Xiaomi, OnePlus and the Aam Aadmi Party, Part 1

Upstarts Xiaomi and OnePlus are shaking up the Smartphone World. Established brands and market leaders like Samsung are losing market share. The God of the present Smartphone world, Apple, is taking notice.

Another upstart, the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi has done something similar. Established parties like the Congress have seen their vote share in Delhi decimated. Since the victory in the general elections, the BJP and the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi could do nothing wrong. Successive victories and huge successes of national schemes were filling up the mass media. But the disruption, that was the AAP, reduced them to less than 5% of the seats in the Delhi assembly.

So what is happening here which is defying logic? Let us look up Modi first. The main marketing media which the BJP employed in the general election was Modi and his huge rallies. Those were a revelation then, an articulate, aggressive Modi, compared to the silence of Manmohan Singh, the erstwhile Congress PM. People lapped it up and BJP won a famous victory. Since then, the same formula used and re-used, finally lost its effectiveness in the Delhi Election. The rallies and the full page newspaper ads were still their but maybe they lost their relevance. The message which the BJP was trying to communicate was lost amidst multiple messaging from the BJP to the masses. The message was the BJP’s perception of what the people of Delhi wanted. Now we know how much wrong they had read the message.

Now, Let us look at Android. Samsung created the novelty- the phablet category, the large screen smartphones.  They were the price warriors also. They had more Galaxy Smartphones across price points than you could count. Then followed the deluge. There were no entry barriers to Android, so a host  of manufacturers followed, big and small in launching an array of Android Devices. All surprisingly had the same messaging, their perception of what the masses wanted to hear. All focused on hardware specifications. All, I am afraid are on the verge of becoming commodities.