HTC No Longer ‘Quietly’ Brilliant

By Alex Angove

Last updated 26 March 2013

HTC will be ditching its now familiar “Quietly Brilliant” tagline in favor of more aggressive marketing stance. According to the Wall St Journal, HTC Chief Marketing Officer Benjamin Ho has declared that the new marketing approach will be “bolder”.

We can’t help feeling that the decision is, while entirely laudable, perhaps a smidge late. HTC may have been ‘quietly brilliant’ for years now, but its recent crowning achievement, the HTC One, deserved a lot more fanfare and hoopla upon its global unveiling than it received. Perhaps a louder approach to marketing would have been more effective a few weeks, or even a month or more ago, rather than after the biggest launch of HTC’s recent history.

For the first time that we can remember there are actually intelligent and measured debates proliferating the web as to whether HTC will take the cake this year or if the Samsung Galaxy S4 will manage to beat out the One in tech reviews. Obviously Samsung is still a shoe-in to sell more units and generate more profit overall, but should the HTC One actually turn out to be the more highly reviewed device then Samsung’s victory would be purely down to marketing.

It’s not all about marketing, but in a way it mostly is. In order to receive mass public appeal, a modern device not only has to be great and offer a unique experience with new features and, preferably, attractive aesthetic design, but it must also be able to tell the public why it should be interested. Last year’s HTC One X was a great phone, it really was, but in our experiences when we asked the average consumer if they preferred the Galaxy S3 or the One X we’d generally hear one thing: “GS3. What’s the One X?”

Creating a great device is obviously still important. Convincing a large chunk of the paying public to buy your device only to find that it’s substantially sub-par is only going to backfire, but by the same token spending millions on designing a fantastic product only to have it wallow in a pool of public disinterest is arguably even worse. At least with the first option you can make a bit of money on the sales, even if your company’s reputation does suffer in the long term. But at least you would have a reputation, at least the public would be familiar with the brand and talk about it.

The top two smartphone manufacturers in the world right now, Samsung and Apple, have one major thing in common: a significant piece of the public’s mental market share. When people think about smartphones they think about iPhones and, to a lesser extent, Android. When people think about Android they tend to think about Samsung.

We’ve received more than one inquiry in our time from readers asking the difference between Samsung and Android and, despite the question sounding uneducated on the outset, it’s not the fault of the person doing the asking. Rather, it’s a symptom/result of Samsung’s vocal presence in the smartphone market. All the law suits, banned devices and huge Galaxy S launches have done wonders for increasing Samsung’s profile as an easily recognised brand. There was a long time there when if you were reading about Android related news then the chances were it was about something that Samsung was involved in.

In short, Samsung has never been ‘quietly’ brilliant.

Modesty may work for individual people, but when an international company makes a great product then it’s time to grab the megaphone. This is a lesson that HTC may finally have learned.

We hope that this new step towards a ‘bolder’ HTC will come in time to push the HTC One with a vigor that we’ve not yet seen, as it really is a top-notch smartphone worthy of going head-to-head with the GS4. Even in the likely event that it takes HTC years to convincingly implant itself in the minds of the consumer public, as it did for Samsung, HTC couldn’t have hoped for a better device than the One with which to start exercising its bragging rights.