Can the "Internet Movement" have a good sports year?

In fact, there are a lot of data to prove that "Sports Year" is not only a concept created by the media circle, but also a traceable wealth password.

For example, after the successful bid for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, the National Bureau of Statistics predicted that the development of a series of related industries driven by it would boost China's GDP growth by 0.3~0.4 percentage points every year in the next seven years. Shanghai, which hosted 12 large-scale sports events in 20 19, also made similar statistics, and found that "sports year" brought 3.09 billion yuan of direct consumption, which boosted the growth of related industries by more than 102 billion yuan.

The Internet industry seems to appear periodically according to this law: around 2008, mint health and goo goo went online one after another. The former launched a weight management app with the functions of measuring metabolic level, inquiring about food calories and recording calories, while the latter gradually shifted its focus from intelligent hardware to online platform, becoming the first mobile phone software focusing on sports and socializing in China; Around 20 14, the field of internet sports broke out again, and Yuedong Circle and Keep became hot potato in the investment circle.

So at the beginning of this year, many people applied this experience and thought that the formula of "sports year = wealth code" in 202 1 was feasible again. After all, since June, the America's Cup, the European Cup, the Tokyo Olympic Games, the Paralympic Games, the 12 Top Tournament and the National Games have been launched one after another. In addition, the Beijing Winter Olympics, which will be held in early 2022, is extremely rich in "event hotspots" needed for the development of sports economy, and practitioners basically only need to consider how to "transform".

So is this judgment correct?

It seems difficult to give a definite answer to this question. On the one hand, this year's seemingly clustered "sports events" are actually full of uncertainties. For example, the Chengdu Universiade originally scheduled for this year was postponed for one year, and the national football team 12 moved its home to West Asia, Super League and CBA. The impact of the silver cross-country race accident is more profound. Every year, thousands of offline events also encounter difficulties in approval. Among them, 202 1XTRAIL Kanas Super Cross-country Race and Suzhou Wuzhong Four Seasons Cross-country Race in Jiangsu Province are suddenly stopped.

In this case, although the traffic bonus brought by the "tournament" exists, can we get the effect of "getting together"-that is, forming a stable incremental source through continuous circle breaking, which seems to add a question mark-and even add additional troubles, such as the negative interpretation of "marathon", "cross-country" and "running" on social media after the silver match accident.

On the other hand, compared with 2008 and 20 14, the gap left by sports economy seems to be not much. Especially for the Internet industry that attaches importance to "innovation and promotion", under the premise that the conventional product forms such as sports monitoring, intelligent hardware and online competition have developed quite well, the market demand approaching saturation usually means two things: doing more difficult business or finding more biased users.

In fact, for the sports industry, the income of 202 1 is not only from sports events.

For example, some time ago, the National Fitness Program (202 1-2025) issued by the State Council defined the development direction of national fitness in China during the Tenth Five-Year Plan period. According to the plan, by 2025, the proportion of people who regularly participate in physical exercise will reach 38.5%, and the county (city, district), town (street) and administrative village (community) will be fully covered by the "15 minute fitness circle" in the community, with 2. 16 social sports instructors per thousand people.

For most people, the national policy document is boring, but if you understand the great opportunities behind this document, you may find it particularly cordial.

From the time line, the National Fitness Program (202 1-2025) is not the first plan of "sports economy" in the State Council. Prior to this, the State Council released the Outline of the National Fitness Program (20 1 16) and the Outline of the National Fitness Program (20 1 15) from 20/6 to 2020 respectively.

Driven by a series of policies, the scale of sports industry in China has been growing. The data shows that from 20 16 to 20 19, the total scale of sports industry in China increased from 1.9 trillion to 2.948 trillion. By the end of 20 19, the total number of sports venues in China had reached 3,544,400, with an area of 29170,000 square meters, with a per capita of 2.08 square meters.

These figures correspond to the continuous improvement of sports infrastructure in China, which makes it more convenient for people to participate in sports, creating conditions for the popularization of national sports and the promotion of social sports atmosphere. For sports economy, they correspond to the expansion of consumption scale, the enrichment of portraits, the enhancement of consumption will, the increase of consumption frequency and the increase of time spent in consumption scenes.

Returning to the contents mentioned in the National Fitness Program (202 1-2025), the above figures have basically been "positively continued", which means that the most important variables in the sports economy, such as the size of consumers, the portraits of consumers and the wishes of consumers, will increase again, which is inevitable in theory.

Of course, another important difference is that the National Fitness Program (202 1-2025) gives higher weight to keywords such as "online" and "wisdom". Including interviews with relevant departments after the release of the plan, these concepts appear very frequently, and sometimes they are even directly placed in the headlines by the media and become the "theme" of the whole discussion.

For example, Zhao Jun, director of the Group Department of Henan Provincial Sports Bureau, once said in an interview that in the future, Henan Province should continue to improve the coverage of infrastructure, strengthen the construction of intelligent fitness facilities and big data application systems, and realize the integration, data sharing and interconnection of national fitness resources.

Wang Renwei, director of the Sports Bureau of Changning District, once told the media that Changning District should not only realize the full coverage of the "fifteen-minute community sports life circle" in all towns, but also speed up the intelligent service process of Changning Sports and realize the functions of online booking, online management, big data analysis and online registration of sports events.

So theoretically, if 202 1 is a good year for sports economy, then in this round of sports economic cycle, the biggest beneficiaries are most likely those "Internet plus sports" industries that have completed the online transformation of the original demand and accumulated enough online users.

Judging from the data currently available, this trend seems to have begun, which is mainly reflected in two points: First, people's favorite sports methods seem to be increasingly influenced by "social networks"; Another point is that many minority movements have begun to break the circle quickly through the spread of social media, and accumulated a market foundation that can support commercial operations.

I made a simple picture about the Internet industry's participation in sports economy. )

Taking the past Olympic cycle as an example, according to the report of Yangguang. com, before the Olympic Games, the proportion of "non-contact" sports consumers such as fitness, fishing and yoga increased sharply, among which a large number of new "fishermen" were loyal fans of Deng Gang and Liu Zhiqiang, and "vegetable boss" was the decisive factor of the whole fishing experience; Accordingly, sports services represented by various sports training, event registration and venue reservation have grown rapidly.

The staff of the Ice Sports Club of Nanjing Olympic Sports Center said in an interview that during the normal business during the Olympic Games, two or three hundred customers came to exercise every day, nearly double the same period last year.

Similarly, the rise of diet meals, light meals and healthy eating plans.

Although there is controversy about appearance anxiety and body anxiety, it is indeed an established fact that "new fashions" such as slimming and partial shaping have been launched on social media in recent years. The public's demand for attitude correction on the grounds of aesthetics has been more and more strongly stimulated and transformed into real consumer demand. Andrew relied on this person to lose weight, and on 20021,he got more than a dozen hot searches with hundreds of millions of readings, such as # Andrew, I don't deserve a hamburger #, # What did Yin Zheng eat in the third week #, # Andrew failed to lose weight #, # Andrew was drunk and forgot the taste of lunch meat #, # Andrew's expression of eating rice after losing weight #, and then "Andrew with the same paragraph" became a major sports fitness blogger and e-commerce.

In short, the competition has stimulated the enthusiasm of consumers. In this process, the "Internet sports" industry is no longer limited to the hard-core scene of "sports", but closer to the broader concept of "health".

According to the aurora data of FastData, in 2020, the number of people who regularly participate in sports in China will reach 435 million, an increase of 27 million compared with 20 19. QuestMobile data shows that as of February 20021year, more than 780 million users have "cloud sports" online, and nearly 60 million athletes use vertical professional fitness apps.

So, can Internet sports enterprises continue this trend? The answer is also full of uncertainty.

First of all, with the growth of the sports industry, especially when offline sports are stagnant due to the epidemic, Internet sports enterprises can indeed enjoy the growth dividend.

Under the influence of the epidemic, the number of offline games in previous years decreased sharply, but the demand of sports people for the games did not decrease, so a large number of users flocked to online games-online games still have medals and entry certificates, but they don't need a fixed venue and will not be affected by more epidemic prevention work-so as a substitute, online users of online games also showed a good growth.

The entire Internet sports market is also growing. According to the aurora data of FeatData, by April of 20021year, the number of active users and the opening rate of domestic sports health app increased from 48.36 million in 20 19, and the opening rate increased from 8.4% to 54.79 million, and the opening rate was 65.438+0 1.5%.

However, from the previous discussion, it is not difficult to find that although the event economy and sports annual meeting bring people's enthusiasm for sports and make more people transform into consumers in the sports field, the transformed consumers will not be evenly distributed in all segments of the sports field, but will be affected by the participation threshold, showing obvious priority. Growth will first drive the conventional "sports economy". For example, we should encourage people to buy more goods that can help consumers participate in sports, such as sportswear, equipment and other related categories, or encourage people to participate in popular sports, such as running and swimming.

Specific to each enterprise, this means that if they don't want to be a big platform for aggregation, then the dividends they can get are very limited. This is related to some common problems that hinder the large-scale development of the whole industry.

For example, at present, products with sports, health and fitness labels on the market basically lack moats deep enough. Take mint health as an example. Since 2007, I have been deeply involved in healthy eating for more than ten years. It owns four sub-brands of health food: Mint Heart (functional food), Mint Top Selection (healthy snacks), Mint Material (healthy fast food) and Mint Sen (children's nutrition). The number of SKUs exceeds 200. Judging from the official announcement of the D round of financing, investors generally believe that it has been established for more than ten years.

However, from the market performance, the "ten-year precipitation" of mint can be replicated. For example, in June of 20 19 and 1 year, the Keep healthy food business "Keep light food" was officially launched. Nowadays, it is also divided into three series: light truck staple food, healthy snacks and nutritional conditioning, with more than 70 SKUs. In other words, Keep has successfully entered the healthy base camp of mint in just over two years.

Secondly, due to the lack of a moat deep enough, many services in the field of sports health also show the status quo of homogenization. For example, products such as glutton, running circle and dancing circle basically follow the same logic in page layout.

(Because the main scenes overlap, the extensible parts are similar. )

Of course, it is certainly not a bad thing to have similar product forms among peers, and it is nothing new. In addition to sports health, music, animation, short videos, long videos and other products are basically the same, which does not affect the blooming of these industries.

However, the problem is that under the framework of instrumentalized large-scale products, even if the products develop as platform as much as possible and try to let users "play" in closed-loop operation through social, e-commerce, live broadcast and other means, sports, health and fitness cannot change their essence into "behaviors with clear needs and quantifiable paths", and a large number of users are still in a state of exhaustion.

In addition, the needs of professional users and deep users are more complex and independent (with more professional knowledge, basic sports AIDS are no longer a necessity), so whether from the operational level or from the perspective of development cost performance, "let more people leave after finishing" must be the most practical strategy of Internet sports enterprises, which brings a problem:

Their most active users can hardly be directly defined as "sports audience"-they have sports, health and slimming needs, but they don't need to grow too much-commonly known as "small white users".

The demand of small white users is easily sporadic. It may be used frequently for a certain period of time, but it may not be used after a period of time. Therefore, for these sports products, on the one hand, it is difficult for users to form scale effect, on the other hand, it is difficult for the traffic brought by users to form precipitation and transformation.

Therefore, in order to better distinguish Internet sports products from competing products in the industry, and to form a memory point that is more popular with ordinary users except "sports" and "health" in the market, there is a trend that everyone tries their best to make themselves "biased" and their fields "too prosperous".

For example, Gu Dong is deeply involved in running, which leads to a series of products such as event operation, intelligent equipment, running shoes and clothing. Mint health revolves around a healthy diet, and also derives services such as healthy food, diet content and healthy recipes. Keep is based on indoor fitness and develops independent shopping malls, fitness courses and sports equipment.

This vertical operation mode solves some problems of product characteristics, but at the same time it narrows the scope of target users because the core functions of the product are too vertical. In order to solve this problem, these sports products have explored their own unique user training path in market operation.

Director Glug Games told us that Glug Games has a complete set of competition system and operation mode, which can gradually cultivate users' love and persistence in sports from the moment they enter the platform.

Specifically, when users first enter Glug, the platform will first recommend some professional sports content to cultivate users' sports mind and cognition. As the user's sports data gradually accumulates, the platform will slowly recommend some events. The initial events will be relatively simple, and users can usually get a good ranking and gradually gain a sense of accomplishment in sports.

In addition, the series operation also includes customizing the medals of each competition, organizing official tour groups of cities, creating a series of IP events such as Zodiac and Constellation, and jointly holding events with movies and brands. Its purpose is also to strengthen the interest and cultural connotation of sports events, increase users' sense of participation, belonging, atmosphere and even honor in running, and finally form the stickiness between users and platforms.

This logic boils down to the fact that the platform does not provide a solution for a requirement, but cultivates a requirement and then provides services and solutions for these requirements. That is, the platform cultivates users' exercise habits, and the consumption generated by users after forming habits supports the revenue of the platform.

There is no problem with this logic as a whole, but when the platform wants to expand its business, it will find that its consumption demand is fixed because the users trained by the platform are too vertical.

As mentioned earlier, in the Internet sports industry, the services and products of each company are actually very easy to approach other products in the same industry. But the problem is that even if a platform adds products and services, users on this platform may not necessarily need what you add, which forms that you may have many products, but it is the early core business that makes money.

It is precisely for these reasons that there has always been an invisible limitation in the development of sports apps, so that there has not been a unicorn enterprise for a long time.

As the saying goes, success is also a user and failure is also a user.

However, in the past two years, there have indeed been some new changes in the field of Internet sports health. These changes are promoting the development of Internet sports health industry from many dimensions such as model innovation, product innovation and technological innovation.

For example, Super Orangutan, founded in 20 14, is loved by young users with its brand-new fitness mode of no annual card, no promotion, professional coach and pay per view. In May of this year, Super Orangutan completed several hundred million yuan of E-round financing, with a valuation close to $654.38+0 billion. Today, Super Orangutan has opened 123 direct stores in 8 cities including Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu, and another 80 stores are under preparation.

The management mode of super orangutan can be regarded as subverting the traditional annual fee mode of gym, which belongs to a model innovation. Similar to the super orangutan, Leke, which is also deeply loved by users, focuses more on technological innovation.

Leke was founded on 20 15, which mainly carries out digital transformation of gymnasiums through the dimensions of digital management of gymnasiums, online operation, supply chain of coaches and courses, and digital user assets.

After the renovation is completed, the daily management of the gym, as well as all links such as card purchase, class appointment and store entry, will be online through the APP. Leke also realizes the collection, analysis and optimization of the overall operation data of the gym, and finally feeds back to the specific business levels such as store supervision, coaching service and product development.

To put it simply, Leke, like Luckin Coffee, digitally transformed the entire gym industry chain by establishing a data center, and standardized the services originally belonging to non-standard products through standardized management, which improved efficiency and ensured the stability of quality. Today, according to the official website, Lucco has more than 600 stores, more than 6 million registered users and more than 9,000 contracted coaches in China.

Unlike Leke's focus on the digital transformation behind the gym, the "Mi Power" launched in 2020 is dedicated to building a mobile Internet sports and fitness platform that links coaches, gyms and users. In terms of motivation, users can not only choose a suitable fitness venue according to their own conditions, but also realize the random collocation of coaches and courses, not limited to a certain gym.

To put it simply, Mi Power has dismantled three key elements in the fitness industry chain: fitness venues, coaches and courses. Through the platform, users can match at will, which not only provides users with more service choices, but also brings more sources of income to venues and fitness coaches.

Of course, in addition to focusing on the technology and model innovation of the gym, the popular Switch game fitness circle since last year has also made the home fitness scene based on hardware devices have new possibilities.

In 2020, a sports fitness mirror was born in Shanghai. This is the intelligent hardware launched by a new company established on 20 19, focusing on home fitness scenes. Since its launch, this product has been deeply loved by the capital market. In just two years, Fiture has completed three rounds of financing, and now its post-investment valuation has reached $654.38+0.5 billion, officially becoming a unicorn.

After the success of Fiture, various brands of fitness mirrors have mushroomed. In may of this year, Glug launched its own fitness mirror brand Fit more, free of membership fees. In the release draft, it is called "an important step for Glug, which is longer than outdoor fitness scenes, to expand indoor fitness scenes".

Almost at the same time, the fitness mirror products of dynamic charm technology, music carving sports, Jianyi, digital intelligence gravity and other companies have also been launched. In addition, technology companies such as Huawei, Suning, Haier and other traditional home appliance manufacturers have also released products with similar functions to enter the market.

In addition to the fitness mirror, a new product that follows the trend, in the new market environment, the traditional modules in those Internet sports products have also entered a transitional period.

For example, "online games" have a "gambling game", that is, users and users agree on a target game, and users who participate in the game need to pay a certain registration fee, and the registration fees of all participants form a bonus pool. After the agreed target expires, the runners who have finished running will share the registration fee with the runners who have not finished running.

This kind of gameplay used to be popular in the WeChat punching community, and it was spontaneously organized and supervised by netizens. Therefore, it is commercialized for a short time through small programs and other means.

(You must have seen this kind of community, and it is also the one with the highest dissolution rate. )

Theoretically, Internet sports products can form an incentive for users through this form of activity, and gradually cultivate users' sports habits.

Generally speaking, in the post-epidemic era, especially when the epidemic continues, people pay more and more attention to health, and world sports events continue to promote people's enthusiasm for sports. Family fitness, which is different from public sports scenes and online events that gather offline events, is cultivating some brand-new services and market opportunities.

In this process, some enterprises have caught up with the enthusiasm and dividends. Of course, more enterprises have not had time to respond in the special market environment. But none of this matters.

Not to mention the Winter Olympics, National Games and other events, take Chengdu as an example. In February this year, Chengdu won the right to host the Thomas Cup and Uber Cup in 2024. In March, Chengdu won the right to host the 2022 International Shooting Federation (ISSF) World Cup (rifles and pistols). In addition, Chengdu will host the World University Games and the World Table Tennis Championships in 2022, the Men's Football Asian Cup in 2023 and the World Games in 2025.

In addition to the richness of sports events, quality education has become a new development direction after the implementation of the policy of double reduction in education and training. In some provinces and cities, extracurricular sports training is also becoming a new way out.

In short, new sports scenes and demands have emerged. In the long term, frequent world sports events and policy guidance will continue to drive more people to participate in sports health. Therefore, for the current internet sports enterprises, by polishing products and improving services, there is still a chance to be immune to the tide of the times at any time.