Weilai started to think about content when it started selling coffee

This article mainly discusses NIO’s strategy of increasing user experience and promoting its service platform and battery swap system by selling coffee.

In addition to joint ventures, what else can be done for brand coffee marketing?

Starting from June 17, several NIO centers in Shanghai started selling coffee, specialty drinks, and children's drinks on food delivery platforms, with prices ranging from 18 yuan to 48 yuan.

It is worth noting that coffee delivery is not an independent action. On June 15, NIO’s battery swap station in Shanghai Minxin Tea City launched the “power-on coffee” service. The battery swap station has a built-in automatic coffee machine, and users can buy coffee during the battery swap period.

It is not uncommon for consumer brands to cross over to the coffee business. Luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Hermès opened coffee shops overseas a few years ago. In April this year, sports brand Decathlon and Mei ONE, the brand behind Li Jiaqi, both opened their own coffee shops. However, in the automotive industry, NIO is the only one to cross over to sell coffee.

What is the purpose of NIO's cross-border coffee sales? In Daofa's opinion, coffee takeaway and electric coffee form a linkage. NIO may want to use the coffee scene as an incision to attract target users and promote its two most important selling points - the service system based on NIO House and the energy replenishment system based on battery swapping.

Sister Dao once proposed a content seeding strategy formula based on the omni-channel marketing trend.

Selling coffee is exactly the scenario that NIO has built based on the needs of its user base and combined with its product strategy. In less than a week, some coffee-related content has received a good response on platforms such as Video Account and Xiaohongshu.

Good products and good content need to be matched with good scenarios to effectively communicate to the target audience. This formula is of course also applicable to car brands, and NIO is not the first new energy vehicle company to successfully apply this formula.

1. Use the coffee symbol to establish a user contact scenario

As one of the first domestic car companies to adopt the DTC model, user demand is the first principle of Weilai's product and service design. Weilai's two major features - battery replacement and service - are both brand competitive advantages that are gradually established based on user needs.

As early as 2012, Li Bin conducted a survey on "Why don't you buy electric cars" on Yiche.com, which he founded. More than 60,000 people participated at the time. The top answer was that charging was not guaranteed, and the second was that the battery price was high. This survey became the starting point of NIO's battery replacement route.

However, in addition to solving the pain points at the technical level of battery swapping, Li Bin has also found another differentiated value for himself - service.

The most famous service center of NIO is NIO House. According to the official definition, NIO House is a lifestyle community where NIO users can share happiness and grow together. It is often opened in the core business districts of first- and second-tier cities, providing services such as meetings, reading, gatherings, and coffee specialties. To put it bluntly, NIO House is the NIO version of Starbucks.

The fact that NIO House has become the business card of NIO’s services has a lot to do with the brand’s unique user portrait.

According to Epps Consulting data, male users account for 64% of the potential consumers of new energy in 2024. However, in this male-dominated market, NIO's user group is mostly female, and users with a bachelor's degree or above account for 83.9%.

These highly educated, high-income NIO users enjoy quiet, stylish leisure time, and one of their main leisure activities is hanging out in a coffee shop. A NIO Fellow (frontline sales) told DaoFa that they will consciously guide female test drivers to experience NIO House to increase conversions.

NIO House is the scene that can most impress NIO's core users, and coffee + takeaway further extends this scene to radiate to the seed-seeking population and the general population.

In addition to strengthening its value advantage in service, coffee also helped NIO solve another difficult problem, which was to better promote "battery swapping".

The good service of NIO House is visible to the naked eye, but the advantages of battery swapping are difficult to express in words, while the disadvantages are very intuitive.

The advantage of battery swapping is that it solves range anxiety, but it is difficult to directly feel it in daily scenarios. Although the topic of electric vehicles queuing for charging during holidays is frequently in the news, it is difficult for users to appreciate the necessity of fast battery swapping without actually experiencing it.

Due to the existence of batteries, the body of electric vehicles is already higher than that of gasoline vehicles. In addition, NIO has to put a battery swap mechanism in addition to the battery, so the space inside the car is even narrower, and there is no front trunk. This disadvantage is particularly obvious on the sedan model ET5. In addition, the product premium generated by the cost of building a battery swap station will ultimately be borne by the user.

Therefore, how to find a suitable scenario to promote battery swapping has always been a headache for NIO.

Searching for "battery swap" on NIO's official account, apart from reports on the progress of battery swap station construction, you will also see car owners shouting about the "convenience" of battery swap. But when potential users ask what exactly is convenient about it? How convenient is it? Car owners are often very secretive: the benefits of battery swapping can only be known after experiencing it yourself.

In the past, it was only conceivable but not expressible. Now, by adding coffee scenes, NIO not only meets the daily consumption needs of many female users, but also intuitively demonstrates the advantages of battery swapping:

The problem of vehicle range can be solved in the time it takes to buy a cup of coffee, which not only allows users to enjoy the very chill and "NIO" scene of drinking coffee, but also allows potential customers to see the feature of NIO that they can swap batteries without having to get out of the car to plug in and out the charging gun, or wait in line.

Seeing the launch of the battery-powered coffee, a NIO Fellow (front-line sales)'s first reaction was "there's something to it." In his opinion, battery swapping itself is a technical and boring selling point, "a cup of coffee can really brighten people's eyes," the Fellow told DaoFa.

A key word in NIO’s user portrait is “self-pleasing”. They pursue quality of life and are willing to pay an extra premium for brand and emotions.

To attract such a group of users, we must first enter their lives. Coffee is one of their daily life scenes. With this as an entry point, NIO can let them see itself.

2. New energy is beginning to focus on the crowd and NIO is not the only one

At present, there are two major trends in automobile consumption. First, the original brand system is broken, and car companies are paying more and more attention to the needs of segmented groups; second, consumer decision-making is advanced, and online marketing is becoming more and more important. There are two reasons behind this trend: one is the equality of power and configuration, and the other is the rise of the DTC model.

In the era of gasoline cars, there was a strict hierarchy between brands and products, with a clear price gap. Power and configuration were clearly marked with prices. If you wanted more power, configuration, and comfort, your car purchase budget would often increase exponentially. However, with the rise of electric vehicles, the change in energy forms has brought about "power equality", and various configurations that were previously only available in luxury cars have also been reduced to bargain prices due to price wars.

As the DTC model becomes popular in the automotive industry, brands move offline stores into shopping malls and publish a large amount of car reviews online, breaking the traditional car consumption chain. According to a survey by JD.com, more than half (56%) of new energy vehicle consumers have locked in their intended models before arriving at offline stores. Social media platforms are gradually taking on the role of consumer decision-making, while offline scenarios are mainly responsible for experience and delivery.

Under these two trends, the problem facing brands is how to find the right scenarios to reach the segmented groups and get the opportunity to showcase themselves. At this time, content seeding is particularly important.

According to the formula given at the beginning, the key to content seeding is to locate the crowd, find the crowd's underwater needs, and then express them in a scenario-based manner. In other words, car brands should not only use DTC on the product side, but also on the marketing side, to communicate with specific people, rather than targeting advertising with shouting.

In fact, before NIO, there were already brands that had successfully used this formula.

For example, Ideal Auto, whose slogan is "Creating a mobile home, creating a happy home", targets "dads". When buying a car, this group of people superficially wants a family car, but their underlying demand is to have a home-like feeling in the car.

Therefore, Ideal placed the refrigerator, color TV and large sofa in the most conspicuous position in the car, and also emphasized these features in the evaluation content, which stuck in the mindset. Later brands such as Leapmotor could only say that they were the "more ideal home" for young people.

Another example is this year's phenomenal hit Xiaomi SU7. In addition to Lei Jun's textbook founder IP marketing, the most impressive marketing method is that by digging deep into the sun protection needs, a performance car has won the favor of female users.

In order to expand the space inside the car, many new energy vehicles have made their roofs into glass canopies, and sun protection has become a rigid demand for most new energy vehicle owners. Xiaomi further noticed the hidden needs of female users behind sun protection - fear of sunburn and sunburn, and explained the selling point of anti-ultraviolet glass in detail at the press conference to address this demand, successfully capturing female users.

In fact, the top car companies currently have their own unique labels, such as BYD's cost-effectiveness, Wenjie's high-end + intelligent driving, and Zeekr's performance first.

Some car companies are still struggling to change. For example, Lu Fang, CEO of Dongfeng's Lantu brand, recently said that they are trying to "shift from TO B to TO C." Nezha, whose sales have been declining, is preparing to re-launch its brand in the second half of the year.

Of course, there are some brands that didn’t figure out their target audience and needs until they were on the verge of life and death. For example, HiPhi’s official website still has an extremely retro advertising slogan: “Choose HiPhi for high-end electric vehicles.”

3. Analyst Comments

Several users who have recently purchased a car told Daofa that they would consume different content on different platforms when buying a car, such as watching car model reviews on Bilibili and Douyin, and searching for user feedback on Xiaohongshu.

According to Daofa, some automobile brands have begun to pay attention to these channels, but they are limited to issuing live broadcast and posting tasks. There is no clear ROI assessment mechanism, let alone running the complete grass-planting link and building a content strategy system for different platforms.

But with the entry of Xiaomi, the situation is changing. Lei Jun, who crossed over from the digital 3C circle, taught all the car company bosses a lesson. Great Wall Wei Jianjun, NIO Li Bin, BYD executives, and a group of founders then joined the game and started playing short videos and live broadcasts.

It is true that the marketing strategy of Xiaomi's founder is difficult for other brands to replicate, but with the number one position of these car companies as the center, the ripples of attention to marketing are spreading to the entire industry. As Wei Jianjun said: Personal participation not only represents a change in marketing thinking, but also leads and motivates the management team. I hope the whole team can keep up with the pace.

From the price of the coupon to the founder of the coupon, content is becoming a new battlefield for car brands, and clever ideas like NIO Coffee will emerge in an endless stream.

Author | Xingzhi Editor | Li Zi This article is written by the operation author [Knife Skills Research Institute], WeChat public account: [Knife Skills Research Institute], original/authorized to be published in the operation party, and reproduction is prohibited without permission.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.