The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By Natalie Mortimer, N/A

April 1, 2015 | 3 min read

HTC head of marketing Ben Walsh has said he is “convinced” the smartphone brand’s “largest marketing execution” to date alongside an in-depth analysis of the business will ensure its success in 2015.

Speaking to The Drum on the eve of the new campaign launch (31 March) Walsh said that HTC has spent the last year and a half focussing on three key areas of the company, and is hoping that this will help improve the brand's dipping market share and build on HTC’s growing brand loyalty.

“In the last year and a half we’ve really taken a close look at the areas that we need to make a difference in and examined every single area,” he revealed. “That is a very long list but the key areas of channel marketing, operating support and retail and then the overall brand campaign are the three areas that we absolutely have to get right in order to make a difference and I’m convinced that we will this year.”

For the new campaign HTC has focussed on media consumption patterns, running key message text such as ‘Let Them Stare’ and ‘Epic Everything’ across its digital and TV executions so that consumers who don’t have time to stop and engage with the ads will still receive the messaging.

The campaign creative itself, the first work by recently appointed agency SapientNitro, plays on the idea that while HTC builds premium, feature-rich products it is the potential its consumers “can unleash” when using an HTC handset that is of importance.

Ads will run across social media, out-of-home, YouTube and traditional advertising formats including TV and print.

Despite HTC suffering a turbulent two years of trading – falling from a position where it supplied one in ten smartphones globally to just 2.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2013 – Walsh said that from a sentiment point of view HTC is in a strong position. The brand has seen a quarter-on-quarter increase on brand preference and has upped lifestyle coverage by 37 per cent in the last year.

“We were the only brand to increase loyalty in 2014 quarter-on-quarter,” he said. “[So success] is about ensuring everything is in place and as of today there couldn’t be more in place to ensure the HTC One M9 gets the best possible start than at any other time in our history.”

Last week the designer of the new handset Jonah Becker left the business after less than year. HTC also shook up its senior management and appointed co-founder and and chairman Cher Wang as CEO.

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