HTC defends marketing initiatives

It hasn't been an easy time for HTC. Racing in an extremely competitive environment with much stronger rivals, the brand is well aware of its challenges.Pushing against its flailing market share, it spent the whole of last year on major marketing initiatives to turnaround its brand.While tech geeks and enthusiasts were aware of the technological differentiators presented by the brand, general consumers still did not know what the Taiwanese smartphone company stood for. Despite all its prior efforts, the public generally saw it still as a tech provider, senior director of marketing, Southeast Asia, Sirpa Ikola tells Marketing.The brand was in desperate need to make itself more interesting. Hence, in the second half of the year, in came Ironman himself as Robert Downey Jr jumped on board as the brand’s ambassador. Many deemed the stunt as HTC’s boldest move yet to reviving its image.HTC reportedly spent US$12 million signing on the actor for a two year period. A global campaign was rolled out starting in August and the initial campaign comprised a series of 16-second ads which featured the actor as the instigator of change. The series of ads were designed as playful and provided unique interpretations of HTC acronyms such as “Humongous Tinfoil Catamaran” and “Hipster Troll Carwash”.Nonetheless in January 2014, co-founder and chairwoman Cher Wang told Reuters in an interview that marketing was an area that the company “didn’t do well” in 2013.So were all the efforts in vain? Was the US$12 million spent worth it, I ask Ikola.“Marketing did what they could. And we did so in a very competitive environment,” was her response.Ikola, who came on board the HTC team last year, justifies that brand building does not happen overnight.“We focused on brand and I think the brand piece worked for us. Whether it worked to activate sales on a retail level or not- perhaps there are still things to be learnt - but brand building does not happen overnight,” she said.To Ikola, both brand building and marketing takes time and one of the key factors in marketing that one quickly comes to terms with is the ability to create multiple experiences and experiment before you hit the targets. What the marketing initiatives did was create buzz around the brand, however.“I think it was a great effort in getting our name out there and it was successful,” said Ikola.“We created a lot of talk-ability about what he (Downey Jr.) was able to do for the brand and that awareness of what HTC stands for was necessary and important. At the same time we need to do more in consumerisation of the brand and educating the people to understand the key experiences that we bring to the market.”And perhaps that is something that HTC needs to do more of. Education efforts, Ikola explained are however not an easy feat for the brand. Plus being an android brand, she says the brand has to work harder to find a point of differentiation.