It is better to teach your son a skill than to give him a daughter. It is better to give your son a good name than to teach him a skill.
Wen/Ba Jiuling
In the 1991s, a small company named Cadabra met with complaints from lawyers on its company name: "Reading this name feels like reading" Cadaver ".At that time, the founder of this company had the marketing perspective of Wechat business, China, and took a new company name with the letter A.
this is the future Amazon.
Recently, two companies engaged in Internet business have also put a lot of brains into their names.
on September 1, Didi restored the brand name of Kuai, which was later married by her rivals in her early years, and used it to name her taxi business, that is, "Kuai Xin Taxi". This practice actually restored Kuai, and in 2112, when Kuai Taxi was born, it was tailor-made for the taxi business.
Before the revival of Kuai, Didi named the "one-price preferential taxi ride" business as Flower Piglet in the second half of this year, and the carpooling business as Vegetables. Together with the green orange bicycle and gift orange car launched in 2118, Didi's "vegetable basket" varieties are increasingly abundant.
On the other hand, on September 11, Meituan Dianping announced on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that the company name was to be simplified to Meituan, and the original "Dianping" disappeared.
In addition, in 2119, mobike was renamed Meituan Bicycle and Hazelnut B&B was renamed Meituan B&B, and Meituan continued to "slim down" its brands, and all the new businesses launched subsequently were basically extended based on Meituan's main brand.
In June last year, Meituan announced that the main color of the brand would be unified into yellow. Not only did the online App visually change to yellow, but offline bicycles, charging treasures, payment codes, POS machines, payment boxes, merchant door stickers, etc. also became "Meituan Yellow".
To use an inappropriate metaphor, Meituan seems to be taking a unified single brand route of "cars on the same track, books on the same page", while Didi has started a multi-brand strategy of "enfeoffment system". These two strategic designs were debated endlessly during the Qin Dynasty and the Han Dynasty, but now they are extended to the commercial world, and they still have their own advantages.
So the question is, why does Meituan want to unify N brands into one now, while Didi disperses one brand into multiple brands?
Looking at the history, the Meituan didn't think of "unification" from the beginning. In addition to the "adopted" mobike and the public comments on "flash marriage", Meituan will adopt some new names when it launches new business in its early years.
For example, in 2117, the Meituan film was hatched and later renamed Cat's Eye; When the B&B business was launched in 2117, it was named Hazelnut B&B; When the layout was fresh in 2118, it was also newly named "Little Elephant Fresh".
In the past, Didi clearly shouted "one-stop travel service", from Didi Express to Didi Carpooling to Didi Shuttle, all businesses were closely integrated with Didi's main brand.
in addition, the minibus has re-experienced the products of the next two companies, and so far it gives people the impression that nothing has changed except the name.
after the prefix "meituan" is replaced uniformly, besides * * * enjoying bicycles, meituan take-out, meituan grocery shopping, meituan optimization, and public comment can still be used separately under the App (or can be used uniformly in meituan App), but there are still differences under "unification".
Didi's new names are Flower Piglet, Green Vegetable, Gift Orange Car, etc. Except for Flower Piglet, other functions still need to be selected by opening the Didi Travel App. It is not necessarily related to the name of the real minibus, whether to carpool or carpool, whether to use the car or the car.
The minibus was informed by people close to Meituan that only the name of the company was involved in this "name change". The main influence is the stock name, with the purpose of transmitting "unified" cognition to the capital market. There is basically no impact on the user level.
But both mobike and the public comment have already circled a wave of users, and if they say they will change, will it waste the original brand value?
as for Didi, the old business changed its name, but it raised the cognitive threshold. Is it really necessary to go to so much trouble?
With these questions, minibuses have consulted some brand strategies and big names in the Internet industry. Let's see what they say.
Being a sub-brand or building a new brand is an important choice when doing new business in the Internet industry. The key is whether we serve one user group or multiple user groups that need to be separated.
Multi-brands are common in industries that need to use brands to separate user groups. A single brand is mostly a variety of businesses that run through the power of a brand to the same user group.
As far as Meituan is concerned, its current product status is that an App meets the needs of users for eating, drinking and having fun in the city.
imagine such a scene, where the Meituan yellow * * * enjoys cycling all over the street to arouse users' brand memory of Meituan. Users must use Meituan App to carry out high-frequency cycling behavior, which completes the product closed loop: improving the daily life of Meituan App and attracting users to use other services of Meituan.
Public comment brand seems to be another script, but it may actually be the same story. Initially, Meituan and Dianping conducted a "peer-to-peer merger" with a shareholding ratio of about 7: 4, and the company was named "Meituan Dianping". However, after that, most of the founders and main executives of Public Comment left the merged company.
I once praised the public comment on the development of urban life information services, just like installing traffic lights, painting zebra crossings and other infrastructure, but at the same time, I admitted that the volume of e-commerce transactions is much larger than information services, and it is inevitable that Meituan's transactions (especially the explosive growth of take-out at that time) will absorb the information of comments.
As far as Didi is concerned, I am not optimistic about Didi's current multi-brand choice, although it is an understandable short-term choice to use "green vegetable carpooling" to transform the carpooling business that once caused trouble to its development and "flower pig" to do low-end and preferential business; However, when users open the Didi App, we will naturally choose taxis, express trains, special cars and even bicycles. We belong to a huge user group, not multiple user groups that need to be separated.
The corporate brand is mainly aimed at investors, the government, the media and other stakeholders, in order to better enable stakeholders to identify and understand the company's commercial brand.
When it comes to Meituan, the proportion of review business income is getting lower and lower, and it is no longer possible to reflect Meituan's business strategy with Meituan reviews. Therefore, upgrading Meituan and weakening reviews are the inevitable steps for brand adjustment in the capital market.
this name change is actually an adjustment of the company's brand level, which does not mean that the product brand level should adopt a single brand. In fact, Meituan must adopt a multi-brand strategy, and I don't think the brand of "Public Comment" will be adjusted in the short term.
The two brands "mobike" and "Elephant Division" previously adjusted by Meituan actually represent the strategic adjustment of Meituan to its two businesses, which is intended to be a supplement rather than seeking a leading position. In this case, it is the right decision to cancel the independent brand.
generally speaking, there are three strategic ways to choose from in an enterprise's brand combination strategy, namely, single brand, main and deputy brands and multi-brands.
a single brand concentrates superior forces to maximize the brand's competitive advantage.
usually, in a key industry and market, when the enterprise is in the initial stage of establishment or the category is in the introduction period and rapid development period, the target market of brand positioning is large enough and the market competitiveness is strong enough, and the enterprise can get the maximum return by investing in a single brand.
the disadvantage of this strategy is that when the market is mature or strong brands have appeared in the market segments, it is difficult for the influence of a single brand to compete with the leading brands in the market segments. If a new opportunity market appears again, the coverage and extension ability of a single brand will be limited by the original brand, and it will be difficult to obtain a dominant brand position.
Multi-brands are suitable for enterprises to grow to a certain scale and volume. When an enterprise's business forms are diversified and cover multiple markets, in order to maximize market share or cover different target markets, multi-brands will better help enterprises gain a leading position.
However, multi-brand has a great test on the brand portfolio strategy, brand investment budget allocation and operation teams of different brands.
meituan and Didi are both platform-based companies, and the reason why they adopt completely different brand strategies has an important relationship with their different competitive patterns.
It is worth mentioning that the brands such as "mobike" and "Public Comment" acquired by Meituan did not simply and rudely de-brand at the beginning, but gave enterprises and users a certain adaptation transition period. From this point of view, the single brand of Meituan did not waste the value of the original brand, because the brand value often goes with the users. If users can transfer to the new brand with them, they will realize the value transfer of the original brand.
but for Didi, it is far from a stable competition pattern. In this case, dealing with different competitors through different brands will be more flexible and targeted in playing, and can also stimulate the competitive consciousness and innovation consciousness of each business unit.
The multi-brands adopted by Didi will indeed bring some internal friction to a certain extent, but it is worthwhile compared with the security risks and potential competition they have to face all the time. What's more, Didi can completely reduce internal friction as much as possible by building a middle platform and enjoying resources.
the biggest disadvantage of a single brand strategy is that if the target audience is very different or the brand itself is flawed, it will have the opposite effect.
For example, if a brand making washing powder is a cross-border catering brand, it is estimated that no one will want to eat it, which is the embarrassment of forming a single brand.
The disadvantages of multi-brands are also obvious, which requires a lot of money to do consumer awareness, leading to high brand building and communication difficulties.
for meituan, all kinds of products it has integrated this time are actually around the life service itself. Therefore, for a specific group of people, a unified and powerful brand provides a high-quality guarantee, which has been recognized by users.
In addition, the brands acquired by Meituan, such as mobike and Dianping, have a certain influence, but they have not formed a strong brand awareness for users.
For Didi, choosing multi-branding is more a strategy designed from the perspective of brand risk, and not putting all the eggs in one basket. In addition, Didi has strong operational capabilities and user resources, and the cost of guiding customers for multi-brands is not high. Therefore, in the long run, this is a good choice.
personally, I think that many companies are not as entangled in naming as the outside world thinks, and more often they are driven by their inertia.
For example, Meituan has always been the naming habit for Meituan to buy food and Meituan XX; Microsoft's Windows, Microsoft's Office；; Oracle's database, Oracle's ERP and so on, in fact, most companies also do the same.
Therefore, we can't simply think that such a naming action must be the result of careful consideration.
if you must name a new brand, there must be a big gap between the two brands.
As for Didi, we have recently adopted different names in different businesses. I think this is because there are some innovative teams inside Didi, which are building a series of experimental products.
because it is experimental, it should be separated from the original subject to avoid damaging the value of the original brand during the experiment.
As for why it is called "Green Vegetable" or "Flower Pig", it is also in line with some younger naming styles of Internet companies recently, and some interesting and catchy words are used to attract everyone's attention.
Author | Half Moon | Interview | Deng Yiming | Duty Editor | Zou Yanzhu
Editor | He Mengfei | Editor | Zheng Yuanmei