After finishing the work of the distant game, Zhou Fangyuan finally made time to carefully understand the white-hot takeaway war that has now entered the world.

In fact, he already knew that there would be such a day, and the reason why he handed over the takeaway stall to his group of high school classmates instead of doing it himself was actually knowing this.

The food delivery industry may seem like nothing remarkable, but in fact, the water is deep.

Thinking back to the previous life, isn't the takeaway war between Meituan and Ele.me, or between Tencent and Ali, fierce enough?

In fact, the war between food delivery companies has never stopped, sometimes it is fierce, sometimes it is relatively peaceful, just like a helmet war, in fact, it is a relatively peaceful one. As a consumer, it is a joy to see the drama of "love and kill" between competitors. But from a marketing point of view, why is the act of "installing ears" on the top of the takeaway brother's head very ingenious, and what does the competition between the two in styling mean?

In the previous life, on Weibo, you can even see Meituan and Ele.me, and various battles and #外卖小哥皮肤大战#话题还登上了微博热搜 with various decorations on the heads of the delivery people. In the matter of styling, both companies are serious, and the helmet "skin" of both is related to the service concept and the brand image they want to build. In fact, since 18 years, Meituan has distributed kangaroo-decorated helmets to its internal delivery riders on July 17 on Knight's Day, which is also in line with Meituan's own brand logo kangaroo, and Ele.me's official delivery service is called Hummingbird, and the image of "bamboo dragonfly" symbolizes its brand's pursuit of "fast" food delivery services, and can also be associated with Doraemon.

Whenever people think of marketing, they always look outward, but the internal "market" is just as important. That is, employees, especially delivery riders, need to reach out to consumers, and they are also the most direct "spokesperson" of the brand.

The birth of "kangaroo ears" and "bamboo dragonflies" is actually a corporate culture that allows employees to identify with the values of the enterprise and form advantages, and is an "internal marketing" that motivates employees to create greater value.

At the level of commercial competition, Meituan and Ele.me accounted for 92% of the food delivery market, and the competition in the food delivery industry at that time had long since been upgraded from service to an extension of brand culture. Helmet accessories with a very low cost alone have gone viral and may have been the most successful brand marketing campaign. At that time, the biggest feature of the helmet war was "selling cute", in the era of cuteness is justice, no one will hate the image of cuteness, and the image of stupid cuteness can also resolve some public relations crises. For example, DingTalk was retaliated by elementary school students for one star, and an advertisement of "Nail Three More" sold cute and begged for mercy. There is also the dispute between Tencent and Lao Gan Ma, Tencent pushed the image of a "simple penguin" to the public.

Behind all recognized popular phenomena must be the deep support of culture, Meituan's kangaroo ears and Eleme's bamboo dragonflies are behind the "cute" culture. This screen swiping incident is not a simple and random success, it is more about the popular culture that young people love, and it is the most emotional appeal that fits human nature.

It can be seen that in order to win the opponent, the two major companies had already done everything at that time.

It's not just the subsidy war of real knives and guns, but even the ornaments on helmets have become a means of war for them.

Speaking of this, I have to talk about Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan in the previous life, who can be regarded as a strange person.

Compared with the college students of Ele.me's entrepreneurial team, Wang Xing of Meituan was already famous before Meituan, and the school intranet and rice of that year, no matter what the final outcome was, one made Wang Xing make money, and the other made Wang Xing have a higher reputation. After Meituan crawled out of the pile of dead people in the Battle of a Thousand Regiments, some people even believed that Wang Xing was a master of prophecy in the Internet field, and many entrepreneurs went to Wang Xing with a pilgrimage mentality to find answers.

Later, Wang Xing's "second half of the Internet" became popular with half the sky, and the Internet industry began to use the "second half" to talk about things overnight. In fact, Director Li also expressed a similar meaning, but he was more extreme, saying that it would be difficult for the mobile Internet to produce unicorns, however, many unicorns that emerged in 2017 made Director Li's prediction very embarrassing, and in the second half of 2016, the investment in venture capital began to concentrate on the head, which began to verify the second half of Wang Xing.

To put it bluntly, the second half is after the disappearance of the Internet dividend, online traffic has become more and more difficult to obtain, this time is not like before, just get an APP and someone will invest, just write a disease-free moaning article has 100,000+ clicks, it's time to improve the connotation construction, and to start doing offline.

Brother Da Ma never said the second half, he said "five new", in fact, people who know how to see that the Ali team not only knew the arrival of the so-called "second half", but even started the layout a few years in advance, when Wang Xing shouted the second half, Brother Da Ma's "five new" had already begun to operate. The most obvious manifestation is Alibaba's rising stock price, and the market value is close to Amazon's.

Let's talk about the takeaway war.

In the final version of this acquisition, in addition to the purchase price of 500 million US dollars, there is also a traffic fee of 300 million US dollars, which is actually a manifestation of the cooperation between the two parties.

After all, whiteness has its own traffic advantage, mobile phone whiteness, glutinous rice, map 5 years of traffic plus search engine 2 years of traffic, as a price of 300 million US dollars, not expensive at all, especially glutinous rice, 5 years of traffic rights, this is of great significance to Eleme's shortcomings, I think back then, in the negotiations between Ele.me and Baidu, I have always hoped that glutinous rice can come in. In this acquisition, although glutinous rice was not merged, the diversion of 5 years was okay. Of course, Baidu has a 5% stake in the new company, and helping Ele.me is also equivalent to helping himself.

After all, the last round of Ele.me was valued at $6.5 billion, and Baidu was able to get 5% of the equity and still had so much cash, which shows that Ele.me's next round of valuation has exceeded $10 billion, at least if others don't pay, Ali will pay.

In fact, the gap between Ele.me and Meituan is very large, because Ele.me is mainly takeaway, while Meituan not only takeaway, but also group buying, wine and tourism, etc., each piece of cake is very large.

And Meituan has done much more than this, movies, KTV, beauty, mother and child, cleaning, etc., Meituan has been involved. In the later period, Meituan focused on the three core businesses of catering, wine and tourism, and in-store integration, and expanded a series of businesses such as homestays, shared power banks, fresh food and online car-hailing. It can be said that life is endless, and boundaries are expanded.

Therefore, no matter from what point of view, the merger of Ele.me into Ali's territory should be the best outcome for both parties.

Then, the big battle between the two food delivery giants began.

After the merger of Ele.me and Baidu Takeaway, it is said that Meituan is very nervous internally, and it has also set up a "duel Ali combat team", so Meituan knows about Ele.me, and he knows that it is a matter of time before Ele.me merges into Ali. Meituan also knows that a vicious war is inevitable.

Purely from the data point of view, in the food delivery market at that time, the share of Ele.me and Baidu is expected to be similar to that of Meituan.

From the perspective of a simple takeaway APP, Ele.me has 35.614 million monthly active users, Meituan has 31.546 million takeaways, and Baidu takeaway is 16.795 million. Of course, Meituan also has its own main APP, with 143.986 million active users this month, which has surpassed JD.com.

Therefore, the variable is how many users choose to order food directly from Meituan or Dianping's apps, rather than through Meituan's food delivery apps. According to the calculation of the 140 million monthly active users of the Meituan app, as long as more than 15% of these monthly active users order food through the app, their total monthly active users can exceed the combination of Ele.me and Baidu takeaway.

Judging from Ele.me's acquisition of Baidu Takeaway, there are probably several most important reasons: Ele.me's back-end system is doing poorly, while Baidu is doing better, and it is urgent to make up for shortcomings in this regard;

Third, the traffic of whiteness has a great attraction to Ele.me, after all, whiteness search has 388 million monthly active users on the mobile side, maps have 342 million monthly active users on the mobile side, and glutinous rice also has 16.64 million monthly active users, plus the PC side, the traffic is very amazing, and it is not worse than the traffic of Alipay.

At first glance, if Ele.me and Baidu Takeaway want to beat Meituan, the first step is to vigorously improve service quality.

Taking Meituan as an example, an average active user only opens 0.386 hours a month, which is equivalent to about 23 minutes, which is basically used as a pure tool, that is, the state of closing soon after clicking, what kind of user stickiness and loyalty does this state talk about? Therefore, after the merger, the simple price war is not the focus, the focus is to improve the quality of the connotation, including faster delivery and better service.

In addition, both sides are strengthening the capacity of third- and fourth-tier cities.

In fact, there is not much difference between Ele.me and Meituan Takeaway in first- and second-tier cities, and after adding Baidu Takeaway, Ele.me will gain a certain advantage in the share of first- and second-tier cities, but Meituan's ability to take delivery lies in its penetration in third- and fourth-tier cities through Meituan and Dianping APP, which exceeds that of Ele.me, especially in terms of key users, and there is a large gap between the two sides. Therefore, after becoming a two-power competition, the battle for third- and fourth-tier cities has become the key to the final victory and defeat between the two sides. But this is not an easy battle, and it is very difficult to rely on Ele.me's single-point breakthrough in takeaway.

The monthly active users of the Meituan app reached 140 million, and Dianping also reached 102 million, and these two vertical entrances of 100 million yuan have brought good traffic to Meituan Takeaway. If Ele.me wants to make a big breakthrough in third- and fourth-tier cities, in-depth cooperation with word-of-mouth is particularly important.

At that time, the number of merchants on the word-of-mouth platform exceeded 2.5 million. Moreover, there are a large number of KA merchants who directly choose word-of-mouth instead of Meituan, and these merchants are exactly what Ele.me needs. The key problem is that the reviews of Koubei are directly tied to Alipay, and there is a Sesame Credit score behind them, and the credibility of the reviews is much higher than that of peers. Therefore, in-depth cooperation with word-of-mouth with offline genes is the key for New Ele.me to defeat Meituan in third- and fourth-tier cities, which is difficult to do with money alone, and it takes a lot of time and brand accumulation behind it.

The third step is to conduct in-depth docking with Ali products.

Meituan's troika is the result of its years of development and experimentation with many categories, and it has a deep foundation in these aspects. In addition to takeaway, Meituan's group buying and hospitality businesses are also relatively mature businesses with strong competitiveness. In this regard, Ali also has a layout, but it is not as deeply involved as Meituan, so at that time, it was not easy to defeat Meituan.

However, what many people don't notice is that while everyone is discussing Ele.me's merger and acquisition of Baidu Takeaway, and Meituan has set up a "Showdown Ali Combat Team", Tengxun has been hiding underwater.

Tencent has a very small means, which is difficult for others to notice - small programs.

Mini Programs are both online and offline, especially for offline merchants, which are very friendly, and "nearby Mini Programs" make offline transaction scenarios more convenient to complete through Mini Programs. Merchants do not need to develop independent APPs, and buyers do not need to install more APPs, they can be used in the Mini Program. The Mini Program displays the content of each store more fully in the form of an app, which is different from a small number of displays by merchants in Meituan, Dianping, or Koubei.

It's no wonder that even if Ali copies it, he has to make a small program, and the new small program may not be successful, but if he doesn't do it, he will be successful by the opponent, and it will be difficult to catch up with it when the time comes. And those who are also afraid or want to lay out also include whiteness and rice, whiteness direct number, and rice direct service have been baked one after another.

Therefore, the takeaway war is all-round, burning money, is just a façade, to put it bluntly, everyone is grabbing this market, this ever-expanding, full of countless possibilities of the supermarket. It's not just about delivering food, it's hiding behind it is a collision between the two major groups. And now, Meituan, which was made up by Zhou Fangyuan and a group of high school classmates, is fighting with local food delivery software across the country, and it is also burning money, all kinds of subsidies, and all kinds of discounts on the surface, but what does it represent behind it?

It's still the market, or the countless possibilities that are so full of it.

Zhou Fangyuan didn't end up in person, it wasn't that he "didn't want to bully the small with the big", he just didn't want to put too much pressure on the other party and force the other party to unite.

Especially Erma, when Zhou Fangyuan's classmates came up with takeaway software, they also quietly withdrew from their own takeaway platform. Although it has nothing to do with the two on the surface, everyone knows exactly what is going on. Zhou Fangyuan knew it, and Erma also knew that he knew it, but everyone knew it.

In the previous life, the two major groups could not distinguish the winner in the end, at most Meituan slightly overwhelmed the opponent.

In this life, Meituan was born ahead of schedule, and it took the channel of the distant group, and it had already persuaded many opponents to retreat in the early stage. But no matter what the actual situation is, this market Zhou Fangyuan can't really be completely ignored. He's just waiting for the right moment, and when the time comes, he'll get off the field quickly and clean up all his opponents.