Vivo chases cricket and Bollywood to attract customers. In a bid to seek attention of the customers, Vivo again decides to follow its already tried-&-tested formula: cricket & Bollywood and has paid Rs2,199 crore (up to $330 million) to sponsor India’s most-watched cricket event, the ‘Indian Premier League’ (IPL).
The sponsorship is more than four-and-a-half times compared to its previous figure for the IPL.
The Chinese smartphone maker has signed up Bollywood actor Aamir Khan as its brand ambassador for around Rs 4 crore per day of shooting. This payment will make Khan’s annual brand endorsement fee around Rs 15 crore.
Vivo entered India in 2014 and gained popularity with features that appealed to Indians, like the phones that are slimmest and have specialised cameras for selfie crazy users.
The company focused on the mid-segment category of phones priced between Rs8,000 and Rs25,000, an affordable sweet-spot in a price-sensitive market.
Contrary to strategy of online sales by Xiaomi and Motorola, Vivo took to carpet-bombing the country in terms of distribution & invested on getting its products in offline stores all across country.
Must Read: Now you can delete items from your Netflix Watch History
Vivo could draw in retailers by offering them generous margins.
According to a senior analyst with market research firm IDC India, ‘Jaipal Singh’, the strength of the Vivo lies in its offline extension as the brand is widely spread in India and this distribution in India has worked in its favour.
The company has also structured its management team in such a way that it had multiple state-level entities to handle distribution & manage the markets.
Marketing had been one of Vivo’s primary areas of focus and the company spent millions of dollars on putting up billboards across India alongside splashing advertisements across media channels.
Vivo manged well to use the biggest platforms and celebrities. Back in 2015, Vivo sponsored the IPL for the 1st time. In 2016, it could sign on Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh as its brand ambassador.
IPL and Bollywood helped Vivo grow rapidly in a short period of time. By the first half of the last year, Vivo was among the country’s top five smartphone brands, and it held around 12 percent of the country’s smartphone market.
