Why Apple iPhone failed in India ?

Read about the Apple iPhone’s debacle especially in the Indian Market. Market researchers argue that Apple has downplayed India for the country not being a potential ground for iPhone. No doubt that iPhone is a great device , Its a revolutionary phone - much more than a phone. Apple iPhone is creating waves across the globe and the Time magazine has named the iPhone as the invention of the year of 2007, but what really went wrong for India?

It wasn’t just the pricing that did iPhone in. Apple got everything-starting with marketing communication to the sales and distribution model-wrong, say analysts.

These finer points can be counted for why India cannot be a potential market. The reasons for the debacle varies from company’s marketing strategy to consumer’s need.

Perspective 1 :India ’s Consumer’s need

• Texting or SMS is the hottest mobile thing in India – It is not so comfortable with the touchscreen keypad in the iPhones
• No Video Recording – iPhone sure comes with a camera but not sophisticated enough for video recording which is so much fun for all.
• TouchScreen phones are still not popular
• Mobile Web is not big in India but its Growing - mobile internet usage is still small compared to PC internet usage. iPhone Web Apps is a totally new area and mobile internet is the backbone for these iPhone apps which are heavily data driven. If Apple can force the Operators like Airtel and Vodafone to bring out unlimited GPRS plans then things might change.
• Users dont spend much on Value Added Services such as ringtones,songs etc - We Indians spend a lot on phones for sure but mainly for calls and messages nothing more.

Alright… But such reasons on consumer’s need would prove ambiguous for why iPhones are still not so infamous in India. “Around 120 million handsets are sold in India every year and, of these, almost 4% to 5% are smartphones. Nokia has around 60-70% share of this market,” says Gartner’s Gupta. Sure, there is a way to get going with iPhones for India!

Perspective2: Company’s Marketing Strategy

Selling huge numbers in India was not even Apple’s game plan, it seems. Around the time of its launch, the company had said it hoped to sell 10 million units globally by December, whereas in India, it would ship 100,000 phones by December 2009. Clearly, Apple wasn’t expecting big sales from the market. It does not seem that Apple ever thought it would make a huge splash in India, allocating just 50,000 iPhones to that market.

“The company failed to strike a connect with Indian consumers. That, according to me, is their biggest failure and it may have repercussions for them in future as well. Whether they sold enough numbers or not is secondary. A brand like Apple need not be told that an iconic product needs iconic advertising, a solid marketing push,” says Prathap Suthan, national creative director of advertising agency Cheil Communications India.

Reasons for the tepid debut of the iPhone in India: price, promotion, and distribution. For one, pricing was always going to be part of it. At $800, the gadget was without a doubt expensive, especially considering a typical IT worker’s annual salary ranges from $12,000-$24,000. Indian consumers were well aware that the iPhone was selling in the US for $199, but Apple made no attempt to explain the sizable cost difference—that subsidzing handsets isn’t common practice in the Indian market as it is in the US. The price of the iPhone is not just the problem. Shedloads of other smartphones are selling well in India. It seems that Apple and its carrier partners Bharti Airtel and Vodafone didn’t promote the iPhone as aggressively as was done in other countries.

Voices from Marketing Researchers assert the above mentioned reasons.

“Besides a very high price tag, one main reason behind iPhone’s failure in India is that there was a very weak link as far as consumer confidence was concerned,” says Anshul Gupta, senior research analyst, Gartner Inc., an information technology research and advisory firm.

“The company failed to strike a connect with Indian consumers. That, according to me, is their biggest failure and it may have repercussions for them in future as well. Whether they sold enough numbers or not is secondary. A brand like Apple need not be told that an iconic product needs iconic advertising, a solid marketing push,” says Prathap Suthan, national creative director of advertising agency Cheil Communications India.