Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun is certainly making a name for himself as China’s answer to Apple’s Steve Jobs. Xiaomi’s products are widely held to be good value, built well and of excellent design. Also impressive is the company’s attitude to customer feedback, with the crowdsourcing of ideas which provide the basis for the design features they offer. The customer feedback is highly valued and when used to give the customers what they want they also make them feel like an important part of the process.
Once a new handset is announced, customers express their intent to buy on social media, giving the company an excellent idea of how many handsets they need to produce but also makes sales extremely fast. When the MI 3 was launched Xiaomi used this sales format to sell 100,000 handsets in just 83 seconds. Pretty impressive stuff.
