The worse it sells, who is more anxious about Baidu Geely？

2239, this is the total sales in the first five months of this year.

This is in stark contrast to Baidu’s complacency when Geely announced the next car.

In March of this year, some media reported that there was a personnel adjustment inside the company, in which Yang Zhen, the head of UD- User Development Department at the marketing end, and several directors were removed from their posts and transferred to CEO Xia Yiping. The head of the UO- user operation department at the sales end was changed from Luo Gang, the original operation head, to Andy.Gao from Tesla.

It is not difficult to see that in the face of sales that have not improved, the more anxious it is, the more anxious it is. I just don’t know if Baidu and Geely behind it are as anxious as the extreme. After all, the extreme is "from beginning to end, I want to fight Tesla".

1. What’s the problem?

Generally speaking, a brand doesn’t sell well, and the problem mainly lies in two aspects, product and marketing. However, it is extremely obvious that the original experience can’t be applied.

Only a few hundred sales per month can only be said that Extreme Yue is not fully on the road of building cars. Further exploration is that the brand awareness is too low, and many users simply don’t know what kind of brand Extreme Yue is. On the contrary, its predecessor, Jidu, may have a higher reputation.

Jidu Automobile is an automobile brand jointly established by Baidu and Geely in January 2021. At that time, officials from both sides announced that Jidu would enter the automobile industry as a vehicle manufacturer. Among them, Baidu holds 55% of the shares and is responsible for end-to-end services as a whole; Geely accounts for 45%, mainly cooperating with related work in hardware.

At this time, the market penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China is only 13.4%. appreciate each other, the three founders of "Wei Xiaoli", also stood by each other from time to time, and Li Yanhong, who is in high spirits, shouted out the rhetoric of "investing 50 billion yuan in the next five years".

Just over a year after the brand was established (in June 2022), Jidu released the first concept car ROBO-01 (the predecessor of Yuejie 01), and in October of the same year, the limited edition of Jidu ROBO-01 lunar exploration went on the market, with a price of 399,800 yuan. Thanks to the concept of automobile robot, Jidu gathered a lot of market attention at that time and often compared it with Xiaomi, and its brand reputation also reached its peak.

That is, at this time, all the external marketing of Jidu suddenly stopped, and the brand name changed again in front of the public.

In August, 2023, Jidu Automobile announced that it was renamed as "Extreme Yue Automobile", and "Jidu ROBO-01" also became "Extreme Yue 01". Behind the renaming, there was a change in the proportion of shareholders’ equity.

According to Tianyancha information, Jiyue is a brand of Hangzhou Jiyue Automobile Technology Co., Ltd., which is jointly held by Zhejiang Geely Investment Holding Co., Ltd. and Shanghai Mihang Automobile Co., Ltd., which is wholly owned by Baidu. The shareholding ratios of the two parties are 65% and 35% respectively.

After a series of actions, Extreme Yue failed to inherit the previous accumulation of concentration, and appeared in front of the public more like a blank sheet of paper, a typical scene. When users entered a few extreme Yue sales stores, the first concern was not the price and configuration of the products, but the question, "What brand is this?"

In order to deepen the cognition and form the difference of market competition, Extreme Vietnam has been strengthening the label of "Intelligent Driving".

For example, the fewer brands in China can support vehicle SOA, and integrate SOA and electronic and electrical EEA into an intelligent architecture JET to achieve global, end/cloud integration; In the choice of intelligent driving route, it is the first production car in China to adopt pure visual intelligent driving scheme.

In addition, the Extreme Yue 01 is the world’s first ERNIE Bot model car, and the intelligent AI partner SIMO is fully integrated with ERNIE Bot, which can support all the function instructions in the car.

2. icing on the cake and giving charcoal in the snow

When "Wei Xiaoli" came to the fore in the industry, Zhijia could indeed form a competitive difference of "no one has me", and Xpeng Motors also completed the popularization of users’ cognition because of its distinctive smart driving label.

When the industry marches to 2024, the intelligent driving function has achieved "universal popularization" and become the standard of almost all models. Even the intelligent driving label of Xiaopeng Automobile is gradually weakening. Under the framework of current policies and regulations, it is difficult to show the ability of "superior".

You all have it, and there may be subtle differences in experience, but they are all within the acceptable range of users. More importantly, the intelligent driving function has not yet become an absolute need that affects users’ car purchase decisions.

According to the research on China’s new car purchase intention (NVI) released by J.D.Power in 2023, although the intelligent experience of cars has increased in recent years, its influence on users’ car purchase only accounts for 14%.

From the user’s point of view, the trust anxiety of "whether intelligent driving is reliable" is widespread, and some traffic accidents have exposed some security risks of intelligent driving functions. In many cases, users trust themselves more.

From this, it is gratifying that the smart driving function and experience can form the unique advantages of the brand, but the ultimate goal is to transform the advantages into brand volume and market sales. Today’s smart driving function is more like a vase of "I can do without it, but you can’t do without it". For the current extreme, smart driving is more like icing on the cake, not a gift in the snow that can increase sales.

In fact, Extreme Yue is also aware of the problem. Xia Yiping mentioned in an exchange with the media in April this year that "Extreme Yue sells experience instead of hardware, and Extreme Yue 01 can’t sell configuration". After all, in the industry context where all brands are crazy about stacking materials, Extreme Yue, which adopts a pure visual solution, has no selling point configuration such as 800V and laser radar.

Before admitting that marketing "made a mistake", Extreme Vietnam tried to save the situation by reducing prices.

Only one month after the listing of Extreme Yue 01, the official of Extreme Yue announced that the price of all models would be lowered by 30,000 yuan, as well as a limited-time discount for smart driving bags. In order to avoid "hurting" old customers, Extreme Yue compensated 30,000 yuan in cash for the users who bought cars before.

It is understandable to adjust the price to enhance the competitiveness of products in response to market changes. However, it is more or less reflected that the brand decision-makers have misjudged the market competition situation only one month after the new car was launched.

With Geely’s experience in building and selling cars as a support, the problems in marketing of Jiyue obviously cannot be explained by "lack of experience".

3. How to turn over?

The current situation of Extreme Vietnam is very similar to that of Lantu two years ago. At the beginning, there was only one product. After Lantu FREE struggled for one year, it ushered in the listing of Lantu Dreamers. In the past two years, Lantu Chasing Light, Lantu Chasing Light PHEV and other products have been supplemented one after another. The new and old products have been continuously improved and iterated, and the sales volume has gradually improved after a relatively complete product system layout has been completed.

One of the reasons is that the brand volume of Extreme Yue is not high, and the product layout is relatively simple. The price range of Extreme Yue 01 is 200,000 yuan, and it is also one of the most competitive market segments of new energy vehicles in China, especially SUV models, such as Tesla Model Y, Wenjie M5, Tucki G6, Weilai ES6, etc., which are all battle-hardened veterans and have deep market precipitation.

It was only after the new upgrade that the sales volume of the M5 in the asking world broke out. Tesla Model Y, Tucki G6, etc. have been optimizing and iterating in details, so that they can always stand in the first echelon.

That is to say, at least two things need to be done.

First, lay out products with different price points and different models, and construct a product matrix that can cover the largest market space within the brand positioning range.

According to the planning of Extreme Yue, the second product will be released this year, the pure electric car Extreme Yue 07, which is also a market with a price of 200,000. However, at present, this car has only "spoiled" its appearance at the Beijing Auto Show. It can be expected that for a long time, Extreme Yue 07, like Extreme Yue 01, will also be under pressure in sales.

The second thing is to constantly polish and upgrade the existing products, and continuously improve the competitiveness of products. For example, after the release of Lantu Zhuiguang, it didn’t sell well, but after the launch of Zhuiguang PHEV, and the price adjustment, the sales volume immediately changed. Now it is necessary to test the market through the modified models of the old products, and constantly explore and find its own accurate positioning.

The above is just a compulsory course for all new brands to experience the market, and the cruelty of the market is that if you don’t do these actions, you will definitely be eliminated, but if you do, you may not be able to turn over, because besides marketing, there are also production delivery, after-sales service and management of supply chain and internal organization, each of which is a mountain, and there is still a long way to go.