Asus has been doing pretty sell by making and selling the Nexus 7 for Google, but it’s already been 2 years and chances are they won’t be the maker for Nexus 7 (or Nexus 8?) next year, so they’re looking for ways to keep selling at least as many tablets, if not more, in the future.
Asus is now trying to sell multiple models on the market, with the hope that some models will catch off, and become popular. They’ve already released five models in the past 3 months: MeMO Pad HD 7, the second-gen Nexus 7, the Fonepad 7, the new PadFone Infinity and the recently released high-end Transformer Pad. Analysts don’t think this is a great strategy, though:
Since Asustek is also prepared to release the MeMo Pad HD 8, the MeMOFone HD 5, the FonePad Note FHD 6 and the PadFone mini in the near future, the market watchers believe the Taiwan-based vendor’s market-flooding strategy could be risky.
Why would it be risky? Because it adds a lot more complexity and cost to Asus’ manufacturing lines, and because releasing so many models with so little similarity or commonality between them might not be a good strategy. Samsung makes a lot of models, too, but that probably wouldn’t work as well for Asus as it does for Samsung, if they didn’t try to tie those models into a unifying brand, and make the devices recognizable by Samsung’s customers.
When people see a Galaxy Tab or Galaxy Note, they instinctively know it’s from Samsung, because they already know how the Galaxy S4 or Galaxy Note looks like. Granted, I don’t think those are the best designs on the planet, but at least they can be easily recognized. I don’t think Asus has managed to create that for their devices yet. Not only do they look pretty different from each other, but they also have quite confusing names, and it’s hard to know which is which.
I still think Asus needs a better branding strategy, and a more cohesive product strategy, too. If they can fix that, then I’m sure they’ll do very well, since their products are already high-quality, from low-end to high-end.