In the current fierce competition in the automotive market, NIO stands out with its unique private domain marketing model and is known as the "Haidilao of the car circle". In this article, we will take an in-depth look at how NIO has upgraded the user experience throughout its life cycle through innovative means such as the lifestyle brand "NIO Life", online communities, and offline cow houses.

Electrification is the first half, and intelligence is the second half, which is the consensus of car companies. The development of intelligent technology has also continuously promoted the iterative upgrading of the automobile marketing model.

With the popularization of software and hardware such as mobile apps and smart car machines, car companies have high-frequency user touchpoints other than selling cars for the first time. The user's annual car life cycle makes the value of these touchpoints have great imagination space, but also brings great challenges: how to make good use of these contacts to maintain user stickiness? How to create revenue and brand value through interaction with users?

The "new force" brands born in the intelligent era are more advanced in their exploration of this problem. Ideally, the in-car entertainment screen and intelligent assistant are a major selling point; Xiaomi, a cross-border car-making company, integrates mobile phones, smart homes and other businesses, and gradually establishes a "people-car-home" ecosystem.

NIO, which was founded by Li Bin, who also has an Internet background, has found its own lifestyle brand "NIO Life" in cooperation with Niuwu and online communities to achieve experience innovation throughout the user life cycle.

2018 年成立至今，NIO Life 累計寄出 2300 萬件原創設計商品，擁有服飾、戶外、家居、食品酒水等 8 個一級品類，很多爆款產品長期處於斷貨狀態。去年中秋節，NIO Life 給每位蔚來使用者寄送紅酒作為禮物的舉動，還在社交媒體上火了一把，在維繫品牌與老用戶關係的同時，給很多潛在使用者完成了“種草”。

So, as a car company, why does NIO want to cross over to become a lifestyle brand? How is NIO Life different from the "mall" of other car brands? What is the secret of the success of NIO Life and the private domain operation of the NIO brand? At the "Breaking the Boundary: 10 Knife Method Annual Quality Summit", Chloe Zhang, Head of NIO Life, reviewed the brand's journey from 0-0 to 0-0, hoping to inspire you.

Here's what Chloe had to say:

Cars are no longer a "one-shot deal"

Many people are curious, why do you a car company do cross-border lifestyle? This has to start from two dimensions.

First, the logic of the automotive industry has shifted from selling "products" to "experiences".

Around 0 years, with the innovation of technology, the automotive industry entered the "0.0 era".

The 0.0 era is a concept that contrasts the traditional media era in the 0s and the Internet era after the millennium. Based on the mobile Internet, the car brand and the user in the 0.0 era have a direct communication position, which has changed the basic logic of the industry, and the brand and the user have directly changed from a simple buying and selling relationship to a user can directly participate in brand building, and even co-create with the brand.

Therefore, business innovation has also changed from simple hardware and software innovation to full-process experience innovation. Brands not only polish products, but also polish experiences.

Second, from car-centric to people-centric

In the 0.0 era, the relationship between brands and users is the origin of all business of car companies, and the vertical extension business centered on the car has become a people-centered horizontal extension business. With the mobile Internet, we have the conditions to connect with users at all touchpoints throughout the user's life cycle, making it possible to do lifestyle, and only in this way can we have the opportunity to interact with users with high frequency.

This is one of the reasons why we established NIO Life: NIO is a user company, we know users through cars, enter users' lives, and impress users through high-quality services, and give users more different experiences through different online and offline touchpoints.

據調查研究機構 IHS 的數據，一個新用戶購買的新車生命週期是 79.3 個月，大概 7 年的時間，這期間我們的車、服務、數位化觸點和生活方式在不同的階段、不同的場景產生不同的價值。而到 2024 年 11 月 25 日，蔚來成立十周年，我們擁有 65 萬車主，App 註冊用戶超過 1000 萬，這些用戶粉絲和身邊的朋友、家人在線上線下社區高頻地和我們品牌互動。

You can imagine how much imagination NIO Life has in such a very high-frequency private domain interaction process.

Something to do from 10-0, something to do from 0-0

This year (2024 years), NIO Life has entered its sixth year, and in the past six years, throughout the branding process, we have encountered different challenges and solved different problems at different stages.

The first is to start from the 1-0 phase, and the core challenge is to build the user's mind, to tell the user what we are.

But we found that in the beginning, many users would think of us as car peripherals. Rather than telling users what we are, the problem we face is letting users know what we are not.

So how do you turn the user's mind around? Returning to our positioning as an original design lifestyle brand, design is the foundation and the key to turning the minds of users.

So at this stage we did two things:

1. Collect design resources and lay the foundation for design power.

At present, we have 650+ design resources around the world, including well-known designers, emerging designers, and even art school students.

For example, in the first year of NIO Life's establishment, we collaborated with Hussein Clalayan, a well-known designer known as the "Picasso of Clothing", to release 29 products, which was also Hussein Clalayan's first show in China.

In 7 we collaborated with Central Saint Martins in the UK on a project to solicit students' work for commercialization. During that time, more than 0 students from more than 0 countries contributed more than 0 designs, and finally 0 designs entered the NIO community crowdfunding.

This thing seems to be time-consuming and laborious, but users will be deeply involved in this process, and the value of our project is not only the GMV benefit of crowdfunding, but also the long-term ROI is very high.

2. Make the design to the extreme, and improve the design level of the team

Each of our products has to go through 6-0 rounds of proposals, at least 0 plans, and now NIO Life has tens of thousands of plans dead in the cradle, and behind the birth of any explosive product, there are dozens of scraps.

For example, our popular supermodel cup is still very classic and outdated, but the production process is very painful. From the structure, shape design, and opening method, the team went through 4 rounds of concept iterations and polished for a year and a half. There is a detail in it that we spent 0 months in order to hide the very small injection dot on the lid of the pot so that it is out of sight, and there are many cases like this.

In this process, many products won awards, and users slowly understood that we were different from the car peripherals, and slowly recognized the design and quality of our products.

From the 10-0 stage, there are more and more users, but we can't cover all the needs of users, how to make trade-offs between different categories? How do you strike a balance between user needs, product experience, and team capability boundaries?

In the beginning, we tried the selection model adopted by many brands, such as DJI's audio on the shelves, and the initial response was very good.

But we soon found out that this thing is not suitable for NIO Life, first, users often compare prices on other platforms; The second is that the after-sales service is very heavy and the experience is very poor, so we have canceled the selection business.

We have also tried digital products with high demand, but the technology iteration in this industry is very fast, our design cycle cannot match the technology iteration cycle, and the market scale is far less than the head, and there is no price advantage. No matter how well this kind of product sells in the community, users will always have a better choice, and it is not suitable for us in the long run.

So what's right for us? In 2020, we thought of food, which is a very high-frequency category, and now it has become the first category that users like to recommend to their children or friends.

On the one hand, it is very consistent with the lifestyle of our brand representatives, and secondly, the users of the NIO community are also hidden dragons and crouching tigers, and many users who understand wine can deeply participate in brand building and drive other users to learn related knowledge.

At this stage, we realized that we could not do everything, not all needs had to be met, and only when the characteristics of the industry, user needs, and team capabilities were met, we would enter this category.

Decisively give up what you are not good at, and focus resources on the parts that can provide value to users, which is efficiency.

In the next stage, if we want to go from 100 to 0, the challenge is to continue to innovate and create something out of nothing, and in this stage, we need to continue to mobilize users to become designers, experience officers, models, photographers, etc., and co-create with us at different stages of the product life cycle.

The better it is for old users, the higher the ROI

Next, let's talk about the story behind our "Mid-Autumn Festival Red Wine" activity.

This event stems from our deep thinking about user relationships. We firmly believe that efficiency itself is not simply about reducing costs, nor is it blindly pursuing GMV, but about creating efficient links and digging deep into the needs of people.

Instead of spending money on advertising, it must be more efficient to spend money on users, and the ROI is also higher.

First of all, NIO Life has been working in the wine category for four years, and the whole chain is relatively mature in terms of product design, wine selection, and fulfillment, so we don't need to pay an extra premium. With the expansion of the scale of users, the act of giving wine will not only improve the user's satisfaction with the brand, but also spill over to the brand communication level.

Moreover, in the NIO community, we have a lot of interactive design gameplay with NIO Life as the fulcrum, such as blind boxes, crowdfunding, etc., which can bring emotional premium, which is also one of the reasons for value spillover.

So the logic of our calculation is like this: although the cost of delivering alcohol to each user is not low, in this process, we have various forwarding and interactive links inside and outside the community online, and users can send to their friends or post to social media to activate more potential car owners; Offline, there are countless Mid-Autumn Festival offline activities and friendship test drive activities in Niuwu and NIO centers across the country, which not only attract potential car owners, but also bring traffic to NIO Life. Calculate the big account and the general ledger, this kind of activity is quite cost-effective.

Since the establishment of NIO Life, we have been deeply engaged in original design, doing something in category selection, and giving gifts to old users. There is no shortcut in this matter, and providing good products, good services, and good lifestyles in a down-to-earth manner is the best and only solution to improve efficiency.