HTC says they will have both Android and Windows Phone flagships, need to market better
September 19, 2012 | By Surur
wmpoweruser.com
The BBC reports in an interview with Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s president of global sales and marketing, that after a disastrous 2012 the company plans to do things differently.
With their share price 80% below April 2011's level at one point, Jason confirmed "The market changed."
"There’s far fewer consumers who are going into the retail stores undecided about what they want to buy.
"Most of our research suggests about 70% of consumers are walking into the store already knowing what they want to buy… so we don’t have the luxury in a significant percentage of times to be able to actually put the HTC One in the consumer’s hands."
The answer was more marketing, but with a budget 1/6th that of Samsung HTC faced an uphill struggle.
"We cannot market like a Samsung – or Apple – where you’ve just got brute force tactics, carpet bombing the airwaves with TV commercials," says Mr Mackenzie.
"We’ve got to be more creative and act and speak like a challenger."
HTC plans to switch the focus of its marketing efforts to the internet, where it plans to educate users about what its devices do.
Referring to their Windows Phone strategy, he said "We will have two flagships," saying HTC planned to challenge the Nokia Lumia 920's claim to be the flagship Windows Phone 8 handset.
"For Windows Phone 7 we didn’t provide enough differentiation to have that flagship status between what we were doing on Windows Phone 7 and what we were doing on Android. When we look at the market we think that was a mistake from us and from our competitors as well."
HTC is rumoured to be set to release two Windows Phone 8 handsets, the HTC 8X and HTC 8S, a high end and low end combinations which will echo Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 strategy in many ways, but will likely run into a lack of trust from users, who are used to expecting less support from the company for their Windows Phone efforts than Nokia.
Read more at the BBC here. |
