Rebirth 08: Rise from copycat phones

Chapter 11 Little Blue Phone
In terms of return and exchange costs, the C2C platform is better. The store can control it themselves and can coax, cheat, or set up barriers to returns and exchanges, and then shorten the return and exchange period, and basically there will be no big problems.

But Jingxi Mall is different. For the sake of its own reputation, once there is a problem during the warranty period and the consumer comes to its door, it will directly replace the product without saying a word, without considering how much loss the return and exchange will cause to the merchant.

Because of the operation, Jingxi suffered no loss and gained reputation, which made consumers very satisfied... As for the life and death of the manufacturer, it was none of his business.

It's just a supermarket that sells things. What it cares about is the reputation of its own supermarket, and it doesn't care about the life or death of the suppliers behind it.

But for manufacturers, this is a great pressure. People in the e-commerce team estimate that it would be better to focus on Taobao and Dimao, which has lower costs and higher profits.

Xu Shenxue disagreed after hearing this: "Jingxi Mall is an important potential website for 3C products. Although the sales volume is not so good now, their growth rate is very fast. By next year, it will probably increase several times. We can't give up easily."

According to later experience, Jingxi Mall will be an important online channel for 3C products in the future. Xu Shenxue also hopes to use Jingxi's self-operated channels to develop smart phones next year.

However, it is very difficult for counterfeit goods to enter the supply chain of large supermarkets. Jingxi Self-operated is essentially an online supermarket, and Weiku Electronics' mobile phones are truly counterfeit phones.

Thinking of this, Xu Shenxue sighed a little, this is the embarrassment of making a miscellaneous brand mobile phone... If he was making a big brand mobile phone, Jingxi would probably have rushed over to actively seek cooperation.

But now, if you want to enter the market, you have to accept other people’s harsh conditions if your own brand is not established... Even so, it will be too late.

Jingxi's sales last year were over 300 million, and this year it is expected to reach over 1 billion. Jingxi is still in its early stages, trying every possible means to expand on a large scale, so when the people from Wecoo Electronics came to negotiate and proposed a relatively new concept of an Internet brand mobile phone, their sales staff would only reluctantly talk to you.

After a year, no one will pay attention to you.

After thinking for a while, Xu Shenxue said: "Continue to talk to them. As for the quality assurance issue, just follow their policy. The factory should do a good job of quality management!"

Since Weiku Electronics dares to create an Internet brand, the prerequisite is that they have confidence in the quality management of their own products. This is the foundation of their existence.

Even though the return and exchange policy in western Beijing is a bit strict, as long as the company's own quality management is done well, the problem will not be too big.

He doesn’t care much about other e-commerce platforms, but he must do business with Taotao Dimao Mall and Jingxi’s own channels.

After Xu Shenxue made the final decision, colleagues in the marketing department still had to continue contacting these two e-commerce platforms as well as other e-commerce platforms.

Whether it is Taotao.com’s Dimao Mall or Jingxi’s self-operated store, there are certain requirements for the products.

For example, Disimao Mall still tends to build an online high-end shopping platform these days, and has relatively high requirements for product brands, company size, business hours, and deposits...but manufacturers ignore them, and consumers don't approve of them, so now it's a mess. They have withdrawn the business department of Disimao Mall and merged it directly into Taotao.com.

The reason why Weiku Electronics can have a relationship with Disimao Mall is because their current Disimao Mall is not doing very well. In addition, although Weiku Electronics is just a generic mobile phone factory, its corporate strength is actually good. Its annual production and sales volume exceeds 500,000 mobile phones, and its annual sales revenue exceeds 150 million. The company has been in business for many years, and is willing to pay a sufficient deposit.

In this case, colleagues from the marketing department came to them with the concept of Internet mobile phone brand, which also attracted the attention of relevant business personnel of Dimao Mall.

There are so many mobile phone brands, but creating a mobile phone brand specifically for e-commerce platforms is unique!
And Weiku Electronics said that this brand is only sold on the Internet, and what they want to create is an Internet mobile phone brand based on the e-commerce platform.

The concept is probably that a manufacturer creates an exclusive product specifically for your supermarket... Even if the product is not very good, it will still attract a certain amount of attention.

What is this called?
This is called attention and respect!

Of course, Taotao.com is an Internet company and is more interested in things related to the Internet. In addition, Weiku Electronics is not short of money, so it gave a sufficient deposit and promised a certain price subsidy, bringing the price of the phone down to less than 449 yuan, and even planned to launch a yuan phone, and guaranteed the quality.

With a series of conditions in place, we finally decided to move into the Dimao Mall.

The access to Jingxi's self-operated platform is actually in a similar situation.

The brand that has settled in is the newly registered "Xiao Lan". As for what the name means, it has no connotation. It is just a random name given by the marketing department.

This group of people were thinking about imitating other brands all the time. They wanted to imitate the fruit phones and give them fruit-related names. At first they came up with a Blueberry... thinking they could also take advantage of the BlackBerry.

Then it was rejected by Xu Shenxue... It’s okay to imitate this thing, but don’t imitate the name. When people see the name, they will think you are a fake brand.

What we make are low-end mobile phones, not counterfeit or shoddy ones... At most, we can make certain "independent micro-innovations" in appearance and functions, but the name is definitely not acceptable.

Then the requirements should be simple, straightforward and catchy... As for the connotation, don't have any connotation...

Then the people in the marketing department just went for it and removed the word "梅" (berry) and added a "小" (small) in front of it, making it "小蓝" (small blue).

Although it sounds a bit dramatic, it does have a fresh feel, and that's how it was decided.

In the future, the "Little Blue Mobile Phone" will focus on online sales and will not participate in offline channels to avoid conflicts with the existing offline channels of the "Weiku Mobile Phone".

Of course, the core of the mobile phone and the production line are actually the same, only the appearance is different.

Many models of mobile phones produced by Weiku Electronics actually have the same core, only the shell and color are different.

For example, the J56, the most popular candy-bar feature phone produced and sold by Wecoo Electronics, is actually a series... and through changes in appearance design, seven or eight different candy-bar phones are now on sale.

The first Blue Phone S1 created by colleagues in the R&D department is based on the J56 core and has a younger and more fashionable appearance. The prototype has an integrated light blue appearance and the direction button circle in the middle has a black border to enhance the visual effect.

The fonts on the keyboard keys use a softer light white font color, and the font design is also softer.

The overall appearance seemed quite good to Xu Shenxue, a latecomer... Of course, the appearance of this thing was actually chosen by Xu Shenxue according to his own aesthetic taste. The appearance team of the R&D department actually came up with more than a dozen design drafts, and Xu Shenxue finally chose this one.

In addition to this main color, there will be three other colors: black, red, and pink gold.

The hardware is equipped with a two-inch 240×320 screen, which can support up to 2GB of expanded storage, and a one-megapixel camera...it is definitely the hardware configuration of a low-end feature phone.

In terms of software functions, it is similar to most of the thousand-yuan mobile phones on the market. It can play MP3/MP4 files, and it also has some commonly used functional software built in. It supports audio and video shooting, Bluetooth, and data cable transmission.

Although the hardware configuration and software functions are low-end, it is not a problem for a domestic big-name manufacturer to sell it for eight or nine hundred yuan. If it is an international brand like Nokia, it can easily sell it for twelve or thirteen thousand.

But with the same configuration, the price of a cheap phone is only around 500-600 yuan...

(End of this chapter)