By Austine Huang,
realme Philippines VP for Marketing
Creative virtual launches, innovative activations, and record-breaking sales. One feat after another. This is realme Philippines adapting to the changing business terrain to serve the market despite the challenges brought about by the pandemic. At its core, realme Philippines is a story that starts and ends with the youth — meeting their needs and engaging with them to deliver on its promise of elevating their lifestyle and being their companion.
The market and business landscape are constantly evolving, but the ongoing pandemic has accelerated many changes these past months — from establishments realigning strategies, operations, events, and conferences going digital, employees working remotely to brands changing the way they interact with their stakeholders and consumers raising their expectations on brand commitment and actions.
Along with greater availability and access to information, the role and demands of the audience have significantly changed. They are no longer just passive recipients of strategies and messaging, no longer on the benches clapping for the ones onstage. They are now an active part of the narrative, joining campaigns and conversations and having a greater role in a brand’s success or failure.
realme utilizes digital tools and channels to better connect with our audiences
Engaging with the audience, especially during these challenging times, is an arduous task. With consumer priorities changing and the focus going to essential needs, how do brands remain relevant? How can brands help ease people’s concerns during this trying period? We at realme Philippines make sure our campaigns resonate with our audiences on many levels–message, language, and medium.
Even before the pandemic, we have been leveraging social media and utilizing both traditional and digital platforms in our campaigns. With the youth, our target market being digital natives, we place a high premium on digital channels. But with the accelerated shift to digital across different businesses and for many needs with the start of the lockdown, we not only had to double our efforts but we also had to rethink the way we do business, starting with how we interact with our audiences and involving them more in our projects and campaigns without compromising our role as their lifestyle partner.
Maintaining our target market’s loyalty is a continuous process — we have to constantly prove to them that we are the right brand for them and that their beliefs and ours are aligned. In August 2020, when we created the realme Fanfest, a month-long celebration consisting of promos, online sales, product launches, brand collaboration, and a virtual concert, we made sure the activities and events revolved around some of the interests of the youth such as fashion, content creation, gaming, music, and entertainment.
We used multiple platforms, optimizing both traditional and social media channels, and sought the youth’s participation and love for content creation through hashtags, competitions, and interactive activities. The realme Fanfest was well-received, earning us additional 67,514 Facebook followers, positive social media sentiment of 95.80 percent, 550 media clips, and a potential reach of 198,274,937 across all print and online media platforms.
The youth are very critical when it comes to authenticity: They crave space where they can express their honest opinions but also want to be assured what they see or read is true and real. Our official realme Philippines Facebook Community has grown to more than 146,000 members because of its egalitarian nature.
It is open to anyone and welcomes ideas and opinions from everyone — breaking boundaries between consumers and businesses as it builds real communities and genuine connections. realme executives and users interact and communicate their ideas and concerns with each other, with squad leaders, mentors, and tech leaders moderating the page. The members are encouraged to ask questions and share their personal stories with the brand and its products and are assured to be welcomed and taken seriously by the members and moderators.
The realme Philippines Facebook Community and our Smartphone Photography Club with 26,000 members are sustainable ecosystems with loyal members voluntarily serving as advocates of the brand. In the age of one Zoom meeting after another, the youth appreciate authenticity more than ever, and as a reward, they will give their loyalty and support, which eventually translates to brand success.
One of our most successful initiatives as a brand that involves the youth is the realme Philippines Mobile Legends Cup (RMLC), which was recently recognized at the 18th Philippine Quill Awards.
The RMLC aims to provide an avenue to help amateur and professional Filipino Mobile Legends gamers develop their skills in mobile gaming. Aside from this, we also won awards for our mini-film SuperWar and online content series realme Philippines Squadcast which both fall under the Communication Management category. The realme Philippines Facebook Community and the realme Philippines Squadcast were also lauded in the Social Media Programs category under Communication Skills, underscoring our broad and effective utilization of new media to reach our audiences.
To further expand our services and continue providing state-of-the-art technology to our customers, we are establishing the realme Techlife, a network of partnerships with local tech brands and companies.
Through the realme Techlife, we will be able to conduct independent R&D, joint customization development and product selection from the tech network. It will also let us continue producing trendy, affordable and high-quality products while creating a smart and trendy IoT life for the world’s youth together with realme.
In the future, further changes in the marketing, business and advertising industry will come. This isn’t a cause for concern but rather a reminder for us not to leave our audiences out of the conversation. As the lifestyle partner of the youth, realme Philippines will continue doing what it does best: listening to the youth and providing them with the technology that they need, guided by our pursuit of innovation and driven with our ‘Dare to Leap’ ideology.
