(One Plus: Crossing the Chasm in the

smartphone market)

Case Study -1

Consumer Behaviour

Kirtish Bhavsar
(20MBAGEN025)
 ➢ Introduction:
Pete Lau and Carl Pei founded OnePlus in Shenzhen, China, in December 2013. Lau previously
worked as a Vice President at Oppo Mobile, a company that shared investors with OnePlus.
Regardless of the fact that the smartphone market was saturated, the founders saw an
opportunity for a new entrant. They presumed that most smartphones had flaws such as
bloatware, cheap plastic hardware, and unappealing designs. Company's intentions were
clear from the start: to create high-end, user-friendly devices that delivered a better
experience at a lower price than any other device on the market.
OnePlus launched its first smartphone, called OnePlus One, in April 2014 and quickly found
success in India, Europe, and the United States. (The OnePlus One was released in India in
December 2014 exclusively though Amazon.)
By October 2014, the OnePlus One was available in 34 countries worldwide, and the company
had recorded revenues of $300 million.

➢ Facts:
• OnePlus unveiled its first product, the OnePlus One, in April 2014 and released it
internationally in June 2014. The OnePlus One came pre-installed with a modified version
of the Android operating system called Cyanogen. The phone featured a high-quality
build, a fast processor, an excellent display, and a very attractive price. Promoted as a
“flagship killer,” it was priced at $299 for the 16GB version and $349 for the 64GB version.
• The OnePlus One was sold exclusively on the OnePlus website, marking a departure from
the typical industry practice of selling through wireless carriers. OnePlus used the invite
system for two reasons. First, the company had a limited supply of phones, so the invite
system allowed it to control supply and demand for the phones and so that the customers
perceive it is a hard-to-get hands on phone.
• The company introduced its second- generation smartphone, the OnePlus 2, in July
2015.The phone was priced at $389 (for the 64GB version), almost half the price of rival
phones like Apple’s iPhone 6 and Samsung’s Galaxy S6.
• In October 2015, OnePlus launched its third phone, the OnePlus X. The OnePlus X featured
an elegant design and high-quality hardware, but it sacrificed performance to achieve the
very affordable price of $249 and it lacked a lot of features compared to the previous
phones launched.

➢ Case Analysis:
From this case we can understand the challenges that technical companies face in crossing
the chasm from early adapt to mainstream market the importance of coherence and
consistency in a company’s choice of target audience, value, proposition and market strategy.
The company started with a moto of bringing a smartphone in the market that is better
looking, good quality, sleek design, but performance and with an aggressive pricing. One plus
wanted to put its product in exclusive category of the smartphone as they introduced it as
flagship phone. They targeted techno-savy people as their targeted audience, which are of
two age groups –
a) 14-25 years b) 25-35 years.
These were the audience who were technically active, who mainly wanted to socialize and
have a hand over latest technology. The customer comes under innovators and early
adopters. These people wanted to have new products/ technology which comes in the market
in their hand are very keen a selling strategy of referral selling only. To make the image of the
brand as exclusive phone which is not available easily in the market in every shop but can only
be bought when com one refers to other. Through hat referral only one can buy that phone
but there were man reasons for selling one plus one through referral and only via company
website that the company had shortage of the phone as they were the initial days of the
company when company needed to have a hold on supply chain of the phone properly. So,
his was a hit for the company but the company wanted to expand ad the expansion would
only happen when the company move from early adopter stage to mainstream which are
early majority and late majority. So, company needed to change and add come additional
marketing efforts such as from the social media and its own website company need to move
towards traditional marketing technique which company was against as company wanted to
go out of the box not like going for traditional mean of marketing so one plus started to sell
its product through online retailers. Such as amazon. Hence the company knew that to tap
other customers they will need to go for amazon while shopping other products people would
get to know about the one plus.
The company made tie-ups with the telecom company and version of showcasing its product
in the store where the people do often visit the telecom related issues. But this made
customers attract to one plus products as were tagging their customers who do their week
manually and prefer to buy product from store rather than going online and wated to fell the
product company also approached some big store where they made a centre of attraction in
between the store cohere people can see the products and have a look on it which target the
other age group people who are fond of offline sopping.
There were some of the ways which contribute to one plus for crossing the chasm from early
adopters to the mainstream.

➢ Conclusion:
From the study done above, it helped in obtaining in depth knowledge about the market of
the OnePlus as compared with the other smart phone brand. Followed by identification of the
target market of the OnePlus and what are the strategies that are being followed by the
company in order to expand its sale and expand its market globally.