How is Leica reborn?

Leica is a century-old brand in cameras. In the past year or two, with the cooperation with Huawei, it has entered the public eye.

Nowadays, Leica, which has unlimited scenery and such powerful technology, has been in a downturn for a long time and was once on the verge of bankruptcy.

Since 1980s, Japanese camera manufacturers such as Canon and Nikon have risen rapidly, entered the international market and started to impact Leica's market share. Around 2000, with the advent of the early digital age, digital cameras developed rapidly, while Leica underestimated digital technology for a long time, and its market share was further severely impacted.

Japanese manufacturers, such as Canon and Nikon, can make products that can't be made automatically by machines after process transformation and redesign, while Leica's products must be made by hand. In terms of manufacturing methods, Japanese competitors have dealt a blow to the old giants such as Leica, which has formed a huge cost advantage, making Leica unable to fight back in the price competition.

However, in the past decade, with the help of capital, Leica was reborn from nirvana and the plot reversed again.

How did Leica do it? One of the important strategies is that Leica has found a new way to re-establish social networks, taking a dominant position in the new networks and regaining the situation in the new games. In the face of the dimensionality reduction blow from Japanese manufacturers, it is almost impossible for Leica to win in price. So it chose not to fight the price war with Japanese companies, but began to cultivate the level of camera users. Generally speaking, it is to actively carry out community construction.

In the past ten years, Leica has designed many photography courses, promoted Leica Academy to all parts of the world, and regularly held photography seminars guided and explained by famous photographers to train Leica buyers, local dealers, professional photographers and photographers to help them improve their photography skills. Committed to let users know clearly that mobile phone photography and camera photography are different.

The construction of this community network is a long process, and it is difficult to increase sales in a short time. However, once this network is established, when photography becomes a Leica culture, the image and existence of Leica symbols in the eyes of photography professionals and photographers will be lasting and far-reaching.

With this strategy, the sales of Nikon and Canon dropped by half in the era when smartphones kept hitting cameras. Even in 20 17, Nikon closed its factory in China, and its core business has shifted to other fields. At the same time, Leica's sales continued to rise, and through cooperation with Huawei, it successfully cut into new markets.

Of course, the development of things is often the result of the interaction of multiple variables. There are many factors for Leica to rise again. Rebuilding social networks is just one of the variables and a perspective.

However, this perspective is also very enlightening for personal development.

It is often said that in the workplace, first you have to do it yourself, then some people say you can do it, and finally those who say you can do it will do it. The essence of a person's difficult career transformation is the process of jumping out of his original social network and entering a new social network. In other words, we should rebuild a new value network, find some friends who can really help us and provide them with some value. When we really integrate into the new social network, we will successfully realize the transformation.