Dear Damai colleagues and dear MVPs (MeDomino Valued Partners):
With 2024 behind us and the Year of the Snake ahead, looking back to the beginning of the Year of the Dragon, what we saw was uncharted territory and enormous uncertainty.
After a year of co-creation with leading companies in the life sciences industry, standing before the Year of the Snake, we can now say that "we were among the first to establish certainty." As the year comes to an end, let us spend a little time talking about these certainties:
- One clear signal is that MeDomino's core operating metrics achieved double-digit growth;
- An even clearer indicator is that MeDomino's products continue to run stably across multiple leading enterprises and have become part of the underlying logic of precision marketing.
We can skip over many of the industry changes in 2024, but we cannot ignore the increasingly strong pressure we feel in the industry and the increasingly tight compliance space. These are precisely the roots of the industry's major transformation.
At the beginning of the year, amid continuous industry change, people in many discussions expressed the same concern: is there any breakthrough innovation, whether in technology or business models? The same happened in technology exchanges. Everyone hoped to see something truly disruptive.
But when they found that our recommendation was solid operational optimization and step-by-step, detailed engineering implementation, disappointment was often visible.
It is undeniable that major human progress throughout history has indeed come from breakthrough innovation. Earlier examples include the Industrial Revolution and antibiotics; more recent ones include artificial intelligence and tumor immunotherapy.
Yet we have also seen powerful engineering achievements such as sea-crossing bridges, tunnels, moon landings, reusable rockets, and powerful CPUs and GPUs. Whether grand or microscopic, these are engineering miracles achieved decades, even centuries, after breakthrough innovation.
The reusable rockets that everyone loves in grand narratives actually contain no fundamental breakthrough innovation. They are the result of steadily pushing Newton's laws from hundreds of years ago to the extreme: the extreme of engineering. Even retro-propulsive rocket-assisted landing had already existed as technology decades ago. Note that it was technology, not theory.
Engineering and continuous optimization are how breakthrough innovation is applied and creates value across industries.
- Just like today's mysterious and powerful artificial intelligence, neural network theory was proposed decades ago. Today's rapid progress is the result of long accumulation supported by powerful computing power.
- Behind a powerful computing cluster of 100,000 GPUs lies extremely complex engineering design and assurance.
- The popular ADC series in the industry is also a classic example of continuous engineering optimization.
Looking back, compressed profit margins and sustained high-pressure compliance environments are far from unique to our industry. Countless industries still envy life sciences.
The internet, finance, and many other industries have gone through this many times. The strong companies that survived all combined innovation with extremely refined operations. Take Meituan, a familiar example. Whether group buying or food delivery, its business model innovation can be explained in just a few sentences, and the resulting intense competition was highly predictable. Meituan's success may look like a victory of capital, but in fact capital chose it after seeing its operating capabilities and operating data. At its core, it was a victory of refined operations.
What the life sciences industry should count on is continuously optimizing its own operating capabilities, especially refined operations. Compared with the level of refinement in food delivery and ride-hailing, operations in our industry are almost at a prehistoric stone-age level.
Some may think those industries have large amounts of data. In fact, they envy the individual-level data and field teams we have. Looking across industries, how many have field teams at this scale? In many cases, those industries can only infer or rely on coarse-grained platform data and tags of unclear origin, so they have to develop complex testing strategies and use repeated trial and error to search for better opportunities.
But our industry has point-to-point engagement capability and fine-grained individual-level data. Better unleashing the strength and value of these teams, and improving their efficiency and effectiveness, is the direction the life sciences industry truly needs to pursue. The thinking behind this is: as compliance becomes increasingly strict, what is the driving force behind prescriptions? Is it customer relationships, fees, or recognition of treatment approaches?
- Do customer relationships really have to rely only on individual ability?
- Fees are indeed where many companies have applied refined capabilities. There are many examples on both client and vendor sides, but MeDomino does not discuss this and does not want to touch it.
- With today's data and technology, is it possible to provide frontline teams with more support and empowerment around treatment concepts? This is worth considering. In addition, whether strategy is executed properly often determines success or failure. Training is certainly important, but a large amount of resource allocation still depends on frontline teams' independent judgment, so there is always great room to improve consistency in strategy implementation.
Let us re-examine the resources in our hands:
Compared with other industries, we have many relatively high-quality field teams, fine-grained but unevenly reliable individual-level data, high-quality but limited content, still relatively considerable profit margins, and very rough execution.
Strategically, our next moves are becoming clearer:
To gain competitive advantage, the core is to fully unleash the power of data and pursue extremely refined operations.
Tactically, we need:
1. Strong strategic consistency
- A platform that connects all resources and customers based on strategic tags
- Customer insight platforms and marketing automation tools
2. Refined allocation of omnichannel resources
- Precise customer tags
- Resource tags
3. Rapid improvement of frontline teams' professional capabilities
- AI empowerment for frontline teams
4. All-out acquisition of customer data
- External data
- Tools that help frontline teams acquire high-quality customer data
- Data from digital channels
5. Continuous, scaled production of professional content
- AI-empowered content reuse
- AI-empowered content generation
- AI-improved content approval efficiency
Translated into technical language, we need comprehensive customer data, unified tags across channels from top to bottom, automation platforms, and AI empowerment that connects every module.
Engineering is the closest thing to magic in the world. - Elon Musk
MeDomino Lu Wenqing
The 24th day of the twelfth lunar month, Year of the Dragon
