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Motorola Wearable Tech

Motorola wants to be your mate as it looks to beat ‘worthy’ Apple and Samsung and ‘redefine’ mobile relationships

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By Natalie Mortimer, N/A

July 29, 2015 | 4 min read

Motorola is looking to position itself as the “fun brand in mobile” with a campaign for three new mobile phones as it looks to wrestle market share from “worthy” competitors Apple and Samsung.

The brand, which currently owns 5.2 per cent of the mobile market share, yesterday (28 July) introduced a suite of new products including the Moto G third generation and two new versions of its Moto X in a bid to compete at both the low and high end of the smartphone market.

Central to this is the brand’s current ‘Choose Choice’ messaging, which launched last year. However a stronger emphasis will be placed on defining a new relationship between consumers and their mobile devices with the idea of making technology “more human”, according to Motorola brand marketing director Barry Smyth.

“We believe that the relationship between the person and the devices is strained,” he told The Drum. “In fact it’s just a unilateral relationship - you’re just a slave to your device, it’s like a bad boyfriend or a bad girlfriend that doesn’t really communicate with you so what we like is for devices to be more contributory to the relationship so this is why we’ve come up with this idea of creating more meaningful relationships with mobile."

“There is this stigma now of people being totally engrossed in their phones and so the degree to which we can create technology that can pull people out of their phones, or at least you can actually have technology that makes you more human, is an interesting space to play in”.

That technology includes the upgraded Moto Assist, Motorola’s contextual learning app that can automate tasks such as turning off a phone when the user steps into a particular location.

Marketing-wise the majority of the activity will play out across social with Motorola steering clear of TV advertising, which Motorola believes consumers have “become numb to”. While he couldn’t be drawn on the planned media spend Smythe did say that “you will see us” as Motorola looks drive home a deeper awareness.

“The message is the key and we believe we have found a way to differentiate our products because there is so much messaging out there,” he said. “At best it is confusing, at the worst people are apathetic about it.

“We think people are becoming a little bit numb to TV advertising anyway particularly in our category. If you look across both carriers and manufacturers we are probably the highest spending category in terms of paid media. That means there are literally thousands of messages that are being pummelled at people… we believe in having more meaningful interactions with people where they are coalescing and that’s in social environments”.

The decision to introduce three products at once is two fold; by combining the launch, which spans 90 countries, Motorola is hoping to create "a ground swell of interest and awareness" that is more economic for its marketing spend, while pulling its products under one umbrella - similar to Apple's approach - helps to introduce the idea of interoperability between the brand's products including the Motorola smart watch Moto 360.

"We are very interested in, and continue to be interested in, creating great wearable technology that compliments the smartphone technology," added Smythe.

With smaller budgets to play with Motorola is hoping that its less serious positioning and more approachable personality will help consumers buy into its products.

"We know that these devices are not precious and our competitors treat them as precious, worthy things," argued Smythe. "We are worthy of our consumers, there’s a different mentality that we take. As a brand we’re not trying to take ourselves too seriously we think this category takes itself so seriously... we’re trying to have fun.

"We're not saving the world, sometimes people are just taking selfies."

Motorola Wearable Tech

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