Text/Qiyue
Editor/Xiao He
The light of Zhuhai at that time is now a small factory in Zhuhai. Meizu, which has been around for 18 years, has almost written the history of the ups and downs of a domestic mobile phone.
Although Huang Zhang’s motto of “make products steadily and do marketing honestly” at the media communication meeting in 2017 is still being frequently mentioned, Huang Zhang spends 4 hours a day browsing forums to collect technical problems discovered by users. , The story of requiring every employee to go online to learn about user feedback is still a good talk.
However, in recent years, Meizu has not made many famous products as promised. Instead, it has been repeatedly criticized for its series of negative news and grandstanding marketing. Some time ago, he was scolded on Weibo hot search for the Qingming propaganda copy.
Now, under the hot search on Qingming Festival#meizuapion#, Meizu is already being questioned by netizens, “Is Meizu still alive?”
As for the new flagship mobile phone Meizu 18 released by Meizu only last month, the tide of product discussions also quickly faded. What remains on the new product is more of Meiyou’s sigh about the “coffin collection”. Today, Meizu has already done so. It is difficult to conceal the market decline.
Marketing overturned frequently, new products were ridiculed
“Practical” seems to be more suitable to describe Meizu and Huang Zhang more than ten years ago.
At that time, Huang Zhang focused on polishing mobile phone models in person, and Li Nan also insisted on walking the road of a unified and harmonious small and beautiful. Whether it is the M8 or the later small and beautiful MX series, in the eyes of Meiyou, it is more than just a mobile phone. It is a practical and exquisite handicraft. At that time, Meizu made a series of popular models that people lined up to buy, and it built a reputation with real products and services.
From 2007 to 2008, Meizu developed the first touch-screen smart phone M8 with all the efforts of Meizu, which became a milestone work of Meizu and even China’s mobile phone industry. At that time, Meizu, which had just transitioned from doing MP3, made mobile phones to save money and even used advertising. Save it, and only promote it on the forum. In 2009, the M8 touch screen failed, and Huang Zhang allowed users to replace it with a new machine for free; the subsequent M9 series, MX series mobile phones, and Flyme system laid the foundation for Meizu’s prestige and value.
It was Huang Zhang’s original intention and dream that at that time Meizu impressed a group of young people who had just come out of society. Meizu fans once believed that in addition to Apple, there was also Meizu that created the history of “queuing to buy mobile phones.” In 2009, the M8 sold for two months and the sales volume reached 100,000. There was also a long queue at the M9 sales site.
However, since recent years, the splash of its products has become smaller and smaller. On the contrary, its exaggerated marketing has made Meizu frequently “out of the circle”. Despite the criticism and regret in the market, Meizu still does its own thing and has become a Ching Ming Festival. A case of marketing rollover in history.
On April 1, Meizu stated on its official Weibo that it would launch a special Meizu 18 series “39” mobile phone, saying that this mobile phone pre-installed contains 999 advertisement pushes, 999 seconds to open the screen advertisement, and 999 APP pre-installed… …. There are many advertisements from friends through reverse marketing, and many netizens criticize this wave of innuendo as very low-level.
On April 4, Meizu used “an advertisement for being killed” to promote the selling points of its new models. Netizens criticized Meizu on Weibo hot searches. Depending on the situation, Meizu immediately apologized on the official blog, and its marketing director Wan Zhiqiang still did not forget to add a sentence in the Weibo apology post that “the promotion of a pure system without ads is always restricted by invisible forces” rubbing this wave of popular promotion The selling point.
On April 7, Meizu announced a poster. In addition to the bitten apple, it stated impressively “45% of the new users who bought the Meizu 18 full-blooded small screen flagship are from Apple users”, April 8 It also launched an “iPhone for Meizu 18” campaign, which indicated that using iPhone to trade in could get a special subsidy of up to 4,000 yuan. It repeatedly caught up with Apple’s popularity to promote its new products and hinted that Apple users would transfer to Meizu.
The protagonist that has been frequently marketed and ridiculed is the Meizu 18 series, which was only released in early March this year.
At the finale of the press conference, when the host shouted “Meizu will start from this series and give up product Internet advertising revenue (the system comes with no ads, no operational pushes, and no pre-installed third-party apps). When the right to choose and decide was returned to the user, there was still a cheer on the barrage, and the Meizu friends lamented that the Meizu who made the product was back.
But when the starting price of 4399 yuan for the 18 series and 4,999 yuan for the 18 pro series was announced, the barrage spontaneously sounded “high price and low matching”, “coffin collection work”, and “slid away”. .
Take the same products that are equipped with Snapdragon 888 and 8G+128G as the Meizu 18 series as an example. Xiaomi Mi 11 starts at 3999 yuan, iQOO7 starts at 3598 yuan, and OnePlus 9 starts at 3799 yuan-OnePlus 9 In order to avoid the edge of Xiaomi 11, the price of Meizu 18 is lower than that of Xiaomi 11, but the starting price of Meizu 18 is 400 yuan higher than that of Xiaomi. It does not have much brilliance in terms of camera, battery life, etc. , The selling point is still focused on “no built-in ads.”
In contrast, Meizu 18, whose brand awareness and strength is much lower than that of Xiaomi, has not much pricing advantage in the mobile phone market during the same period. The sales volume is even more sluggish. Data on the Tmall platform shows that since its launch on March 8, this The monthly transaction volume of mobile phones in the Meizu flagship store is only 5334.
Whether it’s its own strength that doesn’t match the price, or imitating Apple’s cancellation of the charging head, Meizu seems to be shifting the loss of the “pure system” to the price; in addition, Meizu has always been “sacrificing for the people” (for the sake of the people). The banner of extreme user experience at the expense of its source of advertising revenue) is to market its pure system vigorously, which has gradually weakened its small and beautiful reputation.
Now for 18 years, Meizu has grown up, but its noise in domestic mobile phones has become smaller and smaller. Throughout 2020, Meizu’s mobile phone sales have been less than 2 million.
“Accidentalist” Meizu, swaying
Meizu has also been brilliant many times.
In 2008, the M8 series made Meizu famous in World War I. The sales volume reached 100,000 units within two months and the sales volume exceeded 500 million yuan in five months. At that time, the founder Huang Zhang was also called “China’s Jobs”. The M9 and MX series of hot models have been launched one after another, which once again triggered a panic buying frenzy.
But in 2015, Meizu, after receiving an investment of US$590 million from Ali, began to slowly change its destiny. At that time, Huang Zhanggang, who had retired for four years, returned to the post of Meizu CEO. Meizu “expanded” while probing.
Since then, Meizu has expanded vigorously and implemented machine-sea tactics. This frequent launch of new machines reached its peak in 2016. There were 11 conferences and 14 new machines throughout the year. Although the sales volume of 22 million in 2016 reached a historical record. The highest value ever, but it only relied on the quantity to pile up good-looking sales, which could not hide the fact that the growth rate of each product was not large, and it soon ushered in a decline.
Moreover, for a mature brand, blindly pursuing the release of new products is not a commendable operation. High frequency usually fails to reflect technological changes and product innovations. On the contrary, it will become a burden, diminishing its original “small and beautiful” “The advantages.
In the past few years, Meizu not only began to blur the boundaries of products, but also continued to struggle in positioning.
Meizu, which could rely on the accumulated brand value and reputation of the M8 and MX series and continue to take the small and beautiful high-end route, began to blindly expand its products and business at this time. At that time, Huang Zhang cursed Lei Jun’s “red rice.” , While imitating its launch in October 2015, the main cost-effective thousand-yuan metal machine brand “Meilan”.
Later in 2018, when the charm of the blue was born, because of Huawei’s success, it felt that low-end products could not make money and chose to cut off the sales to act as the “Charm Blue”, and announced that starting from the Meizu Digital Anniversary series, Meizu will be fully integrated. High-end route.
Although high-end was indeed the general trend at the time, compared to Huawei with R&D investment and hard-core technology blessing, Xiaomi with Redmi and OPPO and vivo with a rich product portfolio, Meizu at that time It is highly bound with the poorly-reputed MediaTek chip, and it is difficult to get rid of the low-end hat for a while.
On the other hand, Meizu’s high-end route sacrifices not only a sub-brand of Meizu, but also the offline share accumulated over the years of word-of-mouth and products.
From 2017 to 2019, due to the sharp decline in sales, Meizu began to close offline stores on a large scale and lay off employees. From the peak of 2,700 stores in 2016 to less than 1,000 in 2018; in 2019, Meizu removed large-scale offline marketing staff, the number of layoffs reached 30%, and the number of stores retained in each province is also very few. Take Beijing as an example, only 7 poor Meizu authorized stores are left.
Despite the small but beautiful route, machine-sea tactics, cost-effective strategy, and comprehensive high-end strategy one after another, Meizu has never seen a real explosion. Blindly increasing the volume to push up the cost, but unable to achieve the scheduled sales target, this is the root cause of Meizu’s loss. During this period, Meizu’s sense of existence became more and more sluggish, and management turmoil appeared at the same time.
Under Huang Zhang’s vigorous “reorganization”, the “Three Musketeers” who grew up with Meizu-COO Bai Yongxiang, Flyme Business Unit President Yang Yan, and former senior vice president Li Nan, have resigned since 2018, and Meizu has also appeared inside. Numerous negative news such as internal conflicts among employees and collective job-hopping of the sales team.
In 2017, when Meizu turned from its prosperity to decline, Xiaomi, which Huang Zhang originally disliked, began to skyrocket, and has now been firmly in the top ranks of domestic mobile phones, but Meizu has been “paying off debts” for its swaying business strategy in the past.
The once shouted “Don’t be China’s Apple, be the world’s Meizu”, under Huang Zhang’s vacillation, began to gradually annihilate, and it also reduced Meizu directly to the “other” column on the mobile phone market share table, even domestically produced 2% of the mobile phone market is not occupied.
The market will not pay for feelings
Huang Zhang, whose debut is the pinnacle, is a small workshop owner who made a fortune in MP3, but is also a big dreamer with ambitions comparable to Apple. Almost every product of Meizu’s early stage was selling Huang Zhang’s stories and values at the same time.
When smartphones just took off in 2006, other small manufacturers usually sold MTK chips and shells directly, and were mixed with a large number of preset fee-deduction software. However, Huang Zhang had great ambitions at the time, disdain to make this kind of cheap mobile phone, and set out to study a smart phone with the same big screen, internet connection and touch screen as Apple.
For this reason, Meizu spent two years building the M8, which is the same as the iPhone processor, but thinner, has a larger battery, better sound quality, and a cheaper price. It is no exaggeration to say that the folk definition of Meizu in that era was the “Apple of China.”
Nowadays, after extensive adjustments from products to personnel, it seems that only a lot of “lace news” remains around Meizu. An obvious market feedback-Meizu 18’s new product launch conference in March is not yet new. In February this year, an internal letter signed as “Meizu CEO Huang Zhipan (the younger brother of Huang Zhang)” aroused a high degree of market discussion.
In the eyes of the Meizu team, the changes brought by the 18 series are defined as “the B side of the industry”, and hope to form a parallel world with the A side of the industry on the “pure land” created by itself.
Meizu, which has been gradually abandoned by the market, is now trying to sell its ideals and feelings again on this high-end road, because the so-called A side is the Huami OV and Apples that have been repeatedly marketed by Meizu with the connotation of “more ads and more pre-installed”.
In 2009, Lei Jun also asked Huang Zhang how to make mobile phones, but after ten years, Xiaomi’s sales volume is already 10 times that of Meizu. In stubbornly pursuing the romanticism of “Four Dissimilarities”, Meizu’s “pure” brand plays no matter how beautifully it is. The price positioning of “18 series starts at 4399 yuan, 18pro series starts at 4999 yuan” is very embarrassing-it is not a small one. Beautiful, but not up to the high-end flagship level.
In the minds of consumers, Meizu has no clear memory points, only Huang Zhang’s ambitious story of making a fortune and his feelings of drifting away have been mentioned over and over again.
When the “magic friends” who squatted at the new product launch conference left a last sigh of “coffin collection, charm pawn” on the barrage, Meizu is also losing the last batch of loyal users willing to pay for it. After all, the mobile phone manufacturers that Meizu used to compete on the same stage have either become giants or withdraw sadly, and there is no such thing as “live almost.”
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