Analysing Marketing Strategy of Smartphone Makers: a unique perspective

[Disclaimer: Had drafted this post couple of years back, and somehow hadnt published it. Some of the principles and observations are still relevant though]

Smartphones have captured the imagination of India. According to IDC, it was one of the fastest growing market witnessing a 14% increase in shipments to 124 million units in 2017 alone.
The opportunity has obviously meant an intense competition in this space.
We have seen that within a few years companies like Xiaomi, Vivo & Oppo have been able to build a strong connect with the Indian consumer. Samsung has been the only veteran in this list.

What can we know about these brands? What kind of connect have they built? How can we know answers to these questions.
After thinking about this problem, I realised that TV commercial ads & Youtube videos have patterns and stories about what these brands are trying to do.
So lets take a look

1) Xiaomi -

Mi A1 (this is the android One based OS, which doesnt have Mi OS)
Sober, Dad son relationship, cool colours

Brand Ambassador: Katrina Kaif
selfies, energetic bright colours

Very Indian Stories (girl waking up, going to office)
Sophisticated, Urban Indian Girl but taking selfie of nearly everything

Xiaomi even though the phones were exactly what they had sold in China, gave it an "Indian" feel.

2) Samsung (Disclaimer: I worked for Samsung & these views are purely personal)
Themes:

• No Brand Ambassador
• Sophisticated, slick foreign shoots
• Lack of Indian themes

J7 Pro -
Full of energy, Message of breaking barriers, achievement, But no Indian?! Atleast the ad didnt feel Indian at all! And the ad didnt have any story but just a way to promote the wireless payment feature

S10- Same ad which is played in US with bank offers appended right at the end. Again, no Indian theme, very western feel

A8+ - to promote the waterproof feature, they ended up shooting some exotic location in South east asia with no indian theme at all

Again, no Indian touch, probably to appeal to the aspirational qualities of the millenials.

Vivo -
Brand Ambassador: Aamir Khan, Ranveer Singh
V9 23k

 

If you look at Vivo over the years you will see a very clear pattern. They started out as a young, energetic brand but later moved to more sober themes.
The ads were Ranveer Singh were about Indian millenials travelling, living in the moment. With Amir khan it was about capturing moments, sober themes and quiter ads (even though they played heavily during IPL). We used to believe it was because they had started targeting a different audience, not millenials but slightly older, professional target segment for their top of line phone range. Again, Indian characters, somewhat believable themes but nothing OTT like Samsung

Across all brands apart from maybe Samsung, as companies realised that Indians were most concerned about camera and nothing else like performance, the ad pitches also moved towards it

It felt that Xiaomi, Vivo & Oppo tried to get rid of their Chinese tag and become more Indian. While, Samsung a veteran in Indian market, without the China tag tried to be an global brand thus focussing lesser on Indian qualities.
In a country like India, very few brand have survived without becoming "Indian". What do you guys think?

Interestingly, Samsung's consumer goods business had launched this ad which won several accolades and became viral in India at a point:

Assessing Performance of B-Schools: An Approach Using Data

The motivation to write this article came when I came across Section 197 Companies Act India (and learn data scraping using python! :P ) For the complete technicalities you may read this article. In a nutshell, it specifies a limit to what the Board of Directors and managers can be paid by a public company. And on top of that, this information has to be disclosed in the annual report.

Yes, a publicly listed company has to reveal what it is paying to its top management. My next step, was to search the report of one of the most prestigious companies in B-schools. And I was not disappointed.

Check out HUL's Annexure to the annual report (2015-16).
You will realize that it is a rich(no pun intended) source of data (check out the remuneration, it is mind boggling). And it got me wondering. Can I use this to see which B-school alumni is really on a roll? If I build this across multiple companies,will I find a coterie of institutes at the top?

This led me to writing a script which would pull names from such data and match it with their education. Following is the result-



This has been taken from top FMCG companies- HUL, ITC, Nestle,Marico, Castrol,Asian Paints and HCL Tech (the only non-fmcg company)

Interpretation

• The results support common knowledge- IIMs and XLRI lead the pack.
• But what is interesting to see is that IIM Calcutta and XLRI have a higher number of alumni at the top level as compared to IIM Ahmedabad. (Perhaps I should collect more data)
• What is even more interesting is that Chartered Accountant's rule the roost and have a good amount of representation in all the companies. All the CFOs were Chartered Accountants.
• All the HR heads belonged to XLRI
• HUL employs the highest number of MBA graduates spread across all premier B-schools.
• Even if the number of companies analyzed is not a lot, it is safe to assume that there is a cluster of institutes (IIM C, XLRI and IIM A) which has a strong presence in the FMCG sector.
• It will be interesting to see if the newly established/emerging campuses (IIM K,I, SPJIMR) will be able to make a difference in this pecking order in future.

Caveats

1) There were many who had not put any information online about their education background. This lack of data can account for some inaccuracy in the result.
2) 7 companies and an overall sample set of 200 business graduates is a very small number
3) It was observed that MBA graduates formed only 20-30% of the total set. These observations are within this subset of MBA graduates.
4) There is a chance that wrong entries might be picked up. But this will become nominal as number of entries increase.

For example, an article by LiveMint showed that IIMA produced the highest number of CEOs in BSE 500 companies. It is slightly surprising since that trend is not clearly visible here.

Tech Corner:

It was the first time I extensively worked on python building a scraper and absolutely loved the Selenium driver. It makes it so much easier to build web bots.

If you want the actual script, do leave a comment and I will get back to you.  :)

Important Links 

1) Section 197 Companies Act
2) HUL Annexure report
3) Selenium-python docs