Scan the QR code in the image to register A guy was walking down the street when he met Death. He asked Death, "What are you doing out in broad daylight?" Death said, "I have to take 100 people from your town today, so I need to work overtime." The guy was alarmed. The town was full of his fellow villagers, and losing any of them would be a pity. So he hurriedly spread the word: "Death is here! Today more people in our town will die than usual. Everyone must be careful!" As a result, 1,000 people died in the town that day. The guy was furious and went to Death the next day: "Didn't you say you'd take 100? Why did you take more without raising the price?" Death replied, "I did take only 100. The other 900 were scared to death by you." In this world, more people die from anxiety than from accidents. Similarly, more businesses die from anxiety than from accidents. Anxiety stems from fear, but it's different from fear; it's more related to uncertainty. If someone puts a knife to your back, you know that if he presses hard, you'll be hospitalized; if he presses harder, you'll die. That's fear. You're in a hurry and exhausted, boarding a high-speed train with a standing ticket. You find an empty seat and sit down. Every time someone walks toward you, you wonder, "Is this person the owner of this seat?" One person passes, and you feel a bit relieved. Another comes, and you start worrying again. Only when the train departs do you feel at ease. At the next stop, the worry begins again. That's anxiety. The consequences may not be severe, but the uncertainty is strong. It's normal for business owners to feel anxious. Markets change constantly, and new technologies emerge rapidly. When bosses open their eyes each morning, everything seems new, as if they've never encountered it before. Feeling anxious is natural—it's human nature. When the boss is anxious, the whole company follows suit. Stoking anxiety is an ancient business. Longevity anxiety, survival anxiety, marriage and child-rearing anxiety, social anxiety, youth anxiety, parenting anxiety—these are still the essence of many businesses today. In recent years, because new things appear more frequently and internet information spreads more easily, the business of manufacturing anxiety has escalated. Mild anxiety is no longer enough; they must shock you with extreme statements, pushing it to the extreme. "Transform or die," "Embrace X or die," "Without X thinking, you'll die"... In short, there are many tricks and many ways to die. There's a famous anti-intellectual poison chicken soup that most people have heard: "Many people lose because, first, they don't see new things; second, they look down on them; third, they don't understand them; fourth, it's too late." It's said to be from the now-out-of-favor Teacher Ma (apologies if incorrect). The subtext is: "Come, I represent new things and new trends. Follow me now. If you don't, you're done. If you do, even a pig can fly." This is the same logic as the success-myth saying, "To succeed, go crazy first; with a simple mind, charge forward." Add to that: "This is an era of grabbing money; there's no time to waste on people whose thinking is still in primitive society." Together, they form a modern super harvester. Manufacturing anxiety and harvesting leeks are integrated—a proper Sickle 3.0. Most of us are slow to perceive new things; that's natural. "Not seeing or understanding" is normal. Just take your time to observe. If you're really anxious, you can learn by doing. Those who "look down on" are actually few; more people fall into ditches because of anxiety. "Too late" is nonsense. We are users, not technology pioneers. There's basically no "window of opportunity." Early adopters have their advantages, and latecomers have theirs—first-mover advantages and late-mover advantages. Each has its merits; it depends on your trade-offs and your level of understanding. When ordinary people pay for goods, they transitioned from cash to cards, to mobile payments, to facial recognition payments. Not many people faced life obstacles or reduced efficiency. Most people used them smoothly and transitioned naturally. If an applied technology makes most users feel "I don't understand," it's a problem with the technology, not the users. In the past two years, when meeting business owners, I've noticed a shift in their anxiety points. Seven or eight years ago, it was e-commerce anxiety; four or five years ago, new media anxiety; since the pandemic last year, digital anxiety has increased. But digging deeper, I understand that what they're truly anxious about isn't "digitalization" itself. First, there's growth anxiety: the company's growth is sluggish, they've tried many methods without results, and they hope a new technology or thing can help them grow and escape the current situation. Second, there's uncertainty anxiety: digitalization, AI, big data—so many concepts, so loudly touted in the media. Who knows what it'll become? What risks are there if we don't follow? Will we miss opportunities? If we follow, will the money be wasted? Are these people just harvesting leeks? Losing money is one thing, but what if we're led into a ditch? A digital service company, together with a super-large internet platform company, followed a well-known FMCG company for over half a year, trying to get them to adopt a digital marketing system. Finally, the boss made the decision: "Let's do it!" The reason: "You've been talking for half a year; it sounds reasonable. Let's try it." The digital company got the contract but was still frustrated: "The boss listened for half a year and still doesn't know what he's actually buying." That's not an exaggeration. One of our long-term partner digital marketing service companies has a boss with a marketing background, so their digital products are quite practical. Even so, their dozen or so salespeople call and visit every day. The biggest problem they encounter is still: "Companies can't clearly understand what the product is or what it can do." So, this guy came up with a countermeasure: for each potential client, they make a simple mini-program and let the company use it free for a month. After using it, they talk. This method works well for some flexible companies, but for larger ones with strict management systems, it's still hard to implement. The point of all this is: If you feel confused about digitalization, that's normal. Understanding it immediately would be abnormal. Most digital companies themselves don't have a clue. There are no "digital marketing experts" in this market yet. Setting aside those vague concepts and anxiety-inducing gimmicks, let's talk about: What exactly is enterprise digitalization? What can it do? What can't it do? And when you can't understand it all at once, what should you do? So-called enterprise digitalization is using digital means to solve enterprise management and operations problems. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines digital marketing as using digital technologies to market products and services. This includes four parts: creating digital content, digital information acquisition and management, digital connection, and digital delivery. Many people are misled by the word "digital," thinking it means using Arabic numerals to describe things: how many users, how much traffic, average order value, growth rate, industry size, etc. That's a big mistake. In digitalization, "digital" specifically refers to internet recording and dissemination methods. This is actually very simple; we engage in digital behavior every day. When you post a moment on WeChat, you're creating digital content. When you see likes and comments from friends, that's digital information acquisition. When you reply to comments, that's digital connection. When you buy things with Alipay or WeChat, that's digital payment. Similarly, for enterprises: making a Douyin account, doing e-commerce, live streaming, setting up a website, a public account, or planting grass on Xiaohongshu—these are all digital marketing, just not professional or systematic enough. Does that mean if we adopt a digital management software, acquire more digital information, or even build our own digital management platform, we can achieve remarkable results in digitalization? The answer is not necessarily. A distributor friend of mine is a survivor of the FMCG B2B bubble burst. After that era, the boss reflected deeply and upgraded digitally around the "delivery pain points" of food retail small shops. Now they can deliver "a bottle of soy sauce," "a bag of chips," or "a bottle of drink," and "delivery within a dozen hours." This solved many practical problems for small retail shops, such as product freshness, item management, and inventory management. Solving this pain point made his business run smoothly. Last time I went with his sales team, each salesperson could open 20 new accounts per month. The company is growing very fast. Another distributor friend wasn't so lucky. This guy is a big distributor in his region, with a very healthy business. Recently, he acquired another large distributor company that wasn't doing well. To improve efficiency, from warehouse to delivery to terminal management, he also implemented a digital management system. The general feedback was that it was worse than before. Terminal stores preferred to order by phone rather than on their app. Seemingly similar actions led to opposite results. This is a concern for many companies. To understand this, we need to clarify: What is digitalization suitable for? What is it not suitable for? What can current technology do? And what problems do we need it to solve, and does the logic support it? Go is known as "the first intellectual sport of mankind." In 2016, after AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol and then beat Ke Jie, the world's top Go player, "God of Calculation," and "the strongest human brain," the gap between human Go skills and computer software has widened. Now it's not even in the same league—it's like Tyson fighting a kindergarten kid. In chess, humans were already no match for computers back in the 1990s. Wang Tianyi, known as the "alien" and "China's No. 1 chess player," does live streams online and gets beaten by software every now and then. Even a mediocre software streamer can defeat professional players. But there's another more interesting thing that the media rarely reports. On January 30 this year, the world's first human-machine Mahjong battle was broadcast live on YY. Two human Mahjong masters won with 205 and 204 points, while the AI player KIMA only got 66 points. One is chess, called "brain gymnastics," and the other is Mahjong, which even grandpas and grandmas on the street can play. AI easily crushes humans in one, but in the other, it still can't match human experts. At this point, you might stop and ask why. If you understand the reason behind this, you'll clearly grasp the underlying logic of what digitalization is good at, what it's not good at, what it can do, what it can't do, and how it works. Although chess and Go are difficult, they are games of complete information symmetry. You see what I play, I see what you play, and the rules are clear. It's all about computational power. If it's about that, all 6 billion humans combined can't beat a high-level AI. Mahjong, though simple, is a game of incomplete information symmetry. There are many personal and psychological factors, and uncertainty. Relying solely on calculating winning probabilities won't beat true experts. The same logic applies to enterprise digitalization. For management and operation activities with high certainty, such as performance evaluation, finance, warehousing and distribution, and process management, digitalization can have a huge impact. For activities with low certainty, such as market demand detection, promotion planning, human resource assessment, corporate culture building, and content output, the information asymmetry is much higher than in Mahjong. Digitalizing these is difficult, and the effect is relatively limited. Specifically, in digital marketing modules: Enterprises that use digitalization to solve connection, delivery, warehousing, terminal, and channel management problems are more likely to succeed. But using it for consumer demand detection, new product development direction, or digital content production only provides limited reference. Expecting it to solve these is basically a mess. There's a term called "user persona," which is a concept that's been hyped up but has very limited practical use. The so-called "user persona" is one of many results from consumer research. As we know, consumer research is an eternal topic in marketing and the most basic and essential issue. In recent years, "user persona" refers to creating a general description of user groups based on their online behavior tracks and other information. The hope is to use this description to judge consumption trends, predict consumer behavior, and guide product development, promotional activities, and brand building. It has some reference value, but thinking that mastering it gives you an invincible weapon to leave competitors 18 streets behind is wishful thinking. Researching and judging consumer behavior is a great learning, a great learning about people, related to almost all social sciences. The "user persona" formed by big data from past behaviors only gives a partial view of consumers—like looking at a leopard through a tube, or even a drop in the ocean. It can partially replace quantitative research in traditional market research. User demand detection and behavior prediction involve almost infinite variables, which is precisely the area where AI is least capable. Moreover, you can't even use the most advanced AI yet. To understand user needs, the most effective method is always in-depth frontline investigation. Just as you can interact with someone online a lot, know all their information, even memorize their biography, it's not as deep as meeting them offline. And you're studying a group. Chairman Mao said, to be a teacher of the masses, first be a student of the masses. To understand the needs of the masses, you must go into their lives, to the village corners, to hold investigation meetings. You must "look downward" and be willing to be a "primary school student." The same applies to market research. Don't think that having a pile of materials and data means you truly understand your users. That's another form of bookism and dogmatism. Studying users requires lifelong learning for enterprises and marketers; there's no room for shortcuts. Internet big data and digitalization provide us with a new tool. But tools cannot replace your frontline investigation, nor can they replace your insight and thinking. 1. It's normal to feel anxious about new things, especially new technologies, but business isn't about who's more anxious; it's about who isn't anxious. 2. The so-called technology window of opportunity almost doesn't exist for us users. When trains were slower than horse carriages, you still took the carriage. 3. Marketing digitalization will happen sooner or later; doing it early isn't necessarily better than doing it late. The key is for companies to clearly know what problems they want to solve with digitalization and understand the logic of solving them. Learning first is wiser than rushing in. Here, I recommend Teacher Liu Chunxiong's series on digital marketing and his new book "New Marketing 2.0," on the public account "Teacher Liu's Digital New Marketing." 4. Digitalization is not mysterious. Digital management and operations have long permeated our daily work; most companies just lack systematization, even strategization. 5. For business activities with high certainty, systematic digitalization has significant effects. For activities with low certainty, such as content creation, online grass-planting, and user behavior insight, the effect of digitalization is relatively weak. 6. Digitalization is a new means and tool, not an end, nor a strategy. It's not like airplanes and cannons replacing swords and spears. 7. There are no true digital experts in the market. Most of those who create digital anxiety have commercial purposes. If someone talks in circles and you still don't understand, it's not that you're behind the times; you've met a "fake expert." 8. Curiosity killed the cat; anxiety kills people. Calming down won't kill you. Being muddled by anxiety can easily turn your company into a mess. By the way, those companies that were anxious about e-commerce years ago still haven't done well in e-commerce; those anxious about new media still have a mess in new media. That's all. If you're still anxious, Old Miao can't help it. Source: Old Miao Tears Apart Distribution (ID: yiheyingxiao) Author: Xiangma Laomiao -END-