Android One: Is it a marketing mistake in India?

On September 15, 2014 Google launched its most awaited project Android One in India and subsequently in various emerging markets in Asia Pacific and Latin America. The sole motive of this project is to tap the major chunk of 5 billion population of the world, known as “The Next Billion” who has never used mobile phone. The current trend in Indian market shows that Android One is struggling a lot and unable to compete with Chinese company like Xiaomi and Motorola. Is it a marketing mistake by Google in India or has Google misunderstood the Indian Customers? Before going into details let’s have a look into some facts about Android One.

Android One is the stock android version (without any customization) mainly targeted towards customers buying the first ever smartphone and developers. The main benefit of Android One is that it is standardized and requires minimum hardware so the cost of the smartphones are very low ranging from 100 to 110 USD. Last but not the least it will get android update as soon as google will release one. Why it is needed? Well, the Android market has got fragmented as various companies have developed their own version of Android by making some changes in the stock android (like new GUI, pre-loaded third party apps etc.) to make it more appealing. So Google was losing its ground and wanted to control its OS like Apple does. That’s why Android One came up.

With a great marketing campaign, strategic partnership with Indian players like Micromax, Karbonn and Spice, Google launched Android One in a grand manner. The price of these smartphones are around 6000 INR to 6500 INR. For the first 15 days of September total 2.3 lakh handsets are shipped but it went down to 2 lakh in the month of October. According to IDC, roughly 8 million smartphones are shipped into India, of which only 2.5% is Android One.

Model	Sep-14	Oct-14
Micromax Canvas A1	119000	132460
Spice Dream Uno	43100	34791
Karbonn Sparkle V	67440	34390

(Imported Number of Android One Devices Source: Cybex Exim Solution)

It is very difficult to say whether Android One is a success or not looking into this trend of two months but it is sure that, it is not doing as expected by the pundits. Let’s use the 4P concept of marketing to analyze it.

Product: Google choice to use minimum hardware back fired it. The MediaTek 1.3GHz quad-core lacks behind the performance of a 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon or a 1.2 GHz dual-core Intel Atom. Apart from the processor, for an Android OS 1700 mAh battery is very low. The camera quality (2MP) in those handsets is also not that great.

Price: The pricing strategy for the Android One is good but the stiff competition made it more difficult. Mobile producers like Xiaomi (Redmi 1s), Motorola (Moto E) are providing better mobile experience within the same price range. So low priced strategy didn’t work properly.

Promotion: Targeting the Tier-II and Tier-III cities in India, the promotion are not so extensive in the traditional media. Apart from some TV ads, launch day newspaper ad not much promotion is there for the target customer. So it could not leveraged it properly.

Place: Android one was launched through the e-commerce sites and clearly it was not a well thought approach. Low internet penetration and lack of supply chain infrastructure made it difficult to reach the target customer. But finally the traditional retailer came into the picture later in the month of September and it is something to cheer about.

Above all, the current set of Android One smartphones failed to deliver value to the Indian customers. It is not only the OS, to make a decent product a good combination of both hardware and software are required. Currently Google is collaborating with big global players like HTC, Lenovo to provide Android One. Hope they will do well in Indian market by fulfilling the need of the target customer.