Frais d’une vente surprise de janvier, Google a augmenté sa stratégie de marketing agressif avec une nouvelle offre aux personnes qui veulent acheter un téléphone Pixel.
Fresh from a surprise January sale, Google has ramped up its aggressive marketing strategy with a new offer to people who want to buy a Pixel 8.
The has company launched a new promotion that gives everyone who buys a Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro a £125 ($158.59) Google store gift card. The promotion runs until February 2nd and it’s only available to U.K. buyers. For U.S. shoppers, Google has slashed prices of its two flagships phones for January, which the company has done a couple of times since the handsets launched in October.
Google is also offering temporarily enhanced trade-in prices for your old device, topping out at £710 ($900.78) when buying the Pixel 8 Pro. Of course, to get this amount you will need to trade in an iPhone 14 Pro Max 1TB. This is a good price because it’s slightly more than you’re likely to get if you sold it on eBay, for example. But trading in a phone that has several years of software and security updates to go isn’t a wise thing to do.
There is some small print here you need to watch out for. Firstly, you have to be signed in to your Google account when buying the Pixel 8. People who checkout as guests won’t receive the gift card. Also, the offer won’t be valid if the phone is returned, and the gift card has to be used within a year of issuance. Similarly, the inflated trade-in prices will only last until February 2nd.
Google has repeatedly slashed the prices of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro since they launched in October last year. In between the price cuts, the company has thrown out gift cards and vouchers to people who subscribe to its services like YouTube Premium.
That $125 voucher that was sent out to YouTube Premium users was stackable on top of the then discounted phones. This brought final prices down to $424 and $674 for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro respectively. A seriously impressive price cut for phones that are barely three months old.
This is part of a much more aggressive marketing strategy the company has undertaken in the last few years, which has arguably paid off with Pixel sales steadily improving. Albeit they remain dwarfed by Samsung and Apple sales. Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 will be announced imminently and it’s hard not to think that Google’s repeated price cuts are related. The Korean company’s new phone is expected to park its tanks directly on Google’s turf with new AI abilities, too.
The goal for Google isn’t just to shift phones, but get people into its ecosystem, which it has been revamping recently. Google Podcasts is being shuttered, in its stead a newly refreshed version of YouTube Music is being pushed. Google Assistant (in its current form) appears to be winding down with a recent announcement that several features are being dropped. It looks like Google is planning to replace Assistant with the more accomplished generative AI chatbot, Bard, which could end up with some premium paid-for tiers soon. Your Pixel phone is a conduit to more Google subscriptions.
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