Five years after the merger with Meituan, Dianping's name officially "disappeared" from Meituan.

Meituan said in an announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sept. 11 that the company's name would be simplified to Meituan, and that the simplification of the company's name would not have any impact on business direction, organizational structure, company operation, etc.

In the past five years, Dianping has been broken up, broken through and integrated in a series of organizational restructuring, and now this piece of sugar has been completely dissolved into the coffee.

The digested Dianping

Meituan's income comes from three parts: catering takeout, arrival, hotel and tourism, and other businesses. Among them, the business of arrival, hotel and tourism is a well-deserved cash cow. As an integral part of the arrival business, Dianping plays two roles: one is to bring the user evaluation system to continuously improve the activity and user volume of App; the other is to bring the supply chain system, that is, a large number of restaurant and merchant resources.

Dianping was a rival to Meituan at first. Meituan officially launched in 2010, Dianping was founded in 2003, and the two sides fought each other in the thousand-regiment battle of the group-buying track. Later, Meituan became the leader of the group buying industry by relying on crushing financing and pushing the iron army.

Meituan had about 52 per cent of the group-buying market in the first half of 2015, while Dianping had about 30 per cent, according to Analysys International. Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting and retail e-commerce industry analyst, pointed out to Pinplay that Dianping was defeated because of the lack of a compliance system after group buying.

Against this background, in 2015, with the help of Sequoia Capital, a joint investment institution of both sides, Meituan and Dianping merged into "Meituan comments". Dianping is the entrance to living consumption decision-making and content sharing platform. The merged Meituan review realizes a closed-loop chain from content to transaction.

The caliber of the deal is a "merger". At first, the two companies announced that their staffing structure would remain unchanged and would retain their respective brands and businesses to operate independently, but soon.Meituan got through with intensive organizational structure adjustment and dataNibbled away at Dianping.

The first organizational restructuring after the merger took place in November 2015. In this round of adjustment, the former senior executives of Meituan are still focused on the core business and foreground business, while the former executives of Dianping business are scattered: former Dianping COO Lu Guangyu is in charge of the integrated business group at the store, and comments on COO; Dianping former vice president Chen Ye serves as the head of the advertising platform and vice president of comments; the former Dianping CTO Luo Daofeng was transferred to the middle and backstage, responsible for technology and data. At the same time, Zhang Tao, founder of Dianping, also issued an internal letter saying that he would no longer serve as co-CEO and become chairman. But after that, Zhang Tao basically stopped focusing on the company and started his own investment and other businesses.

In the second adjustment after the merger, as Meituan established the career structure of "three carriages", Dianping was further broken up and, together with the integrated business group, was classified into the integrated business group; in the structural adjustment in December 2017, the review platform, together with restaurant catering and smart payment, was included in the "newly arrived business group". In the adjustment at the end of 2018, the arrival business group where the review platform is located has become the largest cash flow department, while APP, one of the two major user platforms for Meituan review, is led by Wang Huiwen, co-founder of Meituan.

With intensive changes, the above three former Dianping core managers have left Meituan. In the organizational restructuring in January 2017, Lu Guangyu retired and his position was taken over by Zhang Chuan; Chen Ye left in May of the same year, and the advertising platform was also replaced by Zhang Chuan; Luo Daofeng left in 2019, and his duties were taken up by Wang Huiwen.

Deeper than the "disintegration" of organizational structure is the digestion of data and content.. Before and after the listing in Hong Kong in September 2018, Meituan followed the example of Amazon.Com Inc, a spiritual idol, to promote the unification of "cars on the same track, books and articles" internally, trying to get through the data between various businesses.

According to 36Kr Holdings, Meituan's data business mainly involves Meituan's whole platform, Dianping and mobike, while Meituan's platform includes core businesses such as takeout, wine travel and hotel arrival, in order to shorten the process and promote the collaborative efficiency of multiple business lines.

After getting through, the accounts of Meituan, Dianping, and mobike platforms and big data behind them are unified, the user portraits are clearer, the advertising push is also more accurate, and of course, the greater the commercial value.

In the specific business, Dianping on the one hand continues to weaken the tool attribute, enhance the community attribute-which is what Meituan has been looking for. Zhuang Shuai said, "whether a restaurant is delicious and what food is delicious, Meituan has wanted to come to his own system since 2017." but Meituan App, as a high-frequency tool, naturally conflicts with the content. The tool is to leave as soon as possible, while the content platform is more advantageous as long as it is used. Wang Lei, CEO of ele.me, once revealed to Pingkuo that the longer it takes to open ele.me App, the lower the conversion rate of placing an order. Based on this, the UGC (user-produced content) content owned by Dianping undertakes the important task of improving community activity and stickiness.

On the other hand, when Internet companies go offline to mine traffic, Dianping, as a platform for offline merchants, is rich in mines and is of great cash value.

If you often go to the mall to eat, you may be no stranger to the queuing app "delicious don't have to wait". Zhuang Shuai said that in the early years, Meituan also approached yummy about the investment, but this investment was won by Dianping, who was also in Shanghai. In October 2015, Meituan and Dianping merged, delicious taste did not have to wait to return to Meituan's arms.

The value of the online queuing app is that diners don't have to wait at the door of the restaurant all the time and can make time for shopping and contribute more revenue. Therefore, delicious food does not have to wait for its popularity in shopping centers, and it has accumulated a lot of resources of shopping malls and popular restaurants. At present, Dianping is still in charge of the operation of delicious food without waiting.

In addition, Dianping's search entry refers to Baidu, Inc. 's bidding ranking and places advertisements in the results to be realized. Dianping's restaurant and other supply chain resources are synchronized with Meituan's platform, which makes sense.

Meituan's single Brand Strategy

When a company establishes a brand system, it often has two routes: one is the multi-brand system represented by Procter & Gamble Co and BABA. BABA has Tmall, Taobao, Xianyu, ele.me, box horse and other sub-brands. The advantage of this route is that a loss will not be lost, and the disadvantages are obvious: each brand has to find a precise positioning, can borrow traffic from brother brands, but can not borrow advantage.

The other direction is a single brand system, JD.com, NetEase, Inc, Baidu, Inc. and other Internet companies are practitioners. Take NetEase, Inc as an example, it has sub-brands such as NetEase, Inc Games, NetEase, Inc koalas and NetEase, Inc Yan Xuan.

Meituan shows a stronger and stronger tendency towards the latter, which has something to do with the story it has been telling recently: as a leader in local life services, through the transformation of home, store, travel, wine and travel, to gain a scale advantage on the C side, and then use the advantage to go deep into the B-end service market. Single brand strategy helps to establish a unified brand image of the company and enhance the awareness of users and merchants on the company's multi-business capabilities. Duan Yongping, founder of Bubugao, once said that if you add one word to your name, you will have to spend 10 million more on advertising.

Following this line of thinking, in June last year, Meituan announced that the brand changed color, with the main tone upgraded to "Meituan Yellow", Meituan App "yellow robe plus body", and offline contacts and interactive entrances all turned yellow, including bicycles, portable battery, cashier codes, POS machines, cashier boxes, and so on.

Prior to this, Meituan had already renamed the acquired mobike "shaving" to "Meituan Bicycle", and even mobike's official Wechat account was renamed Meituan Life; in July 2020, Meituan renamed the former "Little Elephant Business Department" to "vegetable Buy Business Department"; in addition, sub-brands such as Meituan takeout, Meituan Hotel and Meituan preferred were also strongly grouped under "Meituan".

Now Meituan's name simplification is another measure of the unification and integration of online and offline traffic and brands. After simplification, the company name will be more concise, and it will also make it easier for users to establish Meituan's connection with the life service industry.

The Future of Dianping

Over the past five years, as Dianping has been digested by Meituan, his independence has been up in the air.

In February 2019, the interface news released news that the brand Dianping may be abandoned, and related functions will also be integrated into Meituan App. Meituan's move is to meet the expectations of investors and boost DAU. In the future, merchant recommendations, ranking, charging merchants'UI and other projects that Dianping makes money will also be directly taken away by Meituan. At the same time, Dianping's UGC content comments and take-out wine travel flow will also be all delivered to Meituan.

The news was quickly denied by Meituan, Dianping official Weibo Corp also issued a tough response: "if someone wants to shut down Dianping app, users do not agree, we do not agree." Dianping has always been an independent app, and there is no possibility of merging into Meituan app. "

No matter how resolute his attitude was, Dianping finally lost his name. An employee in charge of Dianping's arrival business told Pinplay: "I judge for myself that Dianping's traffic will be transferred to Meituan this APP sooner or later, and in the end there may be only Meituan this APP." "

The competitive environment faced by Dianping is not the same as that of five years ago.

Now its number one enemy is Little Red Book. According to Dianping's internal staff, Dianping regarded Little Red Book as a competitor in 2018. In July 2018, Dianping got caught up in an infringement dispute with Xiaohongshu because he was eager to build a content community. Some users of Xiaohongshu claimed that their account, profile picture and shared content in Xiaohongshu were directly embezzled by Dianping.

Dianping failed to grow her own little red book, and now its number of users has been left behind by it. According to data released by QuestMobile, Meituan App had 256 million monthly active users in June 2020, Dianping 50 million, and Xiao Hongshu 75.58 million monthly active users in the same period.

In Dianping's strong food field, the growth momentum of Xiaohongshu should not be underestimated. Conan, head of the Little Red Book community, has revealed that since February, the number of daily active users of Little Red Book food category consumption has once exceeded that of beauty makeup, becoming the largest vertical category in the station.

If the form of user evaluation content is expanded from picture and text to video, Kuaishou Technology and Douyin, two national apps with nearly 500m monthly active users, can also be regarded as competitors to Dianping. Starting in the second half of 2019, both Douyin and Kuaishou Technology began to support the food industry.

In Meituan's entire business format, the status of review is not as important as it used to be. This is the end of the digested.