Marketing Case Study Motorola from No.5 to No.2 in 12 months

Business Standard features a story about Motorola and how despite India being a Nokia country(Nokia's 2nd largest market) Motorola fought its way through to gain the second spot and an interesting aspect of its marketing campaign is use of a community marketing initiatives and how its spends on online media were more than normal industry trend

And instead of sticking to the industry average of 0.3 per cent of total ad budget, Motorola’s online spends were 20 times higher.

Apart from ads on Yahoo!, the company also developed consumer engagement initiatives through MotoStar.in: Motorola claims to have 98,000 registered users on the site.

The article also talks about the use of Oomph factor and Motorola's strategic use of Abhishek Bachchan. You can read the complete article here

The first norm Motorola broke was in asking consumers to forget features and consider phones for their oomph value.

For buyers who had gotten used to hearing “better colour screen”, “better battery life” and “more storage”, the prospect of going by just looks took some getting used to. But Moto took its sales pitch out of “What’s inside the phone” to “Look, what a cool a phone I have”.

The Summer 2006 campaign, featuring new brand ambassador Abhishek Bachchan, began with a contest “Guess the Motostar”. The contest attracted more than 160,000 responses, but it’s very likely that many of them guessed wrong. Bachchan didn’t hold centrestage in the Motorola commercials: the Slvr handset was the real star.

In the commercial, an embarrassed Bachchan realises that the girls sitting near him are swooning not over him, but his phone.

Television was the obvious choice of lead media for Motorola’s comeback campaign, but it also made tactical use of print to drive product and retail information as well as online
The campaign paid off, say Ogilvy executives. By mid-2006, Motorola’s marketshare had climbed to 7.6 per cent, making it the No. 2 player. But Samsung and Sony were still dangerously close. A concerted attempt at increasing share by either of these companies could have seen Motorola unseated from its precarious perch.

What Motorola needed, therefore, was a phone to capture the imagination of the mass markets and become the undisputed No 2. Here, price was an issue. Motorola was not about being a mass market brand, says Mathias.

For instance, it had no handset priced below Rs 5,000 — and the lower tiers account for more than 60 per cent of mobile phone volumes. The solution: the MotoFlip W220, launched in August 2006.

Priced under Rs 4,000, Flip was the first Motorola brand to enter the top 10 handsets sold in India — the other nine were, and still are, from Nokia. That’s a quick achievement for a model that is competing with around 188 models in the Indian market. Interestingly, Flip’s communication didn’t feature Bachchan.

Instead, it showed a middle-class couple fretting about their son who returns home late every night. They worry even more when they see his expensive-looking phone — where did he get the money for such a costly article? In one fell swoop, the ad established the phone’s low price point and its premium appearance.

Flip also helped Motorola increase market share by more than five percentage points and the brand has a share of more than 15 per cent (source: GFK); analysts estimate that Motorola now sells over 1.4 million handsets a month. The brand’s equity with retailers has jumped to 39 per cent from 18 per cent earlier, according to a TNS survey.

Meanwhile, 21 per cent of consumers consider Motorola a cool and trendy brand, compared to 6 per cent earlier. India may be Nokia country, but clearly Motorola has carved out some territory for itself.