Lei Jun tells stories, but the automotive industry can’t learn from him

Lei Jun's storytelling played an important role in Xiaomi's promotion. As Lei Jun said, the purpose of speaking is not to sell products. Lei Jun's popularity has laid a good foundation for Xiaomi's marketing activities and captured traffic. Recommended to Internet friends to read.

Starting from 2020, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun will give a public speech every year.

In this "large-scale CEO reality show" with "Lei Jun telling stories" as the main theme, every time we see the man with the Xiantao accent, standing alone on the stage telling about his past and promoting Xiaomi products.

On the evening of July 19, the speech entered its "fifth season". The 55-year-old Lei Jun still told his own story, with the theme of "Courage". Liang Jingru did not come to the scene. Lei Jun spoke for three hours, and the first hour was about car manufacturing.

Three years ago, Lei Jun made up his mind to build a car, and staked all his achievements and reputation in life on fighting for Xiaomi Automobile. Now Xiaomi Automobile has been built, and has received more than 100,000 orders, which has been a hit. Lei Jun finally has the confidence to review the past three years of car manufacturing as a winner and a veteran, and consolidate his "model worker" personality.

Of course, the purpose of the speech is not to promote the products, just as Lei Jun said before the speech, to attract more "traffic". In addition to promoting Xiaomi SU7, in the second half of the speech, Lei Jun also released new products such as Xiaomi folding phone, noise-cancelling headphones, Xiaomi bracelet, air conditioner, etc.

An automotive industry insider commented on Lei Jun: "When Boss Lei appears, half of the Internet's traffic is taken up. It's simply a traffic black hole."

So, what did Lei Jun say in this speech and what did he want to convey to the outside world?

1. What was said?

This speech is divided into two halves. The first half is a flesh-and-blood car-making story, and the second half is a slightly boring new mobile phone product launch. We will focus on the first half.

Lei Jun started from the time when the decision to build cars was made three years ago, and continued to talk about today when the company is challenging the goal of annual delivery of 120,000 vehicles. Most of the information has been made public before, but it was strung together again and told by him himself, making it more complete and moving.

There are several interesting details, which we will focus on here.

Three years ago, before Xiaomi decided to build a car, it conducted 85 surveys and interviewed more than 200 people. Li Bin and He Xiaopeng urged Lei Jun to build a car.

After research, Lei Jun found that building a car would require at least $10 billion. The premise for Xiaomi's directors to support building a car was that Lei Jun himself must lead the team and do it personally.

When Xiaomi decided to build a car, several VCs offered Xiaomi Auto a price of 10 billion US dollars. Lei Jun rejected the external investment and decided to build it entirely on his own.

Putting these three things together, we can see that Lei Jun's decision to build cars was a well-thought-out and well-prepared one, and he can be seen as having entered the battle with the belief that he would win.

After officially starting to build cars, in order to understand the market demand, Lei Jun mobilized his team to talk to more than 300 engineers within Xiaomi. He also went to the parking lot of Xiaomi's office area to see what cars everyone was driving one by one, and found out the brands, models and price ranges that everyone bought.

At the first project review meeting at the end of 2021, Xiaomi had a particularly big internal disagreement. The meeting lasted a full 21 days, and finally decided to start over with the entire product plan. Lei Jun's positioning for Xiaomi's first car is: As a newcomer, Xiaomi will be a huge success as long as it can get on the table smoothly. Don't subvert or overturn the table right from the start.

From this we can see that Lei Jun is very pragmatic in making cars, respects industry rules, and avoids many detours.

Lei Jun didn’t know much about cars and rarely drove because his company assigned him a full-time driver. In order to bridge the information gap, he did the following three things:

First, I drove myself to get back the feeling of driving. At the same time, I took the time to read a lot of biographies of car tycoons, and even found all the racing movies I had watched in the past and re-watched them.

Second, he test-drove more than 170 cars in three years. He first borrowed cars from friends and colleagues, then went to 4S stores of various brands for test drives, and later simply wandered around the underground garage of Xiaomi. When he saw a car he had never driven, he asked his assistant to put a loan note on the car and borrowed it to experience it. He also interviewed car owners, took notes, and searched for information and comments related to the car on the Internet, compiling more than 200,000 words of information.

The third is to learn to drive a racing car, get a racing license, and learn to drift. In order to get on the track, he bought a very advanced crankshaft simulator and practiced secretly at home. He also forced the Xiaomi team to practice racing, and more than 100 people got a racing license. During the speech, Lei Jun deliberately played a carefully shot video of him drifting in the Xiaomi SU7.

Through these three short stories, Lei Jun further strengthened his image as a diligent and reliable model worker, and demonstrated his dedication to making cars.

During the entire three-hour and five-minute speech, Lei Jun spoke alone from beginning to end. By the end, his voice was noticeably hoarse, but his tone and volume did not decrease at all. One could not help but admire his hard work.

In the last "One more thing" session, Lei Jun unveiled the prototype of Xiaomi SU7 Ultra in his PPT. This October, the car will officially enter the Nürburgring Nordschleife and plans to become the fastest four-door electric car in the Nürburgring Nordschleife within ten years.

This is a huge flag, pointing directly at Porsche.

2. What to convey?

On the surface, Lei Jun's speech was just him speaking alone on the stage, but in reality it was a "review meeting" carefully planned by Xiaomi, which simply pushed the boss to the forefront and used a carefully packaged personality to open up traffic.

The difficult decisions, painful persistence, interesting reversals, and highlights of the Jedi counterattack in the speech are all carefully selected segments, outlining the ups and downs of the story in a way that ordinary people can understand.

In fact, most of the founders of new car companies have experienced similar stories, some of which are even more thrilling than Lei Jun's. But they can't tell it, or if they do, the outside world may not understand it, and they can't get the support of users.

Lei Jun has a deep insight into the charm of stories and also skillfully detonates its power.

From the perspective of communication, stories are a very common but extremely clever way of communication. Studies have shown that information conveyed through stories is easier for people to remember than information conveyed through other means, with the difference being 22 times. In this way, storytellers can instill thoughts, emotions and values ​​into the audience and make them empathize.

For example, in his speech, Lei Jun mentioned the details of how he asked employees to borrow cars by posting a loan note, and his experience of taking careful notes and secretly practicing driving on a simulator, cleverly creating the image of a hard-working, humble and pragmatic CEO.

For example, in order to demonstrate the appeal of Xiaomi's car manufacturing, Lei Jun mentioned three people who joined Xiaomi Auto regardless of everything. After hearing Lei Jun's announcement of car manufacturing, one of Xiaomi's early employees excitedly went to the riverside to drink with his friends, walked along the riverside for a whole night, and then sent a message to Lei Jun to participate in car manufacturing. A designer at BMW's German headquarters gave up his life in Europe, resolutely resigned, packed his luggage, and moved his family back to China to join Xiaomi Auto. This kind of plot, like a cool article, is indeed very popular.

Robert McKee's Story, a must-read classic book for screenwriters around the world, has this sentence: Stories are essentially irrational , and they do not express ideas through the kind of boring rational speculation in essays. If you have to choose between trivial material told brilliantly and profound material told poorly, the audience will always choose trivial stories told brilliantly.

Lei Jun talked about a lot of trivial things in his speech, some of which were so trivial that they seemed to have nothing to do with the company's business. For example, Lei Jun said that he went to Turpan to participate in the summer test of Xiaomi cars. The local climate was extremely hot. He found that the local watermelon was 0.3 yuan per kilogram. He couldn't help but buy a few and sent them back to Beijing. He found that the shipping fee was 100 times the price of the watermelon.

These insignificant jokes are actually valuable materials for spreading stories, and can be transformed into firewood for traffic. In the midst of chatting and laughing, the image of a CEO who works tirelessly and goes to the front line has been deeply rooted in people's hearts.

Lei Jun also sprinkled a lot of chicken soup in his speech. Through the foreshadowing and reversal of various stories, in a slightly sensational way, with just the right background music, he expressed his feelings and values ​​to the outside world. All the difficult moments in the speech paved the way for the subsequent reversals and highlights, further gaining the favor, understanding and support of fans.

Lei Jun's speech is undoubtedly a great help to Xiaomi's marketing. Lei Jun said "people and cars are one", which is actually "people and companies are one". The greater Lei Jun's influence, the better Xiaomi cars will sell.

3. How’s it going?

Without commenting on the technology and quality of Xiaomi cars, just talking about marketing, Xiaomi is indeed at least half a body ahead of many car companies.

Xiaomi also has a group of loyal fans, which is an important factor in the rapid growth of Xiaomi SU7. Lei Jun mentioned in his speech that when Xiaomi SU7 was officially launched in March, many of the first batch of car owners who placed orders had never seen the car or test-driven it.

The outside world underestimated the potential of Xiaomi Motors. Before Xiaomi Motors went public, as Lei Jun said, not many people were optimistic about it.

The outside world is used to inferring future development from the current situation, rather than solving current problems from a development perspective. Many people previously believed that Xiaomi Auto entered the market too late and had little chance of success based on the development of Wei, Xiaopeng and Li Auto.

What is often overlooked is that over the past decade, Xiaomi has fully demonstrated its ability to reap half-ripe fruits in a mature market in the most aggressive way, whether it is mobile phones, televisions, home appliances, or today's cars. With consumers gradually being educated and the supply chain becoming increasingly mature, Xiaomi Auto has unique advantages.

People also underestimated Lei Jun's courage and strength to start a new business. Lei Jun once commented on himself: "Extremely aggressive under extreme conservatism." When the situation is unclear, his decision-making will become restrained and cautious, but when the general direction is relatively clear and the risks are controllable, Xiaomi will move forward quickly.

The market performance of Xiaomi SU7 exceeded Lei Jun's expectations. According to Lei Jun, when the full-year production capacity of SU7 was determined in February, the company ordered 76,000 units, which means an average monthly sales of 10,000 units after the production capacity ramped up. The actual sales performance far exceeded expectations. In June, Xiaomi delivered more than 10,000 units. The annual delivery target of Xiaomi Auto was initially raised to 100,000 units, and later to 120,000 units.

Lei Jun said that the company expects to complete the delivery target of 100,000 vehicles ahead of schedule in November this year.

According to this progress, Xiaomi's average monthly delivery volume will reach 16,000 units in the next few months. In the pure electric sedan market above 200,000 yuan, Xiaomi SU7 will occupy the first camp.

Judging from the performance of Xiaomi SU7 after its release, Xiaomi's car manufacturing is currently quite successful. At least through this car, Xiaomi has taken a seat at the table of new car manufacturing. The entry of Xiaomi Auto has brought the already fiercely competitive Chinese auto market into an unprecedented involution. Lei Jun's speech and a series of marketing actions have attracted CEOs of major auto companies to learn and imitate. But everyone knows that some things cannot be learned.

The market is now concerned about Xiaomi's second car, the "Xiaomi SU8" rumored in the market, which did not appear in this speech. Lei Jun also responded that "Xiaomi SU8" is not true and Xiaomi Auto has no such car series or model planning.

Lei Jun tried to temporarily divert the outside world's attention to the Nürburgring Nordschleife by racing the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra prototype car on the Nürburgring Nordschleife to further verify the performance and quality of Xiaomi cars.

Lei Jun's annual speech is over, but the story is not over. For Xiaomi Auto, getting on the poker table is just the first step, and the game has just begun.

Author: Liming

Source: WeChat public account: "Dingjiaoone (ID: dingjiaoone)"