The vitality of values

• Liang Lu

 

 

As we all know, foreigners like to talk about the weather, while Chinese people like to talk about food. Thanks to the great richness of Chinese recipes, food occupies a large amount of space in our social context. So whether it is content or marketing, food is always a good choice. As the marketing king, Xiaomi is obviously well aware of this. Recently, it successfully leveraged traffic with a fried dough twist, and became popular with Xiaomi’s values.

 

 

The story begins with an internal speech at Xiaomi. This competition was held to celebrate Xiaomi’s 14th birthday. The theme was “We Xiaomi People”, and the purpose was to allow employees to speak out and interpret the company’s values. After several months of competition, 14 contestants finally made it to the finals, including today’s protagonist Bing Jiabao, the behind-the-scenes promoter of Xiaomi Canteen’s popular hemp twist. After he gave a speech titled “Fight for Hemp Twist”, the gears of fate began to turn.

 

 

According to Xiaomi’s official introduction, Bing Jiabao is a “social phobic who is afraid of looking people in the eye.” It was this “social phobic” who brought the atmosphere to a climax, making everyone including Lei Jun laugh. In his speech, he used the big hemp flowers in the Xiaomi cafeteria as an example to show how their department used engineering thinking to create a hit in the cafeteria, a logistics world.

 

 

Mahua was originally unremarkable, but Bing Jiabao used three layers of narrative logic to transform this featureless mass food into “Xiaomi Mahua” step by step.

 

The first step is to integrate the making of fried dough into the workplace context. He used words such as “shit shoveling officer”, “social phobia”, “little Karami”, “black and red are also red”, “chicken blood”, “flag” and other common workplace social terms. In particular, some words that should have been used to describe people were used to describe dough, which produced a magical effect.

The second step is to integrate the process of making fried dough twist into the industry context. He used professional terms in front of a group of human resources, development, and marketing personnel. For example, “OKR”, “experimental field”, “incubation ground”, “integrated process”, “sunk cost”, etc. These words are used in the canteen field, which is very interesting.

The third step is to integrate the making of fried dough twist into the context of Xiaomi. For example, Lei Jun’s digital method of “five hours” and “ten steps”, Xiaomi’s jokes of “insufficient production capacity” and “hunger marketing”, and “making friends with classmates through food” to echo Xiaomi’s concept of “making friends with users”.

 

A good speech will not only bring laughter, but also some touching elements. “Not being on the list does not mean that there is no way forward. The scraps of society are everyone’s little pride.” This sentence immediately raised the level of the speech. This reminds people of the Xiaomi user portrait given at the press conference: “Not willing to be mediocre, still fighting for their dreams, with fire in their hearts, light in their eyes, and the whole body shining with the light of optimism and confidence.”

 

 

Whether it is the phrase “scraps of society, everyone’s little pride” or Bing Jiabao himself, they all have the same core as this portrait – Xiaomi’s values. These values ​​are reflected in Xiaomi Mahua. Especially “making friends with users”, making every Mahua carefully; “engineer thinking”, implementing rigor in every process. The intrinsic connection between values ​​and marketing is worthy of Xiaomi! This was originally an internal activity of Xiaomi, but it still became popular with humor and inspiration, transforming brand values ​​into excellent marketing materials. The reason for this transformation is that there is an intrinsic connection between values ​​and marketing.

 

 

Steve Jobs once said, “Marketing is about values. It’s a very complex world, so we have to be very clear about what we want people to know about us.” In the process of value marketing, brand values ​​will influence specific groups of people. Users who like a brand and buy it frequently will have a better return on investment. At the same time, with strong user loyalty, a brand reserve can be established. The existence of Mi fans confirms this. They are the most valuable asset of the brand along the way, and are also the confidence of Lei Jun to create the super category of Xiaomi Auto from scratch.

 

 

The Xiaomi Mahua event was a heartwarming event that inspired morale in the park and moved all the Mi fans. The Analects of Confucius said, “Those who are near are pleased and those who are far away come to visit.” This is the charm of brand values.

 

Grasping quality means grasping requirements

Sugar fried chestnut

The first of the four basic principles of zero defects: the definition of quality is to meet the requirements. Therefore, grasping quality is grasping the requirements, and grasping the needs of customers can respond to changes with the same attitude.

 

Starting from the requirements means that we must pay attention to the process and requirements, details and systems. In other words, we must transform the needs of customers and the market into specific work requirements, business standards and technical specifications. This requires us to take prevention as the priority, formulate and understand the requirements clearly before doing things, and do things right the first time. Not only that, we must break the double standards and not be afraid of mistakes. Once an error is found, its root cause must be found and eliminated.

 

If you look closely at McDonald’s, you will find that all procedures are implemented with very quantitative means. What are the recipes for Chinese food like? It is not about controlling the cooking time or the frying time, but it must be a little salt, a little MSG, etc. When every chef cooks by feeling, it is more difficult to open a chain store. Many people say that we Chinese are born to open restaurants because we can cope with many changes. But once a Chinese restaurant opens a chain, it will soon face death. Why?

 

McDonald’s is open all over the world. Wherever you go, when you are not used to the local food and you want to find a new restaurant, people will go to McDonald’s because its taste will not change. I hope everyone will think about this issue, because behind it are two different ways of dealing with the problem.

 

When everyone pays attention to specific things and tiny details, they are moving towards zero defects. But everyone should also pay attention to one point: although details constitute perfection, perfection does not lie in details. If we hold on to details, it is very likely that the so-called “devil” will be led out of the details.

 

We advocate institutionalism to fight against the “bureaucratism” that has existed for thousands of years; we learn from McDonald’s spirit and practices of pursuing quality, but we also remind everyone to prevent the entire society from falling into the “McDonald-like iron cage.”

George Ritzler made a profound criticism of the “McDonaldization Iron Cage” in “The McDonaldization of Society”. However, George Ritzler also believed that while McDonald’s pursued high efficiency, it used efficiency, predictability and controllability to build a “McDonaldization Iron Cage” of “self-restriction, emotional control and mental suppression”, in fact replacing quality with quantity. Its focus was on quantity rather than quality, which was reflected in the “illusion of quantity” and the “rationalization” tendency of reducing product and service processes to numbers.

 

Standing on a balanced basis, we can understand why Mr. Crosby’s “Quality is Free” became popular all over the world. In his view, there is nothing wrong with institutionalization and standardization, but the people who make the system and standards are wrong. They regard the enterprise as a huge machine and follow the rules of mathematics and physics to formulate the AQL implementation standard, which directly leads to people no longer striving to “meet the requirements” but starting to focus on “how far we are away from the goal” and “whether we can compromise and accept it”. This is very sad. Later, a young man named Tom Peters compiled the materials he and his colleagues researched at McKinsey into a book and published it in 1982, which triggered a management revolution in the American business community and made the term “pursuit of excellence” popular all over the world. In his book, he paid tribute to Mr. Crosby: Quality is not a technology – no matter how good the technology is. “Quality is a matter of focusing on employees, passion, consistency, face-to-face contact and instinctive reaction.”

 

Quality is not a technical activity. Enterprises should pay attention to people’s mentality and behavior, and strive to change the cultural mental model of the organization to create a new way of doing things that is passionate and trustworthy.

 

Only by focusing on overall needs and managing quality at the level of the entire company can we participate in the operation and management of the enterprise. We should regard quality as a competitive magic weapon to create value and ensure the realization of strategic goals, and never regard it as just an operational project or a technical activity.