The evolving choice of China's home appliance industry from mechanical to humanized intelligence

It cannot be said that the "collective carnival" in the home appliance market since 2014 is the result of the cross-border "disruption" of Internet companies, but the invasion of Internet thinking has, to a certain extent, broken the "stagnant water" of the home appliance industry for several years. It is more appropriate to describe the current home appliance manufacturers with the name of the game in Hunan Satellite TV's "Happy Camp", that is, "We fight!" New technology, new products, new channels, new marketing, new ecology... Just as Michelle, the wife of US President Obama, said in her exchange speech at Peking University: "The power of technology opens the door to the world and allows us to contact with previously unimaginable thinking and innovation." However, when "disruption" "blooms everywhere" in the entire home appliance field, companies are pushed into a "field" where "no change means death". They are excited about their constant innovation, but confused by consumers' "non-buy".

Is it that market demand is moving too fast, or that companies still haven't kept up with the times? In fact, the reforms in all fields, including the home appliance industry, are not about right or wrong, fast or slow, good or bad. The theory of "survival of the fittest" also has universal value in the home appliance industry. Lu Renbo, deputy secretary-general of the China Electronic Commerce Association and a well-known home appliance expert, pointed out that the development and changes of any industry can be interpreted and analyzed by the theory of human evolution. "Change" always exists in the industrial environment in which the company is located. Whether the home appliance manufacturing company can perceive and utilize the power, relationship and environment of change determines whether the company can survive in the future. But what is different from the past is that in the Internet era, the decisive role of consumers in the external environment that affects the results of the "evolution" of enterprises is becoming increasingly prominent.

The "evolutionary thinking" in the collective awakening of home appliance companies

Since the beginning of spring 2014, the "activity" of the domestic home appliance market has increased significantly, and mainstream home appliance brands are collectively awakening from their slumber. Midea released its M-Smart smart home strategy and carried out strategic cooperation with Alibaba Cloud Computing; Haier launched the U+ smart life operating system, striving to achieve the interconnection of a full range of cross-brand home appliances; Changhong launched CHiQ TVs, CHiQ refrigerators and CHiQ air conditioners based on its "home Internet strategy" in less than three months; TCL has made efforts in the game market to expand its smart product market; Hisense has joined hands with 11 video websites, aiming to use smart TVs to smooth the boundaries between home appliances and the Internet, hardware and services; while the foreign brand Samsung deepened its display technology, it cooperated with Future TV to create the UHD8 series of Internet TVs; and LG led the development of screen display technology in the color TV market with its new TV products that integrate the three top technologies of 4K, curved screen and OLED.

Looking at the various "big moves" of home appliance giants, the following characteristics are mainly presented. First, compared with the same period in previous years, the speed and number of new home appliance products released far exceeded the past, and directly drove the stock price performance of home appliance companies. Second, the trend of dual upgrading and integration of soft and hard technologies is obvious. While the color TV industry is accelerating the upgrading of screen display technology, it is deepening intelligent collaboration and application; in the context of collectively welcoming the first year of intelligence, the white appliance industry emphasizes the concept of energy saving and health. Third, terminal products are based on the ecological construction of the upstream and downstream industrial chains of enterprises and the overall transformation plan. With the launch of new home appliance products in 2014, the Internet transformation plans of different brands such as Changhong's "Home Internet Strategy", TCL's "Double +" strategy, and Midea's "1+1+1" strategy have surfaced one after another.

However, just as the transformation of the home appliance industry entered the fast lane and traditional home appliance manufacturers were full of longing for the grand blueprint they had outlined for themselves, some doubts were also heard in the industry. Some people openly "challenged" the next generation of new display technology OLED; some people complained that the customized smart TV systems launched by foreign brands did not actually solve the problems of the current dominant Android system; others said that smart home appliances were difficult to operate and had complicated functions, and were actually "decorations"... For a time, manufacturers were caught in the dilemma of new products and new technologies being "well-received but not popular."

However, according to Lu Renbo, deputy secretary-general of the China Electronic Commerce Association and a well-known home appliance expert, if we interpret the changes in the home appliance industry in the Internet era and the various questions raised by people from the perspective of evolution, we will find that the transformation of the home appliance industry is like biological evolution, and must be born out of the process of "variation-inheritance-selection". When new and old products, new and old technologies, and new and old concepts coexist in the same space, competition between them is inevitable, but there is no absolute "right or wrong" or "good or bad". Only when contradictions appear can the entire industry continue to move forward in self-correction and improvement.

The "Transformation View" of the Internet Age from Mechanical to Human

Since the second half of 2013, Internet thinking has become a hot topic for home appliance companies. In the theory of evolution, Internet thinking is essentially equal to "the requirements of human evolution + the way of thinking of computational science". The reason why traditional home appliance manufacturers feel confused and lost in the process of transformation and upgrading is mainly because for a long time, under the background of standardized mass production, "mechanized thinking" has made traditional manufacturers pay more attention to the disruption brought about by technology and product innovation, which only belongs to the category of "the way of thinking of computational science". In the Internet era, with the change of user habits and the improvement of status, "the requirements of human evolution" plays an increasingly important role in the transformation of products and brands.

Take the color TV industry as an example. 4K technology was questioned by the industry at the beginning of its development. It was not until 2013 that it successfully counterattacked and gradually became the standard configuration of TVs, and then moved towards the second-generation 4K stage with higher standards. In 1999, Microsoft attempted to use the "Venus Project" to open the era of Internet TV in China, but it ended in failure. In 2013, the cross-border development of Internet companies pushed smart TVs into people's vision and even promoted the intelligence of the entire home appliance industry. Is it true that 4K TVs and smart TVs were not accepted at the beginning of their development simply because of the immaturity of technology? The answer is no.

In the Internet era, user experience based on consumer usage habits and environmental changes is sometimes more important than technological innovation itself, that is, whether it can truly conform to the "requirements of human evolution", or simply "user-centric". Although all companies have realized the importance of reserving user resources and traffic, home appliance companies, especially traditional manufacturers, have obviously not found the "pain point" for the question of "how to truly meet user needs" or "what kind of home appliances consumers will eventually fall in love with".

Lu Renbo, deputy secretary-general of the China Electronic Commerce Association and a well-known home appliance expert, said that at present, technology is not the only factor that determines the success of product evolution. The decision on whether a product or a company can survive lies in the hands of consumers. Home appliances, with large appliances as the core, are tools to liberate people from tedious and heavy housework, so the key to complying with the "requirements of human evolution" should return to the way of interaction. In the process of transformation, traditional home appliance manufacturers do need to change from "feature machine thinking" to "Internet thinking", but the premise is to retain and optimize the essential attributes of the product. How to integrate upstream and downstream industry chain resources to truly provide users with home appliances with good experience and humanized use is the problem that manufacturers need to overcome first.

Learn to fall in love with consumers through "interaction"

As mentioned above, the evolution of home appliances at this stage should focus more on the transformation of "interaction methods", which includes two levels. One is the interaction at the product level, that is, through technological innovation, users can get a more convenient and comfortable experience when using home appliances. For example, the emergence of 4K, OLED, and curved TVs is to bring consumers a more extreme visual experience; the intelligence of home appliances and the ability to control home appliance terminals on mobile devices are to overcome the problems of poor human-computer interaction, inability to move with the body, and inability to automatically sense the external environment.

However, when the homogeneity of technology and product development is serious, the interaction at the product level cannot achieve personalization and differentiation. At this time, the development of the home appliance industry faces the second level of interaction, that is, the emotional interaction between enterprises and users. This level of interaction has gone beyond the home appliance products themselves, aiming to provide consumers with exclusive and personalized services and establish a good communication mechanism, thereby establishing a high corporate reputation and even forming a spiritual influence on consumers, just like Apple created by Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, most of the current domestic home appliance companies remain at the first level, innovating for technology rather than subverting for users.

In his book "The Power of Unorganized Organizations: The Future is Wet", American writer Clay Shirky once pointed out that "the future is wet", because under the Internet, people and groups can communicate and interact in a gentle way through social tools based on common interests, instead of "dry" communication as before. Therefore, the change in the entire social environment has forced home appliance companies to reposition their roles in the industry. Traditional home appliance manufacturers and even upstream and downstream companies in the industrial chain not only play the original roles of "producers", "raw material suppliers" and "sellers", but also become "virtual personalities" that can provide consumers with more services and emotional communication.

The so-called "virtual personality" refers to a machine or organization that exhibits some human nature. In other words, the development of home appliance companies needs to rise from only bringing material enjoyment to consumers to providing spiritual and cultural needs. Lu Renbo, deputy secretary-general of the China Electronic Commerce Association and a well-known home appliance expert, said that the shaping of home appliance brands in the future can be explained by the relationship between genes and hosts in the theory of evolution, that is, the brand is not shaped by the enterprise, but the user is the gene host of the brand. Users may participate in multiple links of the enterprise's operations, thereby achieving common growth with the brand, and can even regard the operation of the brand as a love affair with the user. When the interactivity of products and emotions reaches a certain level, customer transfer value will be generated in the transaction. With the increase in the relative difference between transfer value and customer value, the brand will burst out with unprecedented potential energy.

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.