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Author | Ermao

Editor|Jiang Yue

Internet Celebrities

Becoming a public figureGreat Wall MotorsIt is not easy for Wei Jianjun. If he is not actively exposed, the outside world will rarely be able to explore his life. In the past, he liked to wear a vest and slippers to eat snacks at the International Plaza in Baoding, but now he can't do that, "He will be recognized." This makes Wei Jianjun, who was used to a free and easy life, feel uncomfortable.

To some extent, his current discomfort is also the result of his active choice.

Xiaomi SU7On the first day of the launch, the number of orders exceeded 10,000 in 4 minutes. This data was undoubtedly shocking to Wei Jianjun. The market showed the greatest acceptance of a fledgling car brand. After more than 30 years of car manufacturing, he thought that Great Wall's cars were very good, but they were stuck in "not knowing how to market". He wanted to open up the communication channel between Great Wall and the outside world.

So, even if you don't like it,But "the times require it, the company requires it", Wei Jianjun is still determined to become an Internet celebrity.He also deliberately added a prefix: become a high-quality internet celebrity.

Figure: Screenshot of the live broadcast of Great Wall Motors' 2024 shareholders' meeting

What is high quality? Probably something like Lei Jun.

It is visible to the naked eye that Wei Jianjun took Lei Jun as a benchmark and started some pixel-level learning on the identity of "Internet celebrity". For example, he learned how Lei Jun made Douyin, wrote on Weibo, and did live broadcasts, sometimes to the point where even the forms were almost exactly the same.

How much does Wei Jianjun's study bring?There is something paranoid about it.

"He likes to go to extremes in everything he learns, even if it means going too far." Liang Henian, an old friend who had worked with him for many years, commented in the book "How Great Wall Was Built". He recalled Wei Jianjun's extreme behavior when Great Wall was building its R&D building:

At that time, Wei Jianjun was immersed inToyotaIn the study of TPS lean production method, one of the essences of this concept is to achieve high-efficiency and high-profit production by eliminating all waste in the production process. Wei Jianjun requires himself to implement the concepts learned in every little thing and every process, not just in corporate management.

Therefore, during the construction of this building, in order to prevent the construction team from cutting corners and operating in secret, he asked the group to purchase all the steel bars, cement and other materials. The cooperating Hebei Provincial First Construction Company only contracted the labor work of the project, forcing the general manager of the Provincial First Construction Company to complain to Wei Jianjun in person:

"You've wrung out the towel, what am I supposed to drink?"

Wei Jianjun’s learning of the Toyota model goes far beyond this.

The core principle of TPS lean production includes the effective use of natural resources. Under the influence of this model, Wei Jianjun became one of the few entrepreneurs in the extensive economic era who reflected on the waste of resources, for example:

In the construction industry, he advocated the use of steel structure design and lightweight blocks to reduce the high energy consumption caused by traditional cement; when most people had not seen water-saving toilets, the Great Wall factory used automatic identification and automatic flushing toilets to reduce the waste of water resources; after attending a meeting, he would take away a half-drunk bottle of mineral water, and more often, he would carry his own water cup with him...

"First rigidify, then optimize",This is how Wei Jianjun has always learned. Therefore, when all the marketing in the automotive industry are following Lei Jun's lead, Wei Jianjun can be considered the first among the industry leaders who have truly achieved the ultimate.

Lei Jun once tried to test the intelligent driving system of Xiaomi SU7 by live streaming while driving, and invited car blogger "A Fei Talking about Cars" to co-create content with him. These forms were moved by Wei Jianjun to his live streaming room. Recently, he led the Great Wall executive team to challenge Great Wall's NOA driving live streaming in Chongqing, and also invited "Hu Ge Talking about Cars" to Baoding to spend the weekend together.

Similarly, Lei Jun went to Xiaomi's offline stores to promote the product, and Wei Jianjun later visited Great Wall Motors' direct-sale store in Zhengzhou. Even after Lei Jun accidentally made Xiaomi work clothes popular during a live broadcast, Wei Jianjun also took off his jeans and changed into Great Wall Motors' cycling clothes during the live broadcast.

In terms of the label of "good student", Wei Jianjun and Lei Jun are the same type of people.

After taking over Great Wall for 34 years, Wei Jianjun has always stayed in a small corner of Baoding to make cars. He and his friends describe him as "not good at speaking". It is said that the Great Wall PR department once hoped that Wei Jianjun could promote himself and the company more, but he responded with a glare:

"Just say whatever you want, and do it."

But now, Wei Jianjun can often be seen in lively occasions. He began to attend brand conferences, brand car clubs, accept more interviews, and began to show netizens the R&D center and direct stores of Great Wall Motors. He also launched a series of short films "Wei Jianjun's Weekend" to let consumers know more about his company and himself. In a recent visit to the Great Wall Intelligent Laboratory, he told the engineers:

"As long as you need me, I'm always available."

Before becoming an Internet celebrity, Wei Jianjun only had one identity: Chairman of Great Wall Motors, which is rare among entrepreneurs. More often, entrepreneurs with a little fame often have multiple roles: representative, committee member, director, chairman, etc. The addition of these identities may be active or passive, but the essence is the same: in addition to running a business, they also need to maintain social relationships and express concern for public affairs.

But Wei Jianjun once refused, saying: I only want to build good cars in my life.

This style may be related to his idol.

The person Wei Jianjun admires most is Ren Zhengfei. Despite being one of the “100 most influential people in the world”, this business tycoon’s only identity is the chairman of Huawei.

If possible, Wei Jianjun might want to be Ren Zhengfei. This is more in line with his character, hiding behind the scenes and focusing on the planning and production of Great Wall Motors. But it is not easy to be Ren Zhengfei, especially at a time when the industry is in a state of anxiety and Great Wall is in the throes of reform. The long-standing pattern of "men in charge of the interior and women in charge of the exterior" formed with Wang Fengying has also fallen apart with the latter's resignation. Wei Jianjun can no longer hide and must stand up and lead the Great Wall ship to a rapid transformation to ensure that it will not be left behind by the times.

totem

“What is Great Wall’s corporate culture?”

"Benchmarking against other companies." A former Great Wall employee answered the question from Chief View in this way, and then added: It means learning from other good companies.The official expression of this culture in Great Wall is: a little progress every day.

If you know Wei Jianjun well enough, you will understand: finding the best learning object within the value radius that he recognizes has been the methodology he has always used to run the behemoth that is the Great Wall.

In the early days of his business, he introduced the Toyota Group's TPS lean production method in order to improve automobile production efficiency and reduce manufacturing costs. In terms of market strategy, he believed in the positioning theory created by Al Ries and established a strategic consulting partnership with Al Ries China in 2008. In early January this year, Great Wall also reached a long-term partnership with IBM Consulting to build a "marketing, supply, human resources, etc." mechanism around the enterprise management system. As for himself, he has now learned from Lei Jun in terms of marketing methods.

To some extent, he has formed a path dependence: he introduced different benchmarks for the Great Wall at different stages, and did not advocate the doctrine of the mean, but instead improved it according to its own characteristics after learning to the extreme.

The way the founder does things largely determines the corporate culture of a company. As time goes by, when this former employee recalls it, he subconsciously only remembers the corporate culture of "benchmarking other companies", which is truly meant for the company's internal staff.

However, simply attributing Wei Jianjun's success to imitation would obviously underestimate the ability of this helmsman.

In 1997, Wei Jianjun, sitting in his office, looked out the window at the suppliers coming and going and sighed: Lao Zhang used to drive a Xiali to deliver goods, but now he drives aAudiHow can we make money so quickly? Can't we make the broken parts he gave us ourselves?

The speed at which suppliers were getting rich made him realize the profit margins in the supply chain. Businessmen are all about maximizing profits, so Wei Jianjun began to integrate the upstream and downstream supply chains.

At that time, Great Wall launched its first official brand "Deere" pickup truck. In order to win the homogeneous competition with its competitors, Great Wall changed the two intermediate coatings to one intermediate coating while ensuring the assembly accuracy and the beauty of the paint surface, thus reducing the amount of putty and lowering costs.

These "small moves" alone are naturally not enough to fulfill Wei Jianjun's ambition. Wei Jianjun carefully studied the supply chain development of traditional automobile manufacturers in Europe, the United States and Japan, and found that almost all successful world-class automakers have experienced or continued the path of vertical integration of the supply chain. Subsequently, Great Wall Motors gradually established a supply chain capable of producing important parts such as engines, bodies, front axles, rear axles, interior trims and air conditioners through a series of mergers and acquisitions and joint ventures, and continued to reduce costs. In all joint venture projects, Wei Jianjun required a 51% stake.

Wei Jianjun, who graduated from high school, did not know at the time that his drastic reforms on Great Wall had a sophisticated term in Toyota, Japan, across the sea: lean production. A year later, when he visited Japan, he found that his transformation of the production chain was also the model of Toyota Motors.

Toyota's success, in a sense, is the success of supply chain management. At that time, Toyota had integrated more than 300 suppliers and achieved sufficiently extreme systematic management. The effect of this model is reflected in the numbers: in the first half of 1974 after the oil crisis, Toyota achieved the goal of reducing costs by 9 billion yen. In Toyota's view, this is a result comparable to the operating profit of 8.9 billion yen in that period.

In terms of making money, Wei Jianjun has indeed found the most suitable person to learn from for Great Wall. Toyota is one of the most profitable automobile companies in the world. As recently as 2023, it ranked first in the world with a profit of 221.5 billion yuan. Great Wall has been the most profitable independent car company in China since 2011. The recently released 2024 semi-annual performance report also shows:

In the first half of 2024, Great Wall Motor expects to achieve a net profit of 6.5 billion to 7.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 377.49% to 436.26%. This profit scale is unparalleled in the entire Chinese automobile industry.

Controlling production efficiency is always one of the conditions for high profits. Wei Jianjun is known as the "cost control master". Even when the price of Great Wall Motors generally did not exceed 100,000 yuan, its profit per vehicle could reach 9,000 yuan, while the profit per vehicle of joint venture brands was generally only 3,000 to 5,000 yuan.

"Great Wall's break-even point is very low. Selling more or less is simply a matter of how much profit you make." This is a problem that Great Wall solved 20 years ago, but it still bothers many car companies today.

Unlike the new car-making forces that later lost money and engaged in price wars, Wei Jianjun always valued profits.

"Running a business is about making profits," he said many years later at a forum titled "The Road to High-Quality Development of New Automobiles." "Now all the financial reports of Chinese automobile companies are in the red. If high-quality development means killing every one of them, and it's bloody, then let's not talk about it today."

For automobile companies, a suitable product line is always a necessary condition to ensure profits.

Back in 2008, Great Wall also encountered product line problems. At that time, it made almost all models in the passenger car field: pickup trucks, sedans, SUVs, CUVs, MPVs, and off-road vehicles. It operated 9 brands at the same time, but it fell into a dilemma:

The good can’t be stopped, and the bad can’t be saved.

For example,HarvardCUV sales in November 2008 were 5,288 units, ranking first in the category. Great Wall's pickup truck sales have also been ranked first in the country for many years in a row, while sedan products such as the Xuanli and Elf have relatively low sales of 836 and 652 units respectively, which are overall weak and not worth mentioning.

Al Ries' "Positioning Theory" helped Wei Jianjun find a solution to the problem.

The book mentions: The energy of the sun is hundreds of thousands of times that of lasers, but because it is dispersed, it becomes a sunbath that human skin can enjoy; lasers gain power through focusing and can easily cut hard steel plates. For companies and brands to gain competitiveness, they must focus. They don’t seek the most varieties, but the most categories. The more products you have, the longer the battle line, and the less money you make. Chasing all goals will achieve nothing.

Wei Jianjun, who was struck, took action quickly. Soon, Great Wall Motors established a strategic partnership with the Reese China team to clarify the main trunk, focus on categories, reallocate resources, and position the SUV and pickup truck businesses as the group's priority.

The effect was soon apparent. Great Wall regained the No. 1 position in the Chinese SUV market and has maintained its leading position ever since. The essence of positioning theory - thinking in terms of categories and expressing in terms of brands - became Great Wall's brand slogan. The automotive industry also remembered Wei Jianjun's words:

“If we don’t make SUV the world’s best, we will never make other models.”

It is not difficult to see that rather than saying that Wei Jianjun is always learning from others, it is better to say that he is looking for an extreme, systematic, detailed and procedural benchmark for the management ideas that have already formed in his mind.

But in the end, he couldn't take another step forward.

Missing

In addition to being known as the “cost control master”, Wei Jianjun is also known by the nicknames “car veteran” and “Baoding car god”.

He likes everything related to engines and is a typical technology geek. He used to go shopping in the car market as a hobby, and almost all the salesmen in Baoding 4S stores knew him. When he saw a car he liked, he would lie on the ground to look at the chassis.

Before Lei Jun won countless fans with drifting, Wei Jianjun had already mastered this technique. In the late 1980s, the young Wei Jianjun could already perform drift stunts. If you look closely, in the first short video released by Wei Jianjun, he tested the Xiaomi SU7 at a speed of over 240 miles per hour.

60-year-old Wei Jianjun is still driving at high speed.

In a sense, the times have dragged him to a track that he is neither familiar with nor good at. The number one person stepping forward to endorse a car brand is becoming a new trend driven by new car-making forces. Lei Jun's entry has provided an acceleration.

Beyond the physical form, one will go further away. This is an allusion from Shishuo Xinyu, which means that when learning from others, if one only pays attention to the superficial form and ignores the inner essence, then one will eventually get further and further away from the real goal.

Whether it is live broadcast or short video, it is just a form of marketing after all, just like the focus of Lei Jun's Drift is not to show off skills, but to respond to the requirements of netizens, hand in homework, and win the hearts of the people. What Wei Jianjun should learn more from Lei Jun at the moment is the latter's accurate grasp of market demand and consumer psychology.

This is not Wei Jianjun's comfort zone. Over the past 30 years, Wang Fengying has shouldered this heavy responsibility. She left Great Wall in 2022 and joinedXpeng MotorsAccording to information sources of Great Wall, Great Wall seems to be trying to avoid mentioning Wang Fengying.

For a long time, Wei Jianjun and Wang Fengying have had a clear division of labor: Wei Jianjun is responsible for production, R&D, quality control and system construction, while Wang Fengying is responsible for the market and all matters that require exposure.

Wang Fengying joined Great Wall less than a year after Wei Jianjun took over. In the days when Great Wall did not have a production line, the first batch of hand-made cars were sold by Wang Fengying in the Northeast market. She was sensitive enough to the market. Around 2000, pickup trucks began to sell well in China, and Great Wall chose to follow suit. As a result, the sales of the one-row and a half pickup trucks that Wei Jianjun decided to make were dismal. Later, the Isuzu pickup trucks that Wang Fengying insisted on producing were sold well all the way.

However, it was not easy to convince Wei Jianjun to accept her point of view. Wang Fengying asked him directly:

"Are you buying the car or are the consumers buying the car?" - For a long time, she was one of the few people in Great Wall who dared to challenge Wei Jianjun directly.

Such things happened frequently later. When Great Wall launched the compact small bridge car "Elven", Wei Jianjun wanted to make it have the performance of a mid-level car, and the price was correspondingly higher. Wang Fengying opposed it, believing that the audience of this car cared more about price than performance. As a result, its market response was indeed dismal.

The Great Wall brand exclusive dealer model was also established by Wang Fengying. ——Wei Jianjun was once an opponent.

Wei Jianjun's objection was not without reason. Before the new century, Great Wall mainly sold low-end cars, and its sales method was similar to that of a hypermarket, with almost no after-sales service. But Wang Fengying wanted to improve the brand image, so she changed to a franchise store sales model that only car brands could do at the time.

To convince Wei Jianjun, Wang Fengying used a "tool man". She found Professor Lu Taihong of Sun Yat-sen University, a well-known brand marketing expert in the field of fast-moving consumer goods at the time, to instill brand thinking in Wei Jianjun. In the end, Great Wall established the marketing model of brand stores. The key strategy is: instead of setting up sales branches, various policies and incentives are used to encourage dealers to only represent the Great Wall brand.

Interestingly, until now, Wei Jianjun and Wang Fengying still have differences in sales methods. Wang Fengying reduced the scale of Xiaopeng's direct sales channels and increased dealers; while Wei Jianjun opened the first batch of Great Wall direct stores in May this year, mainly selling its owntankAnd wey two high-end brands.

One goes left, the other goes right, but the two people who have separated no longer need to argue and reach a consensus at the same table.

They no longer have the same worries. Wang Fengying is trying to adapt to the new culture, while Wei Jianjun is facing the loss of old employees. According to statistics from 21CBR reporters, five senior executives of Great Wall Motors have resigned in the past year, including those of Haval,Wei brand、EulerAmong them, Weipai had the biggest personnel changes, with 6 CEOs in 8 years.

For Wei Jianjun, another more practical worry is: sales.

The turning point came in 2021. Wei Jianjun set out to establish an organizational form of "one car, one brand, one company". Sales fell by 16.7% in 2022. Although there was a slight recovery in 2023, it was still 50,000 units short of 1.28 million units in 2021.

The high-end brand WEY has performed poorly, with sales declining in the past three years. Last year, sales were 41,602 units, almost halved from the peak, and less than competitors.Lynk & CoOne fifth of.

SUV market, Great WallHaval H6The legend of maintaining the No. 1 sales for 103 months ended in 2022. That year, Haval H6 fell to third place, down 29.1% year-on-year, and fell to fifth place the following year. In the first half of this year, Great Wall no longer appeared in the list of the top 10 domestic SUV sales.

It is worth mentioning that the Tank series has always performed well in the off-road market. In the top five domestic off-road vehicle sales rankings in the past two years, the Tank series has always occupied three seats. In December last year, the Tank brand surpassed the second place with sales of 15,560 vehicles.Equation LeopardThe sales volume of more than 10,000 units was the highest in the industry, and the Tank brand’s annual sales volume reached 162,539 units, a year-on-year increase of 31.21%, making it the brand with the largest growth rate under Great Wall Motors.

The situation of "the strong always get stronger" always appears in the different growth stages of Great Wall.

However, according to relevant data, the domestic off-road vehicle market size is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan in 2024. In comparison, the domestic SUV market size reached 260.622 billion yuan in 2023. The ceiling is obvious. Wei Jianjun has to find a way to regain the lost territory while maintaining his leading position in off-road vehicles - after all, SUV is Great Wall's most familiar battlefield.

The Great Wall needs to transform, and it is transforming, but this takes time.

Wei Jianjun likes to play table tennis. His left-handed racket-holding method is different from that of ordinary people. He always attacks head-on. He said: I would rather seek death than wait for death.

So in January this year, Wei Jianjun sent a message to IBM for help. The two sides have a long-term strategic partnership on the road to digital transformation and global development.

This is a path that Ren Zhengfei has taken.

It was 1997. Ren Zhengfei felt that he had lost control of Huawei. Although Huawei was already ranked among the top 10 of China's top 100 electronics companies, Ren Zhengfei saw the crisis behind it: R&D and the market did not have mature R&D processes and decision-making mechanisms, manufacturing and sales were a mess, the organization was complicated, the management was chaotic, and the efficiency was extremely low.

How to turn this growing team of talents into a scientific and technological force capable of large-scale collective operations became a difficult problem for Ren Zhengfei. He went to the United States and found the answer - the IBM management system.

The birth of IBM's consulting management system was largely due to the fact that the elephant IBM had one foot in the grave in 1992. CEO Lou Gerstner stepped into the crisis and rescued the huge and rigid IBM from the quagmire through drastic management reforms.

Ren Zhengfei saw Huawei in that story.

Many years later, the IPD (Integrated Product Development) system and ISC (Integrated Supply Chain) brought by IBM enabled Ren Zhengfei to master the ability to control a giant chariot, and also gave Huawei an institutional framework to grow into a global enterprise. Everyone knows the story that followed: Huawei's annual revenue soared from 4.1 billion yuan that year to more than 700 billion yuan today.

Just standing at the historical node at that time, no one could predict the situation today.

This time, the person who saw himself in IBM's history was Wei Jianjun. But whether he could achieve the same ending as his predecessors would obviously take time. The role of the times cannot be ignored - Huawei's current status is related to its own capabilities, but also inseparable from changes in the external environment.

There are no successful companies, only companies of the times.

Wei Jianjun never gave up. He once said, "In the past, there was too little wine, so it was not afraid of being out of reach. Now there is too much wine, and you don't know which kind of wine is really good." Even if the Great Wall is a bowl of good wine, in this overly lively era, if people can't see it, the story will lose the material to continue telling.