Taobao, Tmall and JD.COM Mall all feel the challenge to the traditional retail industry. Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, powerful state-owned enterprises, were subverted by Tencent with a simple WeChat in less than three years.

Nowadays, many traditional newspapers and magazines, both in income and readership, are declining and being replaced by the Internet, a new way to get information from Weibo or WeChat. I can also predict that traditional TV stations may be subverted within two years.

Recently, crazy people on the internet have poured into the industry of making TV. Recently, many TV manufacturers invited me to communicate, and I said earnestly that there was a bottom line for how to compete in home appliances in the past, and everyone still made profits. Now there is no bottom line after the barbarians of the internet rush in, and the price is not the lowest, only lower. Many bosses who have worked in the TV industry for ten or twenty years feel very confused.

I think this is the worst time and the best time. For traditional large enterprises, facing the Internet is just like a "sunflower collection". If they want to succeed, they must go to the palace first.

Of course, the bigger the enterprise, the bigger the body, and it is particularly painful to get up from the palace. The last page of Sunflower Collection says that even if you are in the palace, you may not succeed. I am now teaching many enterprises the art of self-palace. With the development of the Internet today, small and medium-sized enterprises can completely counterattack.

Everyone has mastered the online thinking, and the effect of airdropping AK47 in a country is basically the same. Everyone is armed with the idea of the internet, which can not only save the palace, but also shut down many large enterprises.

Some traditional enterprises have experienced a particularly complicated mental process when facing the challenges of the Internet. The first stage is called "looking down" They think the internet is just a thing, and it can't become a trend. We have been in this industry for decades. Soon they found that the network gang was not dead, but more and more excited and ready to study it. They felt dazzled. As the saying goes, amateurs watch the excitement and experts watch the doorway. For many non-Internet traditional enterprises, it is precisely because they don't understand the rules of the Internet game, and only a few key words make them more and more unclear.

When it comes to real research, they "don't understand" why when you have to reason with them. Values determine the direction of an enterprise. The more successful an enterprise is, the things it succeeds will shape its genes. You and the sharks in the sea teach him how to shoot a leopard in the desert every day, which sharks can't learn.

After a while, some enterprises did make up their minds to start reading "Sunflower Collection". New animals are designed to destroy old animals. Many enterprises enter the Internet and find that the pioneer of the Internet has run ahead. He is "invisible".

Internet is not technology!

Many enterprises have some misunderstandings. Don't they think that the Internet only costs money on technology? There are many big concepts on the Internet, and you have attended many deceptive meetings. When it comes to the Internet, it is cloud computing, big data, social networks and mobile terminals. It seems that spending money and using things online has become an Internet enterprise.

I think these are some strategies. If you want to face the challenge of the Internet, you should make good use of it and turn it into a weapon in your own hands. Some basic values of the Internet are different from traditional business.

Before I say anything, I want to talk about the changes in consumer behavior. Have you found that in the period without the Internet, our relationship with consumers is based on information asymmetry, and what we buy is not refined. Businessmen are basically for profit. Although we always say that the customer is God, there are only two concepts in economic relations, one is the merchant and the other is the customer. Who is the client? It's the person who bought your things. Whoever pays me is God, which is a traditional economic game rule.

Many times we talk about various marketing theories, 4p (product, price, channel, promotion. ) theory. In fact, these are all through advertising, publicity and promotion. Finally, you successfully fooled the user and bought your things. Including the theory of supermarket, what stack, and the promotion of the last meter promoter. For example, if you sell home appliances, you are likely to go to the appliance supermarket. The beauty who finally sold successfully persuaded you that she wanted to buy A TV and finally bought B TV.

All marketing theories aim at success. I can tell you that with the internet, the rules of the game will change and the environment will change in the next decade. Consumers have more and more initiative and right to speak. Information asymmetry will be less and less. User experience will become more and more important.

Today, when all products are highly homogeneous, what you provided to users in the past was the function at the earliest, and then it was to meet the needs of users. Let's talk about creating value for users. When all peers are creating value for users, you will find that it is the user experience that ultimately determines everyone's success.

From customer experience to user experience

What is experience? For example, Huaxia Bank invited me to dinner. I opened a bottle of mineral water and drank it. It was indeed mineral water. Is this an experience? This is not an experience. Only by doing one thing to the extreme and exceeding expectations is it called experience. For example, someone handed me a mineral water bottle, and when I drank it, it was full of 50-degree Maotai, which I couldn't understand. I just talk about where I eat. I thought it was mineral water, but it turned out to be Maotai. I want to write a Weibo, which must have been forwarded more than 500 times.

Only by becoming an experience can it be deeply rooted in people's hearts, can it really make users have emotional identity and spread word of mouth. What is the most subtle thing about experiencing this thing? No matter how much you advertise, you can't solve the problem of experience. You advertise and blow your TV and refrigerator like smallpox, but you can't say that the user experience after buying my product is good.

This experience is decided by the users themselves, and it is not up to you to post on the Internet. I told traditional manufacturers that the rules of the game have changed now. You took the money from the user and sold it to him. You just want this user to stop coming to you. What will the rules of the game become in the future? You sell things to users or give them away. Your experience journey has just begun, and users have just begun to deal with you. You can't wait for your products and services to make users feel your existence and value every day.

I put the word experience first. Why didn't I talk about customer experience before? I said user experience. There is a very interesting phenomenon on the Internet. If you want to use the Internet, don't think about your money pocket from the beginning, and you can't make something like traditional business to fool him into buying it. You should first consider saying, even if he is not a customer who pays me, can I turn him into a user who knows me or uses one of my products or services?

This user and customer are only one word apart, and I think this is very different. I don't know why. If many of you are surfing the Internet for the first time, what is the first shock you get from the Internet? There are many things, many services, free news reading and free mail. Those services are not only free, but you are even welcome to use them. The service quality is very good.

Three modes of making money on the Internet

Judging from the rules of commercial games, although the products on the Internet are ever-changing, there are three modes of making money on the Internet. The first one is very traditional, using the Internet to sell things. Selling real things, you can call it e-commerce. Selling funds, stocks and wealth management products, you are called Internet finance. If you sell SP, virtual services and discount coupons for restaurants, it's called O2O. Aside from these concepts, the first mode is to use the Internet as a platform to do traditional business, but give full play to the characteristics of the Internet, that is, the power of gathering people online.

Compared with the pure Internet model, there are two ways to make money. One is advertising, that is, when your service can't make money, if you have enough eyeballs and enough users, you can recommend some other products and services to them. Actually, this is an advertisement. It's like watching TV for free, but there are advertisements on TV.

The other mode is the value-added service mode based on online games. You can charge some users who provide special services. For example, a game may have 65438+100000 diaosi to play for free. Suddenly, a man from Gao Fushuai came. He feels different. To be a big brother, he has to spend a lot of money, buy a horse, buy a sword back and pay diaosi. He is respected in this server and acts like a big brother everywhere. Earning money from these people is value-added service.

Over the years, no matter how awesome Internet companies are, they can't escape these three modes. You must find a way to get the largest user base. Why do some people sell funds online? Or because the larger the user base, you can save the cost of contacting each user. Only 2000 people and 200 people visit a website. You sell advertisements, and no advertisers pay for them.

Including value-added services, many people will have the illusion that I can earn 10000 people's money if I get 10000 people. On today's internet, I feel that besides selling white powder, the business with higher profit than selling white powder is online games. The charging rate of online games is less than 5%. Today, any value-added service on the Internet is paid at a rate of several percent. In other words, if you have a huge user base, you may build a pyramid with a toll station on it. If you don't even have the pedestal of this pyramid, you need these 10000 charging users. Sorry, someone has already done this. There used to be a company in China with many free users, about 3% paid users, so they decided to drive away all free users. Do you know what it is? They even fled from charging users.

This is the rule of internet games, which determines a sentence we often say. In order to gain commercial benefits first, we must first consider how to establish and create user value.

Historically, perhaps in traditional industries, due to various complicated situations, China has a large population, people are easy to fool, a vast territory and asymmetric information. On the internet, you rarely see a business that can continue to operate, if it is mainly to fool users. Enterprises that can really develop on the internet, even if some enterprises are not very good to their peers or even some enterprises are controversial, no one dares to really offend their users.

Only when you find ways to provide users with high-quality services, even free services, and turn many people into your user base, can you establish a business model after you have a strong user base. This is my second key word. When you decide to access the Internet, you really can't understand it. Don't think about making money from the beginning, or simply copy traditional business to the Internet, or simply regard the Internet as a distribution platform and promotion platform. This is not a real understanding of the Internet. You should seriously consider how to use the Internet to create more value for customers and users, so that you can get more users than traditional means. Users can recognize your value and it is closely related to the experience.

To play the Internet, you must be able to play for free.

The third key word, what I want to say is free. Free is the spirit of the Internet. Free is a particularly interesting thing. In today's China, we lack trust. Free is increasingly becoming a marketing tool in daily life, and sometimes people even think it is a cheating tool.

For example, if you go to a restaurant, the restaurant says that you can get a bottle of beer if you order enough food for one table. You said, I don't want those dishes. Can you give me free beer? The boss will definitely kick you out. Free is conditional. Free internet is not like this.

For another example, a group of people in white coats suddenly came to your community and claimed to see a doctor for free. I believe that experienced people will sound the alarm in their heads, and they will definitely sell you medicine. There is a purpose behind free.

Each of us has an innate fear of freedom, and we don't believe that there is a free lunch in the world. In real life, even if you send a bottle of water, the more users you serve, the higher your marginal cost. Even if the water is canned for free, you still need a bottle and logistics fee. This means that in real life, under normal circumstances, free services and free products are unsustainable and can only become a marketing tool. Free tasting and free compensation are all staged.

The Internet has one characteristic. All the products and services above are virtual and digital. It is possible that your R&D fee is fixed and everyone can download and access it for free. At this time, you will find that, for example, if you make a thing and spend 1 1,000 yuan, if there are 1 1,000 people using it, the cost allocated to everyone is 1 yuan. What if 1 100 million people are using it? You will find that the cost you share with others is almost negligible. But 1 100 million users, whether doing value-added services or advertising, everyone has an UP value, which is equivalent to the income that each user contributes to you because of this business model, which will exceed the cost shared by everyone. This makes the free mode on the Internet not only feasible, but also sustainable, and it is even possible to establish a new business model.

Therefore, Internet free is not a scam, and the great success of many Internet companies is based on free. Because once you launch a free product, its quality even exceeds that of those charged products, which has a huge impact on the user experience. It is one of the most favorable advertisements, surpassing all advertising and marketing methods.

Let me give you some examples. Everyone knows that Ma Yun is a man of God. When he first became an e-commerce, Taobao first announced that it would open a store for free, and opponents would charge for opening a store. The big sellers in Yi Bei feel that they can't open it, and even if it's useless, they are willing to copy the store on Taobao. All sellers go to Taobao, and there are sellers and buyers.

At the beginning of free time, Ma Yun may not have figured out how to make money. For various reasons, three years later he announced that he would continue to be free, forever. Finally, when all B2C businesses in China set up shop on Taobao, what's the problem? You search a piece of toilet paper and get 10000 results. Open a shop for free. No problem. If you want to search toilet paper, some people have to pay a value-added service fee. Taobao has become one of the most profitable Internet companies in China, which is a free business model.

Everyone uses wechat. Some time ago, many people were debating whether WeChat should be charged. I will tell these people that you don't know much about Tencent. Tencent is an internet company. According to the rules of Internet games, why can we subvert operators and give away SMS and MMS charged by operators for free?

Why do some people like to use WeChat? Because it makes the experience better than SMS, and it is free. As long as there is traffic, there is no need to pay SMS fee for WIFI, and there is no need to pay 50 cents or 1 yuan for MMS for sending photos. It quickly killed the operators from the communication level.

However, its business model, everyone thinks that you liars must kill us for free first, and then charge. This is the traditional view of the Internet, which is wrong. Who dares to charge online? A bunch of us are waiting for free.

The free business model on the Internet that I am telling you today is to extend your value chain. You are free where others charge, so you have to find a way to create a new value chain to charge. You got it? Wechat takes back your communication fee. You use WeChat every day, which is a huge user base for Tencent. But as long as it promotes games on WeChat, makes people masturbate and recommends products to you, it can easily earn more money than the short message fee charged by China Mobile every year.

This subverts and destroys the traditional Internet, destroys the traditional business model and establishes a new value system. When 360 was first done, we were a group of people who didn't understand safety. Sometimes I think people on the Internet are a bit like me, just like a bull rushing into a China shop or punching a master to death. We don't understand the rules of safe games. We rushed in and felt that everyone needed something safe. With so many Trojans, viruses and fraudulent websites, everyone still spends money to buy protection. This is definitely wrong and should be done for free.

We were also exploring. Do you think I have a long-term vision and think about the future business model? Many successful entrepreneurs will give you such lectures after their success, and you will feel how far-sighted and strategic he is. This kind of god is not something we diaosi can learn. To tell the truth, we didn't know at the time. At that time, I thought that free might be the point that attracted users more easily. Sometimes you tell users that the technology is good and users don't understand. You tell users that things are good. How can users know that your things are good unless they try? We decided to be free forever, free for life.

Today, for many people, if you want to embrace the Internet, I hope you will reconsider. Do you really take the customer first as the slogan of the enterprise? Do you really think about what users are? Even if you do something beneficial to people who don't pay you now, you may not lose your core value for free.

How do you attract your users? I think for diaosi enterprises, we should not set up research institutes as soon as we innovate, and get a bunch of experts and scholars to invest hundreds of millions. What we have to do is to stand from the user's point of view, and only need a little improvement, but it can make users exceed expectations. There is a typical example, there is a short film about making a music kitchen, and the typical example of the catering industry is Haidilao. Haidilao didn't say what shells were put in our soup to attract everyone. It's not that our family ate abalone, dragon liver and phoenix marrow. They clean your glasses and eat melon seeds, and provide many services that traditional catering can't provide, which exceeds your expectations. In the era of increasingly fierce homogenization competition, experience is the only way to win users.

What I just said is the free business model. Can I do it for free in the future? Can free bring the multiplication of massive users? When your users are free, you should never simply conclude that the grandson will be wiped out. You have to consider the fact that the free Internet has killed many huge enterprises. Wechat killed telecom operators less than three years ago, when Alipay was free, which made many of you become Alipay users. At that time, how many people thought that Alipay could gather a lot of money to be the balance treasure today and earn more money every day? Free is really something to do, so don't think that free things must be deceptive. The more free the product is, the lower the cost the user chooses and the lower the cost the user gives up. I spent 1 0,000 yuan on a refrigerator, but it doesn't work well and I can't return it. On the internet, the user used your things and the mouse ran away at a click. The more free things are, sometimes the user experience should be put first. You have to find a way to do it to the extreme, even better than charging. Think about it, if you can make something better than charging, the experience is still there, and it is free, even small enterprises can be invincible.