What Motorola needs to do in 2018

Strip down the lineup, go back to the basics

Look at Motorola’s site. For a company that doesn’t rank so high in terms of worldwide sales, it sells too many phones. The lineup includes multiple products in the high-end, mid-range, and low-end segments. Unless you’re Samsung or another high-volume brand, you shouldn’t be doing that.

Whatever Google did for Motorola doesn’t matter to Lenovo. The old Motorola was a hot mess. It boasted an oversized lineup and didn’t bother implementing compelling features. In 2012, Google purchased Motorola to keep the brand alive. Motorola’s been around for decades, and Android would’ve received widespread embarrassment for not having any viable alternative to Samsung. The Google-owned Motorola was reset and slowly reintroduced itself with the Moto X in August 2013, the Moto G in November 2013, and the Moto E in May 2014.

Motorola found its groove again under Google’s watch. But the company was handed off to Lenovo in late 2014. The new Chinese parent company threw out Google’s playbook and brought back old habits.

In 2017, Motorola’s near-lethal problem returned. The lineup, as it stands today, is unnecessary for a second-tier brand. Had it stayed on Google’s narrow path, Motorola might’ve become the true Samsung rival we always wanted it to be. That’s not going to happen anything soon, though. Lenovo cares more about quantity than anything else.

Most of the year was crazy-busy, and we’re not talking about the mobile industry alone. Motorola was playing against itself in a sense. The Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus launched in February, and their releases followed in March. The Moto E4 and Moto E4 Plus popped up in June alongside the Moto Z2 Play. Late in the summer, the Moto Z2 Force was announced. But it didn’t end there. Motorola released the Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus in the final months of 2017.

In a matter of six months (that felt like two weeks), the company sent out almost ten phones. That’s absurd for anyone. Motorola needs to drop products from its pipeline immediately. We don’t need two members for the Moto G series or the Moto E series. And half-year upgrades certainly weren’t warranted for the Moto G series this year. Ideally the company will do two phones for the Moto Z series and one each for the others.

We’ll love Motorola just the same if it focuses on small number of products and makes them each special in their own way. Not only does the current lineup make keeping track of things difficult for the team at TechnoBuffalo, it confuses consumers while shopping.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2018/01/06/what-motorola-needs-to-do-in-2018/