Tick Group: Stick To The Spirit Of Group Buying Marketing

At the age of 40 Tick group CEO Song Zhongjie looks gentle and gentle, but there is no lack of ambition to start a business. In his 20 years of working experience, although he has been vice president of China HP, general manager of China HP marketing and service department, Pu Yuan Technology COO, Google China business director and so on, these brilliant titles have never been annihilated. Entrepreneurship Passion.

So far, he has had three business records. As early as 2002, he began his own business. After losing the first battle, he founded AI Bang network in 2009 with CEO Liu Jianguo, but joined the AI Gang 3 months later and resolutely left. In July 2010, he worked with a team of Google China executives, known as the "most luxurious team" in the industry, to create tick group and join the Chinese group buying market.

　 Emphasizing the commercial logic of marketing

When Song Zhongjie founded the tick group, the Chinese group buying market was at the beginning of the hundred regiment war. Despite the emergence of many group buying brands, Song Zhongjie has his own confidence and judgement.

When we saw the overseas group buying mode of Groupon, Song Zhongjie felt that the form of group purchase was very simple. It reversed the traditional group buying or wholesale mode. The traditional group buying or wholesale mode was to find people first, and when we had enough 100 or 1000 people, we went to the retailers to talk about wholesale prices. The Internet group buying mode is to find a good marketing promotion plan for businessmen first, such as merchants can give a big discount price, then put it on the group buying website, and then recruit a group of consumers. Finally, the group buying website obtains a certain percentage of sales from the sales.

"Group buying" is a good way to meet the needs of users and merchants, and it is also a good marketing and promotion mode to solve local merchants' marketing. At the same time, group buying has sales characteristics and can bring real gold and silver to businesses. However, unlike other group buying websites, group buying has increasingly been used as a sales channel, and tick group emphasizes the marketing characteristics of group buying. Song Zhongjie said.

Of course, Song Zhongjie has also seen that the core competitiveness of this model lies in the ability of group buying websites to acquire merchants, as well as offline operation management and spreading the entire national market, and to build every place into a nationwide sales service network with combat effectiveness, cohesiveness and control.

Song Zhongjie, who calls himself "self aware", thinks: "being a social media is not our strength, but if it's group buying, our sales and marketing management experience in the past fifteen or six years is an advantage."

Some people say that the group buying mode of Groupon is not suitable for the Chinese market. But Song Zhongjie always sticks to the "marketing character" of the tick group. "Group buying has the effect of advertising and sales, whether advertising or sales, which are needed by merchants. As a sales channel, the purpose is to let merchants get real gold and silver, but as a form of marketing, the purpose is to enhance the reputation of merchants or the influence of brands. If it is a sales channel, why are merchants willing to make a 50 percent off, 70 percent off or 80 percent off loss price? If the price is high, it will not attract a large number of consumers, because to achieve a huge consumption, we must reduce the price, which is not earning money. Therefore, group buying should be positioned in word-of-mouth communication, which is a commercial advertising fee, and the group buying website promotes marketing for merchants. This is also the business logic of group buying. Song Zhongjie said. {page_break}

According to the logic of marketing, the tick group emphasizes on providing a complete set of marketing and promotion plans for merchants, rather than simply talking about "price and quantity" with merchants. That is to say, tick group not only helps the merchants to do word of mouth marketing, but also helps businesses to promote Internet through social networking sites, forums, micro-blog and other channels, and encourages consumers to send some experience stickers to expand the visibility of merchants. According to the situation of group buying users, the tick group will also review the effect of the merchants. There are several original targets, what the effect of group buying is, and how to promote it.

Although Song Zhongjie wanted to understand the group buying, they found that they did not buy it, and even thought they were boasting, because some businessmen still considered the question of selling logic: "why should I sell it to you at such a low price"?

In fact, in order to avoid the large gap between the group buying consumers and the merchants target consumers, the tick group will set a reasonable group buying price for the target consumers of the merchants.

"Price for high-end consumers, both attractive and effective exclusion of some non target consumers. These tests are all about the marketing capabilities of group buying websites. We need to study what the characteristics of the target customers are, and what level of per capita consumption is, so that we can draw up what products, commodity combinations and price positions to attract these people, rather than simply sell them. Song said. It is reported that tick has specialized marketing planning departments, but recruited more than 10 advertising and marketing professionals, specifically for merchants to provide marketing and promotion programs.

In order to help merchants do group buying, and after signing contracts with merchants and buying customers before buying a group, the tick group will give relevant training to businesses, such as how many people will be in the three month group buying period, what kind of peak distribution of people flow, how to arrange waiters, chefs, spare parts, etc., how to receive an appointment phone and how to entertain customers, and not to say "group buying" without any discrimination.

　　 Balance in dilemma

There are two core businesses of group buying website, one is the ability to acquire merchants, the other is the service experience of consumers.

At the beginning of entrepreneurship, the ability to acquire business is more critical. Song Zhongjie knows this. With the accumulation of resources in Google China, Song Zhongjie quickly won the support of a group of merchants. Less than half a year, through the franchise mode, the group buying service in 338 cities has been opened, with more than 3 million registered users.

At the end of November last year, tick group received IDG millions of dollars in investment. By July, the tick group was 1st anniversary, but the scale of the company has grown to 500.

Like the tick group, the Chinese group buying market, which has been developed by FireWire, inevitably leads to many problems: the consumption experience is getting worse, the consumption funds are occupied, the fishing websites and the group buying websites are being excavated. A variety of negative issues have led to a decline in user confidence and user churn. In fact, group buying website is also facing many challenges in its internal management. {page_break}

Under the dilemma of speed and quality, tick has to slow down and solve the problem of service quality. Therefore, screening quality merchants and providing quality services to users become the key to enhance customer viscosity of group buying websites.

In order to select high-quality merchants, the tick group first adjusted the internal sales mode, and changed from the original "human sea tactics and sheep management" to "target sales", that is, the list of cooperative businesses listed by the product department of tick group, and the audit focused on the promotion purpose, product mix and price of the business to achieve the expected target, thus narrowing the scope of the business, improving the quality of the business, and reducing the workload of the salesmen.

The tick group carried out one vote veto "sunshine" mode in the interior. This mode is that the operation Department is responsible for checking the online word-of-mouth of the merchants, and finds that bad reputation can exercise one vote veto.

It is precisely because of the strategy of laying stress on marketing and paying attention to balance in the past year that tick group has acquired over 3 million registered users in a very short time, and tick group has also sold 7 million 500 thousand group buying vouchers, and sales in this year reached two hundred million. As the youngest group buying network in the first tier, the tick group may usher in a real adult ceremony.

Investment story

IDG Capital Partners Chang Chen:

Group buying, as an innovative e-commerce platform, is developing rapidly. However, the clear business mode of group buying has also led to a large influx of capital, and the group buying market has also evolved from "100 regiment war" to "1000 regiment war". In such a fierce competition, how far can group buying enterprises go? The test is that the entrepreneurial team's management and operation capabilities are strong. IDG investment tick group is valued for its entrepreneurial team. The tick group has rich experience in marketing, marketing and team management in the Internet industry.

third eye

Feng Lin, director of network finance department of China Electronic Commerce Research Center,

Compared with the C2C platform, group buying enterprises have weaker ability to restrict businesses, and participate more in the process of influencing consumers' purchase decisions. The tick group alleviates the uncontrollability of terminal operation by group buying enterprises to some extent, and enhances user experience through the training of merchants and advance compensation. To some extent, the corresponding increase is the cost increase of group buying websites and merchants. This essentially reflects group buying as an electronic business mode, and lacks of information level in the current stage. If you can add information about service booking, such as adding services to the website, see functions and other information means, and provide solutions, or conduct data mining for consumer behavior to create more accurate marketing, which is more valuable for group buying enterprises, businesses and consumers or three parties.