NIO, which is obsessed with operating a fan club-style user community, has come to the point where it has to put on the brakes.

Not long ago, the obituary of the well-known entrepreneur "Meng Jianke" who died in a car accident while driving a NIO EX8 on the highway due to using the automatic driving function went viral on Weibo.

As a party directly involved in the accident, NIO responded immediately that it would cooperate with the traffic police and other departments to investigate the incident.

At the same time, netizens have also begun to question whether new forces such as NIO have exaggerated the autonomous driving functions.

All in all, the matter was still being discussed within a relatively normal framework until this point, until lawyer Lin Wei, whose position in the NIO User Trust Fund is second only to NIO founder Li Bin, issued an open letter in the name of the car owners.

This "Joint Statement of NIO Owners on the Understanding of the NP/NOP System" in the name of NIO fans has brought the impact of this matter to the abyss.

The general meaning of this statement is that all NIO car owners know that the so-called NOP system is not safe, and the driver is fully responsible if an accident occurs while using this function.

As soon as the statement was issued, it received a lot of attention from the outside world and also attracted a lot of questions - why can Weilai's users be so unconcerned about their own interests and insist on "fighting black" or even "whitewashing" the brand after problems with the car's functions occur?

When talking about this issue, we have to mention NIO’s fan club-style user community model.

As a star company in China's new energy vehicle field, NIO is significantly different from Xpeng and Ideal, and even has obvious differences from Tesla.

Weilai coexists with the fan club model

Unlike other car companies that only have a business relationship with their car owners, NIO has a much closer relationship with its car owners. This is due to the fan circle operation model adopted by NIO for user communities, which aims to convert NIO car owners into die-hard fans of the NIO brand. To this end, NIO has made unremitting efforts.

For example, when NIO held its first car club, it announced that it would provide benefits including food, lodging and transportation expenses for car owners who came to participate in the club. NIO also established a number of NIO Houses in first- and second-tier cities specifically for NIO owners to communicate with each other.

In addition, NIO’s executives will personally interact and communicate face-to-face with NIO owners on weekends to understand their thoughts on NIO cars.

It is quite rare for a company to have such close interaction with consumers. Because of this, NIO has gained batches of die-hard fans, thus greatly expanding the scale of its brand supporters and benefiting NIO greatly in its development.

During these interactions, fans not only took the initiative to rent billboards for NIO, but also took on sales work for NIO. They not only actively promoted NIO cars online and offline, but also personally promoted NIO cars at auto shows, which helped NIO gain more exposure in the public's perception. Especially compared with Ideal and Xpeng, NIO received full marks in brand intimacy, which made consumers less worried about the product and more at ease from the collective noise when choosing NIO cars.

This is called the square effect in communication. It means that in public places where people gather, people often behave in ways that are very different or even completely opposite to their daily lives. The reason for this is that the gathering of groups makes the individual personalities and consciousness of different levels disappear in the emotional infection of the group, and the unconscious becomes the ruler of the group.

Therefore, when NIO was almost the same in resources and strength as Ideal and Xpeng, it received a lot of "off-field assistance" thanks to this group of brand fans who might even be inferior to fans of celebrities. After all, for these fan owners, NIO is their idol in life, and they also gain more meaning in life from this fan group.

This also explains why when NIO is hit by negative news, NIO’s fans will do reckless things to protect the brand’s reputation - because they have truly tied their own personalities to NIO.

From the fans' perspective, anyone who says that NIO is not good is being mean to themselves.

However, we can also see from this that the reason why NIO fans behave in these ways is closely related to NIO’s intentional guidance.

NIO first strengthened its relationship with car owners through various benefits, and then formed strong connections in the entire car owner community by frequently holding car clubs, thus forming the originally loose group of car owners into an organized and disciplined fan support group.

The reason why NIO fans put aside their own identity as consumers and chose to stand with the brand to maintain its reputation is mainly because NIO uses the fan circle model to operate the car owner community and successfully brainwash users into fans. From the results, it can be seen that MLM companies often use this trick.

It’s time to put the brakes on the fan club model

It is obvious that NIO’s success today and its outstanding achievements are inseparable from its fanatical fan culture.

However, as the company develops and the number of fans increases, NIO fans, like other fan groups, are facing negative effects caused by internal disagreements, which are backfiring on the “real owner” and damaging NIO’s brand. Really It has begun to put the brakes on its fan club-style community operations.

In January this year, NIO fans gave NIO a negative news as a gift at the beginning of the year.

In order to go to Chengdu to attend NIO's annual NIO Day, this group of fans chose to charter a flight, but they ignored the epidemic prevention and civil aviation regulations, sang and danced without wearing masks on the plane, posing a serious threat to epidemic prevention and traffic safety.

After the news was released, the actions of NIO fans unsurprisingly aroused criticism from the public, and the NIO brand was also criticized. They were considered to be running a pyramid scheme, which greatly damaged NIO's public image.

This time, the spontaneous signing of the " Joint Statement of NIO Owners on the NP/NOP System " by NIO fans to protect NIO's reputation was more like an act of "defending Wu Yifan's sleeping fans". Not only did it fail to help NIO maintain its brand reputation, but it also caused NIO, which announced that it would remain silent on this incident until the police announced the results of the investigation, to be once again accused of being a "pyramid scheme brand". It also vilified the public image of NIO owners into cold-blooded animals who do not value life.

Not only that, this incident also caused a split in the originally united NIO user community.

Shortly after the statement was released, a post with the topic "Oppose the car owners' joint statement" appeared in the NIO community. Judging from the comments in the community, most of the users who voiced opposition also believed that those who signed the car owners' joint statement were overstepping their authority and chose to stand with the manufacturer instead of speaking out for their own interests.

The split of the user community is indeed a major blow to NIO, which was once proud of its thriving user community. After all, once the community is split, it means that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the two forces. For NIO, which has benefited a lot from the community, it is tantamount to a nuclear explosion among fans.

However, even if NIO fans did too many irrational things and ultimately made NIO pay for them, since NIO started out as a fan club model, all it can do is bite the bullet and swallow it, which is a kind of "seeking benevolence and getting benevolence".

Moreover, in addition to the various negative news created by NIO fans due to their collective irrationality, the blind support of NIO fans is also gradually destroying the foundation of NIO's long-term development.

As a technology + automobile company, the foundation of Weilai's business should be leading technology and excellent products. However, as the scale of Weilai's fan circle expands, Weilai's core competitiveness now seems to be the influence of car owners over social order and morality.

For the technology-based automobile market, if you want to survive in the market, the first priority is still technological research and development, rather than creating a fan club-style user group. After all, we have seen too many products with good marketing but ultimately failed to attract customers.

It is obviously an unknown whether NIO, which has grown up with the support of fans, can remain on the bench in technology research and development.

In general, NIO's fan club-like fan groups played a significant role in the early development of the brand. However, with the development of the company and the expansion of the fan club, the phenomenon of irrational fan groups has become more and more common, bringing NIO a series of negative news and having a significant negative impact on the public image of NIO and its car owners.

Li Bin, the founder of NIO, once said that NIO's goal is to catch up with established companies such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi. If this is true, then it needs to do research and development more steadily, rather than focusing more on how to operate the fan circle community.

Don’t forget, those big Vs who once promoted Wu Yifan’s sleeping benefits to his fans have now been cancelled.

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.