How Co-Creation Created a New Flagship Smartphone

Instead, we are actually focused on our users, what do they want and how can we give them the best experience possible. Lots of brands at the moment, when they think about community engagement, they think that means liking a tweet or replying to other people on Twitter. But actually for us, community engagement is a much deeper thing. It involves interacting with people on a human and individual level. Why we think about community is that actually it goes to the very core of why we created OnePlus. At the beginning, when we started five years ago, the last thing that anybody needed was another smartphone. But actually, there was a group of people obsessed with tech that really thought that they could bring a better phone to the market. And the reason for that was actually a very simple premise. We thought, why don't we ask people what they actually want? And so we asked, what do you want in a smartphone? And our community started to grow and started to evolve. Because as soon as people feel listened to, they want to engage if they really see that they can impact change. So we believe that in order to bring the best product, it has to be a product that people want. And you can spend millions on an R&D department doing research. But actually, when you talk face to face with people, you can really get some really great insights into how they use their phone, what do they want, how do we create the balance of a fast and smooth experience that means that people can have something to interact with that they love. From an innovation perspective, there's two ways we could go about it. There's product innovation. And a lot of people at the moment are innovating within the smartphone space. So for instance, foldable phones. But what we believe in is meaningful innovation. So actually innovating in ways that bring the best user experience, not just innovation for innovation's sake. And actually, when we started, it was quite an innovative thought to actually ask people what it was they wanted. I think it's very important that we engage with our customers and our users on a very personal level. So rather than just online, we do think online is very important. We have a great forum where we ask for product feedback and we have two-way dialogue. But actually, we want to make sure that there's a human connection. So everyone from our company, including our two co-founders, they go out and meet customers every single day. And also we focus on offline events. So in local countries, we want to make sure that we feel like a local brand because we care about our community in that particular country. Example is Amsterdam. We created an OpenEars forum where we brought some of our R&D departments to actually talk to our community about what they want in a product and to feed into our camera development. And then that actually impacts the product. And then on a more fun basis as well, because actually it may be that people don't want to engage in terms of product development, but they want to engage in your values and the community spirit. So we also do plastic fishing in the Amsterdam canals on a weekly basis where members of the OnePlus community can come, get involved, meet the team, and just talk about tech. The way that we do all of our marketing is co-creation because actually when we first started there was a lot of people complaining like, we don't want advertising. Why are you spending money on advertising? You should be spending money on bringing us the latest phone. We don't want, we don't need you to advertise. So we want to make you feel involved. And that involves video content as well. So there's something that we did recently was actually a Go Explore challenge. And because the smartphone is basically the way that everybody is creating video at the moment, we encouraged our community to go out on the longest day, film some, film something that they were doing. And then we created a mashup of that and then send that out through our channels. There's two ways of co-creation. There's actually submitting content, but there's also us enabling people to get involved in the video content that we create. So another example would be we have created a piano out of 17 OnePlus 70 Pros. And we are taking that around Europe and encouraging our community to come down, play on it, and then dedicate songs to other people in the community or their friends that we will then post on social on their behalf. So something that's very relevant to us at the moment is the development of 5G. So as a smartphone, we actually were the first smartphone to bring 5G to the UK. And it's been a huge part of our R&D and also will be something that we're thinking about massively from a content creation. I think it will change the way that people use their phones and it will change the way that people communicate in terms of the increase in capacity, latency, speed. People will be able to interact on an individual level instantly all across the world. And it's something that we are really focusing on for next year. We haven't been using webinars, but something that we do do is that we release a new product every six months. So we bring a product. So for instance, this year we have brought the 7th to market and also the 17th. And how we do that is we have a keynote in one location around the world. And then that is broadcast around the world through live streams. And then we cut that down and create a keynote in 60 seconds or keynote in 15 seconds so that if people that are really engaged want to watch the whole hour, they can. But actually how do we make that in a little bit more digestible content?