In 2008, when looking at which mobile products generate the most talk (or what we like to call buzz), the clear winner was the Apple iPhone 3G, which due to netizens recycling content from traditional media to forums and then back to traditional media, helped it to rise above the rest in terms of buzz.
In 2009 Q1/Q2 however, despite Apple releasing the upgraded iPhone 3GS, due to stiff competition from HTC with the G1 & G2, Palm with the Pre and Meizu with the M8, the title of most talked about mobile is still far from clear cut.
Now while we’d guess that most people have heard of the first three mobile brands we just mentioned (Apple, HTC and Palm), what really stood out for us was how the relatively unknown Chinese mobile brand Meizu managed to generate as much buzz as it did. As such in this post we look into the secret behind this domestic brands outstanding IWOM performance.
Firstly, by taking a look into Meizu M8’s buzz volume and net sentiment rate (NSR) from around its launch date on the 18th February we can see that the phone’s buzz volume peaked in April with 496,938 posts per month and that its net sentiment rate peaked in March at 0.86 .
When compared to the buzz and sentiment rate of the Apple iPhone from the same time period we can see that the Meizu’s M8 buzz was almost five times higher than the iPhone’s and that it was beating the iPhone in terms of net sentiment rate.
How did Meizu manage to do this? Looking even deeper we discovered that one of the main sources of the buzz was from the official Meizu’s BBS bbs.meizu.com, which when compared to the Apple iPhone’s most famous fan BBS bbs.weiphone.com revealed some pretty interesting stastictics:
As well as beating the Apple fan BBS in terms of members, the Meizu BBS then goes onto then beat them in terms of passion (the average number of posts each user writes), creativity (the originality of those posts) and interactivity (the average number of times other users will respond to their post). By harnising this communities passion for Meizu products this is how the release of the M8 managed to generate as much buzz as it did.
Now while building a strong community or BBS around your brand is far from easy, the way Meizu did it was by having their CEO Huang Zhang often posting and replying to questions on the Meizu BBS about phones user interfaces, hardware configurations, slogans and even asking them to comment on the brands price strategy. For example taken from a recent post:
Netizen: “My Little Computer”, how about this slogan?
Huang Zhang (CEO): Good work, ~~~ “Little Computer” might work nicely on TV.
Page Views: 10,972; No of replies: 204 (Link)
Although these CEO’s replies are often very limited, his participation within the community backed up with a strong group of forum administrators has gone on to create a healthy vibrant community, which now posts over 40,000 posts per day and boasts over 1,400,000 registered members.
Although we don’t have the Meizu M8’s sales figures on hand and so can’t tell you if this high IWOM exposure and engagement led to sales, in April, Zhuhai TV (Link) reported that from 18th February to 18th April Meizu had gone on to sell over 100,000 M8 phones.
Summing up, while we don’t think that every brand should necessarily have its own BBS, we think the Meizu BBS is a great case study as to how a brand can leverage their most passionate supporters and advocates to help raise exposure of their products and take on the international brands such as Apple, HTC and Palm.
The following post was written by Ouris our Mobile Analyst. For more information about the talk about Mobile Phones on the Chinese Internet take a look at our Mobile Phone Syndicated Teaser.
