Have you ever heard of WeChat or the Coca-Cola Company specifically educating what they call "lower-tier users"?
I have always disliked concepts like this. "Lower-tier" sounds like there's a high-and-mighty position in the business world, where companies stand above and pour goods, experiences, and lifestyles down below.
In this concept, consumers become roles waiting to be discovered, developed, and educated. It's like charity, describing the entry of a new product into counties and towns as an "advanced" lifestyle's enlightenment and transformation of smaller cities and towns.
But if you think about it carefully, what many brands call "going lower-tier" is actually solving very ordinary problems.
Logistics couldn't deliver before, now they can; channel costs were too high, now they're lower; products were too expensive, now supply chain efficiency has improved, and prices can finally be accepted by more people.
They didn't discover some new story called "lower-tier demand," they simply extended their brand's reach to places farther from central cities.
WeChat doesn't need to specifically study "social needs of county residents," and Coca-Cola hasn't educated so-called lower-tier customers to relearn "thirst." Once the concept of a "lower-tier market" is created, ordinary efficiency problems suddenly become a grand marketing theory.
Companies stop reflecting on their products, prices, and channels, and instead focus on how to enter the lower-tier market, how to educate lower-tier users, and how to build a lower-tier brand mindset.
"Solving real problems" thus becomes a "new concept essay contest," and suddenly everyone seems to know what to do next, and all problems have found solutions.
Why are these companies obsessed with inventing new concepts?
Many companies really love new concepts.
When products don't sell, it's called insufficient user mindset; when departments bicker, it's called lack of organizational consensus; when AI transformation fails, it's called the company lacks native AI thinking.
These terms sound trendy and professional. They have causes, directions, and even a hint of expert flavor. Companies like them partly because they reduce expression costs, compressing complex situations into easy-to-propagate and report tags.
But more importantly, giving new names to unresolved problems makes it look like you have new solutions, and it can cover up an embarrassing fact: the team may have no idea how to handle these problems.
After renaming a problem, people easily develop the illusion that they have already solved it.
I've attended many such meetings. A room full of people spent hours discussing user growth, organizational synergy, and transformation issues, with directors' reports full of fancy words like "granularity," "closed loop," "empowerment," and "alignment." I understood every word, but together they were confusing and elusive, without a single actionable implementation plan.
After the meeting, everyone went back to their busy work, merely shifting the end time from 8 PM to 9 PM, rebranding "inefficient overtime" as "organizational transformation investment."
Delete the concepts and let the problems emerge naturally.
The biggest problem with new concepts is that they easily create false consensus.
Packing all problems into the same drawer allows the marketing department's need for increased spending, the sales department's need for expanded dealers, and the product department's need for cheap new versions to all be mixed under one term.
In the end, everyone agrees on "lower-tier," but no one is discussing the same problem; they are only using the same language.
These new concept essays are often hard to falsify. When we find products still aren't selling, we can explain it as "the user mindset still needs to be built." When AI transformation shows no effect, we can say the transformation is "entering deep water." When departments fight and play politics, we can explain it as "organizational consensus still needs alignment."
The worse the results, the more it proves that the work needs to continue. In the end, no one wins.
The simplest way to handle this problem is to first delete the new concepts and describe the problem in the plainest language.
Condense every problem into one sentence: Who encounters what obstacle, and which variable are we preparing to change?
This is not a grand narrative that can be written into a PPT with animations and charts. But at least everyone knows what to do next and where to check whether it's effective.
True consensus is that everyone shares a consistent understanding of the problem and the action, not that everyone uses the same new term.
Most of the time, giving a new trendy name to an old unresolved problem is meaningless.
If you encounter a problem in business, product, career, or AI applications that has become increasingly complicated by various concepts and you've never figured it out, feel free to email me with the specifics.
I'll help strip away those vague terms, clarify the actual difficulty you're facing, and identify the most critical sticking point.