Analysis of Tesla’s Marketing Strategy in China

Tesla, an automobile company which started its pure electric vehicle business at an early time, has made a lot of efforts since it officially entered China market in 2014. In this paper we investigated the strategy of Tesla’s development and marketing based on case study. Through the study of Tesla’s development strategy and marketing strategy, we found that Tesla has widened the product line to make it appropriate with the characteristics of the China market and adopted development-oriented strategy to upgrade from the supply side. In order to get more market share, it also developed different products to achieve the need of consumers in different classes. Tesla uses differentiation strategy on products, makes the unique performance and design become the core competitiveness that cannot be easily followed by competitors. Supplemented by a series of marketing strategies such as celebrity effect and hunger marketing, it occupied certain shares of market in a short time. We did a comparative study between BYD and Tesla to find the advantages and shortages of the two companies and what they could learn from each other. Through SWOT analysis, we believe that Tesla should continue to develop its advantages in R & D and supply chain, seize the good opportunity of China’s economic recovery after passing the most serious time with COVID-19 to consolidate its market position and occupy more share of market in China. Overall, these results shed light on Tesla’s marketing strategy in China at the company level, as well as its current strengths and weaknesses and the direction of efforts it needs to take in the future.