn to or which app you open, when you don’t know what to do, just press the “Home” button and everything will return to the starting point.

At that moment, you will feel how smart you are! I gave this button that gives users a sense of smartness a name - "smart key".

▲The HOME button of an Apple phone

Whether an electronic product can make the user feel smart depends on whether it has a smart key. With this smart key, your new technology is no longer a cognitive barrier to users, but a key to unlock user cognition. With smart keys, users will like your product and will pay for it.

Law 2: Appearance is justice, good design is productivity

We all say that today's mainstream economy is the appearance economy, which is an inevitable trend of consumption upgrading. Today is an era of "looking at faces", and appearance is becoming more and more important. Appearance means traffic! If we make our products beautiful, the products will attract traffic on their own.

1. Establish product design standards and corporate design language

Beauty has standards. There are standards for whether people are beautiful, and there are also standards for whether products are beautiful.

What is this standard?

For industrial products, there are four authoritative awards in the world, namely IDEA12, IF Design Award23, Red Dot34 and Good Design45. Since the judging criteria for these awards are very strict, the winning rate is very low, only a few in ten thousand.

Let’s take a look at Xiaomi’s achievements. By 2017 alone, Xiaomi had won thousands of major awards, including hundreds of international gold awards.

It can be said that in China's product industry, Xiaomi is in the top three, if not first, in terms of the number of awards it has won.

On the one hand, Xiaomi does attach great importance to product design, and we firmly believe that product design is one of the important factors of a product. On the other hand, Xiaomi attaches great importance to the four major industrial design awards.

We certainly don’t make products to win awards, but it’s definitely right for designers to design products according to the standards of the four major industrial design awards. This also implicitly sets a standard for designers to design products.

It is not enough to have standards for product design. The company must also have its own unique design language , and this design language must be easy for users to recognize .

In this regard, with the rapid development of Xiaomi's ecological chain, the Xiaomi product family continues to expand, and these products maintain a unified style. The reason why this can be achieved is that Xiaomi has formed its own unique design language, which is called "MI Look" within Xiaomi.

Xiaomi's design style is generally based on white, with a little functional display: the overall shape also strives to be simple, with mostly straight lines.

These designs not only give the entire product a soul , but also give users a very clear experience, allowing users to quickly understand the working status of the product.

▲Xiaomi product pictures

With design standards and its own design language, Xiaomi's designers no longer have to use their imagination to design products. As long as you carefully understand the product definition and user targets, and then follow Xiaomi's design standards, the designed products will not be bad.

Of course, we are not denying the creativity of designers. For commercial products, designers’ ability to replicate in large quantities is also a core competitive advantage.

2. Design is about subtraction, simplicity is not simplistic

Product managers know how to do subtraction when defining a product and cut out features that users don’t need.

When I was designing the smart TV, I always wanted to keep it simple. However, the number keys on the TV remote control are really difficult to design, and they look ugly no matter how you design them.

Finally, I suggest removing the number keys altogether. This challenged all traditional TV designers, who insisted that many people were already accustomed to using number keys to select channels.

I did a lot of design work on the software interaction to display the channel images on the screen. At my insistence, the smart TV remote control removed the number keys for the first time.

Later user feedback proved that users preferred to select channels on the screen. Soon, major TV manufacturers removed the number keys from the remote control, and it became the object of imitation by major smart TV manufacturers.

▲Xiaomi TV remote control without number keys

3. Please be "abnormal" in your pursuit of details

In order to design a good product, detail design cannot be ignored. Although it cannot be said that details determine success or failure, details can indeed improve the style of the entire product.

We often say that products speak for themselves, and in fact, most of the time we are referring to the details of the product. Whether a product is designed carefully is reflected in the attention to details.

▲Comparison between Xiaomi air purifier and other air purifiers

Take Xiaomi air purifiers as an example. Why do those air purifiers on the left look black and ugly, while the Xiaomi air purifiers on the right are so beautiful?

In addition to the appearance design, there is another very important reason, that is the detailed design of the air inlet.

Many products ignore the issue of aesthetics when designing, especially for heat dissipation vents or air inlets, which are actually very important parts that affect the appearance of the product.

Initially, in order to design the air inlet well and ensure both air intake volume and aesthetics, Xiaomi engineers tested 5,730 air inlet holes of different diameters, large and small. Finally, a design with an air inlet diameter of 2.0 mm was adopted.

As you can see, so much effort was spent just on designing the diameter of the air inlet.

There are many such detailed designs, which can often capture the user's psychology, improve the product's style, enhance the user experience, and thus improve the quality of the entire product.

Of course, there is one thing I would like to remind everyone: when working on product details, you must pay attention to costs and don't go too far.

Many details depend more on whether the designer is attentive. Such detailed design will not increase the cost and can be done more.

Law 3: High cost-performance ratio, users can buy it with their eyes closed

The most critical part of the entire transaction is the deal, and the core of the deal is price . What price is the easiest to trade at?

I personally like the sentence in "The Law of Minimalism" very much: "Too good to be matched, too cheap to be resisted." The cheap here is actually a relative value. Users feel it is cheap, not cheap. In fact, this is what we often call high cost performance.

1. How to set a price that is cost-effective and will make users scream?

First, prices are set by users, not businesses. Many people mistakenly believe that a company with low profits has high cost-effectiveness. This is from the perspective of the company itself and may not be truly high cost-effectiveness.

The real high cost-effectiveness is that users feel it is worth buying this product at this price. So the formula that really determines the price of the product is:

Price = How much the user is willing to spend

After defining the price, high cost performance also needs to be redefined - high cost performance does not mean that the company's profits are very low, but that the company's pricing is lower than users' expectations.

Xiaomi once put forward a theory that pricing should be low enough to make users scream. The formula is:

Price ≤ half of user expectations

When the price is half or lower than the user's expectations, the user will scream, which we often say is less than half price.

User expectations are often based on the price common sense that users have accumulated in their daily lives. On the one hand, the product prices set by manufacturers that occupy a monopoly position are easy to remember;

On the other hand, it is a vague concept. In many ant markets, users’ understanding of product prices is not to establish an association with a certain brand, but to understand its approximate price, which is actually approximately equal to the average price of the product.

The value of user expectation can be determined as long as you study user transaction data. This is the advantage of e-commerce, which can adjust prices and marketing strategies at any time based on big data.

To sum up, high cost performance does not necessarily mean cheap or no profit, but rather a comparison . We should not equate high cost-performance with low profits. High cost-performance may also bring high profits, such as Apple mobile phones.

2. High cost performance is a comprehensive index of performance and price

To make a cost-effective product, you must work hard on both performance and price. Xiaomi has put a lot of effort into establishing a reputation for "high cost-performance" in the minds of users.

Xiaomi prices almost all of its products according to this logic. The 49 yuan mobile phone power bank, 79 yuan Xiaomi bracelet, 299 yuan Xiao Ai smart speaker, and 99.9 yuan AirPods-like headphones it launched were all more than half cheaper than general products on the market, even large appliances.

Xiaomi plans to lower the price of 65-inch TV to 1,999 yuan and the price of Mi washing machine to 799 yuan. Xiaomi has launched these products one after another, bombarding users with huge impact.

Many Mi fans have formed a habit when buying things now. Before buying something, they will first check whether Xiaomi has similar products, and place an order if so. If Xiaomi launches a new product, they will place an order directly without comparing, and they will make a profit if they buy it!

Once such a reputation is formed, it will mean huge brand trust, and users can buy things with their eyes closed.

Looking back at Xiaomi’s three highs logic, we need to know that this is a unified whole and cannot be separated. A product can only be a powerful weapon if it possesses these three weapons at the same time.

Technology and good looks bring high added value to the products, and high cost-effectiveness brings direct conversion.

Although it is indeed very difficult to achieve these three points at the same time, it is the key to determining the competitiveness of the entire product. When we talk about product strength, we are competing on these three things.

There is a saying within Xiaomi: Drive yourself crazy and drive your opponents to death.

Finally, I would like to offer you two small suggestions

Tip 1: Don’t let your users pay for the “expensiveness” of new products

The cost-effective pricing of the products we mentioned just now can be understood when applied to some already mature categories, but what about new products? Many companies will be hesitant at this time.

The reason is simple: when a new product is launched, sales have not yet picked up and the cost is high; a large amount of R&D costs and mold costs need to be shared, so the cost of a new product remains high when it is launched. It is a common phenomenon in the market today that new products are “expensive” when they are launched on the market. Is this pricing scientific? Of course it's not scientific.

The best way to launch a new product is to make the first battle a decisive one, and to maximize the high cost-performance from the very beginning. This will make users feel incredible, increase the sales of the entire product rapidly, give confidence to the entire industry chain, and make competitors despair.

When they see that they have no advantage in technology or price, they will simply give up. This is the core point of the first battle being the decisive battle.

If you are going to do something, do it to the extreme. If you are going to set the price, set it according to user expectations. When your price directly penetrates the user's psychological price range, your product will quickly occupy the user's mind and lead the market, and other competitors will be powerless.

Suggestion 2: Design a “smart button” for the product that will make the user’s father happy and satisfied

Simplifying all controls into one button brings great convenience to users. I call this design a "smart key".

The feeling that smart key users have when using the device is that they feel very smart. A product that makes users feel smart must be a good product.

Therefore, I suggest that when designing products, you should try to design a smart key so that users can have the simplest and quickest way to use it at any time. Such a product will definitely be liked by users.

Note:

1. IDEA, American Industrial Design Excellence Award. ——Editor’s note
2. The IF Design Award is regularly held by the Hannover Industrial Design Forum, Germany's oldest industrial design organization.
3. Red Dot, the Red Dot Award, was founded by Europe's most prestigious design association. ——Editor’s note
4. Good Design, Japan Good Design Award. ——Editor’s note

Author: Kaohsiung Yong

Source: Kaohsiung Yong