When browsing through the blogs of my COMM101 class, Rosie Lu’s blog post caught my eyes as I am a personal owner of a OnePlus One smartphone. In Rosie’s post, she wrote “Invitation is also like a baton, it passes on the business from one customer to another.” I couldn’t agree more.
I recall when I was in need of a new phone, and learned about OnePlus One from my friend, I was more than skeptical. First of all, it featured a significantly low pricing of $299 with a quality build equivalent of the traditional $600 phones in the our North American market. This seemed to be too good to be true. Secondly, it’s a Chinese brand that I’ve never heard of. Naturally, my unreliable alert was turned on as I’ve had previous experiences with poor purchases from Chinese websites. Finally, the phone is distributed through invitation-only online sales. This means I wouldn’t even be able to physically examine the phone until I actually make the purchase and wait for it to arrive in the mail. All of these points spelled sketchy to me.
Had it been anyone else who told me about the product, I probably wouldn’t have even given it a second thought. This reinforces the point that Rosie was trying to make in her blog post: as a new, foreign brand and business, the invitation allows customers to share the product with their connections while delivering genuine feedback regarding the product. It’s simply a natural referral system that promotes their brand and credibility in our market through their customers at no cost.
Being a direct online seller, they can also avoid the cost of a store lease while using the invitation to prevents leftover of inventory because one invitation resembles one unit of the phone available. In fact, they recently implemented a pre-invitation option for their OnePlus Two model to ensure sales and and allows them to make decisions on production. One can easily see how the invitation helps sustain the OnePlus business model to offer low product pricing.
Image Source:
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