Where exactly is the frontier of modern agricultural innovation?
Agriculture, with its infinite imaginative space, has become the "last cake" waiting to be developed in the hearts of people who have already adapted to industrial civilization.
It is unclear when it began, but agriculture was pushed to the forefront of commercial fashion, and a few thin fields back in the old hometown became the object of envy among relatives and friends. All at once, tall-handsome-rich men, fair-rich-beautiful women, the diaosi crowd, old farmers, migrant workers, business tycoons and IT experts began to re-examine that once-neglected, distant or even once-disdained mountain village and rural countryside with curious, complex and surprised eyes. Chu Cheng and Liu Tao formed product differentiation through the interpretation of various stories, creating a unique "blue ocean" brand for agricultural products; ecological leisure, creativity and wellness became new highlights of rural development; new agricultural communities such as Xinnonghui and Xinnongzhijia, with the momentum of a prairie fire, formed a huge agricultural ecological circle across the country, giving farmers the most convenient channels to access advanced business models, operations management, and agricultural materials and agricultural technology sales channels. Coupled with the government's sustained support for the agricultural industry, agriculture, endowed with "favorable timing, geographical advantage and popular support" and countless favors, suddenly became "the next typhoon mouth" and "the next real estate"...
In one sentence, Chinese agriculture has become hot!
The term "typhoon mouth" comes from Mr. Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi: "Enterprises should find the place most likely to have a typhoon mouth, and be a pig that knows how to borrow force to take off." Although China's agriculture has achieved certain development since reform and opening up and solved the food and clothing problem of the Chinese people, its business model has not undergone essential changes: small-workshop-style agricultural economy has severely constrained the development of agricultural modernization, the lack of rural marketization has led to the formation of a hollow economy in rural areas, and the failure of supervision over agricultural products has caused serious deficiencies in food safety. Agriculture, with its infinite imaginative space, has become the "last cake" waiting to be developed in the hearts of people who have already adapted to industrial civilization.
However, the big shots and brilliant figures who won repeated victories in the industrial and commercial fields, and the capital that was invincible there, have rarely had successful cases in the agricultural field. Although some emerging agricultural product enterprises have made some innovations with the help of internet sales channels, due to factors such as the seasonality of agricultural products and consumers' shopping channels and consumption habits, they are still in the initial stage. Relevant data show that among the 3,000 fresh food e-commerce companies in China, none is profitable, which has caused many investors to slow down their investment pace.
Over the past 30 years, China's industrial enterprises have successively passed through the stages of product competition and market competition, and excess commodity supply has forced industrial enterprises into the stage of business model competition. The optimization of business models, especially business model innovation based on industrial chain integration, is unleashing strong vitality. In contrast, agricultural enterprises face not only product quality, standardization, shelf life and logistics problems, but also price fluctuation problems caused by regional oversupply and regional shortages. Large-scale agriculture in Europe and America and the creative agriculture models of Taiwan, China and Japan also face symptoms of incompatibility in mainland China. Unlike industrial enterprises that upgrade products through research and development, the shapes and tastes of agricultural products that have existed for thousands of years are difficult to change in the short term. Without the potential for product innovation, what can agriculture rely on to win? Some enterprises believe in playing the safety card, and some even install cameras at planting bases and farms to prove the safety of their production processes, not realizing that safety is a necessary condition for entering agriculture, and practices such as cameras start from the enterprise's own standpoint and merely add costs. For seemingly simple agricultural enterprises to achieve a qualitative leap, the only way is business model innovation.
The first issue in business model innovation is to achieve value innovation, directly reaching customers' mental "pain points" and "itch points" with unique value propositions. On the basis of value innovation, first achieve an overall upgrade of the enterprise's operational level through innovation in sales models, operations and supply chain management models; then occupy the profit high ground of the industry (industrial chain) and expand profit points through profit model innovation to enhance the hematopoietic function of agricultural enterprises; then enhance the company's valuation and make achievements in the securities market; finally form a closed loop of business model innovation and barrier design.
If it is said that "Chu Cheng" cleverly added the emotional factor of Mr. Chu's inspirational experience, it would be better to say that its business model designers cleverly used our habitual thinking of Maslow's hierarchy of needs rising level by level, making the common Hunan rock sugar orange variety, through Mr. Chu's hands, become a combination of satisfying "physiological needs" and "self-actualization needs," then using Mr. Chu's celebrity effect to form brand differentiation and obtain pricing power, and finally completing sales with the help of the internet effect. For a time, those who did not know the truth told their own agricultural product stories one after another. Although they could form a temporary differentiation for agricultural products that originally had no differentiation, they did not know that Chu Cheng's skill lies beyond the poem, and simple imitation is unlikely to achieve sustainable development. After Chu Cheng experienced the successful creation of a product brand, the profit model of pure product sales became the next issue for operators to solve. It is rumored in the market that the local government intends to take the opportunity to combine Chu Cheng with local tourism resources to create a Chu Cheng estate integrating leisure tourism and inspiration.
Only this kind of agricultural business model innovation based on the perspective of the industrial chain is the entrance to agriculture's "frontier."