2016. OPPO is now the best-selling smartphone brand in China. Not one of the best-selling. The best-selling. Canalys data for Q2 2016 has OPPO at the top of the Chinese market with an 18.8% share, ahead of Huawei, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Apple. For a company that the Western tech press treats as a second-tier regional player, this is a number that requires a rethinking of what “second-tier” means when the market in question is the largest in the world.

The product that drove this result is the OPPO F1, launched in January 2016 and marketed globally as “The Camera Phone.” The F1 is not OPPO’s most advanced hardware. It is OPPO’s most clearly positioned hardware. The F1 is built for one use case: taking photographs, particularly portraits and selfies, and sharing them on social media. The front camera is 8MP with f/2.0 aperture and OPPO’s beauty processing mode. The tagline is not a specification. It is an identity. “The Camera Phone” does not tell you the megapixel count. It tells you what kind of person buys this device and what they do with it.

Why the offline retail strategy wins in 2016

The marketing approach that puts the F1 in Chinese consumers’ hands is the one OPPO has been building since 2008: deep offline retail penetration in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, celebrity endorsement contracts that are significant by Chinese market standards, and shop-in-shop retail presence that ensures OPPO is the brand the sales assistant recommends when a first-time smartphone buyer walks into a phone store in a city that Xiaomi’s online-direct model has not reached.

Xiaomi’s rise, which dominated Chinese tech media coverage from 2011 to 2015, was built on online direct sales and flash sales with extremely limited distribution footprint. OPPO spent the same period building the offline retail network that is now generating China’s highest smartphone market share. The retail strategy that looked slow relative to Xiaomi’s viral growth is now outperforming it. The lesson is not that online or offline is better as an absolute. The lesson is that China’s consumer electronics market is large enough and geographically diverse enough that both strategies can succeed in different segments — and OPPO chose the segment where most of the volume was.

The celebrity endorsement machine

OPPO’s endorsement portfolio in 2016 includes Chinese pop stars, Korean pop crossovers, and international sports figures. The spend on celebrity marketing is significant by any standard and enormous relative to OPPO’s R&D investment. This is a deliberate allocation decision: OPPO has determined that brand desirability in its target market is driven more by aspiration — who is seen using the phone — than by specification performance. The F1’s camera quality is good but not technically leading. What the F1 campaign makes buyers feel is that the F1 is what beautiful people use to take beautiful photographs. That feeling is worth more than benchmark performance in the market OPPO is targeting.

The Western tech media critique of OPPO in 2016 is usually some version of “good hardware, heavy marketing, not for enthusiasts.” That critique is accurate and completely misses the point. OPPO is not building for the Western tech enthusiast. It is building for a Chinese consumer who has never owned a smartphone, is buying their first one, and is standing in a retail store where the sales assistant is recommending OPPO because OPPO has trained that sales assistant, equipped that store with OPPO display materials, and paid the marketing costs that make the brand name recognizable. That buyer is acquiring OPPO at a rate that makes OPPO #1 in China. The enthusiast market is a rounding error by comparison.

Part of OPPO: The Complete Story, my full history of OPPO from DVD players to the BBK empire.