OnePlus

Introduction

It’s amazing to see the growth of OnePlus starting out in Shenzhen, China and moving into many other English speaking region. To find out how the marketing team made waves and grew the brand’s market share, we spoke to Sathish Kumaar, social analytics consultant and key contributor to the organization. He provides valuable market insights to support the marketing team in India by monitoring the performance and strategize their marketing plan.

The challenge

In the spring of 2018, OnePlus released their latest smartphone, the OnePlus 6, and launched numerous campaigns like the OnePlus 6 Marvel Avengers Limited Edition, #OnePlusUnboxing campaign, and Live Pop-Up. These campaigns garnered a large amount of engagement online and it was important to track and understand the meaning behind these figures.

However, the team experienced a challenge with monitoring mentions of the brand in real time, coming from multiple sources. Understanding the challenge and inefficiency of this manual process, the digital analytics team spearheaded by Sathish adopted Brandwatch Analytics.

Using Brandwatch, OnePlus was able to add context to their brand tracking which powered their product lines, helped developed more impactful influencer relationships, and improved the consistency in their customer service.

Giving consumers what they want

With Brandwatch Analytics, the team discovered that many consumers’ interests stood out during the launch period. Using sentiment analysis and category breakdown, the digital analytics team uncovered what consumers discussed most during the launch, the top three topics being the processor chip used in the product (Snapdragon 845 processor), the price point, and the design (the Avengers limited edition phone version).

To further narrow-down the interests of this audience, OnePlus used data from Brandwatch Audiences and found that people discussing the OnePlus launch were more interested in technology and sports than the average Twitter user, 28% and 24% more respectively.

Using these insights from the conversations and interests among their followers, the marketing team had a better understanding how to strategize the type of campaign they planned to launch in conjunction with the launch of OnePlus 6.

Having these supporting data points, it was an easy call for the entire team to agree on sponsoring the gaming sports tournament— AsphaltCup. They leveraged the gaming event to promote OnePlus 6 by amplifying the features in the messaging of the campaign which increased the interest and engagement of their fans.

OnePlus values their fans and understands the importance of listening to the communities’ interests and this has translated to an increase in positive engagement.

Dissolving negativity through listening

When OnePlus 6 was first launched, the team noticed a huge spike in negative mentions of the notch features.

When they did a deeper dive into the data, they found that their customers were unhappy about the phone display’s notch feature because it partially covered the screen display.

The social team took this constructive feedback to the product team and had the team update the features. To further address these customer opinions, the first software update for the OnePlus 6 included an optional feature to “hide the notch”. After that update was released in late May, there was an obvious decline in negative mentions.

Consistency in customer service

Social media holds the largest database of customer opinion, so it’s important that brands attend to them when they happen. (See the Best Brands for CX report) OnePlus values the feedback of their customers and constantly improve to meet their demands.

To ensure customers are given the highest level of attention, a group of 20 customer support representatives is dedicated to attend to any questions on OnePlus official social media accounts. However, this investment in responding to as many customer service responses as possible occasionally led to errors in the responses representatives gave customers. When the initiative was first launched, the team found an average of 6 errors daily ranging from typos and grammatical mistakes to incorrect recommendation.

To eliminate the errors, the team created a dashboard on Brandwatch Analytics to monitor replies. When a mistake is made in a representative’s reply, an email alert will be sent to the marketing team and the customer support is given an SLA (Service-Level-Agreement) of 5 minutes to amend the reply. Subsequently, the team compiled all the common mistakes identified and created a set of standardized answers.