In this series, I break down the Haier business and provide insights into what it means to be an ecosystem organisation.
- Part 1 – The RenHanDeyi approach
- Part 2 – The Haier Business Model
- Part 3 – How Haier Delivers Scenarios: Smart Solutions (this article)
- Part 4 – The Orchestration Engine of Haier
- Part 5 – Culture, Purpose and Strategy
- Part 6 – How Haier Harnesses AI
- Part 7 – How To Transform To Ecosystem Organizing (coming soon)
- Part 8 – Strategies and Tools For Ecosystem Organizing (coming soon)
Most companies begin with the product they already make. They improve its features, reduce its cost and persuade customers to buy the latest version.
Haier starts from a different place. It asks what the user is trying to achieve in a particular part of life. The answer might involve preparing healthier meals, caring for clothes, improving air quality or managing water more efficiently.
The product is only one part of that outcome.
A family planning an evening meal does not experience separate markets for refrigeration, cooking, food delivery and nutrition. They experience a single activity with a desired result. Yet most businesses divide that activity across products, departments, suppliers and service providers.
Haier calls the complete context a scenario.
A scenario brings together products, software, services, physical spaces and ecosystem partners around a defined user outcome. It gives the user a more complete solution while giving Haier a broader role in the experience.
Three Winged Bird is the scenario brand that makes this approach visible to customers. It combines smart appliances with home design, installation, digital services and external partners. Instead of asking customers to assemble a working system themselves, Haier organises the components around the experience they want.
This article explains how that model works, how Haier develops scenarios and why it changes the basis of competition in the appliance industry.
Table of Contents
What Is a Scenario in the Haier Business Model?
A scenario is a connected set of activities, products and services organised around an outcome in the user’s life.
The outcome is the starting point.
In a kitchen, the desired outcome might be preparing a nutritious meal with less time and waste. Achieving it can require food storage, ingredient selection, shopping, cooking instructions, appliances, kitchen furniture and delivery services.
A traditional appliance company concentrates on the performance of the refrigerator or oven. Haier considers how each component contributes to the complete experience.
This changes the central design question.
The conventional question is:
How can we make a better appliance?
The scenario question is:
How can we help the user achieve a better outcome?
The distinction sounds simple. Its consequences are not.
Once the outcome becomes the unit of design, the business must look beyond its existing product boundaries. It needs to understand how users behave, where the experience breaks down and which capabilities are missing.
Some capabilities may sit inside Haier. Others may come from food companies, furniture designers, software developers, logistics providers or service specialists.
The scenario therefore becomes both a customer solution and an organising principle. It determines which products should connect, which partners should participate and what information the system needs to learn.
How Is a Scenario Different From a Product Bundle?
A product bundle groups several items into one commercial offer. A scenario coordinates several components so they produce a complete result.
The difference is purpose.
A kitchen bundle might include a refrigerator, an oven and a dishwasher. The products may share a brand, a design language and a promotional price. Each product can still operate independently.
A scenario begins with the activity of using the kitchen. It considers how food is selected, purchased, stored, prepared and cooked. It may also include nutrition advice, automatic cooking programmes, ingredient delivery, installation and continuing support.
The bundle makes purchasing several products easier. The scenario makes achieving the outcome easier.
Product bundles also tend to end at the sale. Once the customer has paid, responsibility moves to delivery, warranty and service teams.
A scenario continues after installation. Connected products generate information about use, performance and changing needs. Haier can use that information to improve services, recommend adjustments and identify new opportunities.
This continuing relationship matters because user needs rarely remain fixed. A household changes as people move home, have children, grow older or adopt different routines. A static bundle cannot respond easily. A scenario can evolve as the user’s circumstances change.
How Is a Scenario Different From a Smart Home Routine?
A smart home routine automates a set of device actions. A scenario coordinates the wider experience required to achieve an outcome.
A morning routine might raise the blinds, adjust the heating and start the coffee machine. The automation saves time by connecting devices through a set of rules.
That is useful, but it remains a technical sequence.
A scenario considers the people, services, environment and decisions surrounding the activity. It may involve understanding preferences, selecting products, arranging installation, coordinating external providers and adapting the experience over time.
The smart home routine answers:
What should these devices do together?
The scenario answers:
What is the user trying to achieve, and what must work together to make it happen?
Technology supports the scenario. It does not define it.
This distinction prevents scenario thinking from becoming a catalogue of connected features. Voice control, sensors and artificial intelligence can improve the experience, but they create limited value when the wider journey remains fragmented.
A refrigerator that suggests recipes may appear intelligent. The value remains modest when the ingredients are unavailable, the oven cannot receive the cooking programme or the user cannot adapt the recipe to dietary needs.
The scenario becomes valuable when the complete system works around the user.
Why Did Haier Move From Products to Scenario Solutions?
Haier moved towards scenarios because product categories reflect how manufacturers organise themselves, not how customers experience life.
A manufacturer sees refrigerators, ovens, washing machines and air conditioners as distinct businesses. Each category has its own targets, technologies, competitors and profit measures.
The customer sees meals, clothing, comfort and home life.
This gap creates a strategic problem. Individual products can become technically advanced while the complete experience remains frustrating.
A customer might buy several smart appliances that use different applications, require separate accounts and fail to share information. Every product may work as designed. The overall system still fails the user.
Haier’s scenario approach addresses this fragmentation by shifting the focus from product performance to outcome performance.
That shift can be understood through three levels of value.
- A product brand promises that an individual product will perform well.
- A scenario brand promises that several products and services will work together around a user outcome.
- An ecosystem brand allows the experience to expand through contributions from users, service providers and partners.
Each level increases the scope of responsibility.
- At the product level, Haier is responsible for the refrigerator.
- At the scenario level, Haier is responsible for how refrigeration contributes to the kitchen experience.
- At the ecosystem level, Haier creates the conditions for food companies, chefs, software providers and other partners to improve that experience.
This does not make the product less important. A poor appliance will damage the entire scenario. Product quality becomes the foundation rather than the complete proposition.
The strategic advantage comes from controlling more of the experience without owning every component required to deliver it.
That is the central logic behind Three Winged Bird.
Haier Scenario Brand: What Is Three Winged Bird?
Three Winged Bird is Haier’s customer facing scenario brand. It turns the idea of an integrated smart home into a service that people can understand, configure and buy.
The brand is also known as Sanyiniao, a direct rendering of its Chinese name. Haier introduced it to move beyond selling connected appliances as separate products. The offer covers kitchens, bathrooms, balconies, air quality, household water, entertainment and other parts of the home.
The distinction matters.
A smart appliance brand sells products with digital features. A scenario brand takes responsibility for how several products, services and spaces work together.
Three Winged Bird is therefore not another label placed on a refrigerator or oven. It is the customer facing layer that connects Haier’s products, digital platforms, service teams and ecosystem partners around a household outcome.
The brand makes Haier’s scenario strategy visible.
Without that layer, scenario thinking could remain an internal management concept. Customers would still encounter separate products, separate buying decisions and separate service arrangements.
Three Winged Bird converts the strategy into an experience that can be designed, delivered and supported.
What Does Three Winged Bird Actually Sell?
Three Winged Bird sells a configured home solution rather than a collection of appliances.
The solution can include appliances, furniture, software, design, installation, delivery and continuing service. The exact combination depends on the user, the home and the outcome sought.
Consider a kitchen renovation.
A traditional appliance retailer asks the customer to choose a refrigerator, oven, hob and dishwasher. The customer must then coordinate the kitchen designer, cabinet supplier, electrician, plumber, installer and connected home services.
The transaction may involve good products. The overall experience remains fragmented.
Three Winged Bird changes the unit of purchase. The customer can buy a working kitchen scenario that combines the relevant products and services.
Haier describes its kitchen offer as a complete process covering smart appliances, cabinet design, delivery, installation and fulfilment. A service steward coordinates the specialists involved throughout the project.
This resolves a familiar service problem.
Complex solutions often fail because each provider completes its own task while nobody owns the complete result. The cabinet maker blames the appliance dimensions. The installer blames the design. The software provider blames the network. The customer becomes the unpaid project manager.
A scenario brand needs one point of responsibility for the outcome.
The service steward performs that role. The steward does not personally complete every task. The role coordinates the people who do.
This difference is small on an organisation chart and enormous in the customer’s home.
Three Winged Bird therefore sells five connected forms of value:
- A home scenario designed around the user
- A compatible set of products and services
- Coordination across suppliers and specialists
- Installation and activation of the complete solution
- Continuing service after the initial project
The customer is not simply buying more items. The customer is buying fewer gaps between them.
How Does Three Winged Bird Fit With Haier’s Product Brands?
Haier’s product brands and Three Winged Bird perform different jobs.
Brands such as Haier, Casarte and Leader provide appliances for different users, price points and preferences. Their role is to produce strong products with clear market positions.
Three Winged Bird sits above the individual product choice. Its role is to combine suitable products into a scenario.
The relationship can be understood through a simple business heuristic:
The product brand provides the component. The scenario brand provides the result.
A Casarte refrigerator may contribute premium food storage. A Haier oven may provide connected cooking programmes. Another appliance may supply water purification or ventilation.
Three Winged Bird brings the parts into one customer journey.
This structure gives Haier flexibility. The scenario does not depend on one product range serving every user. Different product brands can contribute according to the customer’s budget, needs and desired level of service.
The same principle applies to external partners.
Haier does not need to manufacture kitchen cabinets, prepare food, deliver groceries or provide every design service. It needs to ensure that each contribution supports the promised outcome.
The scenario brand becomes the interface between the customer and a network of contributors.
This creates a clear division of work:
- Product brands compete on the quality of their components.
- Three Winged Bird competes on the quality of the complete experience.
- The ecosystem expands what that experience can include.
The result is not a rejection of product excellence. Scenario value collapses when one component performs badly. A connected kitchen containing an unreliable oven is simply a more elaborate disappointment.
Product quality remains the foundation. The scenario extends the value built on it.
Why Is Three Winged Bird More Than a Retail Brand?
Three Winged Bird does more than attract customers and present products. It provides the structure required to deliver a complex solution.
A retail brand usually helps customers discover, compare and purchase an offer. Three Winged Bird must support a much longer journey.
The journey can include:
Understanding the home
The process begins with the customer’s space, routines, needs and constraints. Room dimensions matter. Existing services matter. Household composition matters. A technically impressive solution may still fail when it ignores how people live.
Designing the scenario
The desired outcome is translated into a combination of products, services, furnishings and digital functions. Compatibility must be designed into the solution rather than tested after installation.
Selecting the components
The customer chooses products and services within the scenario. The choice remains important, but it takes place within a coherent design.
Coordinating delivery
Products, materials and specialists need to arrive in the correct sequence. A missing cabinet panel can halt the installation of several connected appliances. Coordination protects both time and margin.
Installing the complete solution
Installation must produce a working scenario rather than a room full of functioning components. Physical fit, power, water, connectivity, software and user accounts all need to work.
Supporting continuing use
The relationship continues through maintenance, updates, service requests and changing household needs.
Haier supports this journey through physical experience centres, digital applications and its smart home cloud platform. The platform connects users, enterprises and ecosystem contributors to support more customised solutions.
The experience centre performs an important commercial function. Customers can encounter a working kitchen, bathroom or balcony scenario before committing to it.
This changes the sale from explanation to demonstration.
A salesperson can describe how several connected products might work together. A scenario environment allows the customer to see the sequence, test the controls and imagine the result inside a real home.
The digital platform serves a different purpose. It helps carry the relationship across design, ordering, project progress and continuing service. Haier has previously described customers placing orders and tracking kitchen projects through the Three Winged Bird application.
Together, the physical and digital channels provide a continuous customer journey.
- The experience centre makes the scenario tangible.
- The application makes the process visible.
- The service steward makes someone accountable.
- The ecosystem makes the solution possible.
This combination explains why Three Winged Bird should not be viewed as a showroom concept or a smart appliance campaign. It is the commercial and service system through which Haier delivers scenario value.
The next question is how Haier creates the scenario in the first place. That requires a method for moving from a broad user need to a working solution involving products, services, data and partners.
How Does Haier Turn a User Need Into a Smart Solution?
Haier develops a scenario by working backwards from the outcome a user wants.
The process begins with a situation in someone’s life. Haier then identifies the activities, products, services and contributors needed to improve that situation. The final solution may cross several product categories and include companies outside Haier.
This approach differs from conventional product development.
A product team normally begins with an existing category. It studies customer needs through the lens of that category, then develops a better version of the product.
A refrigerator team asks how to improve refrigeration.
A scenario team asks how to improve the way a household plans, buys, stores, prepares and consumes food.
The first question produces a product brief. The second can produce an ecosystem.
Step 1: Start With the User Outcome
A strong scenario begins with a clear change in the user’s life.
The outcome must be broad enough to reveal new possibilities, yet specific enough to guide decisions.
“Build a smart kitchen” is too vague. It describes the technology and the setting, but not the result.
“Help a family prepare healthy evening meals with less effort and waste” is more useful. It identifies the user, the activity and the improvement sought.
A practical scenario statement should answer five questions:
- Who is the user?
- What are they trying to achieve?
- In what situation does the need arise?
- What prevents a good result?
- How would the user recognise improvement?
This discipline prevents the team from dressing an existing product idea in the language of customer need.
A scenario is not defined by the number of connected products. It is defined by the outcome those connections improve.
Haier describes its smart home business through needs such as convenient food preparation, clothing care, comfortable air and household water management. These needs cut across the company’s traditional product categories.
Step 2: Understand the Complete Activity
The team must then map what the user does before, during and after the focal activity.
Consider preparing an evening meal.
The experience may begin hours or days before anyone switches on the oven. It can involve planning meals, checking ingredients, buying food, storing it safely and adjusting choices around time, health or dietary needs.
The activity continues after cooking through cleaning, storing leftovers and replenishing supplies.
This wider view reveals the real points of friction.
The problem may not be that an oven takes too long to heat. The household may struggle to decide what to cook, lack the right ingredients or distrust its ability to prepare a difficult dish.
Improving one appliance will not solve those problems.
A useful heuristic is:
Map the activity before choosing the technology.
This sounds obvious. Many innovation projects reverse the order. The team begins with artificial intelligence, sensors or a connected device, then searches for a customer problem that makes the technology appear useful.
Scenario development requires the opposite discipline. Technology enters only after the team understands the desired result and the current experience.
Step 3: Identify the Missing Components
Once the activity is visible, the team can determine what must work together.
Some components will be physical products. Others may be software, information, content, logistics, installation or professional services.
A meal scenario could require:
- Refrigeration and food storage
- Cooking appliances
- Recipes and cooking programmes
- Ingredients and prepared food
- Nutrition information
- Food delivery
- Kitchen design
- Installation and support
No single component produces the outcome.
This creates an important test for whether ecosystem organising is justified:
Can one business deliver the required outcome alone?
A conventional product or service may be sufficient when the answer is yes.
An ecosystem becomes useful when the outcome depends on several distinct capabilities and no single organisation can provide them efficiently.
Haier’s own account of the ecosystem economy makes this distinction. It argues that a scenario such as a smart home cannot be fulfilled by one product or one enterprise. It therefore places users at the centre of the collaboration between Experience EMCs and Solution EMCs.
Step 4: Assemble the Right Contributors
Haier can now determine which internal teams and external partners are needed.
The principle is capability before company.
The team should not begin by asking which existing supplier relationships can be reused. It should ask which contribution is required, then identify who can provide it best.
The answer may include Haier appliance teams, software developers, furniture companies, food producers, chefs, designers, installers and logistics providers.
Each participant contributes a piece of the solution. The scenario gives those contributions a shared purpose.
This avoids a common ecosystem mistake.
Many companies recruit a large collection of partners and announce an ecosystem before defining what the partners will achieve together. The result is a directory, a conference or a collection of logos.
A working ecosystem begins with a value gap.
The participants join because their combined capabilities can close that gap more effectively than any participant acting alone.
Step 5: Connect Products, Services and Data
The components must then operate as one solution.
This requires more than technical connectivity.
A refrigerator may communicate with an application. An oven may download a cooking programme. A delivery service may provide ingredients. Those connections matter only when they improve the user’s experience.
The scenario therefore needs several forms of integration:
- Functional integration
- Products and services perform compatible tasks.
- Information integration
- Relevant information moves between the components.
- Experience integration
- The user encounters a coherent journey rather than several separate interfaces.
- Commercial integration
- The customer can understand, buy and pay for the solution.
- Service integration
- Problems can be diagnosed and resolved across organisational boundaries.
Haier uses connected appliances, its smart home applications, cloud services, experience centres and partner resources to support scenario solutions. Its stated ambition is not merely to automate appliances, but to combine products and services into personalised smart living experiences.
The distinction between connectivity and integration matters.
- Connectivity means two components can exchange data.
- Integration means that exchange improves the outcome.
The first is a technical property. The second is customer value.
Step 6: Deliver the Scenario as One Journey
The scenario must survive contact with the customer’s home.
This is where elegant ecosystem diagrams often meet a loose cable, a missing component and an installer who has never seen the software.
Delivery exposes the gaps between participants.
A scenario can fail through poor sequencing, unclear responsibility or incompatible standards. Each provider may complete its contracted task while the complete experience remains broken.
Three Winged Bird addresses this risk by combining design, product selection, material choices, delivery, installation and fulfilment. Haier has described a service steward who coordinates internal specialists throughout the process.
The service steward provides a simple but powerful form of governance:
One person owns the customer’s view of the outcome.
The role does not remove specialist accountability. It prevents specialist boundaries from becoming the customer’s problem.
Step 7: Learn From Use
Installation is the beginning of the learning cycle, not the end of the scenario.
Actual use reveals which assumptions were correct.
The team can learn:
- Which features customers use
- Where the journey becomes difficult
- Which recommendations create value
- Which services customers ignore
- Which partners improve the experience
- What adjacent needs emerge
This information can change the scenario itself.
A kitchen scenario may begin with connected cooking. User behaviour may reveal demand for nutrition planning, ingredient ordering, specialist meals or food waste reduction.
The solution expands because the team discovers a related outcome, not because it wants to add another feature.
This creates a learning loop:
User need → Scenario → Use → Evidence → Improved scenario
The loop is the engine of scenario development.
Without it, the scenario becomes another fixed offer. With it, the experience can evolve as user needs, technologies and partner capabilities change.
How Do Experience EMCs and Solution EMCs Support a Scenario?
Experience EMCs identify the user need. Solution EMCs organise the capabilities required to meet it.
The two roles solve different problems.
An Experience EMC stays close to users and identifies opportunities to improve their experience. It explores what people are trying to achieve, where current solutions fail and what a better outcome would look like.
A Solution EMC turns that opportunity into something deliverable. It brings together the products, technologies, services and partners needed to create the result.
The relationship can be expressed simply:
Experience EMC: Are we solving the right problem?
Solution EMC: Can we deliver the right solution?
Neither side is sufficient alone.
An Experience EMC without delivery capability produces attractive ideas that remain on paper.
A Solution EMC without strong user insight can build an impressive answer to the wrong question.
The user sits between the two. Feedback from the experience side shapes the solution. Evidence from the solution side changes what becomes possible.
Haier describes these two EMC forms as interacting around the user. The arrangement supports repeated adjustment rather than a one way handover from research to development.
Part 4 of this series will examine how Haier coordinates these participants through contracts, incentives, targets and shared information. The purpose here is narrower. Experience EMCs and Solution EMCs convert a user outcome into a working scenario.
Case Study: How Haier Built the Internet of Food
Haier’s Internet of Food shows how a product can become the gateway to a broader scenario.
The starting point was not simply to make an oven smarter. The opportunity was to help households prepare food that would normally require specialist knowledge, ingredients and preparation.
Haier combined a smart oven, digital cooking programmes and standardised prepared dishes. Users could buy food through a connected interface and use a cooking programme designed for the dish.
The offer connected appliance performance with food production, preparation, distribution and digital instructions.
Haier reported that the platform had sold 387,000 roast ducks and 200,000 Chinese New Year meal sets by the end of 2021. These figures come from Haier’s annual report and show the scale reached at that point. They should not be read as current sales figures.
The strategic value of the case does not rest on the number of ducks sold.
Its value lies in the change of logic.
A conventional oven business earns when the customer buys an oven.
The Internet of Food creates opportunities before and after that transaction. It can connect the user to recipes, ingredients, prepared meals, chefs, food brands and continuing services.
The oven becomes part of a recurring experience.
What Problem Did the Peking Duck Scenario Solve?
Peking duck is difficult to reproduce at home because the result depends on more than oven temperature.
The dish requires suitable raw materials, preparation, packaging, storage, transport and a cooking process that works inside a domestic kitchen.
Improving the oven alone would not be enough.
The Smart Cooking EMC brought together contributors from outside the appliance business. Accounts of the project describe collaboration with chefs, duck producers, food processing companies and logistics providers. The partners adapted the food and preparation process to work with the appliance.
The resulting scenario aligned several components:
- A suitable duck
- Standardised preparation
- Packaging that protected quality
- A cold supply chain
- A compatible oven
- A digital cooking programme
- A route for ordering the dish
This reveals the core value of scenario thinking.
The final experience was not created by adding intelligence to one product. It was created by redesigning the system around the result.
What Did the Appliance Contribute?
The oven remained important.
- It provided a controlled cooking environment and a physical point through which the experience could be delivered. The digital programme reduced the skill required from the user.
- The product did not disappear inside the ecosystem. Its role changed.
- It became an enabling component rather than the complete source of value.
This distinction matters for established companies.
Scenario strategy does not require a manufacturer to abandon its core products. It requires the company to understand how those products can anchor a larger outcome.
- The refrigerator can become the gateway to food management.
- The washing machine can become the gateway to clothing care.
- The air conditioner can become part of a complete air quality solution.
The product provides a strong position from which the company can extend. It does not define the boundary of the opportunity.
How Does the Internet of Food Create a Value Loop?
The Internet of Food can create a reinforcing loop between use, demand and improvement.
The sequence is:
User orders a meal → The appliance supports preparation → The user experiences the result → Usage produces evidence → The offer improves → More users and partners participate
Each participant gains something different.
- The user gains access to a difficult dish with less effort.
- The food producer gains a route into the home.
- The chef or recipe developer gains a way to distribute expertise.
Haier gains greater use of its connected appliance and a continuing relationship with the household.
The quality of the result affects the whole loop. A poor dish weakens trust in the food provider, cooking programme and appliance. A strong result increases the value of every component.
The participants are therefore linked by outcome performance.
That is stronger than simply listing several offers on one platform.
What Other Haier Smart Home Scenarios Exist?
Haier has applied similar logic to clothing, air, water and wider home environments.
The details differ, but the pattern remains consistent:
Start with a life activity → Connect the required components → Coordinate contributors → Learn from use
Internet of Clothing
The Internet of Clothing expands the focus from washing clothes to managing clothing care.
The scenario can include washing, drying, detergent selection, fabric care, storage and styling.
Haier has demonstrated connected laundry settings where appliances identify relevant clothing characteristics, select suitable programmes and coordinate washing, drying and folding activities. It has also connected washing machines with wardrobes, dressing mirrors and apparel resources.
The shift in value is clear.
- A washing machine cleans fabric.
- A clothing care scenario protects garments across their use cycle.
This wider outcome creates space for detergent companies, clothing brands, care specialists, wardrobe providers and software services.
Internet of Air
The Internet of Air focuses on the quality and comfort of the home environment.
A complete air experience can involve heating, cooling, ventilation, purification, monitoring and adaptive airflow.
The user does not want several devices operating independently. The user wants a comfortable environment with appropriate temperature, humidity and air quality.
Haier describes air solutions that coordinate air conditioners, purification systems, fresh air systems and monitoring capabilities.
The scenario shifts attention from the performance of one air conditioner to the quality of the air across a space.
Internet of Water
The Internet of Water connects purification, softening, heating and household use.
Different appliances may manage different parts of the water journey. The experience improves when those products share information and operate around the household’s requirements.
Haier describes water solutions that connect water heaters, purifiers and related equipment to provide purification, softening and heating.
Once again, the unit of value expands.
The user is not buying isolated equipment. The desired outcome is reliable water of the right quality and temperature for each use.
Whole Home Scenarios
Three Winged Bird also combines scenarios across rooms and spaces.
A whole home solution can cover the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living area and balcony. The task includes appliances, furnishings, digital controls, design and installation.
Haier currently presents smart living as a full scenario experience delivered with ecosystem partners rather than as a collection of independent smart products.
The wider the scenario becomes, the greater the coordination challenge.
More components can create more value. They also create more points of failure.
This is why Haier’s organisational model matters. A whole home scenario cannot be managed effectively when each product division optimises its own sales, interface and service process.
The complete outcome needs its own ownership, measures and operating logic.
How Does the Haier Scenario Model Create Value?
The scenario model creates value by improving the complete experience and expanding the economic opportunity around it.
The user, Haier and ecosystem partners do not receive identical benefits. The model works when each participant gains enough value to continue contributing.
What Value Does the User Receive?
The user gains a more coherent route to the desired outcome.
This can include:
- Fewer disconnected purchasing decisions
- Better compatibility between components
- One coordinated design and installation journey
- Easier use of complex technology
- Services adapted to the household
- Continuing support and improvement
The most basic gain is reduced friction.
A whole solution saves the user from discovering every dependency and managing every provider. This is valuable because complexity usually shifts towards the customer when firms organise around separate products.
The scenario model brings some of that complexity back inside the delivery system.
What Value Does Haier Receive?
Haier can increase the breadth and duration of its customer relationship.
Instead of competing for one product purchase, it can participate across several products, services and moments of use.
This may create:
- Greater value from each household
- Sales across several product categories
- Service and ecosystem revenue
- Stronger retention
- Better information about emerging needs
- More opportunities for innovation
The deeper strategic gain is improved relevance.
A company that understands the full activity can identify opportunities that remain invisible to a company watching only its product category.
A refrigerator team sees food storage.
An Internet of Food team sees planning, buying, storing, preparing, cooking, nutrition and waste.
The second view contains more problems worth solving.
What Value Do Ecosystem Partners Receive?
Partners gain access to a larger solution and a clearer point of demand.
A food company can connect its offer to a specific cooking occasion.
A designer can contribute to a complete kitchen project.
A software provider can serve a defined part of the user journey.
A specialist partner may reach customers it could not acquire efficiently on its own.
Participation can offer:
- Access to relevant users
- Integration into a complete solution
- New routes to market
- Shared information and learning
- Revenue linked to the scenario
- Opportunities to create adjacent services
The scenario gives each contribution context.
A partner is not simply available somewhere on a platform. Its role is connected to a user need and to the other components required to meet it.
How Does a Scenario Change the Unit of Competition?
The strongest effect is a change in what the business competes to control.
In a product market, companies compete to sell the best refrigerator, oven or washing machine.
In a scenario market, companies compete to organise the complete experience.
This changes the basis of advantage.
A rival may produce a technically superior appliance but hold a weaker position in the customer journey. Another firm may combine good products with better design, software, service and partner coordination.
The second firm may create more value even when none of its individual components leads the category.
The unit of competition moves:
- From the product to the outcome
- From the transaction to the relationship
- From the firm to the ecosystem
This does not remove product competition. It places it inside a larger contest.
The strategic question becomes:
Who organises the system through which the user achieves the outcome?
What Makes Haier’s Scenario Strategy Difficult to Copy?
Three Winged Bird cannot be copied by launching a smart home label and recruiting several partners.
The visible offer rests on capabilities that Haier has developed over many years.
Direct User Interaction
Scenario development depends on a continuing flow of evidence about user needs.
Traditional market research can identify broad preferences. Scenario development requires detailed understanding of activities, problems and changing circumstances.
The organisation must remain close enough to users to detect needs before they become conventional product requirements.
A Broad Product Foundation
Haier can connect scenarios across refrigeration, cooking, laundry, air and water because it already has relevant products and technical knowledge.
This foundation provides credibility and control over important parts of the experience.
A firm with a narrow product portfolio can still organise a scenario, but it will depend more heavily on partners.
Strong Partner Access
The company must attract contributors that can improve the outcome.
Partners will not participate simply because the orchestrator uses the word ecosystem. They need access to demand, useful information, fair economics and a credible route to execution.
The quality of the ecosystem depends on the quality of the opportunity offered to its participants.
Integrated Delivery Capability
The solution must work in the user’s home.
This requires design, logistics, installation, activation and service. These capabilities are less glamorous than artificial intelligence, yet they often determine whether the customer receives any value.
A scenario strategy without delivery capability is a concept deck waiting for a complaint.
Shared Digital Infrastructure
Products, services and contributors need a way to exchange relevant information.
The platform must support the user journey rather than create another disconnected interface.
Haier has linked connected products, smart home applications, its experience cloud and physical experience centres to support the design and delivery of scenarios.
Organisational Freedom
Teams need enough authority to pursue opportunities that cross existing business boundaries.
A kitchen scenario may require product teams to share customers, information and revenue with external partners.
Conventional business units often resist this. Each unit protects its budget, targets and customer ownership.
Haier’s EMC structure is designed to support collaboration between internal Micro Enterprises and outside participants around user needs.
Measures Linked to User Value
The system must reward the complete outcome.
When each participant is measured only by its own product sales or task completion, local optimisation returns quickly.
The oven team sells ovens. The installer minimises time on site. The software provider increases application use. None of those measures proves that the kitchen scenario works.
Scenario performance needs measures such as adoption, outcome quality, service reliability, customer retention and total value created.
These supporting capabilities make the model hard to imitate.
The visible offer can be copied quickly. The operating system behind it cannot.
What Can Other Companies Learn From Haier’s Scenario Approach?
Haier’s model cannot be transplanted whole into every organisation. Its principles can still improve how companies design connected offers and ecosystems.
1. Define the Outcome Before the Offer
Begin with the result the user seeks.
Do not begin with a product bundle, partner list or technology platform.
A clear outcome gives the participants a shared purpose and provides a test for every component.
Ask:
Does this contribution improve the outcome?
When the answer is unclear, the component probably does not belong in the scenario.
2. Map the Complete Activity
Look beyond the moment when the product is used.
The strongest opportunities may sit before or after that moment.
A cooking appliance company may find greater friction in meal planning or ingredient access than in cooking performance.
An industrial equipment company may find greater value in diagnosis, scheduling or maintenance than in the machine itself.
Map the full activity before defining the solution boundary.
3. Separate Components From Outcomes
A product, service or technology is a component.
The scenario is the outcome created through their combination.
This distinction helps teams avoid treating connectivity as customer value.
A connected product is not automatically part of a useful scenario. Its information or actions must improve the complete result.
4. Identify the Missing Complements
A complement is something that increases the value of the core offer.
For a smart oven, recipes and prepared ingredients can be complements.
For an electric vehicle, charging, route planning and energy services can be complements.
For business software, implementation, data and specialist advice can be complements.
The key question is:
What else must be present for the user to achieve the result?
This question exposes where partners may create more value than additional internal features.
5. Give Someone Responsibility for the Whole Experience
Complex offers need a clear owner.
The customer should not have to resolve conflicts between the organisations delivering the solution.
A scenario owner should have enough authority to coordinate the journey, expose gaps and challenge participants when the complete result is at risk.
Without this role, each provider can succeed while the customer fails.
6. Design the Commercial Model With the Experience
The commercial model cannot be added after the technical design.
The team must decide:
- What the customer buys
- Who receives the payment
- How revenue is shared
- Who carries each risk
- Who pays when something fails
- How continuing services are funded
A technically integrated scenario with fragmented contracts can still feel fragmented to the user.
7. Build a Learning Loop
The scenario should create evidence that improves the next version.
This requires consent, appropriate data practices and clear measures.
The purpose is not to collect every possible signal. It is to learn whether the scenario produces the intended outcome.
Useful measures may include:
- Time saved
- Effort reduced
- Outcome quality
- Adoption of the complete journey
- Failure points
- Repeat use
- Customer retention
- Partner contribution
Measurement should follow the value logic.
8. Expand Only When the Core Scenario Works
A broad ecosystem can look impressive while creating little value.
Begin with one outcome and prove that the participants can deliver it reliably.
Expansion should follow evidence of an adjacent need.
The sequence is:
Solve → Learn → Extend
Not:
Recruit → Announce → Hope
From Selling Appliances to Organising Life Outcomes
Haier’s scenario strategy changes the role of the company.
It no longer sees value as residing only inside the appliance. Value also comes from how the appliance interacts with services, information, spaces and other organisations.
Three Winged Bird makes that logic visible to the customer.
It turns separate products into a designed experience. It connects the physical home with digital services. It gives partners a role in creating the outcome. It gives Haier a relationship that can continue after the initial sale.
The most significant shift is conceptual.
Haier does not ask only how it can sell a better product.
It asks how it can organise a better result.
That question changes the boundary of innovation.
- The refrigerator is no longer the complete offer. It becomes part of food management.
- The washing machine becomes part of clothing care.
- The air conditioner becomes part of a healthy and comfortable environment.
The product remains valuable. Its meaning expands.
This is the central lesson from Haier’s scenario model:
The next source of value may not sit inside the product. It may sit in the connections required to help the user achieve a complete outcome.
Those connections do not organise themselves.
They require decisions about roles, targets, contracts, information, investment and rewards. They must align independent participants without rebuilding the hierarchy that Haier worked to remove.
Part 4 examines that challenge.
The Orchestration Engine of Haier will explore how Haier coordinates Micro Enterprises, Ecosystem Micro Communities, platforms and outside partners around shared user value.
References
Baiyere, A., Salmela, H. and Tapanainen, T. (2020) ‘Digital transformation and the new logics of business process management’, European Journal of Information Systems, 29(3), pp. 238–259. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2020.1718007.
Chen, J. (2016) ‘Haier is the sea: CEO Zhang Ruimin’s innovative management’, Management and Organization Review, 12(4), pp. 799–802. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/mor.2016.46 (Accessed: 9 August 2026).
Fischer, B., Lago, U. and Liu, F. (2013) Reinventing giants: How Chinese global competitor Haier has changed the way big companies transform. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Available at: Wiley.
Iñiguez, S. and Lorange, P. (eds.) (2022) Executive education after the pandemic: A vision for the future. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82343-6.
Keller, R., Ollig, P. and Rövekamp, P. (2022) ‘Pathways to developing digital capabilities within entrepreneurial initiatives in pre-digital organizations: A single case study’, Business & Information Systems Engineering, 64(1), pp. 33–46. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-021-00739-3.
