As early as 2010, Forbes published an article on the Chinese online magazine《 Why Segway can't be fully popular 》Translated articles of. However, this article is rather amateur, mainly citing the contents of some biographies, and trying to analyze the reasons why Segway cannot be popular from the perspective of products. It is hard to believe that the author has ridden a balance car.

So why are balance cars, including Segway, still unpopular after 12 years of development? Let a professional interpret this problem.

There are two major brands of balance car among Chinese consumers, namely, South Easy Walk and North Wind Walk. Yibu's headquarter is in Dongguan, and Windrunner's headquarter is in Beijing. Some news said that the latter obtained 12 million yuan of financing last month. Other brands do not have the same sales volume and influence as these two brands, or they specialize in the industry (for example, the New Century brand is only sold to the public security system). At the same time, there are also a large number of balance car enterprises just starting their businesses. In the month when I was spreading my own balance car club, I received at least three phone calls from entrepreneurial teams about their own balance car products.

Segway, the original brand of balance car, has been officially sold in China since 2006. But it faces the same problems as all domestic balance car brands.

Even more, I think the current commercial characteristics of domestic balance car manufacturers are learned from Segway, together with their shortcomings.

This shortcoming is precisely the reason why Segway is not fully popular.

That is, balance cars have never been sold as consumer electronics products.

In the past ten years, Segway itself has not figured out how to sell balance cars. As a result of this problem being left to the Chinese, the trade policy has replaced everything.

Segway was first busy with solving the problem of law and policy, and presented it to the then US President George W. Bush in the form of a national gift, taking a high-level line. The harvest is public service orders including police stations.

So Segway came on the scene as a special equipment for field patrol - this is not a good start.

Later, the Americans who can come to work created a lively Segway community themselves, but Segway seems to care nothing about individual consumers and continues to be busy expanding the scale of its institutional orders. The concepts of golf cart, park tour bus, etc. were all developed in this period.

As a result, the Segway community, which is composed entirely of individual consumers, declined rapidly. I didn't do a detailed research on the specific reasons for the decline. But one thing is enough to illustrate the problem - in the case that Segway has been born for 12 years and sold to most countries in the world, any damage to Segway reported for repair must be sent back to the US headquarters for repair. This is not just a matter of policy, but Segway has never considered whether its agents and dealers should have the ability of after-sales maintenance for individual users.

There are a large number of Segway users in China, many of whom give up the balance car completely because it is too inconvenient to repair after the failure. In a small Dongguan, there are a dozen damaged Segways. (Most people who are willing to spend 80000 yuan to buy a balance car for fun don't care too much about the 80000 yuan.)

Who can accept this situation and continue to buy Segway? Equipment leaser.

Sanya has the largest number of such enterprises. Many brokers rent Segway from leasing companies at the price of one day, ride to private beaches in five-star hotels, and rent it to tourists at the price of 300-500 for half an hour.

In this case, Segway has become a kind of production tool, where some enterprises' income business lies. Then business maintenance and after-sales are not mixed with personal feelings. It doesn't matter if it's troublesome.

Segway, busy pursuing short-term sales performance, messed up the public's psychological perception of "balance car" from the very beginning. It arouses the curiosity of the public, but does not care how to establish the relationship between products and buyers. The attention paid to enterprise users far exceeds that of individual users.

Equipment that is not purchased because of feelings can only be production tools. It is impossible to become a successful consumer electronics product.

From this point of view, Segway sees no difference between a balance car and an excavator or an electric drill. So Segway has not been successful so far - as a production tool, the balance car is inefficient, because its practicability is the biggest weakness, and there is no rigid demand.

Segway's bad problem also infected people who gradually entered the balance car industry after 2006.

This kind of infection is a complicated process. On the one hand, the process of localization of the balance car itself in China is the process of the supply chain enterprises exploring the end products. Imagine how an electronic component enterprise or profile supplier sells products;

On the other hand, Segway itself did not do a good job in product positioning, so that domestic peers did not know what model to use for reference to sell balanced cars - or even how to define balanced cars.

In the United States, Segway is not only a brand, but also a category. So a new name is needed in China, and as a result, a variety of names have come out - "location car" and "thinking car" derived from transliteration, according to the "intelligent vehicle" and "walking robot" of R&D technology, according to the "somatosensory car" of the use method, according to the brand, such as "easy walking car"... and so on.

On this issue, we need to thank Bo Du and Jinan Intermediate People's Court. He clearly read that "electric balance car" is the biggest contribution to the industry - and finally unified the scientific name of this category from the public level in 2013.

The name is just a small matter, but the vague category has led to a detour for all balance car brands in China - it has not yet returned to the right track.

At first, the trade habits from the supply chain system made it the responsibility of balance car manufacturers to sell cars to dealers. This is actually shirking the responsibility, because the dealer is not very clear about how to sell the balance car. As a result, after it seems that the initial excitement has been achieved, manufacturers and agents and dealers are in a dilemma.

Next, the two sides began to explore together. Based on the relatively high price, balance car manufacturers try to sell their cars through mature luxury car sales channels - with poor results. Most of the professional dealers with store management experience began to sell in the way of exclusive stores, and with the transformation of retail real estate (from department stores to urban complexes), they have made certain achievements.

So, after affirming the franchise store model, both parties continued to cross the river by feeling the stones. In this situation, dealers are already stronger than manufacturers, so the possibility of manufacturers operating direct stores is greatly reduced - this is considered to affect the interests of dealers. As a result, because different dealers have different understanding of products, different business strategies, and different product combinations (most dealers also act as agents for other types of products), consumers who buy balance cars from different dealers have different experiences and perceptions.

As a result, after two or three years of development, many balance cars have been sold, but consumers are still concerned about the practicality of balance cars, and the public perception level almost thinks that this product is a special tool for site patrol, or a high-end toy for rich children, rather than a public product. As they said that balance cars and mobile phones should become the standard electronic equipment above the middle class, it would be considered as a fantasy. Even most private owners who have bought balance cars are often embarrassed to drive them out.

For dealers, the sales volume of balance cars can only match that of cars or luxury goods, but it is far from giving them the same level of high profits, and there are also a lot of transfer to leasing or enterprise services - for balance car manufacturers, this is the old way of Segway.

As for manufacturers, as of today, no balance car manufacturers in China have held product conferences for the media and consumers - their product conferences are more accurately called dealer conferences. The emotional relationship between products and consumers is not a topic of concern.

This is the overall situation of the domestic balance car market as of today, and why Segway did not succeed.

Looking forward to tomorrow, my personal judgment is that the category of balance car will break out in two years, just like the domestic mobile phone two years ago. The reason is simple. At present, the trend of all intelligent devices is to connect and interact with each other. The home wifi environment has created the first wave of smart devices based on different screens - your mobile phone, tablet, and TV have become a smart chain around individuals.

The second wave of two trends has arrived - smart cars and wearable devices. The second intelligent chain around individuals has already taken shape. Not only Tesla, but almost all automobile brands have started to develop systems that can join wireless network and home network environment on new products. Not to mention that mobile Internet gene is enough orthodox wearable device family.

The new and cool intelligent devices, including balance cars, will become the third intelligent chain for individuals; Or the balance car will become the key point to connect the home wifi environment and the car network - there are many possibilities. Since the second half of this year, the balance car has been able to install 3G SIM cards. How far is it from large-scale embedding of operating systems and becoming a mobile Internet application platform.

But this opportunity does not belong to Segway, and it is hard to say which domestic balance car manufacturer it will belong to. It can only be said that whoever first regards their products as consumer electronic products that can really ignite the popularity, who first sorts out the supply chain, production capacity and dealer relationships, who first completes the market cultivation of the daily application of balance cars... who has the greatest opportunity.

The reason Segway didn't have the opportunity is the same as the reason why eBay failed in China - too long decision-making process, indifference to individual users and not intelligent products.

Segway, which sells for 80000 yuan, is indeed better than domestic products in terms of workmanship and performance details. However, if the cost of domestic products with an average price of 20000 to 30000 yuan is liberalized at the price of 80000 yuan, it is not difficult to surpass Segway - after all, like the iPhone, most components and processes of Segway sold in the United States are completed in China.