The Oneplus One is a highend smartphone made by the Chinese company Oneplus. It’s a very unique phone. Not especially for it’s features but because buying this phone requires an invitation. And this is the part where producers meet consumers! Getting an invite is possible by contributing at forums, through contests and from friends. So if you’re more active they will reward you by giving an invitation.
But now you are thinking: “why do I want this chinese phone”? The answer is it’s incredible cheap price and it’s high specifications. You will get a phone with the same speed and features as the so called “flag-ship” devices from Samsung, Apple and HTC for 269 euro or 300 dollars.
Now you are maybe thinking: “wow that sounds good, let me buy this smartphone”. But that’s the downside of this sellling model. Getting an invite is extremely hard. Oneplus One can’t giveaway too many invites because of the small production of this phone. That’s why lots of community members show their frustration at their facebook page or at the Oneplus forum.
examples:
For the frustrated people who can’t get an invitation, the company just announced some good news. At the end of october they change the invite system to a pre-oder system. This means that if the phone is in stock they will send it immediately. If it’s out of stock it becomes a pre-order and they give you an approximation for when it will ship before you submit the payment authorization.
What are your opinions about this invite system? Do you mind waiting for that long for a phone when it’s cheaper than the flag-ship devices from Samsung or Apple? And from the marketing side of Oneplus, do you think it’s a smart idea to make a community of fans and rewarding them if they are active at the forum? Let me know in the comments what you think about this.
reference:
https://www.facebook.com/oneplusofficial
http://oneplus.net/blog/2014/09/the-oneplus-pre-order-system/
https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/the-oneplus-invite-system-updated-may-9.1150/
http://oneplus.net/one
https://plus.google.com/102032589992734862411/posts
One of my friends uses this smartphone Oneplus and he is quite satisfied with the functions.
However, I think the model of invitation makes Oneplus like a gift rather than a product. The community Oneplus focuses on is a relatively closed one. It can only reach and cover a limited number of people. By the way, Oneplus didn’t perform well in advertising in China and I never heard it before my friend got this phone.
There is another company of smartphone in China called Mi, and its community is much more open compared to Oneplus. They uses the “hunger marketing” that every week they only sell limited number of phones but if you get an F-code from someone in the community, you will get the priority to buy the phone. Mi also communicates actively on their own forum as well as the social network pages, and it has much more influence in the market of smartphones.
In my opinion if a company wants to combine the community with the business, they should try to engage more people in the community and develop the strangers into the friends, rather than just invite more friends into the community, which Oneplus is doing.