Finding success for a smartphone in Indian Market

Indian Market is flooded with Smartphones running on all available operating systems, a hell lot of features, impressive specifications with some added gimmicks to woo users. With so many smartphones available in market only few of them actually leaves impression while others are lost in crowd with no one to even remember their name.

Now end user is more informed and intelligent than ever. People are aware of latest technologies, Operating Systems, Features etc. So just a smartphone definitely doesn't work now, it needs something extra.

Strike when Iron is hot :

Its been learned while overall specifications and features matters while deciding on which one to buy there is always a trend of feature to be popular. For example in early 2000s Nokia sold over a million 6100 and 6610 cashing on craze of color screen mobiles. In 2003 Nokia sold 2 million units of 6600 which became first mobile with camera to sell over a million units. At the same time music was a priority and Nokia did very good with its Xpress music series with side music buttons for easy and quick access to music player. Then came the era of smartphones Apple made its debut in 2007 with first iPhone but was too far from reach of common man. Samsung gave a tough competition to Apples iPhone and iOS by Android smartphones backed by Google. Samsung's share in market increased by multiple folds leaving Nokia and other major brands far behind the race. Samsung banked on Android and its Market(now google playstore) to compete with Apple's iOS and AppStore. Android's Open Source nature and Samsung's success gave confidence to Indian smartphone makers and suddenly all Indian brands which were infamous as Chinese mobile brands selling mobiles with very loud speakers, dual SIM, a very weird battery charger sometimes two batteries were provided out of box gained some confidence and shifted towards Android smartphone.

Micromax, Lava, Karbonn all could see future in Android Smarphones but none of these brands were looked upon as reliable brands when it came to spend more than 7-8K until Micromax dared to launch Canvas series with first Canvas mobile sporting 5" display, dual core processor , 1GB RAM and 4 GB internal storage. Striking straight into Samsung's territory with Nearest competitor in terms of specification costing 8-12K more Micromax got it right and set a trend of 5 inch display screens with lower price. Later in 2013 Micromax launched Canvas HD sporting a quadcore processor for price half than its nearest competitor. After which Xolo, Karbonn, Spice followed up with their quadcore smartphones in the same price range.

There are enormous opportunities as people are obsessed with slimmest, lightest, smallest, largest and all other adjectives.

Price it Reasonably: 

Its always the combination of latest/popular technology and reasonably price which wins the customers trust. Samsung tasted success in Android smartphones because they provided alternative to highly priced Apple iPhones with similar features in a very low price. Same goes for Indian Smartphone makers. A large section of Indian people are conservative in their expenditures towards such things and thinks 10 times before investing money in any such gadgets.

Strike it harder:

So when you have the right smartphone for the market showcase it. Create a hype over its silliest features, invest in creative advertisements. Show as you have built only limited units of this master piece and open it for prebooking (Remember Canvas HD was out of stock within an hour of its launch on Snapdeal). This gives potential buyers a fear that might miss it if they are late more the hype is more benefit comes to you.

Find exclusive store:

Instead of distributing handset in entire country find an online retailer like Flipkart or Snapdeal to centralize all your sales and save your distributing cost. Additionally your product will get more publicity thru their marketing channels. Recent example is success of Moto G and Moto E phones. Moto G became arguably best selling smartphones from Motorola and it sold exclusively on Flipkart. Snapdeal and Micromax has also partnered several times for the same cause.

Create Hype over availability:

Sell limited number of devices in a day or two, people are impressed to see sold out icon frequently on a product and their desire is increased by two times in fear of losing a chance to own this master piece device. At the same time bring them back soon before any competitor takes advantage of it.

Make it available for Reviewers:

Once you have the right product make it available for reviewers which will help customers know about how good is the performance, how your product beats or competes with your rivals etc. More than 70% of smartphone buyers does online research on products and bloggers can help you a lot with this. 

Other Factors: 

To make a brand more reliable one must also work towards creating a good network of service centers. Roll out OS updates more often as far as possible, people dont want to get stuck on an old version of OS.  Build quality products and not for sake for numbers. For eg: 5 MP camera of Moto G is far better than 8 MP camera of Canvas HD.

Have anything to say or add? Feel free to comment in the section below.