In-depth original author | He Jing minority sports is becoming the heart of this part of young people. After Ultimate Frisbee, coda surfing became popular on various social platforms. The outbreak of minority sports is often inseparable from its strong social attributes, in other words, film production. Coda surfing can be said to be a sport praised by stars and online celebrities in short videos. In Tik Tok and Xiaohongshu, the triangular one-piece surfing suit that highlights the figure is almost the standard for beautiful bloggers. Standing on the surfboard, the sea breeze is blowing head-on, and it is easy to pose in various positions, which is both beautiful and elegant. In the star's vlog and variety shows, this sport also has a very high exposure. When recording Life of Desire, Peng Yuchang mentioned many times that he wanted to play coda surfing. Stars experience coda surfing as one of the most experienced players in China. Xiao Hui, the founder of coda world club, obviously feels that coda surfing has experienced explosive growth since 2020. Xiao Hui told Shen Xiang that he bought the first wave-making boat in China on 20 15 and set up a club. In 20 19, there were less than 50 coda surfing clubs in China. In just over two years, the number of clubs quadrupled. At the same time, coda surfing, as a new sport, the speed of industry standardization is far behind the speed of development. The 2022 China coda (Surfing) Open, sponsored by the State Sports General Administration, started in late August, but so far, coda surfing has not had a standard document in China to define the judging criteria of the competition. The defects of industry price involution, operational ability and service quality are gradually exposed, and many clubs that operate coda surfing make ends meet. Boredom in frisbee, flag football, paddle boards, bicycles and land surfboards has made many minority sports popular, but coda surfing seems to be limited by factors such as venues, and it is difficult to "get out of the circle" from online celebrities. Will it really become a veritable sport? Or is it a pose punching scene? Does it have a commercial prospect? We talked to several practitioners. Two years of explosions, charm geometry Although coda surfing has just caught fire in China, its history can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s. After decades of evolution, coda surfing became popular overseas for the first time. Xiao Hui, who has many years of water skiing experience, accidentally saw a foreign coda surfing video on the Internet on 20 15, and it got out of hand. However, at that time, this sport was almost unknown in China. It happened that Xiao Hui heard that a boss in Guangdong had a wave-making boat and sold it for millions. So Xiaohui took out the money she had saved for many years and bought the wave-making ship by installment with her friends. "This is also the first wave-making ship in China." Xiao Hui said. After Xiao Hui's unremitting publicity, a group of coda surfers gathered around him soon, and the coda World Club was established on 20 15. At that time, the birthplace of coda surfing was still in Xiao Hui's hometown-Hai Xian Lake in Mianyang, Sichuan. Although Hainan was introduced from 20 18, as a tourist attraction and superior natural environment, coda surfing has quickly become popular in Sanya and gradually swept the country. Now many cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan have inland coda surfing. The reason why coda surfing has developed so rapidly in a short time is largely due to its social properties. "The vast majority of customers come to experience, mainly for taking pictures and making videos." Xiao Hui said. In Xiaohong's book, more than 40 million readers are reading # coda surfing #, among which beautiful pictures, celebrity surfing videos and online celebrity bloggers are the most popular. With the help of Tik Tok platform, the number of coda surfing topics reached 5.29 billion times. In mid-July this year, Tik Tok launched "Tide Sports Notes" to encourage users to participate in new sports such as skateboarding, land rushing, diving, parkour and coda surfing through traffic incentives. Tik Tok platform promotes sports such as coda surfing on social platforms through traffic incentives. Coda surfing is packaged as a symbol of distance and freedom and is the source of dopamine. Under the siege of words such as "Come to Sanya without coda surfing" and "Do it if you like, and never be happy again", people who have been unable to travel for a long time due to repeated epidemics are even more eager. "On the social platform, I only feel the chic and freedom of beautiful bloggers on the blue sea. When I really play, I feel that the sea water is really salty. I'm so drunk that I want to throw up. I fell into the sea and my hair was wet and stuck to my head, leaving only a mess. " A player who first came into contact with coda surfing said. But compared with traditional surfing, coda surfing can be regarded as an accelerated sport. Traditional surfing mainly relies on natural waves. The single wave time is short and the wave height is unstable. It is a running-in game between man and nature. While coda surfing relies on wave-making boats to make artificial waves, which are not only stable in size but also last for a long time. For beginners, it is relatively easy to get started, and usually you can learn to stand in forty minutes. Coda surfing, as a mild extreme sport, allows players to experience the excitement of surfing, and with the protection of life jackets, the safety factor is higher. Although the threshold is not high, the high price still discourages a large number of surfers. However, due to various reasons, coda Surfing Club is experiencing large-scale price involution, which is popular among consumers, but to some extent it is a hidden worry of the industry as a whole. Xiao Hui told Shen Xiang that at present, the prices of wave-making ships are basically above one million, and the configured ones even reach more than four million. Moreover, there is no manufacturer in China that can make wave-making boats, so it can only be imported from overseas. The price of coda surfboards starts from 10,000 yuan, and the high maintenance cost leads to the high price of coda surfing. In Sanya, the price of surfing per hour starts from 1000 yuan. Moreover, coda surfing also has certain requirements for the site, and the water area should not be too small. There are not many inland lakes that meet this condition, so the prices of inland surfing places such as Qiandao Lake and Chengdu-Chongqing Land Rover Lake will double. Such a high price has discouraged many fans. Nevertheless, many clubs in Sanya have to queue up one week in advance during the peak period. "A boat can take six people, less than 200 an hour. If you just want to take photos and send them to social platforms, it's okay to play occasionally. Many users try coda surfing with this mentality. " Xiao Hui said. With the enthusiasm of users, the number of coda surfing clubs has soared several times in two years, and most of them are gathered in Sanya. There are five or six clubs in Hongzhou Pier alone. In order to compete for customers, the club started a price war. Jack, the founder of Forehand Wave Club, told Shen Xiang that due to the low industry threshold, as long as there are wave-making boats, the club can be set up, more and more people enter the club, and the competitive pressure is increasing. "Especially some small clubs that have just entered the business have no customers and can only rely on those personal intermediaries. These intermediaries rely on social platforms to promote low prices to attract customers. After bringing customers to the club, the intermediary will take a high rebate. The ultra-low-cost operation of small clubs has lowered the overall price of Sanya. At the current price, most clubs are operating at a loss. " Source of the price war of coda surfing in Sanya: The price war of Xiaohongshu is getting worse and worse, but correspondingly, it is the increasing labor cost, the highest oil price in the country, the rising ship berth fee, and the accessories can only rely on the high maintenance fees imported. The rapid development has gradually exposed the pain points of many industries. At present, users of coda surfing are mainly experiential, and most clubs are equipped with professional photographers, which provide paid photo service in addition to surfing. In the eyes of many clubs, coda surfing is more entertaining than sports and pays more attention to service. This forms a vicious circle: coda surfing is a new sport, but the club has insufficient understanding of the industry, the coach itself is not solid enough to form a systematic teaching course, and the service quality is not guaranteed, so it is difficult to cultivate new people's interest in this sport, which also means that there is no advanced course to stimulate consumption. A novice player shared his first experience: "I did a lot of homework before I decided to set up a club, and I specially chose a leader in the industry, but I didn't have any training before I left." When I go into the sea, I only have such safety tips as' Be sure to loosen the rope when falling into the water'. There is little technical guidance. How to exert strength and balance depends on your own exploration. However, a class lasts for one hour, of which 40 minutes are delayed on the way to sea and return, and 20 minutes is over without learning anything. " Marketing is another big pain point of the club. Without the blessing of marketing means, it is difficult to stand out from the crowd of clubs and grab customers in clubs with high price and homogenization. Forehand Club has become a specialized new media operation department. Jack, the founder, told Shensheng that at the beginning, they would cooperate with some online celebrity fans to make numbers from 0 fans and make them into large sizes by releasing coda surfing videos. At present, only the founder Jack has more than one million fans in Tik Tok. In the form of short video and live broadcast, the forehand wave is watched live in Tik Tok from 500 million to/kloc-0.00 million, and several matrix numbers add up to billions of video exposures. At the marketing level, in addition to analyzing the target customer base, making accurate delivery in Tik Tok and Xiaohongshu to attract long-term customers, some clubs also try to expand, such as linking with skateboarding and skiing institutions. The fans of these sports have a high degree of overlap. Internet celebrities' hobbies are like a gust of wind. They come and go quickly. When the heat fades, how can these 200 clubs maintain stable development? The coda surfing industry needs to stop and think carefully about the future development trend of the industry and how to make the industry move towards benign development. Over the past year, many clubs have realized that the price war has no future and will only hurt the industry itself. Jack said that at present, several big head clubs are discussing solutions together, and you may * * * set up a coda Surfing Association, calling on the industry to maintain reasonable prices together, and also providing operational and technical guidance to small clubs. Coda surfing, as a niche sport that burns money, is hardly as popular as Frisbee, but as long as the target user group is accurately positioned, it is impossible to be independent. For a sport, specialization is almost the only way. Take Ultimate Frisbee as an example. Ultimate Frisbee has a history of several decades overseas, and there are official international competitions. Although it only became popular in China in recent two years, the first China Frisbee League organized by the State Sports General Administration has been held all over the country since August this year, and the ultimate frisbee has also changed from an online celebrity to a national competition. Now some surfing clubs have also seized the opportunity and started to specialize. In May this year, the Tail Wave Surfing Club, a one-year-old competitive sports club, announced that it would cooperate with Sanya Vocational and Technical College to train competitive surfers. Taro World Club also said that it is developing upstream industries and trying to train coaches. Holding competitions is part of the professional layout of the club. This year, the Forehand Wave and Tail Wave World Club and the Water Sports Management Center of the State Sports General Administration jointly held the Tail Wave Surfing Open. Jack, the founder of forehand wave, believes that the significance of holding such a competition is not only to improve the overall level of employees, but also to make the industry recognized at the national level. The national points competition also gives players who want to take a professional path an opportunity to connect with international competitions. Elite is also the trend favored by clubs. Xiao Hui summed up coda surfers with "money and leisure". Nowadays, many clubs, such as coda world, forehand wave and Zeus, have established training systems specifically for teenagers. In addition, some clubs are cooperating with external industries to broaden their business areas. For example, forehand surfing club and electric surfing brand WaveShark reached a cooperation and shared resources at the beginning of this year. "Such cross-disciplinary cooperation is not only the promotion of coda surfing, but more importantly, the expansion of the entire water sports scale and the cultivation of users' minds. The industry has developed and the supporting facilities have kept up, so as to reduce costs and increase efficiency. " Jack said. Although there are some development directions worth exploring in the domestic coda surfing industry, standardization is still a topic that has to be mentioned. Internationally, the rules of IWWF (World Water Skiing Federation) international coda surfing competition are usually adopted in coda surfing competitions. Although most domestic competitions refer to this rule, it will be fine-tuned according to the actual situation in each competition. There is no official document to clarify the domestic competition rules and judging standards. The explosive growth of the industry is often accompanied by the sequelae that "supporting facilities" can't keep up. Fortunately, some head platforms have realized the pain points of the industry in the development process and began to try to explore new development directions of the industry. However, the minority movement is not the only way to go to the public. Cultivating the minds of sticky users is another solution of minority movement.