Wenheyou -- the underlying logic of the birth of super IP

The following articles are from chaos Science Park and the author is chaos Science Park

Source | chaos Science Park (ID: hundun University)

It started from a street stall in Changsha, Hunan Province in 2010 and became a super IP 11 years later. At present, there are three stores in Changsha, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, all of which are famous for their tens of thousands of people queuing up, which is called "Wen he you".

Why is Wenhe friendship club so successful? Is it a catering brand or a cultural phenomenon? Will its success last and can it be replicated?

From the essence, to the business strategy, to the organizational evolution, we will find that Wenyou and youYou are so different: "it is like a blind box of a city. It can speak out the highlights of a city in a way that young people can understand, or bring you there." But it is not a utopia fabricated out of thin air like Disney and Hollywood.

Five points of "Wen he you":

In 2010, it started from a street stall in Changsha, Hunan;

Wen bin, founder;

"Wen Heyou" means: Wen bin and his friends;

At present, there are three stores in Changsha, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, all of which are famous for the number of people queuing up to tens of thousands;

At present, wenheyou has completed rounds B and C of financing, and after the two rounds of financing, the valuation has exceeded 10 billion.

The article is divided into three parts:

The first part, on the exploration of the essence of Wen and you, tells about their "we can't accept being like others";

The second part analyzes the business strategies of Wen and you, and tells how they can restore their native stories and provide emotional value;

In the third part, let's talk about the iterative feedback of Heyou and how they went from innovating business to creating the world.

01

Wen Heyou's essential exploration: we can't accept being like others

1. Why choose Wen and you as a case?

First, it is a phenomenal business case. Wenheyou has almost become a cultural landmark;

Second, there are some controversies about it, mainly about the scale, replicability and the profitability of various stores;

Third, the evaluation that it is a new species. Because no one can know what kind of income model wenheyou should use to calculate, whether it is based on the catering model or the comprehensive model;

Fourth, the valuation of more than 10 billion yuan belongs to the top level today.

Another very important reason is the understanding between the enterprise and the founder. We all say that "the cognitive boundary of founders is the real bottleneck of an enterprise."

So, when the founder is close enough to the bottleneck, what is the constraint? When he is far enough from the bottleneck, what force is pulling the founder to expand?

On the other hand, Wen Heyou has changed from a roadside stall to a brand valued at 10 billion yuan in 11 years. If there is a bottleneck in the development of an enterprise, the cognitive boundary of Wen Heyou is definitely worth digging.

In other words, the dismantling of wenheyou's case is to find out the underlying logic that drives entrepreneurs' continuous iteration and growth, and to explore the real underlying cognition of entrepreneurs.

图片来源：微博@文和友

2. What is the value to users if we dig through the wenheyou case?

In the process of learning the model, we actually want to see the essence. In other words, how much a thing can be done often depends on cognition.

When we can dig out the essential cognition, we can often expand the cognitive boundary, which is cognitive innovation, also known as "cognition first, strategy later". After we have thoroughly explored the text and friends, we can find a way to dig deeper into the essence, expand the boundaries, and see the effects of different perspectives and perspectives.

3. What is Wen and you?

What is Wen and you? I asked the CEO of wenheyou, "can you tell me what wenheyou is?"

He asked me two questions: "have you ever been to a museum? Do you listen to rock and roll?"

I try to understand the meaning behind this sentence: every city has one or more museums. If you go to a museum for the first time, you must not know what is inside before you open the door. But you can probably guess what may be in the museum, such as history, culture, slices at a certain time, some records and inheritance. This uncertainty of certainty is wonderful.

Besides rock and roll, rock and roll represents a very different spirit, such as rebellion, anger, and the call of peace. It seems that this spirit has been reduced and replaced by other spirits today, but what belongs to a certain generation and a certain group of people is still there.

Therefore, in my opinion, these two questions are actually torturing values and soul.

He has a more detailed description: "Wen and you are Wen and you, a kind of culture that belongs to us and can affect a generation. TA may not be popular or even understood by people, but it must be."

4. Wen Heyou has been popular for nearly 11 years. What's the secret?

Wen Heyou has been popular in the past 11 years. What is the secret? When we try to understand the real secret of a founding team, we often don't want to see what he did right, but what he didn't do.

So what is unacceptable to Wen and you?

The CEO of wenheyou said: "in wenheyou, what can't be accepted is the same as others."

5. What do wen and you see and believe in before they dare to be different?

Looking back at the evolution of Wen and you, let's look at the nature of cognition.

The roadside stall in 2010 was the starting point of Wenbin's entrepreneurship. At that time, he only had a budget of 5000 yuan. However, he spent nearly half of the startup funds and spent 2000 yuan to build a brand - sharp ribs.

For most roadside stalls, the essence is food. What should we do? be cheap and at the same time very good. However, Wen bin saw another thing. The roadside stall is an alternative to the main meal, not necessarily a just need.

Therefore, is there another possibility that it is most important to attract you through the brand and trigger your desire to stay at the roadside stall to eat something? Therefore, he made the signboard and strengthened the "exclusive dip" to form a memory point.

In 2011, the roadside stall was upgraded to a large stall, called wenheyou old Changsha fried club, known as the fighter in Changsha night snack.

Wen and you made a cognitive difference when they were doing big stalls. Other people's stalls are essentially a restaurant, so the main dishes are rich and delicious.

But what is a big stall? You can wear slippers, talk loudly and take off your suit at the stall. It may be a place where you can relax with your friends, so here is a topic. So, is it possible that the boss or the store itself has a person set up / topic enough to make people like and remember when we choose the big food stall, and it becomes a reason for us to invite people to eat the big food stall. Therefore, in my opinion, the man set up by Wen Heyou at that time was the "God of food", frying everything in it, stinky tofu, big sausage

Then in 2013, if you have an impression on Hunan Satellite TV, you may remember that the variety shows of Hunan Satellite TV are either filmed in Wen Heyou, or Wen Heyou brings food to the program. It is really "one Wen and you, half an entertainment circle".

Most of the small shops in Changsha are located in the streets and alleys at the entrance of the community, and they do business with the surrounding acquaintances. But in fact, Changsha is not only a place for local people to consume, but also a large number of outsiders like Changsha, and many people from all over the world come to spend on weekends.

Therefore, wenheyou's cognitive innovation has come again. It wants to do the business of "guests to Changsha", so that the guests can feel the noodles. At this time, the best way is to bring the star goods.

Time continues to go down to 2015. The crayfish in Dufu jiangge store is on fire. This shop has started to be a little different. Wenheyou has copied part of the culture of the old block here, and introduced the old shouts, old crafts, old snacks and old objects of Changsha, including dialect exhibitions and crosstalk. It is a bit like the super wenheyou that you see today.

On this matter, Wen and you have different perceptions from others.

To be a hot shop, most bosses think that they should be "interesting", so they should keep the quality. The essence of these restaurants is called food taste. What I study is frying and frying. In this case, Wen Heyou's team seems to have captured that when people were consuming, some people had new needs, not only for delicious food, but also for fun and fun in this store.

Therefore, the essence of wenheyou's store is the local flavor of Changsha. It is "interesting" in terms of hearing, touch, taste, smell and vision.

Photo source: Weibo @ Wen Heyou

Therefore, from the beginning to the present, wenheyou has a unique essential understanding of what they want to do at each stage, which helps them develop at a high speed.

If the most popular Lobster Restaurant "Dufu jiangge store" of wenheyou was not demolished in 2017, then this case is a catering case, which is at most a cultural and stylish catering chain.

However, they encountered the demolition, which instead created the rise of a new species. Because the whole startup team of Wen Heyou is "Pozi street youth", born and raised here, they can't leave here. They must return here, so they must enter Hisense square in the business district.

At that time, foreign brands such as Starbucks could enter Hisense Plaza and get the first floor. This is very interesting. Most of these post-80s young people have overseas backgrounds and are completely disenchanted with overseas brands.

Therefore, they challenged the mode of "overseas imported brands settling on the first floor", and also brought a new era for them. Then, we entered the super wenheyou, which we all know.

What is the difference between Wen and you in the matter of going to the mall to get the store?

Generally speaking, the purpose of brand entry is to obtain traffic, and to obtain traffic, we must try our best to get the most favorable berth within this rule.

The logic of wenheyou is to challenge those traditional rules and cognition: when others are trying to obtain traffic from the business circle and shopping mall, their value lies in "we can contribute traffic".

In other words, other brands are looking for the best location of the store, hoping that the store will bring traffic to them; Wenheyou is to create traffic so as to occupy the best position of the shop.

As we all know, Hisense Plaza gave wenheyou the golden position of an international brand, and cooperated with the construction project transformation with a huge workload.

The above is the difference between Wen and you in the face of "taking the store".

From Changsha wenheyou, to Guangzhou wenheyou, and Shenzhen wenheyou, the kernel is actually different. But you can recognize that this is Wen Heyou, which vaguely has the flavor of "definite uncertainty" of the museum.

6. What is the essence of the "difference" between Wen and you?

When most people are doing business, they are trying to win, and they are doing things that have a high success rate. At this time, the essence of business is to identify and understand the needs of users, and meet them with their own products and services. It is called "product thinking, user thinking".

However, Wen Heyou's team showed from beginning to end that "I just want to do something with high odds". At this time, the essence of business is to create demand, lead the business direction and formulate rules.

This may be the essence or driving force of the bottom layer of "step by step, step by step" between Wen and you from the beginning to the present.

7. Wen Heyou creates demand. What is the nature of demand it recognizes?

When it comes to demand, we all know Maslow's demand hierarchy theory. However, from the perspective of economics, psychology, management and so on, there is an interesting definition of demand: demand is a desire or emotion generated by a person in a certain scene. All demands are based on the 24 hours of physical and mental existence, and there is a time limit.

There are three key words: people, scenes, desires or feelings.

People: when we talk about consumption, people aged 25 + are always the absolute main force of consumption;

Scene: when we talk about the scene, the largest scale scene is definitely not a shop or a street, but the current era and society.

Desire / emotion: in the final analysis, it comes from the lack or overflow of certain emotions, so you want to supplement or release them.

Further expansion. Who is the 25 + year-old?

Starting with the 2000 millennium, the 25-year-old was born in 1975; In 2010, the 25-year-old + population was born in 1985; He was 25 years old in 2020 and was born in 1995. We call them the Post-70s, post-80s and post-95s respectively.

What are the Post-70s, post-80s and post-95s respectively in, that is, what kind of era and society? In fact, they are in the 30 years of rapid economic development since the reform and opening up. In the past 30 years, the biggest change has been the supply and demand changes brought about by China's rapid economic development.

Consumption 1.0 era: supply exceeds demand. As long as your product is useful and your product is good, you can certainly sell it. So many famous Chinese trademarks were born at that time.

Consumption 2.0 era: supply exceeds demand. The value of the product itself is not so important. The scene experience loaded by the product begins to become important. Everyone is competing for experience value.

Consumption 3.0 era: supply and demand segmentation. It is completely grown on the aesthetic point of the individual consumer, and must be completely consistent with all the itching points and pain points of the individual. The needs of each individual are seen, and the emotional value is captured and stimulated.

Therefore, from 1.0 to 3.0, we have experienced essential changes from commodities to scenes and then to individuals.

We will bring the "three principles of people and goods market" into the model. The essence of consumption 1.0 era is goods, the essence of consumption 2.0 era is field, and the essence of consumption 3.0 era is people.

Therefore, wenheyou has gone step by step from the roadside stalls to today. Unexpectedly, each step is half a step faster than the peers of the same era and enters the next consumption era.

Now, it has undoubtedly stood on the mining and identification of emotional value.

Photo source: Weibo @ Wen Heyou

The annual bullet screen of station B in 2021 is called "breaking the defense". It refers to the irresistible shock generated after the psychological defense line is broken. It may come from the same frequency, cultural resonance and empathy of the family and the country. It is the momentary emotional change of an individual that marks the social mood flow.

Briefly recall those defense breaking moments in 2021:

The awakening age: when two young people look back in shackles, the bullet curtain flies up and breaks the defense. This is the inspiration of their peers.

Last year, whether it was the epidemic or the flood, in the whole process of fighting the epidemic and providing disaster relief, on countless videos and short films, people flew up one after another to say that the defense had been broken, which was a shimmer of mortals.

EDG won the championship, and universities and communities broke the defense. This is the realization of youth dream.

And old Mr. Yuan Longping's dream of enjoying the cool under the grass has broken the defense of all Chinese people. This is a model for the elders.

The hongxingerke incident also broke the defense of many people. Many people went to the live studio to buy a pair of shoes that they could not use at all... This can not let an honest good person suffer.

All this leads us to the next problem.

8. What is the greatest common divisor of emotion?

Emotions are personal, so there is no way to customize emotional solutions for everyone.

Therefore, when we want to build a good business model or a large scale, we need to consider what is the largest common divisor of emotions?

Looking for the largest common divisor, we can understand it as "increasing the number of samples". When you are alone, emotion is an individual emotion, your own emotions. When a group of people are together, their emotions come from a series of positive and negative feelings generated by getting along, communicating, running in, accompanying and interacting.

When there are many people, such as a community, a city or a country? At this time, the emotions of this group are based on positive and negative relationships such as mutual relations, cooperation and constraints. Of course, there will be a lot of positive and negative feelings of temperature.

9. Remember that answer about what Wen and you are?

"Have you ever been to a museum?" "Do you listen to rock and roll?"

The museum is the mood of that group of people. It is called the city; Rock and roll may be the reaction of one kind of people or one generation. It is called spirit.

Therefore, how to carry the city and the spirit behind it, and how to tell the story well, has become a very important thing. As written on the official account of wenheyou: besides people, the most important thing in a place is language and taste, which is the root of the local culture.

At this point, we seem to be able to draw a conclusion: Wen Heyou is actually a storyteller of a city story. It uses a series of carriers such as architecture, culture and food to create a very perfect city story. It restores and presents a story in a specific scene, and then tells it to you.

Photo source: Weibo @ Wen Heyou

10. What are the essential differences between the stories told by Wen Heyou and those told by Disney and Hollywood?

So, what are the essential differences between the stories told by Wen Heyou and those told by Disney and Hollywood?

First of all, the story told by Disney is a dream, a dreamland constructed by Utopia.

On the contrary, there is another heterotopia. Heterotopia was once a real place. It has historical existence, ethics and humanistic basis. I tried to find a word to describe it, space-time wormhole.

(wormhole: wormhole is a narrow tunnel that may exist in the universe to connect two different spacetime. It was first proposed by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Flem in 1916, and was assumed by Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1930 when studying the gravitational field equation. It is believed that wormhole can connect the parallel universe and the infant universe and provide the possibility of time travel.)

What Wen Heyou seems to be doing is such a wormhole with a sense of time and space, and its essence is heterotopia.

To sum up, Wen Heyou's "one" actually shows the spirit of a city based on the principle of emotional value and maximum common divisor in psychology, marketing and other disciplines.

02

Wenheyou's business strategy: providing emotional value

1. What are the success factors of Changsha Wenhe you and what have they broken down?

Back to Changsha wenheyou, in fact, there are many factors for its success.

From the user side, who did Changsha Wen and youyou hit?

Someone said, "I found Changsha when I was a child, and I miss it very much."

Some people said: "I understand why my father likes to chat with passers-by everywhere. There were no strangers in his living environment at that time."

Another 50-60-year-old man began to cry when he entered wenheyou. He cried uncontrollably: "this is what my family was like back then. My family was torn down and lost."

For example, the forever street in the above figure is actually a street that once existed in Changsha and was later demolished in the process of urbanization. The founders of wenheyou are all local "post-80s" in Changsha. According to the memory, they restored the eternal street at that time and the market of old Changsha when they were children.

Therefore, what Wen and you have broken down is the story of "restoring the hometown".

"Hometown" here refers not only to the old hometown, but also to the old people, as well as the impressions and memories of the past; "Story" here refers to the past, in fact, it also refers to the narrative method of dramatic structure and the expression method that allows you to feel emotions.

When the story of restoring the native land was perfected, some interesting things happened. Local people will take Wen and you as their living room. Guests from other places will understand Changsha when they visit Wen and you.

And after wenheyou achieved the extreme of "the story of restoring the hometown", it obtained the incremental flow and broke away from the competition of the stock flow.

2. Changsha wenheyou is very good. Can you copy it? Can it be scaled up?

At this point, there is a sharp question that must be answered: the feelings are very beautiful. Changsha Wen and friends are very good. Can they be copied? Can it be scaled up?

For example, Wen Heyou was appraised by the industry as "Guangzhou gets cold, Shenzhen gets cold", and the heat was no longer queued in the past. How to explain these things? In this regard, we will also wonder why the same people and the same way can move people in Changsha, but not in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. I tried to search for the underlying logic. Later, I found "Fordism" and "post Fordism".

Large scale, standardized, vertical organization, producer determinism and oligopoly are called Fordism, focusing on the mass market; Customization, personalization, horizontal organization, consumer sovereignty theory and competition cooperation structure are called post Fordism, focusing on the niche market. Therefore, scale is obviously incompatible with the "one city, one system".

3. Did Wen and you realize it?

The theme of the newly renovated wenheyou Shenzhen store is called Shenzhen market. It recaptured the history of the small fishing village and oyster people in Shenzhen, and combined the young people's taste for oysters today.

Therefore, the super wenheyou in Shenzhen no longer exists. Instead, it is the oyster market in the old street to find the feeling of "one city, one system", instead of opening a Changsha restaurant to Shenzhen.

Let's take another look at wenheyou. Wenheyou posted a post on the official account some time ago, saying that a film festival would be held, with the theme of "life should be fierce", and then made a lot of seafood stalls.

In the same way, Guangzhou wenheyou has captured the spiritual characteristics of Guangzhou and is vigorous. Moreover, it is combined with seafood, and there is also a taste of "one city, one system".

Regarding standards and replication, the CEO of wenheyou responded as follows: from a commercial perspective, products should be replicated, and the certainty of making money is high. But if we want to make money, we only need to open a chain store of crayfish. We still hope that everyone can do something different. Keep emotional, don't be too rational. If everyone is very rational, it will become very boring.

To sum up, what Wen and you have broken down is the "story of restoring the hometown", that is, the wormhole of time and space that makes people break through.

How did it break down? There are three simple principles.

The first principle: it comes from the "language" of expression, which can be expressed and carried through the architectural space.

The second principle: the spiritual core shows the local cultural experience in the process of "speaking".

The third principle: sustainable business structure. If the business itself is to survive, it is necessary to pay attention to the construction of the business structure and make the community fire. Only in this way can it be sustainable.

Therefore, wenheyou is actually a blind box of the city. It tells the highlights of a city in a way that young people can understand, or brings you there.

03

Wenheyou's iterative feedback: from innovative business to creating the world

How did wenheyou evolve and what is its iterative feedback mechanism?

In the process of restoring the hometown story, all the feedback is precipitated and shaped into the city spirit, constantly improving their ability to dig and capture the city spirit, and further enhancing the single point of restoring the hometown story.

The city spirit and the city story are abstracted from the local culture. It does not represent a simple slice of culture, but a more abstract, deeper and more emotional thing.

Therefore, it seems that Wen Heyou is doing the wormhole of time and space, but in fact, it is actually building the ability to really do the spirit of the city.

Photo source: Weibo @ Wen Heyou

1. Has Wen and you evolved? So, in the past 11 years, has Wen Heyou evolved? If it has evolved, what has it evolved into?

At the beginning, "Wen Heyou" means "Wen bin and his friends". That is to say, at that time, a group of young people were together to innovate the business model, so they were repeatedly breaking down the competitive advantages in the niche, constantly looking for the blue sea in the Red Sea, and constantly turning parallel competition into vertical point competition.

Today's wenheyou is "city culture, world friends". Therefore, this team and this organization have been doing such a thing as "from innovating business to creating the world and rebuilding social value".

2. What is the difference between Wen and you and others?

So far, what is the difference between Wen and you and others?

Quoting the examples of doing and being often mentioned by Professor Li Shanyou: many people do things in doing something, and things and people are separate; A very small number of people are learning to be something. From this point of view, Wen Heyou is not a city spirit, but a city spirit.

Wenheyou's official account says: if we don't create, we can die.

Isn't this some kind of charming city spirit?

To sum up, the evolution of wenheyou is actually in the process of making native stories, constantly precipitating, shaping, refreshing, and optimizing the understanding of the essence of the city spirit through feedback, so as to iterate out the ability of mining and precipitation, and then recover the native stories better, more accurately and more efficiently.

Therefore, for everyone, when you look at your own enterprise, you must clearly see whether you are fighting this battle or practicing this skill.

Because the battlefield may change, the weapons may change, but your internal skill is your own. This is what a truly self evolving super life should pay attention to, that is, the underlying driving force of fractal innovation.

3. What did Wen and you bring to the world?

Having finished the first three parts, let's answer: what did Wen and you bring to the world? This is a question we often ask when trying to find the value of an enterprise, but I think it is difficult to answer. So we changed our perspective: if there were no Wen and friends, what would the world be different?

Wen Heyou CEO gave an answer, temperature. Without Wen and you, there may be less temperature.

What is the temperature of the city spirit?

Like the above figure, it seems that the dilapidated buildings are crowded, but people are interdependent, energetic and full of hope. The atmosphere creates an impulse to participate. What they miss is not the old streets, but the relatively slow pace of life and friendly neighborhood relations.

Is this the temperature of the city spirit?

Associate Professor Luo Cheng of the Chinese Department of Sun Yat sen University has a very interesting aesthetic interpretation: today's social aesthetics or consumer aesthetics can be divided into two categories. One category is petty bourgeois aesthetics characterized by consumerism, individualism and fadism, which advocates that you should be better, more refined, and have what others do not have, and that is solo music; The other type is the well-off aesthetics characterized by historical places, contemporary atmosphere, common ethics, good days and good charm. It advocates that everyone should share, interact and experience together, which is the joy of all.

Professor Luo also said: "the market culture, the public life, and the feelings of people's happiness together constitute the spirit of the 'flavor' of contemporary Chinese urban culture. The 'flavor' is the 'local experience'. Although there are differences between the four corners of the country and the north and the South of the great river, they are all organic components of the pluralistic unity of Chinese civilization. Therefore, the differences in the 'flavor' of the rivers and the great wall are more internal and common in the spiritual structure, This is the realm of life and the ideal of civilization of "caring for people's old age", "United States and the United States" and "people and things."

4. Why did Wen and you become Wen and you?

As a bystander, although we use the thinking model to understand it, can we be a writer and friend? I don't think so.

Why can these people make it? What is their motivation?

Wen Heyou's founding team is all the post-80s generation. The memories of childhood are the temperature of the streets and lanes, but the life after adulthood is the wandering in the city. Therefore, it may be that the loneliness of the 80s generation has stimulated their creativity, which has created this place full of memories and the old days when the neighbors never moved away.

Therefore, the founding team of wenheyou is looking for, ah, a sense of security that returns to the mother's environment, a warm home, and a familiar family. Therefore, it has found a familiar street, a lady who sells sweet wine, an uncle who fried pig's feet, and an uncle who sells stinky tofu... For these reasons, it does not hesitate to dream.

其实，创造者们背后的精神动力远超过任何商业可预测可衡量的范畴。