Monday 25 March 2013

HTC won't be 'quietly brilliant' any more: Aggressive marketing on the way!



   Back in November of last year HTC knew that they were in a little bit of a rut. Their One series had sold alright, but it was being eclipsed by Samsung's Galaxy S3 sales and things needed a little bit of a shake up. Since then we've come quite a long way: we've not got the HTC One knocking around, yes in limited quantities, but we'll come to that later. HTC couldn't see too much of a problem with their devices and they thought and still think that they are missing out on sales because of Samsung's huge marketing budget. As a direct result of that HTC hired Mr. Benjamin Ho to be their new marketing chief.

   It turns out he's been quite busy behind the scenes since then and he discussed some of what he's been up to with the Wall Street Journal. The first and most significant change is going to be the removal of the 'quietly brilliant' slogan. It's quite an iconic catchphrase similar to, but not quote as potent as, Nokia's old 'connecting people' phrase. The way he justified the change is that, “We have a lot of innovations but we haven’t been loud enough,” so essentially he is hoping that he will last slightly longer than his predecessors with a more up and at 'em approach!

   In fact we've already seen some of his ideas come to life already. Some of you might remember our piece which summed up HTC's take on the Galaxy S4 announcement, where Ho himself called Samsung's new flagship 'more of the same' and HTC took to Times Square to hand out promotional material for the HTC One, amongst other things. HTC were also quite aggressive on their social media pages, especially on Twitter where they deployed the hashtag #TheNextBigFlop!

   Ho also discussed how HTC would bump up their digital marketing budget by 250% over last year's effort and traditional media marketing will increase by 100% so we should start seeing HTC One ads popping up left, right and centre. Don't forget as well that HTC have signed that Champions League sponsorship deal, so you football fans out there you will be seeing that for the next few seasons!

   As a passing note Ho confirmed that the shipping delays of the HTC One are because of problems getting the cameras built for the device, saying, “There is some shortage, because the phone’s camera was designed specifically for us, and production cannot be ramped up so quickly.”
WSJ Via Slashgear.

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