Samsung has regained its top spot in Indian smartphone market by reinventing itself. It has surpassed the Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo by concentrating on youth-centric marketing, lower priced devices and a mix of online and offline retail.
The new tactics like reinventing itself as a younger brand and new marketing techniques, has helped the South Korean tech giant reclaim its top spot in the Indian smartphone market in the second quarter.
“Samsung was living in a sort of denial of the threat that Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo posed but now they’ve come out of the ostrich hole,” said Rushabh Doshi, research manager at industry tracker Canalys to Economic Times.
Its Galaxy J series have been doing really well in India: J6 and J8 selling 100,000 a day. These phones offer variety of new features like ‘chat over video’ which allows users to view videos without interruption as they chat side by side.
Five years ago, it had 20 per cent share in the Chinese market, but this year it fell down to less than 1 per cent outshined by Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo majorly by pricing. For Samsung, India is the biggest market after US and for that it has invested heavily by opening world’s biggest smartphone factory in Noida last month.
Samsung was behind Xiaomi just by 2 per cent: it had market share of 26 per cent whereas Xiaomi having 28 per cent market share. But Samsung started selling three new phones in the quarter while Xiaomi had one product release.
Samsung changed its advertising strategy by eliminating traditional TV advertising and adopted online campaigns featuring Tiger Shroff and uploading videos and photos on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Samsung also sponsored the Mumbai Indians IPL cricket team making its famous among the youth of India. It has been spending a lot on marketing to gain the spot back.
