Anker Innovation Wu Zhuohui: Do three basic skills well, accelerate global brand reengineering
In the first half of the year, third-party e-commerce platforms represented by Amazon significantly increased the intensity of control, and the entire cross-border e-commerce environment seemed “precarious”. However, opportunities and challenges coexist. Obviously, Chinese brands can no longer focus on “distribution” when going overseas. Instead, they need to further evolve. The next step is branding.
“Chinese brands must first do three basic skills when going overseas: First, sellers must respect local regulations in terms of operations, legal affairs, finances, and internal control; second, perform fine-tuning through traffic disassembly, shopping feedback analysis, listing analysis, and forecasting research. Third, providing good products is always the top priority of the brand. After completing the basic work, to accelerate development, then breaking through the minds of local consumers and building brand power must be the core key.” Anker Innovation E-commerce Said Wu Zhuohui, general manager of the service department.
On September 16, the “Take the Wind·Accelerate the Fifth Morketing EC Summit 2021 Cross-border Export E-commerce Marketing Summit” co-sponsored by Morketing Global & Morketing came to a successful conclusion. He brought a keynote speech on “Accelerating Global Brand Reengineering, Refined Operation and Brand Love”.
The following is the speech record (edited and compiled by Morketing Global)
Let me briefly introduce Anker’s innovation. This year is the tenth year of Anker’s innovation going overseas. Anker started from Amazon. When it made its first pot of gold in 2011 and 2012, it began to transform into a product company and did a lot of work. R&D, to date, the R&D team accounts for more than 50%. Because we firmly believe that being a product company can make Anke go further, so we invest heavily in R&D, supply chain, etc.
Anker has two visions:
1. Create a set of benchmark brands. That is, we insist on the concept of making products and bring the best products to consumers around the world, hoping to establish a set of global benchmark brands.
2. Provide a set of technical services. I hope to use some of my good past experience to provide basic services to peers and overseas brands and empower them.
In the past few years, Anke has also made three more successful brands. One is Anker, which is the first brand of Anker to make accessories, and is the TOP1 in multi-national categories in Europe, America and Japan; the other two are new brands, one is two years old. Soundcore has achieved the top 3 online in North America; the other is eufy, which has been in business for 3 years, and the current sales have exceeded 100 million U.S. dollars, all of which have achieved some results.
Moreover, Anker has been in the top ten for three consecutive years in the ranking of Chinese overseas brands by Google and WPP. In the professional survey conducted by Anker in 2020, the brand awareness of Anker in North America will increase from 31.8% to 40% in 2020.
Anker went public last year, and the financial report also disclosed some figures. In 2020, the revenue will be more than 9.3 billion, covering 100+ countries and regions and 100 million global users.
So today I share some experience of past brands going overseas, hoping to help friends who are about to or are on the way to sea.
01
The brand goes overseas,
Three basic skills
In the first half of the year, many colleagues heard some news about cross-border e-commerce, and felt that the overall environment seemed not so good, including stricter platform supervision and even the impact of Sino-US relations. So in this situation, how do we break the game? We believe that three parts need to do basic skills:
1. Respect the market rules.
After the epidemic, although everyone felt it was a bit difficult to go overseas, from the data point of view, the proportion of the entire North American e-commerce channel has basically doubled from 15% in 2019. Compared with China, European and American e-commerce has accelerated faster. Chinese e-commerce channels accounted for 52%, but the growth was only about 21%. After the epidemic last year, the overall growth rate in the United States reached 31.8%. The habits of European and American consumers have changed greatly, and they are migrating online, which means that the opportunities for going overseas are actually better.
At the same time, we see that in Amazon’s business, the growth rate of the entire third-party sellers reached 55% last year; Wal-Mart e-commerce also had a growth rate of about 79% last year. These are all opportunities, of course there are also challenges. When we look at these challenges, we will find that many overseas sellers and brands have neglected to study the rules of each platform, which leads to many times we do it according to our own inertia. It seems that the business is quite good, but because the rules are not enough Paying attention to it or failing to study it leads to some problems in the business process.
In fact, some major mainstream platforms in Europe and the United States will have very detailed specifications telling sellers what to do and what to not do. Therefore, we would advise friends who are going to sea, the first thing is to understand the platform rules and some local laws and regulations.
In this regard, Anker has its own different teams to ensure the standard and long-term nature of our entire business. On the one hand, there are legal, financial, and taxation teams to ensure that Anker is compliant in the chain of international trade. On the other hand, Anke established an internal control team in 2012, which will interpret the rules, laws and regulations of all platforms and turn them into some norms that the company’s employees must comply with. In addition, the operation team that directly deals with e-commerce every day will translate all platform rules into Chinese and summarize small mistakes that have been made occasionally in the past. For example, the title on Amazon cannot write words such as best and first. These rules are incorporated into the operating specifications.
In short, it is to tell everyone to better respect the rules and not to be tempted by short-term benefits.
2. Refined operation.
To this day, sellers going overseas should be familiar with the basic operations of each platform. Anker does not have any know-how, but we hope to do everything a little bit better in the entire value chain. Therefore, in the refined operation of e-commerce, we will focus on listing, price, traffic, media, and forecasts. And so on to do some different project research in various aspects.
For example, for Listing, we internally disassemble it into dozens of modules to see the traffic and conversion of each module.
The other is the dismantling of traffic, which should be the core of the e-commerce link. The largest traffic on Amazon is still search, which basically accounts for more than 80%, so if you do a good job of disassembling the traffic, your traffic will be accurate and the start of your business will be no problem.
Secondly, when the business reaches a certain stage, many sellers will have some troubles, such as the turnover of goods and funds, etc. The root of this lies in how to make category forecasts more accurate. Anke continues to accumulate an AI forecasting system, including factors such as low and peak season coefficients, life cycles, etc., which will be factored into factors to provide the sales operation team with relatively accurate forecasts. For more mature categories, 90% accuracy can basically be achieved.
Of course, in recent years, whether it is Amazon or independent stations, everyone is thinking about how to make products closer to consumers in the process of brand going overseas or making a brand. Therefore, Anke is constantly developing a new system called the customer service cloud system, which will organize the data feedback from online consumers. It has recently been upgraded to apply the information to product planning and other aspects, so that the products made are in line with consumption.者expected.
For example, Anker’s power bank on Amazon has been black for many years, and has a rough and sturdy appearance. This is actually the conclusion that we have drawn from digging consumer voices in the past few years. Consumers in Europe and the United States are concerned about this category. , The first appeal is that it must be durable, and Anker has been developing products in this dimension.
In order to more refined operations, Anke will also work hard on management. There will be many internal indicators, these indicators are to ensure that the business runs more healthily.
3. Good product.
We also recommend that each overseas brand focus on how to make the best products. For example, Anker’s security camera products. Most consumers in Europe and the United States live in villas. After we discovered the epidemic, from an omni-channel perspective, the two best-selling categories in the United States: one is guns, and the other is surveillance. Because many people are unemployed and the whole society is not safe, many Americans will buy guns and install a lot of surveillance in their homes. Anker’s message to consumers is that we have made a major breakthrough. Combining the technology of Anker’s battery in a camera about the same size as the competing product, it can be charged once and hang outdoors for 180 days.
What do we hope to go to sea for? It must be to bring the best products to consumers around the world, so the products must be all 1 before 0, which is the belief and obsession of the product company. In other words, whether your sales reach 10 million, 100 million, or 1 billion, if you don’t insist on making a good product, the first 1 may be easily removed.
Finally, only when these three basic conditions are met, the conditions for going to sea are basically met.
02
Break through the minds of local consumers,
Is the key to accelerating the brand going overseas
Next is the brand going overseas, how to accelerate? As I just said, first, we must bring the best products to consumers; second, we definitely hope to promote our brand on a global scale, and ultimately the brand can increase the product premium. In other words, we ultimately hope that the brand can be deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, so that it can last longer and at the same time bring more profits to the company.
Let me cite two figures to illustrate the importance of branding:
The first number, taking the headphone category on Amazon as an example, the number of brands that can continue to enter the TOP100 list, about 666 brands will flash into the top 100 within a day, but can remain on the list for more than 5 days The likelihood of listing is only average. With the increase in the number of maintenance days, the number of brands also decreases. There are only 5 brands that can consistently be in the top 100, and Anker is one of them. So branding is a long-term affair. Being at the top of the list today does not mean success. What you need to think about is how to stay at the top of the list for a long time.
The second number is that the penetration rate of online purchases in Europe and the United States has always been higher than that in China, but now consumers’ online consumption is growing rapidly, reaching 31.8%. This shows that many European and American consumers will compare offline brands. She feels that many new online brands have not seen them before and are afraid to place orders, so she likes to shop in offline stores. This is a phenomenon we see.
The penetration rate in Europe and the United States is already very high, so how to occupy their minds is a more critical matter.
The transmission channels in Europe and the United States have not changed much. Everyone should be familiar with other channels except for Tik Tok, which has just gone overseas in recent years. Under such circumstances, how to reach users more accurately is a severe test for brand building. In other words, it actually puts forward higher requirements for the basic skills of brands going overseas.
Last time I mentioned at the Morketing conference, we divided cross-border e-commerce brands into three stages: 1. Channel brand; 2. Improved brand; 3. Leading brand.
From the perspective of Anker’s development, starting in 2018, we hope to turn several of our brands into category-leading brands. What should we do? We have broken down the entire value chain a little bit more, from market segmentation, brand positioning, to concept generation and creation, to product testing, pricing, marketing advertising evaluation, brand health tracking, and finally to the closed loop of customers. Each point is better, because we firmly believe that the long-term value of the brand must continue to create value for customers.
Take a high-end headset released by Anker in 2018 as an example. At that time, Anker did global marketing and hired ten Grammy tuner to help us endorse, and sold nearly one million during the 12-day pre-sale period. US dollars. In the past few years, we have continued to study European and American consumers, and at the same time more accurately use media channels to explore how leading brands are opened step by step. When we have better integrated marketing capabilities, we find that brands can better support premiums.
Finally, I can share a few brands that Anker cooperates with, which is the second vision mentioned earlier, and use Anker’s experience to empower the brand.
The first is the mobile phone of the domestic brand TCL. Anker helped TCL occupy 5 seats in the top 50 Amazon mobile phone bestsellers in North America within a year, and the best single product ranked the top 2 in the United States.
The second is Zhengguanzhuang, a Korean beauty brand. Anker uses refined operations and the entire marketing system to help empower it. Finally, in the case of a new account, Shanghai Sunshine achieved over one million sales in the first month, exceeding the original expectations of the brand by more than 10 times, and the customer unit price exceeded the platform average by more than 60%. The customer unit price of this brand is not low, the highest-end is 169 US dollars, and the average customer unit price is almost 100 US dollars.
The third is actually the relatively large partner that Anker has just mentioned, a sub-brand of Nestlé, Vital Proteins. Through our own e-commerce experience, we have helped their business on Amazon basically double every year. , At the same time, the off-site marketing activities have been integrated to better undertake in Amazon.
Today, we will share these briefly. We hope that everyone will work together to promote the beauty of China’s smart manufacturing and bring good products and good brands to the world. Thanks!