The Evolution of IoT Ecosystem Brand Standards: A Gift from Haier to the World

The Internet of Things has become a watershed in the development of the times, with countless brands exploring paths for growth that adapt to the era.

On September 20, global leading insights and consulting firm Kantar Group, in collaboration with the Saïd Business School at Oxford University and Haier Group, released the “IoT Ecosystem Brand White Paper.” This is the world’s first ecological brand standard for the IoT era, which means that global enterprises have a “standard” to rely on for the evolution of ecological brands, and this is a reflection of Haier’s exploration in the IoT era, serving as a growth manual for the business community.

Questions of the Era

Time passes, and eras change.

The wheels of history roll forward, and the pace of global industrial progress and development has not stopped.

In the tide of global industrial change, too many companies have gradually fallen with the changes of the times, and the reason can perhaps only be called the “tragedy of the times.” Just like when the retail giant RT-Mart was acquired, industry insiders lamented, “It competed with all its peers but lost to this era.”

Coincidentally, Nokia’s CEO also expressed similar sentiments when it was acquired by Microsoft, saying, “We didn’t do anything wrong, but we don’t know why we lost.”

Why do these companies decline, and how should they maintain vitality in the face of a new era? Questioning the era may not yield a standard answer, but we hope that through this continuous inquiry, we can strive to be companions of the times and maintain development vitality.

Now, the dividends of the internet economy are gradually fading, and a brand new IoT era is accelerating its arrival. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, the internet is about to disappear, and a highly personalized and interactive interesting world—the IoT—is accelerating its arrival.

Regarding the trend of the times, Haier Group’s Chairman and CEO Zhang Ruimin has unique insights. He has publicly stated that in the IoT era, companies must either transform into leaders of ecological brands or become partners of ecological brands.

The evolution towards ecological brands is Haier’s answer to the questions of the era and a concrete path for Haier to keep pace with the times. In this regard, Felipe Thomas, an associate professor at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University and a researcher at the “Future Marketing Initiative,” stated, “The concept of IoT ecological brands represents the future development direction. Each brand’s value in the IoT ecological brand system is thus enhanced.”

In response to the questions of the IoT era, the business community, academia, and research institutions seem to be providing increasingly clear common answers, which is ecological brands. The “IoT Ecosystem Brand Standard White Paper” jointly released by Kantar Group, Oxford University, and Haier at the recently concluded International Forum on the One-Person-One-Unit Model precisely illustrates this point.

This white paper gathers top wisdom from the business, academic, and consulting worlds and serves as a guide for development in the IoT era, its authority is self-evident: Kantar is a consultancy focused on data research, with in-depth studies on global industrial development; the University of Oxford has consistently ranked first in the world university rankings for five consecutive years, and the Saïd Business School is regarded as the fastest-growing business school in Europe.

In this white paper, the IoT ecological brand has a clear definition for the first time: “An IoT ecological brand is a new brand paradigm that creates a value experience through co-creation with users and partners, continuously providing boundless and iteratively evolving overall value experiences, ultimately achieving lifelong users and win-win coexistence for all parties in the ecosystem, creating a value cycle for society.”

Notably, unlike traditional brands, the key points of IoT ecological brands can be summarized in two aspects: one is boundless co-creation, and the other is win-win coexistence. Boundless co-creation means that in the face of the complex user demands of the IoT era, companies must innovate alongside users and partners to meet user needs, while win-win coexistence emphasizes that all parties in the ecosystem can achieve added value in the co-creation process, continuously creating new social and ecological value.

At this moment, ecological brands have become the winning path for companies to stand at the forefront of the IoT era. This white paper is timely.

According to Zhang Ruimin, in the future economy, if a company is not ecological, or even not an important part of the ecology, it is “doomed to die.”

The Path of the Era

When the times abandon you, it won’t even say goodbye.

The era, with its unique cruelty, forces companies to remain alert at all times and constantly seek to step to the rhythm of the times.

After diagnosing the IoT era, where should the global industry go? This remains an unknown mystery. After continuous exploration, Haier seems to have found a transformation path that can be referenced for this era, at least a development path that can be borrowed from the times. According to Steve Denning, former knowledge management director at the World Bank and a Forbes columnist, “Haier has always been at the forefront of organizational operations, not only leading in 20th-century management models but also at the forefront of 21st-century management models.” He believes, “This is not a garden with walls, but a boundless ecosystem.”

This may be the core reason why the “IoT Ecosystem Brand White Paper” focuses on Haier as a key research case. So why is Haier at the forefront of the times?

This stems from Zhang Ruimin’s long-term thinking on maintaining the vitality of enterprises.

“All companies cannot escape death, and their lifespans are getting shorter, and the same goes for the Fortune 500 companies,” Zhang Ruimin stated at a forum. Former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly shares a similar view with Zhang Ruimin: all companies cannot escape death, while all cities are nearly immortal. Some cities have stood for a thousand years without falling because cities are ecosystems that can thrive indefinitely.

This is precisely the original intention and key of Haier’s exploration of IoT ecological brands.

On May 10, 2018, Zhang Ruimin first proposed the concept of IoT ecological brands. In June 2019, he established the brand category of “IoT ecology” for the first time, with Haier as the first and only IoT ecological brand listed in the BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands. In 2020, Haier was again the only “IoT ecological” brand on the list for two consecutive years, with its global ranking rising from 89th to 68th, a leap of 21 places.

From Haier’s inclusion in the “BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands” to the joint release of the IoT Ecosystem Brand White Paper with Kantar and the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, it fully reflects that Haier is leading the IoT era. In fact, Haier’s exploration in the IoT era can be condensed into two sentences: re-defining users and re-defining enterprises.

The essence of the internet era is traffic economy, while the IoT era brings personalized user demands and big data applications between interconnected devices, ushering in an era of experience economy, sharing economy, and community economy, where the greatest characteristic is that users become the dominant force in industrial development. Haier’s exploration of ecological brand transformation is precisely about re-defining the interactive relationship between enterprises and users, which is to involve users in business activities, turning them from mere consumers into “prosumers.”

However, this change is mainly attributed to Haier’s exploration of the “One-Person-One-Unit” model. In this model, employees become entrepreneurs, innovating around user needs on the Haier platform to create an ecosystem, achieving user value through personalized scenario experiences, and realizing their own value in the process. In other words, the biggest change in Haier’s One-Person-One-Unit model is the transformation of two types of people: users turn into prosumers, and employees turn into entrepreneurs, which is the long-term driving force for enterprise development.

Traditional enterprises are walled organizations, while ecological brands are boundary-less ecosystems. This may be the best expression of Haier’s re-definition of the concept of enterprises in the IoT era. Haier’s ongoing exploration breaks the boundaries of enterprises, expanding them into a complete ecosystem, thus attracting various ecological parties to form a tropical rainforest.

This is Haier’s path of exploration in the era, and also the exploration path of ecological brands in the IoT era. As Wang Xing, CEO of Kantar Group China and Global President of BrandZ, stated, “Many companies, including Google and Huawei, are asking us: How should we build ecological brands, and what can we learn from?” This has been a common question among many well-known enterprises.

Gifts of the Era

Products will be replaced by scenarios, and industries will be covered by ecologies.

This is Haier’s latest judgment on the IoT era.

As Zhang Ruimin has often said, there are no successful enterprises, only enterprises of the era. He has a clear understanding of Haier’s development, which is to always follow the rhythm of the times.

The release of the “IoT Ecosystem Brand White Paper” marks the formation of a brand-building paradigm aimed at the IoT era. This is not only the world’s first ecological brand standard but also Haier’s gift to the IoT era, which will open a new era of development for the global IoT era.

In the traditional era, Haier’s “smashing refrigerators” awakened the quality consciousness of enterprises, thus winning the first quality gold medal in the history of Chinese refrigerators. This story has been regarded as a classic in the Chinese business community, because for a long time afterward, Chinese manufacturing gradually shed the label of being cheap and low quality through its own efforts, which was precisely the contribution of Haier’s “smashing refrigerators” at that time.

In the IoT era, Haier is transforming into an ecological brand, turning enterprises into boundary-less open innovation ecosystems. Taking the smart kitchen as an example, Haier no longer provides users with single product solutions but integrates ecological resources to provide scenario solutions for users, creating smart kitchen scenarios in collaboration with Boloni, Tongrentang, UNILLIFE lunch boxes, Juanzhuang Wuyou, and other partners to meet diverse scenario needs such as purchasing, storage, cooking, cleaning, and safety.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of Haier’s ecological transformation. Currently, Haier’s ecological platform showcases the unique Haier Clothing Internet, breaking away from the single product end of washing machines, incorporating the entire industrial resources of clothing and washing into the ecosystem; we can also see the unique RRS logistics, breaking the delivery boundaries of traditional logistics, giving birth to a new mode of scenario logistics; as well as blood networks, vaccine networks, biological sample networks… each of which is an ecosystem and a unique disruptive innovation.

In this sense, the “IoT Ecosystem Brand White Paper” is obviously an anomaly because it discloses the “Morse code” for building ecological brands, creating a completely open-source brand-building paradigm that global enterprises can learn from, which plays an important role in accelerating the arrival of the IoT era.

The “IoT Ecosystem Brand Standard White Paper” establishes a model of co-evolution between Haier and its partners. Under this model, the iteration of user experience will continue indefinitely, and IoT ecological brands will thrive.

The Evolution of IoT Ecosystem Brand Standards: A Gift from Haier to the World

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