Sina Technology Xu Yuanlei
Four days ago, Meng Yutong started posting videos on the “Pearl Yutong Featured” account. Yesterday, the Douyin store of the account has been approved and officially launched, focusing on the sales of small home appliances. As a result, a big show began-as of last night, the store has 22 products on the shelves, including rice cookers, airfilterWait, the sales volume is only 2.
In fact, the act of opening a store quickly reflects to a certain extentGreeThe eagerness to break through online channels also confirms Gree’s efforts to catch upbeautifulAnxiety.
“Sure enough, I started to bring the goods”
The Douyin account “Mingzhu Yutong Collection” started to publish videos 4 days ago, and selected a photo of Dong Mingzhu and Meng Yutong as the avatar, and also followed Meng Yutong’s private Douyin account.
At present, the account has released 4 videos and gained 22,000 fans. Many netizens commented, “As expected, they started to bring goods.”
Douyin account “Bright Pearl Yutong Featured”
From Dong Mingzhu’s announcement of “I want to train Meng Yutong into the second Dong Mingzhu”, to Meng Yutong’sWeiboPublicly responding to “I am just an ordinary hitman”, Gree Internet celebrity secretary can be said to be out of the circle very quickly. Meng Yutong’s private Douyin account has approximately 1 million new followers in one week, and Weibo has more than 160,000 followers.
The registration entity of “Pearl Yutong Selection” is Gree E-Commerce Co., Ltd. This is a wholly-owned e-commerce company established by Gree in 2019 to take over the e-commerce business operated by a third party at that time.
With the creation of secretarial celebrities and the opening of stores on Douyin, it can be seen that Gree has made further in-depth exploration of channel reforms and marketing methods, and has once again expanded its online sales channels.
In July of this year, Dong Mingzhu said frankly that he would still do live broadcasts in 2021, but it would not be as frequent as last year, and would “bring a group of people”, which meant that young people would be trained to carry out live broadcasts instead of themselves.
Meng Yutong is also likely to participate in the Gree live broadcast team. According to previous media reports, Gree has now taken back its operating authority for live streaming.
Crushed by the United States, Gree is eager to change
In the late 1990s, Gree stabilized the price chaos at the time by establishing a joint-stock regional distribution model, and then rapidly expanded and occupied the domestic market.air conditionerLeading position.
However, in recent years, with the rise of e-commerce channels and the younger generation of consumer groups, Gree’s regional sales system has gradually revealed its shortcomings.
For Gree at this stage, the transformation of online channels has become the focus of the company’s marketing revolution. Especially under the influence of the epidemic, the live broadcast room is like a new battlefield.
At the Boao Forum for Asia in April this year, Dong Mingzhu said that the reason for the live broadcast is: “This era has come. Our past tradition is tens of thousands of specialty stores. Under the epidemic, we still want to use the past model. No more.”
In 2020, Dong Mingzhu will conduct a total of 13 live broadcast tours nationwide, with sales reaching 47.62 billion yuan, accounting for a quarter of Gree’s revenue of 170.497 billion yuan last year. At the end of March this year, Gree’s 2021 national live broadcast tour was unveiled in Wuhan, and Dong Mingzhu achieved sales of 1.14 billion yuan in the first battle.
The move to open a store on Douyin reflects to a certain extent Gree’s eagerness to break through its online channels, and also confirms Gree’s anxiety to catch up with Midea. According to the financial report, in the first half of 2021, Midea’s e-commerce sales accounted for more than 45%.
Midea Group, which is also known as the “home appliance duo” along with Gree, achieved the first surpass in domestic sales of air conditioners in the third quarter of 2020. At present, Midea is far ahead of Gree in terms of performance scale or market value scale.
Financial data show that in the first three quarters of 2021, Gree Electric achieved revenue of 138.135 billion yuan and net profit of 15.645 billion yuan attributable to its parent; while Midea’s revenue was 261.342 billion yuan and net profit attributable to its parent was 23.455 billion yuan. As of today’s close, the market value of Midea is 482.7 billion yuan, while Gree is 209.3 billion yuan.
While exploring changes in online channels, Gree had to balance the interests of offline dealers. For example, in the live broadcast last year, Gree used the exclusive QR code for each offline store to guide dealers through the live broadcast.
For companies like Gree that have a huge distribution system, whether the new retail method of “offline experience + online purchase” can truly achieve the perfect integration of traditional distribution power with the Internet may take time to further verify. But it is undeniable that Gree has always hoped to use these online sales channels and marketing strategies to tell new growth stories whether it is Dong Mingzhu’s live broadcast, secretarial celebrities or Douyin’s opening stores.