Selling cars is not shabby! Every CEO of a car company is an internet celebrity, but do you know which school they belong to?

The engineering man who works with machines all year round and the serious boss of the car company. This is indeed the impression that the car industry gave us in the past.

But things are different now. This is an era where traffic is king. From the public relations departments of manufacturers to the CEOs and various executives of car companies, everyone is working hard to create traffic. Even Wei Jianjun and Yin Tongyue, who are over 60 years old, are vying to become Internet celebrities.

After all the hardships, there are so many boss-level internet celebrities in the automotive industry. Who seems to be the most successful at the moment?

The first one would probably be Lei Jun, chairman of Xiaomi.

Xiaomi has been in business for more than a decade. If you look at the history of China's technological development over the past decade, Xiaomi has hardly left any footprints in technology. However, with Lei Jun's strong personal charm and marketing ability, Xiaomi has managed to make a mobile phone that is the first to use Qualcomm SoC into the top three in the world.

The same is true for the automotive business. Xiaomi SU7 is a relatively unpopular mid-to-large pure electric coupe. It does not have any real core technology, but it attracted overwhelming traffic before it went on the market. The popularity has remained high, and even the door handles can be searched on hot searches. Eventually, it broke into the monthly sales club of 10,000 units in a very short time.

Lei Jun is an all-round Internet celebrity, from painting door handles to bending over to open the door for users, to his college entrance examination scores, and even his wife's good friends, all of which can be used to generate traffic. He can appear on CCTV, play on TikTok, and play on any platform that can generate traffic. At present, Lei Jun's skills are unmatched in the industry. In the foreseeable future, Xiaomi's core competitiveness will still be these two words: Lei Jun.

If you want to pick someone in the automotive industry who can compete with Lei Jun in influence, it can only be Yu Chengdong.

Unlike Lei Jun, Yu Chengdong is not the boss, but only a senior professional manager. However, he is equally capable in creating topics and controlling traffic.

Think about it, without Richard Yu, would anyone care about what cars Xiaokang Auto makes? For other new brands, it is harder than climbing to the sky to let users know about them, but Richard Yu's special physique with traffic has put Wenjie, Zhijie and Xiangjie in the spotlight and made them the top brands in their respective market segments.

Lei Jun and Richard Yu are both masters who grew up in the era of smartphones, but they have different paths. Lei Jun's traffic can come from anywhere. In his early years, he could even go to a small physical store of Xiaomi to meet with middle school students. Richard Yu's traffic is mainly based on Huawei, the "mother body", and is promoted based on core technologies.

In addition, there is another school of internet celebrities in the automotive industry, that is, the new forces. These people are led by Ideal CEO Li Xiang, NIO Chairman Li Bin, and Xpeng Chairman He Xiaopeng, as well as heads of other small and medium-sized manufacturers.

Compared with traditional car manufacturers, new forces are more dependent on traffic. Most of the new forces in car manufacturing are latecomers who made a PPT and started working with investors' money. In addition, the prices of early models were not cheap. This development process determines that they must regard traffic as their core competitiveness.

Li Xiang's famous quote is: Those who mediocre at technology, the sales of competitors are mere mediocre, and if the design of MEGA is like this, then jump off the building;

Li Bin’s famous quote is: I don’t understand why people still buy gasoline cars;

He Xiaopeng speaks less frequently, but he also had an "AEB dispute" with Yu Chengdong.

These internet celebrities from new energy manufacturers are very busy every day. They talk about everything online, and their choice of words and sentences are very down-to-earth. They even swear occasionally. The daily life they post is in the same style as that of traffic stars, except that they are talking about cars, which is a little more professional.

In addition to the new forces such as Wei, Xiaoli and Li Auto, executives of other brands have also begun to follow their example and post on Weibo, including BYD's Li Yunfei. This trend is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Seeing these new forces taking over the huge traffic, traditional car manufacturers are also beginning to get restless. They may not be as flexible as the new forces in product development, but they can still devote some resources to turning their CEOs or executives into Internet celebrities.

The most typical example is Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall. In the past few months, Wei Jianjun has frequently participated in various live broadcasts, interacted with manufacturers such as Xiaomi, shared his daily life, appeared on the cover of fashion magazines, and even took the initiative to expose his internal speeches and publicly educate his executives. In order to generate traffic, he can be said to be very busy.

In fact, such attempts have already begun inside the Great Wall.

In the past two years, Great Wall has launched models with strange names such as Big Dog, First Love, and Divine Beast, and named its models after various types of coffee. In addition, there are various cats under the Ora brand, playing games, dating, petting cats, walking dogs, and drinking coffee. Great Wall's style was already abnormal two years ago. Wei Jianjun's frequent appearances in recent months have only strengthened Great Wall's transformation efforts.

All of this is for traffic. No matter what, the attention paid to the Great Wall has indeed increased significantly during this period. Whether traffic has any effect is a later question. First of all, you have to have traffic, and then you can talk about other things.

Others who followed the same path as Wei Jianjun include Yin Tongyue of Chery, Zhu Huarong of Changan, and Li Shufu of Geely, but the degree of "Internet celebrity" varies from person to person. Li Shufu is probably not interested in doing high-intensity live broadcasts like Wei Jianjun.

Before becoming Internet celebrities, the CEOs of traditional manufacturers might not even have a photo of them on the Internet, but now they are often active on Weibo and Douyin. They are fighting for traffic because the automotive industry is undergoing tremendous changes. If they don’t take some action, they may really be lost in the crowd.

In the age of traffic, this phenomenon is not uncommon. The smartphone market in the early years was also like this, except that traffic is now more in-depth, and it seems that no manufacturer can escape it. In fact, Tesla's success today is also directly related to Musk's "self-contained traffic".

Traffic is neither good nor bad, as long as it can bring attention to the manufacturer and promote sales. However, no matter how important traffic is, it only plays a supporting role, helping manufacturers sell cars. In addition to traffic, manufacturers should strengthen their independent research and development capabilities and product performance.

Think about it, would you really buy a car from a CEO just because of his personality? It's a car, not a movie ticket that you can use to watch an idol.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.