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..