In the history of Chinese Internet entrepreneurship, there is a great term: Shanzhai. When copycat changed from a noun to a verb, the history of this great copycat has been unfolding:
Tencent started as a copycat of ICQ, and has never been able to stop it, becoming the copycat capital of China's Internet. Moreover, Tencent has been imitating and often surpassing it. Beyond ICQ, beyond Kaixin.com.
Kaixin.com is a copycat of Facebook. The success of Kaixin.com has greatly encouraged the trend of copycats on the Chinese Internet. They are not Tencent-style copycats, but copycats for the sake of copycats.
Fanfou, twitter, muttering, copycat twitter. This round of tragic copycats were suppressed by policies and swallowed up by giant crocodiles.
·Meituan, a copycat of groupon. It became a generational trend and led to thousands of regiment wars. At first, Wang Xing returned, then grassroots entrepreneurs rushed to the scene, and now major portals are using the Weibo model to reap the benefits.
So far, group buying is still very popular. This round of craze is very similar to the SNS entrepreneurial craze triggered by Kaixin.com. The reasons are as follows:
1. The open spirit brought by open source provides convenience for the simple model of group buying. It is extremely convenient to build such a website. To build a simple group-buying website based on the Meituan model, you only need to download a set of codes called "the most rustic" and it can be completed in a few dozen minutes.
2. Meituan’s model is relatively simple and the difficulty of business cooperation is also very low.
3. The most attractive reason: Meituan’s model caters to the impetuous psychology of many people. This model seems to be as “quick” as Kaixin.com. This group buying model is a complete viral marketing. Ultra-low prices constitute the source of the virus, and incentive mechanisms and transmission mechanisms constitute the transmission channels.
Convenient, simple, and quick, all this seems perfect and completely in line with the most core characteristic of this era - impetuousness.
Putting aside the impetuosity we see, we seriously consider whether this model has any value. Who does this and ultimately gets the value?
We can analyze that as far as the model itself is concerned, its purpose is not to achieve sales but to achieve brand communication. Therefore, the commission for operating such projects on the website is actually not the commission, but the advertising fee. The ultimate effect of brand communication depends on the size of the audience and the accuracy of the audience. Therefore, websites of different sizes achieve very different results when operating group buying operations.
Small and medium-sized websites and regional websites currently mainly serve the service industry, such as catering, entertainment, leisure and fitness, etc. The service fees are very low and the advertising revenue is not high. Large brand companies lack recognition for this type of website. Therefore, small and medium-sized group buying websites built by entrepreneurial companies will not become a big trend for the time being.
What are the reasons why giant crocodiles are involved in group buying? We have already pointed out that group buying is actually selling advertising. If a company like Tencent has no worries about communication channels and has an extremely large audience, then what kind of sensation will it achieve if it provides a viral source? Viral campaigns, coupled with huge audiences, are just right for big advertisers. In this scenario, big advertisers (such as automobiles, cosmetics, and daily consumer goods) are a perfect match for viral spread.
There is no way that Groupon has not demonstrated this advertising model to pioneers such as Wang Xing (it is currently difficult to tell whether they are pioneers or martyrs). However, the first step for an entrepreneurial company with the Shanzhai model is to gather such a large audience. How long is this road? How long does this road take? How much travel does this road require? How many people can survive?
Impetuous entrepreneurs, faced with a thousand-team battle, have they seriously considered the following questions:
1. In the short term, it will be difficult for small merchants to make money. It is still difficult for Meituan to make a profit, and the road ahead for newcomers is even more difficult.
2. There is too much competition and survival is not easy. What is easy for you means it is easy for others. That is to say, this model has no core competitiveness.
3. The cost of developing to a large enough scale is astronomical. Can you gather users to 10% of Tencent’s size? How many city substations need to be developed to achieve this scale? What kind of equipment, personnel, and management are needed? Low threshold does not mean low ongoing investment. Without profits and scale, financing is an extremely slim prospect.
Based on this analysis, we suddenly realized that the seemingly simple group purchase was not a game we played. The Thousand Regiment War is just a game and a dream. Having absurd dreams, when you wake up, time has gone forever!
A word to entrepreneurs: Cherish life and stay away from group buying! (Text/Ning Zhe Network Zhou Ning)