Tobias Kleinmann & Xin Chen 
HTC Marketing Plan [PDF ebook] 

Project Report from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics – Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1, 7, San Diego State University (Marketing Department), language: English, abstract: HTC quickly emerged on the smartphone scene with the remarkable success of The Sense, one of its first models, and broke many industry sales records. People were asking, “Who is HTC?” Our research indicates that HTC’s rapid rise to success was because of innovation and technological capabilities. Even though the HTC brand was not widely recognized, its smartphones were generating interest. In our primary research, we discovered that some people owned an HTC phone but did not know that HTC was the manufacturer. Obviously, brand awareness was relatively low. For HTC to stay relevant in the hypercompetitive smartphone industry, it needs serious revamping of its marketing plan.

With smartphone market penetration increasing to more than 20 percent in the past five years and reaching 46.8 percent in Q3 2011, HTC has tremendous opportunities to establish a solid market position. After examining the market conditions and current HTC performance in the U.S., our team proposes that HTC position itself as a technological leader by targeting consumers ages 18 to 34. This promising segment has potential sales of $2.5 million.
We analyzed the industry and examined external factors that could impact HTC’s bottom line. This analysis gave us crucial insight into the smartphone market. We also analyzed the competitive environment that includes Apple, Motorola, and RIM (Blackberry). HTC, which has a positive reputation on the merits of its technology, needs to boldly differentiate itself in the marketplace. Through market analysis, we discovered that HTC has a strong market size, market potential, and distinct target markets.

We recommend that HTC take specific steps through segmenting, targeting, and positioning to execute its marketing plan. We are confident that our plan can increase HTC’s market share by 2 percent each year. By the end of 2012, our marketing objective is to reach a 24 percent market share of the smartphone industry, which equals 18.7 million HTC customers. The plan includes recommendations and precautions at distribution channels so that HTC differentiates itself from the other brands. We developed a budget for the marketing plan and devised procedures to monitor each effort in order to reach our projected market share increase. We are confident that our marketing plan can take HTC from an emerging brand to a dominant market leader.