BYD's counterattack gives new consumer brands 0-1 experience

How can a brand establish a good image in the face of a large number of consumers, and how can it carry out marketing promotion? Please read this article for understanding.

When it comes to branding, actually, regardless of industry, a lot of underlying things are the same. After all, we are all targeting consumers, so simplicity is the best way.

Today I will share the example of BYD. Its 0-1 stage was not smooth, and it was even accused of plagiarism. Although it is different now and has already made a comeback, we can still see the idea of ​​building a brand from it.

Today, BYD ranks among the top 3 global automakers in terms of total market value. However, more than a decade ago, BYD was not considered a brand at all. At most, it was just a brand. More than a decade ago, the first offer my school received was from BYD. At that time, as a 985 university, the pass rate for science and engineering students to interview BYD was extremely high.

At that time, BYD's core business was batteries, and its car was the F3, which was ugly in appearance but cheap and sold well. After all, spending more than 70,000 yuan could buy a "Toyota Corolla" that cost nearly 150,000 yuan, which was still a good deal. As of the official discontinuation of production in 2021, the total sales of the F3 had exceeded 3 million units.

The F3 helped BYD gain GMV, but it also caused BYD to lose its brand image. From then on, BYD was branded as a "copycat" and a "low-end car".

Therefore, although there are many offers in campus recruitment, there are also many people who reject BYD’s offer.

Today, BYD has become the leading brand of domestic new energy vehicles, with a variety of low-end, mid-range and high-end automobile products being developed in three lines, exported to Japan and Europe, and competing with foreign brands. Han DM/EV has also become the only mid-range and high-end C-class domestic sedan with monthly sales exceeding 10,000.

The previous image of low-end cars and low brands has long been subverted.

What has BYD done over the past decade to gradually get rid of its low-end image? Is it because it has money to invest? What inspiration can brands in the new consumer track learn from?

1. Product Strength

BYD has become a "brand" in recent years, not because of advertising, exposure, and continuous advertising investment. Just imagine, if BYD's model was still the F3, no matter how much advertising it spent, it would all be wasted. Chongqing Lifan's financial resources were stronger than BYD's at that time, but Lifan insisted on imitation and low-price strategies from beginning to end, and now Lifan has faded out of everyone's sight.

Therefore, the foundation of any brand's growth must be product strength. A company does not create a brand first, but creates customers through products, and then creates a brand through customers' purchases, dissemination, and word of mouth. If people in the marketing industry think that they can create a brand through branding and advertising exposure, then they cannot build a brand.

BYD’s previous cars were initially based on plagiarism, but its founder Wang Chuanfu advocates technology and has been accumulating industry-leading technologies, including batteries, core components of electric vehicles, and so on.

According to third-party data, BYD has applied for 13,000 patents in the past 20 years, 16 times that of Tesla, and more than half of them are related to batteries.

With the accumulation of technology, BYD has gradually gained the strength to challenge other brands, including BYD's black technology "blade battery" in the field of electric vehicles.

After the Han, which is equipped with blade batteries, was launched, it received 30,000 orders just a few days after its launch, even though its brand power is not as strong as Tesla's. This also showed the Chinese people that BYD can compete with Tesla.

Consumers are not fools. If the product is not good, it will slowly lose the market. Korean cars Kia Hyundai, French cars Renault, Japanese cars Infiniti, Italian cars Romeo, etc., have seen their sales shrink and their reputations deteriorate due to product problems. Could it be that the brand power and market budget of these brands are not as good as BYD?

As consumers, we know that it is very important to know the product when we buy it. However, many bosses who create new consumer brands stop at being product OEMs. They copy others and hope that their core competitiveness lies in marketing and promotion. As a result, they invest a lot of money, have good sales, but the company does not make money.

2. Brand Impression

Whether a brand is high-end or not is not determined by its advertising slogans. Just imagine, more than a decade ago, if BYD had declared that it wanted to be a high-end Chinese car manufacturer, it would not have been able to say so itself based on the F3.

BYD’s previous logo, which borrowed the blue and white color from BMW, has always been criticized as being ugly.

Brand impression is not determined by the slogans of the brand. To get rid of the labels of low-end, cheap and poor quality, BYD must make a new appearance. In terms of brand impression, in addition to improving product strength, BYD has also done the following things:

1. Change the logo. After all, it is necessary to save face.

2. Improve car design

The design team poached from Audi has directly raised the appearance of BYD cars to several levels; in terms of body interior, the former interior designer of Mercedes-Benz S-Class began to serve as BYD's global interior design director in 2019.

3. Price increase

The confidence brought by the products is directly reflected in the price of BYD cars, which makes consumers feel that BYD is striving to enter the ranks of domestic mid-to-high-end cars. The recently launched million-level model has directly raised BYD's image by several levels.

4. Public relations

Public relations is something you have invested in, but you don’t know how much products it can help the brand sell. Is it okay not to do it?

When a brand is mentioned, you can think of its high-end options. Even if you don’t choose it for the time being, choosing other products of the brand will not feel inferior.

Many people think that BYD's rise is due to the electric car dividend in China in recent years. To forge iron, one must be strong. In recent years, electric car brands have emerged one after another, and many brands have relied on spending money on marketing, and several have run away. The growth of a brand is definitely not just driven by marketing capabilities, especially in the red ocean track.

Conclusion

The success of an enterprise depends not only on its brand power and marketing power, but also on corporate strategy, corporate operations, channel strength, etc.

Today, I just want to share BYD's case from the perspective of product strength and brand impression, and I hope that you can learn from it. Whether it is the new consumer product track or the high-tech automobile track, whether a brand is successful is not determined by marketing investment. Without products, marketing is useless.

Many brand owners come to me with limited budgets and mass-market products. They especially want to find marketing techniques to build brand power and achieve sales growth. When I communicate about product power to most people, they will think it is nonsense and they may not even believe it: other people’s products are not that good either, but they have become popular through promotion and live streaming.

In fact, behind the glamorous GMV you see of others, there may be no profit. High GMV does not mean strong brand.

Author: Keny Wei , WeChat public account: Marketing Lao Wang