The Secret strategy of OnePlus

okay we're gonna talk about these seven strategies that oneplus uses to sell you its phones and this is a collab with Martin from tech alter so leave all his links in the description below so to start things off price expectations the oneplus sixty McLaren edition is about as good value as you can get for a car branded special edition phone but in my opinion is actually a really clever way to hike up the price of the one plus seven you see the standard 60 starts at 499 pearls in the UK but the McLaren Edition is all the way up at six hundred and forty nine the company gets away with this because it's a special limited edition phone and comes with all sorts of goodies in the box but at the same time they've managed to shift our point of reference the one plus seven is of course going to be better than both of these phones but by introducing the McLaren 60 the seven will seem like great value even at 599 pounds even though that's a whole 100 pounds more than the base 60 then we've got the fact that right from the 1+3 the company has worked really closely with celebrities and youtubers and they don't pay us but what I mean by this is that they pay close attention to what it is that we want about two weeks before the launch of a new one plus device they ship one out to all of their top influencers which means that we have time to test and film the phone in our own studios and this makes oneplus content so much better than from a lot of companies who might just set up a stunned surrounded by really poor lighting and expect you to squeeze through crowds to try and get some footage okay over to you Martin hey I'm walking from tech out there and I've criticized oneplus quite a lot on my channel before but there's no denying that they're very smart I think my favorite example would be their pricing strategy we all know one class made a name for itself as the flagship killer company with aggressive prices and even though current oneplus phones cost as much nowadays as the flagships they were trying to kill just a few years ago that label stuck with them and so did the strategy that they actually copied from Apple let's call this the steady pricing strategy oneplus just like Apple keeps the price of their phones steady over the whole lifecycle until the next model is announced and this works in well for us enthusiasts because we pay attention to the launch events to the launch prices and the reviews that get made at launch based on these we label phones instantly at overpriced or good value or somewhere in between and these labels stick with us over time and first impressions last so when people actually buy phones a few months later they still think of warm plus phones as the affordable ones even though at that point comparable flagships often cost significantly less and this is great for one plus as production and marketing cost of these phones go down and as the S special edition devices like the McLaren Edition that actually raised their prices they become more and more profitable over time while still being perceived as providing great value it's kind of like the reverse of what companies like LG get who instantly get labeled as overpriced during their launch and then actually has to end up selling phones at razor thin margins during the majority of their life cycles all right back to you our okay so now I'm gonna talk about something that we're gonna call the color cycle you probably know that a lot of companies make limited edition versions of their phones Apple might do a product red every now and again and Samsung has made some pretty slick color variants like the white note 9 but none more so than 1 plus in fact for the 5 T the company launched with midnight black and then within the space of four months had already come out with a Star Wars edition sandstone white and then lava red by staggering the release of colors like this they can continue to dominate the news cycle if they had just dropped all color options that launch with this phone people might have forgotten about it by the time the oneplus 6 arrived and oneplus can only do this because there's such a focused company compared to a company like samsung that's throwing out 50 phones per year oneplus pretty much just as to this focus makes it agile oneplus can make a decision for example to start production of a new color variant and it could be implemented within weeks then we've got the second mover advantage now the reason people get really excited about the price of one-plus phones is because really that's it these phones are never the ones to introduce groundbreaking features or really all software algorithms like you see on Google's pixel phones they just do or others are doing but cheaper so when you compare them to companies like Huawei and Samsung oneplus saves millions on R&D it's a self-reinforcing cycle oneplus saves on research costs and then passes the saving on to customers which then makes their phones stand out because they're cheaper okay back to you Martin okay Aaron actually told me to pick two separate examples but since I find pricing so exciting here are a few more thoughts about pricing steady pricing has the kind of indirect effect of making a price really memorable just think about it nobody remembers the price of a Galaxy Note 9 or an LG v 40 like in both cases those are some nebulous figures that change all the time and across retailers and so on but if you are a phone geek a real nerd there is a really good chance that you remember at least the prices of a few iPhones or a few oneplus devices to the last digit they are proudly displayed on every product page at every launch event they are mentioned in most reviews quite prominently and they likely haven't changed since they were announced and if pricing is a key part of your strategy either because your Apple and you really want to appear as a premium brand or because you're one plus and you want people to think that you're very affordable then keeping that price steady really gets that message across effectively and makes it very memorable and finally discounts and these big price drops they might work on the short term to boost sales but they're really dangerous on the long term they make consumers question the original price tags of these products and they make it really hard for a brand to charge premium prices in the future after all if you know that for example LG phones are always half price just a few months after their launch would you pay the premium launch price for them I don't think so which is why companies like oneplus rarely ever mess with the price to poor sales and instead add extra goodies like earphones or add new colors for example all right thanks for having me on and back to you on all right so we can almost summarize a lot of what we've talked about in what I would call one pluses aggressive marketing strategy right from the start oneplus has been all about revolution destroying what came before creating a new league and to be fair their first phone really did embody this mantra it looked unlike anything we'd seen came with top-tier specs and held a price of 249 pounds but right now at the start of 2019 oneplus doesn't really have that price advantage anymore that mid-range flagship market is extremely competitive but the thing that's held true is oneplus is aggressive positioning of their products take the LGG seventh in queue which got a lot of flack for two main things ugly software but mainly the fact that it did nothing to differentiate itself here's the thing if you really think about it on a hardware level the one plus six and the LGG seven think you are very very similar offerings these specs and designer clothes they look almost identical from the front and technically the g7 has two times the screen resolution Fussel really cool ultra wide lens on top even actually in terms of price I was able to find the g7 for less so what I think happened here is that oneplus managed to differentiate themselves because of how they pitched their device they put emphasis on the price and really sold the features in a clear way to people they engaged celebrities and influencers and really used the second mover advantage to save costs at every turn alright guys thank you so much for watching this video has been pretty much three months in the works so if you did enjoy it be sure to smash that subscribe button down below and head over to Martin's channel he makes really thought-provoking tech content all right catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 590,173

Keywords: oneplus, oneplus 7, one plus 7, oneplus 6t, oneplus strategy, oneplus exposed, oneplus review, oneplus history, oneplus story, oneplus 7t, oneplus7, oneplus 7 unboxing, oneplus 7 features, oneplus 7 official video

Id: HPmXvLpfFRE

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019