Home appliance manufacturers must be wary of the frog effect: otherwise they will be stuck in the quagmire and unable to escape

The frog effect, which is caused by boiling a frog in warm water and eventually being scalded to death in a comfortable environment, is accelerating in the critical period of transformation and upgrading of the Chinese home appliance market in recent years. For all home appliance manufacturers seeking reform, they must be highly vigilant against the "frog effect" appearing in their own products, otherwise they will find it difficult to extricate themselves.

If a frog is thrown into boiling water, it will feel great pain and will kick hard to "jump out of the water", thus having a chance to survive. However, if a frog is placed in warm water and the water is gradually heated, the frog will gradually adapt to the water temperature, and by the time the water boils, it will be unable to escape and will only face the fate of being scalded to death by the boiling water.

This is summarized by many entrepreneurs as the "frog effect". It mainly refers to the fact that once an individual or organization adapts to a certain living environment or enters a development inertial track, it is easy to face a bottleneck that is difficult to break through, unable to create new achievements or open up a new business. Either it will fail in the successive impacts of latecomers and challengers; or it will fall from excellence to mediocrity in the inertial track of self-satisfaction.

In recent years, in the Chinese home appliance market, facing the impact of the Internet wave, many manufacturers are faced with the above-mentioned "frog effect" test and challenge: some turn a blind eye to the changes of the times, believing that "remaining unchanged in the face of changes" is the best policy, and still live in the inertial track of past development, satisfied with current achievements and performance; some, although proactive in the face of changes in the times, have a "three days of fishing and two days of drying the net" situation in the implementation process, take a detour when encountering difficulties, do not face up to the difficulties of transformation, and just respond to the situation and follow the crowd.

It can be seen that whether it is the transformation of home appliance manufacturers to high-quality, innovative, high-end and quality, or the verticalization, flattening, service-oriented, online and offline integration of home appliance retailers, or the new technologies, new materials and new breakthroughs of home appliance suppliers, they have all entered a critical period of a new round of transformation. They are all facing a new choice of "breaking down to build up", that is, they must break the development model and concept of the past and build new drivers and platforms.

For example, over the past 30 years, the biggest bargaining chip of many Chinese home appliance giants has been "low-cost, large-scale manufacturing" and the supporting "low-price, large-scale shipments", thus forming a unilateral scale drive. Today, scale is still an important means for Chinese home appliance companies to conquer and lead, but its connotation has undergone new changes. With the continuous increase in labor costs, the sharp fluctuations in raw material prices, and the polarization of consumer demand, the era of unilateral "large-scale, low-cost" drive has completely ended, and a new large-scale, high-value drive must be established.

The key to high-value large-scale driving is to establish truly differentiated high-quality innovation capabilities and technology-driven capabilities. Many home appliance companies have experienced repeated and turbulent changes in their differentiated high-quality products, such as "investing more when they have money and investing less when they don't". In many cases, they only persist to the second or third step, and choose to give up or stagnate when there is only one or two steps left to success. The result is tragic, and the contradiction of product homogeneity of a large number of home appliance companies is still prominent and serious.

Similarly, in the process of the transformation of home appliance retail channels, facing the online and offline integration and vertical flattening of retail channels, many traditional home appliance dealers chose to go against the trend and cycle of the times. They went to the tiger mountain even though they knew there was a tiger in the mountain, and wanted to compete head-on with e-commerce and chain stores. The final result was that a large number of home appliance dealers, on the one hand, became wholesalers and cross-border merchants of e-commerce and chain stores, and bought goods from e-commerce channels at low prices; on the other hand, they attacked the low prices of e-commerce channels in a high-profile manner, saying that the source of goods was of poor quality and the products were cut corners. This also fully exposed the "profit-seeking" nature of traditional home appliance dealers.

How many home appliance manufacturers have fallen into the "frog effect" without knowing it, and although they are doing well, they are already stuck in the quagmire and cannot extricate themselves? At the same time, how many home appliance manufacturers are breaking through the "frog effect" trap, and although they are experiencing poor performance at the stage, they are getting closer and closer to the dawn? The final answer can only be answered by time, but the entire home appliance industry has long been hit by the tide of the times and there is no turning back!

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.