Marketing And Competitive Strategy: Motorola's Marketing Strategy

Recently, Motorola, the past mobile phone giant launched a marketing campaign that urged the loyal customers of Apple to buy its Moto Z instead of upgrading their IPhones to the 7 version (Kulp). Motorola designs Moto Z as the comparative object of IPhone so that it can provide the great innovation – the Moto Mods to its target audiences. The Moto Mods are the accessories of Moto Z including a projector, a speaker and a power pack that significantly attract the buying attention of Apple 's fans (Linaria). Accordingly, this marketing campaign can be identified as the differentiation strategy and a competitive strategy to highlight the product quality and innovation against the leading company of Apple in the mobile phone market. However, it

Carmine Gallo demonstrates that the greatest success factor of Apple is its insane customer loyalty (2). Apple achieves this insane customer loyalty through the strong likeability, trustworthiness and quality as the aspects emphasized by its products such as IPhone (Gallo 9). In this case, Motorola targets the loyal customers of Apple because it believes that they may change customer decisions through the attractiveness of new functions that IPhone cannot provide. However, Motorola campaign didn 't affect customer 's desire to buy iPhone 7. The effectiveness of customer loyalty shows a negative correlation (Chandrasekaran et al. 161). It determines that it is hard for Motorola to successfully urge the loyal customer of Apple to change their buying behaviors when Apple builds a significantly strong customer loyalty. Unfortunately, according to the illustration of Gallo, Apple can be recognized as the most successful performer in building the strong customer loyalty in the world (4). As the suggestion of Miklos Sarvary, it is better to target a sufficiently different market segment compared with the competitors, in order to ensure the competitiveness of the marketing strategy

Consistency is the most important aspect associated with the development of brand image (Haynes, Lackman and Guskey 289). It determines that the marketing strategy of Motorola should be consistent with its brand image in recent years in order to benefit the image to its new products. However, the brand images associated with Apple and Motorola are significantly different. On the view of Apple, it is the most "cool", "fashionable" and "valuable" brand in the global mobile phone industry (Gallo 2). In contrast, the brand image of Motorola in long-term is "traditional", "commercial" and "high-quality for business" (Elkin 4). However, Luca Petruzzellis figures out that Motorola has a weak brand effect of attracting the purchase of consumers compared with Apple (627). Accordingly, on the one hand, Motorola develops its marketing strategy with the factor that its brand image is strong as same as Apple so that it can successfully attract the attentions of Apple 's loyal customers. On the other hand, the real market performance in Italy indicates that Motorola 's brand image is significantly weaker than Apple. These two scenes support that Motorola fails to achieve the consistency associated with its marketing strategy and brand