Topic > Marketing and Competitive Strategy: Motorola…

Recently, Motorola, the former mobile giant, launched a marketing campaign inviting loyal Apple customers to buy its Moto Z instead of upgrading theirs iPhone to version 7 (Kulp ). Motorola designs Moto Z as a comparison object of iPhone so that it can provide the great innovation – Moto Mods to its target audience. Moto Mods are the accessories of the Moto Z including a projector, a speaker and a power supply that greatly attract the attention of Apple buyers (Linaria). As a result, this marketing campaign can be identified as a differentiation strategy and a competitive strategy to highlight product quality and innovation towards Apple's leading company in the mobile market. However, Carmine Gallo proves that Apple's biggest success factor is its insane customer loyalty (2). Apple achieves this crazy customer loyalty through strong likeability, reliability and quality as aspects emphasized by its products like IPhone (Gallo 9). In this case Motorola is targeting Apple's loyal customers because it believes that they can change customers' decisions by attracting new features that iPhone cannot provide. However, the Motorola campaign did not influence the customer's desire to purchase iPhone 7. The effectiveness of customer loyalty shows a negative correlation (Chandrasekaran et al. 161). Determine that it is difficult for Motorola to successfully convince Apple's loyal customers to change their purchasing behaviors when Apple builds significantly strong customer loyalty. Unfortunately, according to Gallo's illustration, Apple can be recognized as the most successful company in building strong customer loyalty in the world (4). As Miklos Sarvary suggests, it is better to target a market segment that is sufficiently different from your competitors, in order to ensure the competitiveness of your marketing strategy. Consistency is the most important aspect associated with brand image development (Haynes, Lackman, and Guskey 289). It is established that Motorola's marketing strategy should be consistent with the brand image in recent years in order to foster the image of its new products. However, the brand images associated with Apple and Motorola are significantly different. From Apple's perspective, it is the most "cool", "fashionable", and "valuable" brand in the global mobile phone industry (Gallo 2). In contrast, Motorola's long-term brand image is "traditional," "commercial," and "high-quality for business" (Elkin 4). However, Luca Petruzzellis believes that Motorola has a weak brand effect in attracting consumer purchase compared to Apple (627). Therefore, on the one hand, Motorola develops its marketing strategy keeping in mind that its brand image is as strong as that of Apple, so that it can successfully attract the attention of Apple's loyal customers. On the other hand, the actual market performance in Italy indicates that Motorola's brand image is significantly weaker than that of Apple. These two scenes demonstrate that Motorola fails to achieve the consistency associated with its marketing strategy and brand