A brand becoming the number two brand from No 5 with market share going up from 2.6 to 15% in a year in a market as highly competitive as the Mobile handsets market is a story which catches attention, which is what it did when I read it in the Business Standard-Strategist today. The company we are talking about is Motorola. The success in the market was attributed to the fact that could move people away from the feature driven compare-and-buy approach to making people buy the product for style and design making it a cool brand to buy. The article also says that it helped that Motorola’s sub-brands have catchy names like Razr, Pebl and Flip which helped it differentiate from competition. A combination of good promotions involving a celebrity's also helped the cause.
But in the youtube I found Al Ries the Marketing Guru criticizing Motorola for its branding strategy,It provided me with a contrast on the situation, which forced me to think are the fundamentals in marketing in these two countries so different??
At the end of the article in Strategist on the sucess of Motorola in India is given the fact that Motorola never had phones in the below 5000/- range and the launch of MotoFlip W220, which was priced under 4000/- only in August 2006. The launch was backed up with a good ad. It makes me wounder if consumers were just waiting for a sub 4000/- handset to be launched or was a mix of things ............
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ReplyDeleteAl Ries was a bit too critical of that, but he had a point. In the USA where most of the brands originate, Motorola and Razr seemed to be two differrent brands. It was a case of "double-branding" as put forth in another Al-Ries report about GM. Yesterday, Motorola came to the campus and the way the presentation went, it was obvious that Motorola were still concentrating on the "Tech Capability" of their phones and not on their robustness (something that had attracted consumers to use many Nokia Phones). Once they start to market it more better and collaborate with GSM suppliers, they have a long way of becoming no.1...
ReplyDeleteMotorola have made their presence felt in the Indian market by banking on the "cool" and "hip" factor of their phones. It's time that they concentrate on the features and oneness with Indian consumers in order to make any inroads into the share of Nokia.
ReplyDeleteIndia does not have the same number of brands as the US. the limited size in terms of the brand numbers makes the double-branding effect insignificant here. Thats where the consumer approach of both the countries differ.