HTC admits that marketing NOT products are the reason for sales slump

[ericdabbs]

It took the HTC Chairwoman Cher Wang to come out an admit that the reason for the poor sales have been the lack of marketing since they know they made a great product in the HTC One based on great tech reviews on the device.

 

Perhaps HTC needs to go back to its roots and make a SD card slot with a removable back and pack a much beefier battery.  HTC has been notorious to be very stingy with the battery and they need to jack up the battery life since that IMO is one of the top features that customers look for in a premium smartphone.

 

I just hope that HTC and LG does some crazy marketing blitz to advertise their devices to draw market share away from Samsung in the holiday season.

 

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/htcs-wang-pins-problems-marketing-not-products/2013-10-07

Edited October 7, 2013 by ericdabbs

[Paynefanbro]

Samsung is just as bad as Apple in my eyes now.

[afazel]

As in they make a halfway decent product that is made out to be the best thing out there by their marketing department? I used to hate Samsung, but now I'm wanting to trade my HTC One out for an S4 or something similar. Looking around here, it seems Samsung has surpassed HTC in radios and antennas since the S3.

[centermedic]

I agree with the assessment. HTC does produce a very good product in the One. Marketing has failed that device miserably. Removable batteries and sd cards are a deal breaker for a small minority of buyers and adds complexity and cost to manufacturing. I think they are on the right track. They just need to spend some mega dollars on advertising while they still have some money left.

[themuffinman]

It took the HTC Chairwoman Cher Wang to come out an admit that the reason for the poor sales have been the lack of marketing since they know they made a great product in the HTC One based on great tech reviews on the device.

 

Perhaps HTC needs to go back to its roots and make a SD card slot with a removable back and pack a much beefier battery.  HTC has been notorious to be very stingy with the battery and they need to jack up the battery life since that IMO is one of the top features that customers look for in a premium smartphone.

 

I just hope that HTC and LG does some crazy marketing blitz to advertise their devices to draw market share away from Samsung in the holiday season.

 

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/htcs-wang-pins-problems-marketing-not-products/2013-10-07

 

    This argument is old and doesn't have anything to do with anything, if that was the case then apple would have been out of business a lot time ago.  Its all about affective marketing and thats it.  Even though samsung devices have removable batteries with sd card slots, how many times have you seen a samsung ad mentioning that?  You don't, because at the end of the day, only an extreme extreme minority of consumers will demand those two features.  I am sure that eventually samsung will go the apple route and end the removable battery/sd card slot option because thats where the industry on a whole is going.

 

    What samsung did was took a page directly from apple's book, got creative with their marketing campaign and took the fight to apple head on in the market place. Unfortunately this type of  marketing strategy usually requires large amounts of expandable cash which samsung has being that they are one of the largest electronic oem's in the world where as htc just makes phones and thats it. Last year samsung spent almost 1 billion US(and probably a lot more this year) just for advertising and most of that went towards their galaxy line. If I had that kind of budget with the right marketing, I could literally sell anything to almost anyone. I am a huge fan of htc and always will be, but I think they are on their way to a path similar to nokia and blackberry but for different reasons and lack or sd card slot and removable batteries are not the reasons.. HTC makes excellent products but to relay that to consumers on a global scale will simply cost way more than what they can afford. Right now I think HTC is still worth a little too much for someone to come in and try to buy them out but I do see it happening within the next year or two if things don't turn around.

[Mobilesolutions]

The first manufacture to make a Triband device with strong radio performance, large 5.2"+ 1920x1080 screen, aluminum body with an SD card will win the holiday season sales race.

-will

[WiWavelength]

It took the HTC Chairwoman Cher Wang to come out an admit that the reason for the poor sales have been the lack of marketing since they know they made a great product in the HTC One based on great tech reviews on the device.

 

Perhaps HTC needs to go back to its roots and make a SD card slot with a removable back and pack a much beefier battery.

 

Nope.  Most buyers do not care about SD card storage or battery capacity.  They have plenty of onboard storage and sufficient battery to make it through the day.

 

Additionally, you just created a scope shift in your post because you bring up that inadequate marketing is the cause of poor sales, then shift the blame to lack of SD cards and smaller batteries.  But that blame reflects your own preferences, not those of most consumers, and mainstream consumers are who drive the bus.

 

AJ

[WiWavelength]

Looking around here, it seems Samsung has surpassed HTC in radios and antennas since the S3.

 

I am not buying that.  Have HTC users on AT&T and T-Mobile reported lesser RF performance compared to that of Samsung users?  If not, this is more likely a Sprint focused issue.  Honestly, I think HTC may have challenges implementing Sprint's boutique configuration of hybrid CDMA2000/LTE, especially with band 25 LTE 1900.

 

AJ

[afazel]

Could be. I'm looking at the last 2 HTC flagships on Sprint.

[The Dave]

HTC hasn't marketed too aggressively since their Evo line came out. Most commercials and ads I see are either Samsung or Apple. But, yesterday during football I saw a LOT of LG G2 commercials. I won't lie, it was nice to see LG take an aggressive front and really showcase their G2. Marketing is what hooks the mainstream crowd, not specs and reviews.

[ericdabbs]

Could be. I'm looking at the last 2 HTC flagships on Sprint.

 

The HTC One I believe doesn't have RF antenna issues.  We know that the HTC Evo 4G LTE phone was not the best designed product HTC has done but the HTC One seems to be pretty solid on Sprint.

[afazel]

I've seen it mentioned several times around here that the S3 and S4 perform better on LTE than the HTC One. Haven't not owned a Samsung device on Sprint since the original Epic 4G, I can't verify for myself. Are you saying this isn't true?

[hankbear]

HTC was my first Android phone (original EVO), and I also had the 3D, not to mention many Windows Mobile phones from them.  I was attracted away by the richness of the AMOLED displays Samsung uses and ended up with an S2.  I then tried going back to HTC for the EVO 4G LTE, but the bad LTE performance soured me and the bad memory management was the final straw.  I just could not stand to wait on Sense to reload all the time.  So, although the screen was amazing, the quirks drove me away and to the Note 2.  I missed the resolution of the EVO 4G LTE, so I ended up with an S4.  I'm only disappointed in the visibility in direct sunlight, right now.

 

It's interesting to note how I feel about HTC right now, though.  It seems like the EVO 4G LTE was a deliberately bad choice for HTC.  The issues I saw appeared, however right or wrong my opinion may be, to be preventable.  And so, it will take a lot for me to consider another HTC device.  I would be curious to know how many people had an EVO 4G LTE and got rid of it.  I know the memory management was an issue for other carriers with the same hardware, so, perhaps that's a part of this story, as well.

 

I will agree that marketing can make all the difference, but I do believe some of their choices in recent hardware have hurt them , too.  At least the EVO 4G LTE had an SD card slot.  While I like Android for the ecosystem, I also like the flexibility of adding more memory.  Given how often I change phones, I convinced myself I didn't care about the battery.  Perhaps most users truly don't worry about the battery and its ability to be removed, even though battery life is a big deal to most. 

[vtimmy13]

I'm so tired of people hatin on the sd card I love bringin all my photos n stuff phone to phone n will not buy phones without it

[themuffinman]

I'm so tired of people hatin on the sd card I love bringin all my photos n stuff phone to phone n will not buy phones without it

Its not a matter of hating anything, its just how things are heading.  Sure, it would be easier to swap cards but its also just as easy to copy and paste your photos or better yet easily set everything up on dropbox. Also, at any given moment how often will you be going through your phone looking at photos?  Another thing to consider is the fact that these phones are getting a lot faster than ever before and customers don't know much about sd cards other than maybe memory size.  A customer might want to upgrade their memory, they walk into walmart, radioshack, bestbuy.....etc to get a card and more than likely they will get the cheapest one they can find with the memory they need not putting into consideration about what class type the card is rated at.  With internal memory, its a lot faster and it takes the guess work out of it.  Again, you don't hear iphone customers complaining.  For the record though I would definitely prefer an sd card but I nor you and many of us here are not part of the typical customer pool. 

[Dkoellerwx]

I'm so tired of people hatin on the sd card I love bringin all my photos n stuff phone to phone n will not buy phones without it

I dump all of my photos into Dropbox, and so long as I'm on WiFi, LTE, or decent 3G, swiping through photos is about as seamless as if they were actually on the phone. I initially worried about the lack of an SD card slot on the ONE, but have not missed it. The internal memory, plus the cloud is more than enough memory for me.

[ericdabbs]

I dump all of my photos into Dropbox, and so long as I'm on WiFi, LTE, or decent 3G, swiping through photos is about as seamless as if they were actually on the phone. I initially worried about the lack of an SD card slot on the ONE, but have not missed it. The internal memory, plus the cloud is more than enough memory for me.

 

All these issues about synching music, files, photos to the cloud aren't a concern on Sprint or Tmobile since we have unlimited data.  However I have seen complaints from ATT and Verizon users who still want the SD card because they don't want to waste their precious data bucket on searching for photos or streaming music to the cloud and plus trying to find a photo when you have like thousands and thousands of photos in the cloud is pretty annoying and slow compared to a SD card. 

 

There are ways around this to for folks on a data bucket but sometimes its hard to convince folks out there not to scale their entire 100+ GB mp3 collection to about 20 GB.

 

For me personally I don't have an issue if the phone I want doesn't have a SD card since 24 GB out of 32 GB of internal memory plus the cloud is sufficient for me.  Now if we are talking about a phone with 16 GB total internal storage with only 8 GB of free internal memory, that would be an issue for me though since I can easily use up 8 GB of internal memory.

[Nickel]

I think it's more than a marketing problem, to be honest. Think about all of the other Smartphone players and what do they all have in common? Samsung, Sony, LG, Apple and even Nokia and Motorola before the mobile divisions got spun off, all had income coming in that wasn't affected by Smartphone sales. Especially considering the fact that they don't make any of their own components so they have to bid against bigger companies who are willing to spend more.  

[Dkoellerwx]

All these issues about synching music, files, photos to the cloud aren't a concern on Sprint or Tmobile since we have unlimited data.  However I have seen complaints from ATT and Verizon users who still want the SD card because they don't want to waste their precious data bucket on searching for photos or streaming music to the cloud

Sure, I can see that. I would be more concerned if I didn't have unlimited data too. I keep a certain number of photos on my phone, for easy access, but only the important ones. Anything that I don't think is essential is on dropbox. I also don't have a huge music library, so that's not much of a concern either.

 

and plus trying to find a photo when you have like thousands and thousands of photos in the cloud is pretty annoying and slow compared to a SD card.

I do have thousands of photos on the cloud.

It's called folders

[themuffinman]

I think it's more than a marketing problem, to be honest. Think about all of the other Smartphone players and what do they all have in common? Samsung, Sony, LG, Apple and even Nokia and Motorola before the mobile divisions got spun off, all had income coming in that wasn't affected by Smartphone sales. Especially considering the fact that they don't make any of their own components so they have to bid against bigger companies who are willing to spend more.  

Well the problem is marketing but like you said htc has nothing else to fall back on.  Sony and lg's mobile devision hasn't been doing well for a while but of course they make so many other products that they can afford to keep their mobile division up and running.  Same with motorola but they decided to cut their losses and sell their mobile division to google and nokia just got sold to MS.  Its just a matter of time before htc gets bough out, and hopefully who ever buys them out can give them the marketing budget they need to get back to being number one.

[ericdabbs]

I do have thousands of photos on the cloud.

It's called folders

 

HAHA.  Folders help but it doesn't mean that all is well.  You can still have hundreds of photos within the same event folder.  I think its nuts if you don't use folders to separate different events especially if a group of photos are from a vacation and a group of photos are from a graduation. 

 

Lets say you have a 2 week trip to Europe, people rarely go and create sub folders and spend all that time to sort by country or day or whatever.  People just shove all 1000+ photos/videos from that 2 week trip to Europe into that same folder so it still takes time to filter through the photos still. 

[Nickel]

Well the problem is marketing but like you said htc has nothing else to fall back on.  Sony and lg's mobile devision hasn't been doing well for a while but of course they make so many other products that they can afford to keep their mobile division up and running.  Same with motorola but they decided to cut their losses and sell their mobile division to google and nokia just got sold to MS.  Its just a matter of time before htc gets bough out, and hopefully who ever buys them out can give them the marketing budget they need to get back to being number one.

I think that's definitely the best case scenario, but I don't see that happening at all. I think whoever buys them will only keep the HTC name for a couple years while it works on integrating HTC into the company. Don't get me wrong, I hope that doesn't happen.

[CAREND]

HAHA.  Folders help but it doesn't mean that all is well.  You can still have hundreds of photos within the same event folder.  I think its nuts if you don't use folders to separate different events especially if a group of photos are from a vacation and a group of photos are from a graduation. 

 

Lets say you have a 2 week trip to Europe, people rarely go and create sub folders and spend all that time to sort by country or day or whatever.  People just shove all 1000+ photos/videos from that 2 week trip to Europe into that same folder so it still takes time to filter through the photos still. 

 

This is called hoarding.  Stop hoarding pictures and use good cloud services that can auto subfolder or allow favoriting.

[JeffDTD]

Im going to agree with Ms. Wang: HTC's marketing campaign has done it no favors. Its unimagineable to me that they would pay the $$ to get Robert Downey Jr. and the best they can come up with are the trainwreck commercials that I have seen, which tell us next to nothing about devices and are crowded with distraction.

 

With that said, I digress a bit. HTC's modern empire was sort of built around "first"s. They were on the bleeding edge of windows mobile hardware finesse, bringing touchscreen device options to everyone else when the fruit was exclusive to ATT. They brought sprint its first 4g phone and sold a boatload based on that devices large footprint and differentiation. They whored out to verizon to help create the "droid" empire it built. Even for regionals, they brought device offerings/alternatives to customers who lusted after the fruit but couldnt get it. Example: cspire. One of , if not the best selling smartphone ever on cspire, prior to the arrival of the iphone, was the htc hero. I can name more than 20 people I knew who had one. Some still do.

 

HTC isnt going to find a revival with removable batteries and sd card slots. Their uptick will revolve around bringing devices to market which no one else offers. There are no apple-less carrier ecosystems to exploit by copying or offering "almost the same" devices. I question their phablet approach as well, unless the device will truly offer something new.

 

Sent from my SPH-L900 using Tapatalk 4

 

 

[Mondays In Flames]

I've always thought HTC makes the best phones out there, but no one knows about them because their marketing department is the worst!

 

The majority of the people don't really care about SD slots and removable batteries. The proof is in the iPhone! Never has it had an SD slot or removable battery, but it still sells. It all comes down to marketing, it helps the people that don't know about the product, know about it!

 

(Sorry if this doesn't make sense, it's early in the morning xD)

 

 

-Luis