How Marketing Ruined The K20 Pro's India Launch

The way a device is marketed can - as it should - often leave dying excitement on the company’s target demographic. With Redmi’s recent disastrous launch of the K20 Pro in India, it is fair to say that poor marketing decisions as well as a steep price-tag has left many deep with a pile of disappointment.

Humble Beginnings

To fully understand how this came to be, it is important to look back on Xiaomi’s prior success in India, the Pocophone F1. Launching a few weeks shy of the One Plus 6, the company’s first phone to raise the price bracket above what was then considered a budget phone, the Pocophone F1 was Xiaomi’s way of telling the market that objective flagship performance could still be achieved in the budget zone.

This message was directly conveyed through the company’s marketing campaigns, where it was made clear that the Pocophone was a value phone: it didn’t include the nicest screen, and it wasn’t the designed with the world’s most premium stones, but it did have one thing - benchmark scores of a $1000 flagship in a $300 body. It was this direct and very visual way of tackling the purely performance tagline that gave birth to the saying “flagship killer”, a line that is very much responsible for the device’s market success.

Stepping on a Grave

Since its very first piece of marketing, the Redmi K20 Pro was called “the flagship killer 2.0”, with the company going as far as to hint that Killer +2 + 0 composed the device’s naming scheme. With such good legacy forged from the Pocophone F1’s release, it was clear that hype would then be formed around this new device.

Coming just shy of the One Plus 7’s release, it was also clear that the company was planning to do a complete repeat of its successful Poco, but this time, things were different. With the catchline of this release being “Believe the hype”, Xiaomi was hesitant to show the device’s statistical performance, let alone the price, instead focusing on device’s sheer power and apparent beauty.

Surely enough, now that the K20 Pro is finally out in India, it is oddly more expensive than the base line One Plus 7, a device that - in the eyes of Indians - provides a premium experience at a premium price-tag. For Redmi, a company so widely known for value devices, to release a phone that provides beauty over sheer value has not only single handedly disappointed its Indian fanbase, but put the company’s entire concept of a “flagship killer” in jeopardy.

Do you think a price-cut could save the K20 Pro’s reputation in India, or is it a fair deal as is? Let us know down below!