Nezha Automobile Association Company was punished.
Misleading commercial propaganda constitutes unfair competition.
Nezha Automobile Association Company was punished.
(Reporter Yue Qian) Recently, the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (Shanghai) showed that Nezha automobile related company Zhonglian Tianxia Automobile Sales & Service Co., Ltd. was fined 200,000 yuan by Shanghai Minhang District Market Supervision Bureau according to the first paragraph of Article 20 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law because of its false or misleading commercial propaganda.
According to public information, Zhonglian Tianxia Automobile Sales & Service Co., Ltd. was established in 2018. It is wholly owned by Hezhong New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd. and belongs to the same parent company as Nezha Automobile. Its legal representative is Fang Yunzhou, and its main business includes new car sales and marketing planning.
According to the administrative penalty decision, on February 18th, 2022, Beijing Zhonglian Tianxia Automobile Sales & Service Co., Ltd. commissioned the members of the WeChat group of "Nezha Automobile Daily Media Group" to release an advertisement to promote its new model "Nezha S". The picture content in the advertisement is "The first batch of highly integrated nine-way valve group is applied in Nezha S industry", "The endurance in winter is improved by 20%" and "9 > 8 (number’ 9). The number’ 8′ is marked with Tesla, and’ 9′ has higher brightness and larger font size) "Nezha s extended range can reach 1100km to bid farewell to mileage anxiety".
The decision of administrative punishment holds that in the advertisement of this case, the parties take Jiutong valve group as a propaganda selling point, and through various combinations of words and graphics, they convey that the newly listed "Nezha S" car is the first vehicle in the industry equipped with Jiutong valve group and that it can increase the cruising range by 20% in winter. However, the conclusion of "20% increase in winter cruising range" comes from the fact that the parties concerned conducted the cruising range experiment of the same car with and without heat pump system, and formed an experimental report, and got the data of 20% increase in cruising range. As a matter of fact, the heat pump system was already used by many electric vehicles in the market at that time. The parties involved passed on the credit of the heat pump system that had been published to the newly used nine-way valve group of their new models by putting the two advertising words "Nezha’s first application of highly integrated nine-way valve group" and "20% improvement in winter endurance" next to each other, which objectively led to misunderstanding when the public read it.
The decision on administrative punishment also holds that in the "9>8" combination displayed by the parties, "9" and "8" are respectively extracted from the nine-way valve group used in the Nezha S car and the eight-way valve group used in the Tesla car. Although the number "9" is indeed greater than the number "8", the correctness of the comparison is limited to the category of simple numerical operation. The parties concerned project the comparison between two different automobile brands (models) by marking their own and "Tesla" brand (models) logos around the two numbers, and making the "9" brighter and larger in font size, thus forming misleading information and objectively leaving ".
The data shows that Nezha delivered 127,496 vehicles in 2023, which not only failed to achieve the annual sales target of 250,000 vehicles, but also dropped significantly compared with the annual data of more than 150,000 vehicles in 2022. When analyzing the reasons, the marketing problem was put on the table by Zhang Yong, CEO of Nezha Automobile. He said that the company’s communication mode is old, and the centralized management of the marketing headquarters needs to be strengthened. In 2024, he will concurrently serve as the general manager of the marketing company and comprehensively improve the marketing communication mode.
Under the background of accelerating the involution of automobile industry, marketing has also become another competition focus of automobile enterprises besides products and technologies. It has become a common phenomenon that "the head of the company" has become online celebrity, "the war of public opinion" has attracted attention and the flow of press conferences has been abundant. After the marketing stall, it even led to false propaganda, asking the water army to discredit opponents and other malicious acts. The competitive ecology of the automobile industry should have been based on products and technologies, but it has been polluted by behaviors such as brushing praise, deleting bad reviews, traffic fraud, playing list control and evaluation, and organizing a group war of words. In the face of unprovoked attacks, many car companies have opened online reporting centers to crack down on false information that damages the brand image, and give clues providers heavy rewards. At the same time, in order to jointly maintain a clean and upright network public opinion space and create a fair and just environment for the automobile industry, in March 2023, the Joint Committee of Chief Brand Officers of China Automobile Enterprises under the China Automobile Industry Association and its member units unanimously decided to jointly launch the "Joint Initiative on Resisting the Network Water Army of the Automobile Industry". People in the industry generally believe that illegal marketing and other behaviors can’t make a car, let alone a good brand. Consumers may be blinded by marketing in the short term, but long-term attraction depends on the real value of the brand. How to find a boundary between active marketing and over-marketing and keep the bottom line may be a problem that needs further consideration when getting off the bus.
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