Since the release of Galaxy S3 and Note 2, Samsung has been striving with their best effort to win over the hearts of today’s smartphone users, especiallythe Apple’s Iphone users. Spending over $402 million in U.S. in their marketing for last year’s Galaxy S3, Samsung’s Promotion part of their marketing mix is finally seeing the light of success.

In their strategy of promoting the core smartphone products, Samsung chose to approach the consumers with the feeling of familiarity, friendliness, and freshness. Instead of bombing the consumers with ads filled with information about the phone’s technological specs, Samsung created episodes of video advertisements that each presents a unique feature of their smartphone. For instance, there are videos about NFC feature used to download music off of a poster, S voice feature for voice command, and Burst Mode feature to take motion pictures. It’s easy, quick explanation of one feature, without tedious reading of lines and lines of information written in words that only tech experts can understand.

The blog post written by Brad Reed tells how successful Samsung’s marketing strategy is in contrast to that of LG and HTC. The most significant point that sets Samsung and others apart is the promotion strategy of how information about the device is carried to the receiver. In the process of decoding, the receiver can fail due to the lack of necessary knowledge required to understand particular content. In this case, the words such as “next generation quad core processor” and “2GB of RAM”(Reed), hinder the consumers from fully understanding how amazing the new features are for the smartphones they are buying. Samsung made it simple and concise to the point that people, even those in their seniority, can quickly understand the complex technological abilities of the Samsung phones, in result, shortening the length of decoding process in communicating with the consumers.

Agreeing to Brad Reed’s post about Samsung’s marketing strategy, if Samsung continues to introduce new revolutionary smartphones that are much in advance that Apple’s smartphones in both technology and marketing, it will definitely be able to overcome the domination of Apple in smartphone market.

It is not too much to say that the 21th century is the decade of the Korean Wave. Korean Wave refers to the “phenomenon of Korean entertainment and popular culture rolling over the world with pop music, TV dramas, and movies”(Korea.Net). Psy’s Gangnam Style is a perfect example of Korean Wave sweeping over the world, which brought together millions of people with a song that is not even understandable by most of the audience.

The majority of Asia is now dominated by the craze of K-pop Idols, who are young, attractive singers from South Korea. From Korean dramas to Korean cosmetics, anything that is ‘made in Korea’ is the thing in Asia. With the number consumers from Europe rapidly increasing, Korean culture is gaining its power in world market. See Korean Wave in Paris, France.

It seems that the consumers of Korean product, culture, and media are considering Korean celebrities as aspirational reference group, the social reference group in which consumers want to belong and relate to. Also, the low level of loyalty of Southeast Asian consumers make them vulnerable to new trends and ideas, which increases the attractiveness of Korean product.

This is an amazing opportunity for Korean companies to ride the Korean Wave and expand into the international market to gain their brand value and penetrate the fortress of North American brands that have been dominating for decades in the world market. Today, Samsung is releasing its revolutionary smartphone, Galaxy S4, an upgraded version of last year’s Galaxy S3 that competed furiously with Apple’s Iphone 5. As one of the components of their STP strategy, Samsung can definitely target towards the consumer segments in Asia and Europe, who have been exposed to and are interested in Korean culture. Using famous K-pop celebrities as their models to market and promote the new Galaxy S4, they may be able to overcome Apple’s dominance in smartphone industry.

Citation:

Korea.net. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.korea.net/Government/Current-Affairs/Korean-Wave.