How OnePlus achieved its status as flagship killer ?
From the brick shape Motorola mobile phones to silk and thin designed smartphones; Smartphones industry has changed a lot in recent years. Smartphones industry requires constant innovation to meet technological changes.
The industry has lot of competition as established brands such as Samsung, Google and Apple leads flagship market share whereas Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi leads mid-range market shares. What new can you offer to people in this day and age of cut throat competition? It is the question which answers all mobile manufacturers must answer.
OnePlus entered already saturated and competitive market, but it offered something new which till date was not offered by any mobile manufacturer. OnePlus offered flagship mobile phones without breaking your bank. The six year old company now competes with big mobile manufacturer such as Apple and Samsung.
Let’s find out how the company was started, what its success mantra is and how it achieved its status as flagship killer.
How OnePlus was started?
Pete Lau, the former vice-president of Oppo left the company to build the perfect smartphones. Pete Lau and Carl Pei founded OnePlus on December 16, 2013. The parent company of Oppo mobile; Oppo electronics is the major investor of OnePlus.
Pete Lau vision was to form a company which focuses on making high-end mobile phones in low price than other phones in its class, believing that users would “Never Settle” for the lower-quality devices produced by other companies.
What its Success mantra is?
OnePlus Phones specialty is in their fast high end hardware with equally high end design. When OnePlus entered the market they were just other mobile manufacturer with no experience. The phones high end hardware and design specification gave it edge of being at par with flagship models of big brands at half cost. But that is not the complete story.
The company was actually a startup with limited resources and uncertainty of achieving success, when it came to actual production of mobile phones. The company couldn’t afford to bear heavy loss in its initial years, so it started to sell its phones through invitation system. The unique style of selling of the phone grabbed the attention of people. It created free PR for the company.
The success mantra of OnePlus lies in the pricing of its mobile phones. We customer can get high end flagship phones without breaking our banks, so why go for other options.
Strategies that made OnePlus “Flagship Killer”
It has been only five years since OnePlus launched its first phone “OnePlus 1” but the brand now competes with mobile phone giants such as Apple and Samsung in terms number of phones sold per year. Let’s look the strategies implemented by OnePlus to established itself as one of top selling mobile phones brands.
OnePlus makes flagship phones at low price; it is possible because of the second mover advantage. OnePlus is never the phone that introduces ground breaking technology which other mobile manufacturer such as Apple, Samsung, Google and Huawei do.
OnePlus waits for the new technology to be success before implementing it. OnePlus saves huge amount of money in the form of Research and Development cost. The money saved from R&D cost was used for making phones at lower price than those manufacturers who introduced the technology.
OnePlus also plays with the price expectation of the customer. It launches two phones per year. The One Plus 6T Maclaren edition is about as good value as you can get for a car branded special edition Phone. But in my opinion it’s actually clever way to hike up the price of One Plus 7.
You See the standard 6T Started at $579 in the US but the maclaren edition is all way up at $699. The company gets away with this because it’s special limited edition phone and comes with all sorts of goodies in the box but at the same time they managed to shift a point of reference. The One Plus 7 is of course going to be better than both of this phones but by introducing maclaren 6T the One Plus 7 will seem like great value even at $699 even though that’s $120 more than base One Plus 6T.
From the launch of One Plus 3, One Plus have played closed attention to what tech reviewer has to say about their phones. One Plus makes their phones available to tech reviewer one week prior to the launch of the phone that makes One Plus content so much better than other companies. One Plus makes good use of influencer to market its phones. The customer can get the information of phone in advance to launch of the mobile. So when the phone is launched, the customer have already made mind to purchase the product.
We all know One Plus made a name for itself as the flagship killer company with aggressive prices. Even though current One Plus cost as much as nowadays as the flagship they were trying to kill just a few years ago, that level stuck with them.
The other strategy implemented by One Plus is steady price strategy. One Plus keeps the price of Phone same in the whole life cycle until the next model is announced. Based on the launch price we level phone as good value, over price and in between.
When customers actually buy phones month later they still think of One Plus phones as the affordable ones even though at that point comparable flagship often cost significantly less. And this is great for One Plus as production and marketing cost of these phones go down and as they add special edition devices like the Mclaren edition that actually raised their prices they become more and more profitable over time while still being perceived as providing great value.