Introduction:

The paper will concern the new smartphone porducer, OnePlus. First of all, we are going to revele some details about the new brand itself and proceed then with its own market analysis. We will then present the different communication tools and the consumer journey and apply the models P.O.E.M. and AIDAA, in order to evaluate those tools. In addition, we are going to analyze the digital presence and the strategic coherence of the brand. To conclude this paper we will provide some recommendations about how they could improve their marketing strategy.

1) Description of the brand and a company

OnePlus is a new smartphone brand, which was founded on December 2013. Its founder is a Chinese entrepreneur named Pete Lau. In fact, he had already some expertise with the technological market, since he was the Vice President of a well­known smartphone brand, called OPPO, and located in China.1 The founder wanted to create a smartphone, which fits to any lifestyle. While OnePlus is a design centric product, it also meets the condition of a high technological device. In other words, we can say that there is a perfect equilibrium between performance and design. 2 In line with this stratgegy, one of the biggest aims of the company, has always been to offer great technology for everybody. The aim of OnePlus, is to offer a high quality smartphone at an attractive price. In 2014 they even got excellent feedback from the TIME magazine, which stated that OnePlus would be the “Phone of Dreams” Due to a well­chosen marketing strategy, the smartphone wasn’t available for all costumers at the beginning of the first sails. To illustrate, in April 2014 only those who had a special invite to purchase the phone were able to acquire one, while the others could only wait their turn. The TIME magazine couldn’t do any better than affirming “it’s hard to imagine a better phone for Android geeks. Too bad you can’t get one”. 3

1 https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/history­of­oneplus.82259/ ​

2 https://oneplus.net/press­releases/Powerfully­beautiful­presenting­the­oneplus­x ​ ​

3 https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/history­of­oneplus.82259/ ​

The company seems to have a huge success, by looking at its expansion of the stores all over the globe. Initially OnePlus had only one flagship store in China and opened two years later a second store in Shanghai, four were established in Europe, two in the US, two in India and one in Indonesia. 4 Their success is not only highlighted by their expansion, but also by the fact that the second generation of the smartphone will come up by the end of the year, called OnePlus2.5

2) Marketing strategy ​

2.1.) External analysis 2.1.1.) The market

OnePlus is in the market of mobile phones and more precisely in the market of smartphones.

2.1.2.) Main competitors

Source: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone­market­share.jsp

The main competitors are Apple and Samsung, representing both 21,4% and 13,9% respectively of the worldwide market share in unit of shipments in the second quarter of 2015. Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo are also part of the main competitors of OnePlus in a worldwide perspective, but with less bigger shares than the two leaders. For now, OnePlus only represents a small share of the 46% remaining brands selling smartphones in the world.

Keeping this in mind, it would be more precise to analyse the situation in China, there were the brand was created only two years from now. In fact, in November 2014, 50% of the total sales were made in China, whereas this ratio decreased gradually to 30%­40% one year later. 6

4 http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/27/oneplus­2­interview­pete­lau­carl­pei/ ​

5 http://www.gsmarena.com/the_oneplus_x_is_a_snapdragon_801_5incher_with_a_ceramic_body_option­news­14729.php ​

6 http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/27/oneplus­2­interview­pete­lau­carl­pei/ ​ By analysing the numbers of August 2015, the main national competitor of OnePlus is Xiaomi, who is leader in the Chinese smartphone market with about 16% of national shipments. The second place of Chinese smartphone sellers goes to Huawei, followed then by Apple, Samsung and Vivo. 7

The rest of the smartphones were mostly exported overseas confirms the CEO Pete Lau. Especially in Europe and in the US and as a consequence the demand in India is rising too. 8

2.2.) Segmentation applied by the company

We decided to focus our segmentation on the smartphone’s market. First, we establish the different devices with the similar abilities like pads, laptops or televisions. The second part of the segmentation is about the operating systems. We wanted to show which OS is used by oneplus. Third we decided to argue the next step of our segmentation on the differents brands existing. Finally we finished this one by the several Smartphones developped by OnePlus.

2.3.) Targeting of the brand

By reading the oneplus’s blog, we could find out that the target market is people aged between 14 and 35 years old who are interested by new technologies but especially by puchasing a new kind of smartphone. Teenagers and young adults represent an important potential target. Among this target, the brand differentiates 2 kinds of targets : the teenagers and the adults. The first one belongs to age bracket of 14­25. They use a smartphone for entertaining themselves and socializing. The second one (age 26­35) prefers to use a smartphone for daily tasks (e­mails, navigation, internet, …).[1]

2.4.) Positioning

7 http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/03/xiaomi­retains­top­spot­in­chinese­smartphone­market/ ​ 8 http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/27/oneplus­2­interview­pete­lau­carl­pei/ ​

Oneplus wants to offer a better hardware than others by working on the design, performances but also on the price, the way to sell phones. Indeed, oneplus’s smartphones are only sold on internet. The oneplus’s slogan is « Never Settle ». It means the company always tries to make better and to see further. Moreover, the brand is very attentive to what think and say his consummers by proposing them a collaborative approach. To give to the consumers a determined spot of the brand and to they acquire a distinctive value against the competition in their mind, we noticed that the enterprise , besides his slogan, acted on three several kinds of differentiation to build his U.S.P : on the product, the service and on his point of sale. As we said, OnePlus offers smartphones with an unequivocal functionality and performance compared to all his competitors. Furthermore, in the Smartphone’s market, OnePlus is the only one to develop devices with an unique design : models fired ceramic fire wich allows them to put forward one of their greatest advantage. Afterwards, the brand bet a lot on the quality of his service. The staff wants to always become acquainted to the every little failure met by any customer. That’s why they created an open and collaborative platform to help their consummers if they need any help and/or they want some advices from other consummers. That is to say, the company sells his products only through the internet. Some might think it’s not a good point for the company but as marketers we think that’s a good way for the company to keep a good quality delivered for the consumer. As it is a start­up, first of all it’s a bit hard to set up some point of sales pretty much everywhere around a country from a financial point of view. Then, we believe that using an exclusive distribution channel like internet is easier when you want to manage the quality of your selling because you always keep the same skilled sellers who always deliver a quality service for the consumer.

3) Operational marketing analysis

3.1.) P.O.E.M Model: Paid Owned and Earned Media

3.1.1 Concept definition

P.O.E.M has become very popular in the interactive marketing for few years. This model is an acronym for Paid, Owned and Earned Media and refers to the different means for a brand to gain visibility on the Internet and beyond. With this model,the purpose of the company is to discuss about the costs and benefits of the various strategies and provide a structure and guidance to discovery new products opportunities in the market.9

Paid media is all ad placements which the brand advertiser has bought on digital or traditionnal media. This type of media allows you to control the timing of the diffusion of your ​ avdvertising, the content and the distribution and in addition paid media are quick and strong channel of diffusion. However the cost is often expensive, it’s the most expensive than any other kind of media. The company have to evaluated if the revenue generated by this activity is upper than the cost paid, moreover this interactive era paid medias don’t allow for interactions and suffer a public distrust.

Exemple of Paid Media: Traditional advertising, print, television, radio, direct mail, etc...

Owned Media is the granted exposure of the company on all the channels it owns and control and on which the company can transmit any idea, message, etc... The company can communicate by social media channels like Facebook or Twitter, its own Website or even its own blog. The biggest advantages are a total control over it’s content and cost.

Exemple of Owned Media : Corporate Website, campaign microsite, blogs, brand community, Facebook fan page, etc...

Earned media is free exposure gained from customer comments and recommandations. It is mainly social media content, consumer reviews, viral video views, renowed blogger etc. Press coverage may also be considered as earned media. When someone mentions the te firm on a social media, the brand visibility inscrease. It’s a sort of online word of mouth. Earned Media influence a lot the buyers cause people believes more other consumers than the brand itself. However this kind of media can be harmful when people says bad things about the brand. So, it’s difficult to control them. Exemple of Earned Media: Online word of mouth, Facebook comments, Twitter, Vine, blogs, forums, review sites, etc.10

3.1.2 Oneplus P.O.E.M’s

In the beginning OnePlus had no marketing budget but as the co­founder of OnePlus, Carl Pei said they had to put their name out there to do something big. But what was the keypoint of their strategic marketing was the will of doing something completely different than other brands. In order to reach their goal with a very limited marketing budget they had to constantly challenge themselves and think about a new way of being heard without using money to stay responsible for the users and not upper the margin or even the price11.

9 http://blog.c­marketing.eu/paid­owned­earned­media­a­lheure­du­digital/ 10 http://blog.hootsuite.com/converged­media­brito­part­1/ 11 http://www.forbes.com/sites/aileron/2014/07/23/how­to­use­poem­to­boost­your­marketing­strategy/ Since OnePlus had a small marketing budget in the beginning they emphasized the need to masterise the use of earned media. Indeed for their first PR campaign OnePlus understood that what is the more important is not to get the biggest coverage but instead to be able to influence the target audience and get ​ them to act, behave or think in the desired way. They also made an official partnership of ​ with Cyanogen Inc., the most important and trusted group of custom ROM developers in the android scene which allowed them to earn more visibility through Cyanogen’s media.12

Before the offcial launch of their OnePlus One device, OnePlus started promoting their upcoming “flagship killer” through articles on greatly influential sites like Tech Crunch, Engadget, Android Authority, and GSM Arena, creating a massive buzz and going viral on social networks. Then they started to send preproduction phones to renowned bloggers and writers in every country where the phone would be launched. Many articles and reviews started populating the net. Attracted by the buzz generated, more mainstream but still relevant publications like Forbes and The Telegraph would publish their own articles about the OPO (One Plus One), surpassing the ratings of most well­known flagship devices. Then they started eventually to put more money to reach more people and started to use paid media such as the googgle display network but only 0.04 % of the traffic source comes from displayed advertising. 13 About owned media they use almost the same channels than other companies such as newsletter, blog, site, etc… But what was new is the use of rafflecopter.com to help them promote their brand on social media and other channels. Using rafflecopter helped to facilitate the launch of the OnePlus one regarding the poor volume of smartphone they could sell since the demand was bigger than the offer. OnePlus saw significant growth in all of their social channels as well as significant engagement on their website forums. The awareness that Rafflecopter helped generate perpetuated the media attention around the company fueling articles to be written by Forbes, Business Insider, Gizmodo, and CNN.Here’s a summary chart of all channels used by OnePlus.14

Paid Media Owned Media Earned Media

Youtube OnePlus youtube channels Youtube tech fan channels

12 http://www.mediavisioninteractive.com/blog/social­media/oneplus­disrupting­mobile­market/ 13 https://www.rafflecopter.com/files/casestudies/OnePlusRafflecopterCaseStudy.pdf 14 https://www.rafflecopter.com/files/casestudies/OnePlusRafflecopterCaseStudy.pdf Twitter community fan Twitter OnePlus Twitter account account

Facebook community fan Facebook OnePlus Facebook page account

Licence Buy by invation only* Magazines

Display Ads Apps( Reflexion,…) Forums

Events Website Fanclub

LinkedIn Referrals

Cyanogen partnership leading to earn their medias as well

*It’s a innovative concept of the brand because the customers are kepts in a constant state of anticipation. It’s like a VIP product for only a select group of people.

3.2.) The « consumer decision journey » with the AIDAA model

3.2.1.) The « touchpoints » on this model

Awareness: Advertising on the brand website, ads and banners on social media and video broadcaster like youtube will help bring awareness on the brand and product. For Oneplus when it comes to awarness we identified 3 touchpoints which are: ­ The partnership with Cyanogen which brang more exposure to the brand. ­ Before the release of it first smartphone (OnePlus one) OnePlus contacted all influential bloggers and tech sites then send them a preproduction smartphone to be tested. And the phone had always good reviews. Interest: This is one of the most challenging stages in the AIDAA model, indeed Gaining the ​ reader's interest is a deeper process than grabbing their attention. And that’s what OnePlus really understodd like said above. Here’s some touchpoints:

­ Word of mouth which is really emphasized by OnePlus. ­ Online Review, News letter, User’s reviews ­ Mastering of the social media via rafflecopter which boosted their visibility on such platform by doing some giveaway which require to be on social media and to share informations about the brand. ­ Sales will occur directly through company’s website www.oneplus.net and they give a ​ lot of details about the product and take a lot of different angle pictures about their products. ­ And the last but not the least and this is what makes OnePlus “unique”, the invitation system which created the craze about the smartphone.

Desire: The Interest and Desire parts of the AIDAA comes together: As you're creating the reader's ​ interest, you also need to help them understand how what you're offering can help them in a real way. 15 And that’s where their slogan “Never Settle” takes it sense. What OnePlus is offering is a niche product that has all the main features you can find on other brands top flagship but with a sober design at a bargain price. So the brand challenge you to never settle as you can see that on their advertising campaign.

15 https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/AIDA.htm

Source: Oneplus.net Action: Finally you need to be very clear about what action you want your potential customers. And ​ here again OnePlus is very clear since they indicated all steps to be followed by the future user on their website. Advocacy: Here what you need is a brand or product advocates who will help you sale more by word­of­mouth, social mentions, any overt interaction with mention of your business or products, online or off.16 ­ Here OnePlus can count on his community to advocate their product but in the same time they have to really pay attention to user’s needs or satisfaction because unsatisfied users could do the reverse than being the brand advocacy ­ They have still stimulate the community on social media and blogs and that is something OnePlus managed pretty well since they have mastered the use of such platform.

3.2.2. Identify 2 possible “KPIs” by a digital « touchpoint » to evaluate the brand’s performance

Using similarweb.com to evaluate the brand’s performance we will evalute the traffic source which tells from where come brand’s traffic and see what can be improved in terms of social media and refferals (Website that are sending traffic to your website) since those digital touchpoint are the main used by OnePlus. Here is an overview from where comes OnePlus traffic.

16 http://www.invespcro.com/blog/aida­marketing­model/

Source: www.similarweb.com / OnePlus Traffic sources. ​ ​

As we can see 7.86 % of the traffic come from social media. Which is good compared to Apple and Xiaomi which have respectively 5.04% and 1.80 % of their traffic coming from social media. That confirm the mastery of social media by OnePlus who has a small budget and therefore emphasize the use earned media. For OnePlus facebook.com represent the main source of traffic coming from social media. So there is some effort to adress to get more traffic coming from youtube.com for exemple which represent only 8.19 % of the social traffic compared to 20.7 % for apple.com.

Source: www.similarweb.com / OnePlus Social traffic. ​ ​

Referrals represent 13.84 % of OnePlus traffic which is not so bad compared again to Apple and Xiaomi which has respectivly 19.69 % and 19.29 % of their traffic coming from refferals. This might be explained by the fact that OnePlus products are more a niche product and therefore they refered by more specialized sites, blogs such as http://forum.xda­developers.com/ which is one of the largest ​ android community (5 millions users)17

4) Evaluatrion 4.1) Evaluate the quality of the website This is the direct link of the official OnePlus website: https://oneplus.net/ ​ ​

1. Printability: On the website, there is no „print“ button available, but the printing itself is not blocked. In fact you can command to print the pages, via the normal procedure of the computer. Nevertheless, it is essential to mention, that the printed pages don’t correspond to the things we see on screen. In fact, in the print edition, several pictures are missing and the text is not always in the right order. To sum up, it is not recommended to print the pages of the website, because the output is not the same.

17 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDA_developers 2. Mobile friendly: According to the Google’s Mobile­Friendly Test, the website is perfectly mobile friendly, but it also highlights the fact that the page uses four blocked resources due to some robots.txt files. But all in all, we can state that the website is usable with mobile phones, having an internet access.

3. Currency: The information is perfectly up to date. It is true, that the brand only emerged in 2013, but the managers maintain all the information on the most recent developments. They also already promote the new smartphone model with all its features, which will appear on the market in the course of the coming year. In addition, the company regularly organizes some special offers, such as big sales events on Thanksgiving or charity auctions, which are presented in the „Blog“ of the websites. In the same category, OnePlus shares its motivations behind its recent developments. For instance, on the 1st December 2015, it published the reason of new sandstone case they produced exclusively for iPhones. In summary, the company not only updates the new products and future products, but also like to share the reasons behind it with its consumers. All things considered, we can say that the website makes proof of currency.

4. Design/ergonomics: The website of OnePlus is very well structured. The visitor immediately gets the overview and knows where to find which information. The texts are short and clear and the consumer is not inundated with non sense information. The design reflects the technological aspect of the smartphone. It gives the idea of something sophisticated and the pictures of the products give a clear representation of the reality. Nonetheless, at the first sight, we have to mention that there are some similarities with the design of Apple.

5. Technological aspects and interactivity: There is a forum on the website itself, where the company answers the consumers’ question on a regular basis. Nobody has to wait long, for getting responses or solutions to its problems, which shows a high degree of interactivity. What is more, consumers can buy the smartphones and some accessories, such as cases and protections, directly via the website. OnePlus, always tries to include the most recent technological standards to its brand. This message is also transmitted via the website, since they explain the new technologies and how they are going to implement them in their product. Additionally, the visitors can push a kind of „like­button“ for each article and share their experience via the forum. They can also share the articles of the website directly on Facebook, Twitter and on Google+.

6. Creativeness/originality:

7. User friendliness: As mentioned earlier, the structure of the internet page is very clear from the first moment on, which makes the navigation through it, a very easy task. The managers of the website apparently applied the keep­it­simple method, because the simplicity of it, makes it definitely a user friendly website.

On the „alexa.com“ website we got some further interesting information about the OnePlus website. On average, most of the visitors are males, having a school or a college degree. What is more, their favourite browsing locations are at home or at the work place. According to the „Alexa Traffic Ranks“, the OnePlus website reached twice its peak in the first and last quarters of the year 2015 in the traffic ranking relative to other websites. In fact, the new smartphone models coming to the market are the resaon of this trend. In a decreasing order, most people visiting the website come from India, United States, Italy, United Kingdom and then Germany. The Chinese market has its own website, which explains, why they are not present in this list. In the present time, about 21% go to the website via search engines, while searching for key words always related to „oneplus“. In addition, before visiting the website, people mostly surfed on Google, Facebook, Amazon and Youtube. In total, 1,398 sites link to the OnePlus website and on the top of that list, we have yahoo.com, reddit.com and wikia.com. For the moment, there are no links related to other sites from the OnePlus website. The website exists since July 2003, but the most work was definitely done in the years after the official creation of the brand in 2013. In total, the website was updated 719 times, mainly in the years 2014 and 2015, after the first smartphones were available on the market. The alexa website couldn’t provide us any information about the ownership for the domain name. (on met ça? Il y a vrmt rien marqué?) 18

4.2) Evaluate the quality of the presence on a social media by your choice (content, interaction, time of response,…)

OnePlus uses several social medias like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, ... We decided to evaluate the social media Facebook for many reasons. First, Facebook is one of the most used social media and is OnePlus most used social channel. They are followed by almost 2,3 millions of followers.[1] The second reason is that they are more active on this social media. Our evaluation will consist in the analysis of the page’s meetrics like the PTAT which stands for “People talking about this” and which measure the number of people who have created a story from ​ your page posts. We will also review OnePlus engagement rate which is calculated by taking the total ​ ​ PTAT and divide by the total number of likes as well as the posts per day and the lenght of posts. There is many others meetrics we could use but these one will provide a good summary of what can be achieve to better reach their consumers. We will then review the content of their publications, page information and therefore do a qualitative analysis.

Posts per day

Using LikeAlyzer an online tool that helps you measure and analyze the potential and success rate of ​ your Facebook Pages we could see that hey post an average of 3.41 posts per day and the tool advise ​ to “turn down the pace” since there is not much interaction with these posts compare to the numbers

18 http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/https%3A%2F%2Fblog.oneplus.net ​ ​

of followers. This therefore suggest that the quality of the content should be improved but not only as the lenght of posts will tell.

Person talking about this and engagement rate. They have 16,882 PTAT and with that amount they should be able to engage more of their followers. They have an engagement rate of 0.74 % which is above Socialbakers study average which gives the average engagement rate compared to numbers of followers.

For organization with large fan base it is challenging for them to engage their audience. This means that admins of larger pages need to create even better quality content so that fans will interact with them.

Content length The majority of OnePlus posts are between 100 and 500 characters. It is recommended to write shorter posts since shorter posts generates more response from your followers.

Qualitative analysis.

Regarding the content, they focus their publications on their products. The main goal of the publications is to communicate information about their latest product in order to get a maximum of likes and shares and to be displayed first in the news feed when one follower is connecting to Facebook. To be efficient they use pictures but also videos to support their daily publications. Then an important point for OnePlus is to have the consumer’s feedback about their smartphones. Facebook is a good way to get information about their consumers but also to know their opinion about the products. However OnePlus’s employees don’t use Facebook to answer or to communicate with users. People may ask questions on the website’s forum. About page information OnePlus posted only one milestones which is insuffisent since they are a ​ great way of telling your company's story. Therefore OnePlus should add more milestones to highlight moments that tey are proud of or want to emphasize. They also like 4 others pages but all of them are OnePlus related pages, what could be done here is to like more other pages like XDA developers page, a good referal traffic source for OnePlus website.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/oneplusofficial/timeline ​

4.3 ) Evaluate the coherence between the strategic marketing and the digital communication tools

OnePlus’s target is people aged between 14­35 so they have to interest young people and use communication tools for this group. Indeed, the several tools used by the brand are the most used by young people. Namely the social medias like Facebook, Twitter and LikedIn and that’s a good way to hit their target and to be homogeneous with her.

Moreover, as we said, the company always try to keep a good input of their customers by being always aware of what they think and say. That’s why we think that to have set up a forum to always stay connected with their consummers is a good tool to stay coherent with their positioning.

4.4) According to us Oneplus’s has an efficient communication process. The brand is active on the suitable communication tools to touch the target in a good way. The communication process is mainly online but it’s a good opportunity for the brand because the target is teenagers and young adults who are the most connected people. It is also in relation with the brand’s positioning. Working with consumers to create a better smartphone is the Oneplus’s goal. Thanks to the website and the social medias oneplus can consider the consumer’s opinion even if it’s a bad opinion.

Similarweb.com http://thenextweb.com/market­intelligence/2015/03/17/how­oneplus­ones­marketing­made­it­the­mos t­desirable­phone­in­the­world/ http://www.marketing­professionnel.fr/tribune­libre/poem­paid­owned­earned­media­07­2011.html http://thenextweb.com/market­intelligence/2015/03/17/how­oneplus­ones­marketing­made­it­the­mos t­desirable­phone­in­the­world/ http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how­to/mobile­phone/how­to­get­oneplus­2­invite­reservation­list­challe nge­competition­buy­opensale­3530450/

[1] https://oneplusblogone.wordpress.com/category/about/marketing­strategy/ ​ ​