OnePlus eyes 600+ stores in India to expand offline presence: Vikas Agarwal, General Manager, OnePlus

Smartphone maker OnePlus, which has a formidable online presence, is gearing up to expand its base by consolidating its offline network.

OnePlus has a strong penetration in markets such as Bangalore, where every third customer is buying an OnePlus smart phone and two out of three are buying via online.

But the growth of the smart phone company is largely limited because of its less offline presence and affordability constraint. The brand is yet to expand beyond top eight cities and its channel presence.

Tasked to expand the brand and its offline presence, Vikas Agarwal, General Manager, OnePlus, India, told BestMediaInfo.com that the company is eyeing to set up 600+ stores in the coming months. Apart from this, they have expanded to USA and Europe this year.

With the recent launch of the OnePlus 6T McLaren edition in India at its ‘OnePlus 5th Anniversary Celebration: Salute to Speed’, the smartphone company has opened up its third offline OnePlus Experience Store in New Delhi.

While most brands rely heavily on celebrities to promote their products, OnePlus finds word of mouth as the best way to sell itself. Being an expensive purchase funnel, buying smartphones is not considered very impulsive purchase. With a 30% market share, OnePlus believes it has a fairly involved purchase that includes users’ research and peer reviews and thus a large part of the brand’s budget goes for brand promotion or community promotion with content at its centre.

OnePlus is globally active on every social media platform to keep its community engaged and intact, with a different strategy and objective for each. To highlight the #shotononeplus experiences, the brand uses Instagram to engage with users, Twitter to amplify the new announcements, YouTube to create and distribute visually appealing and engaging emotional content and Facebook to have wider reach. To bring authenticity to the content, it has marked its presence on LinkedIn as well. The brand uses traditional ATL mediums only while launching new products.

Talking about product launches, Agarwal added, “While launching a product, you have to make sure the entire country is aware about it. You have to get the biggest channels available. We have even tapped properties like IPL and Asia Cup. When we do sales promotion for a short span, print is a more suitable medium. For short-term action-based messaging, print is the most suitable medium.”

For the 6T McLaren edition, the brand will target all the marketing channels depending on the campaign objectives. For the launch or mini promotion, it typically will use digital as the medium. The device is a combination of 10 GB RAM, 256 GB storage and WARP Charge 30 at Rs 50,999, which available for open sale via online purchase on Amazon.in and oneplus.in.

The company has no creative agency for India and Starcom is handling its media. The brand has started with the local production of key smart phone components to improve manufacturing capabilities in India while setting up a R&D centre.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com