What is ‘Bendgate’? It is firstly created by a Youtube producer called Lewis Hilsenteger (a.k.a. Unbox Therapy) where he showed an iPhone 6 Plus can be bent with bare hands, and it soon spread via various social networks and became a world-trending topic. Bent iPhones soon occupied a dominant space on the media and this movement of showing bent iPhones on social medias was given the name ‘Bendgate’.
Apple’s iPhone, being the leader of the smartphone market, is known for its elegant design, stable performance and constant high-quality. This enables it to dominate with a huge portion of market shares, and leaving other smartphone brands, such as Samsung or LG, to exert themselves to compete for only a small portion of the rest. With Ries and Trouts’ analysis of value proposition, It is natural that these brands are not satisfied with their current brand positions, hence they seek for opportunities to reposition their brand. To do so, a company can reposition the brand value of its competitor (the leader) and propose to costumers a new brand image or their own. The effort of repositioning is described as the battle of information in consumers minds, and this is exactly what ‘Bendgate’ is all about.
Image credit: ABS-CBN news
Image credit: ABS-CBN News
Image credit: ABS-CBN News
The tweets above are released by Apple’s competitors soon after ‘Bendgate’ became trending. At a glance, these tweets merely bring a laughter to readers as they taunt iPhone’s Bendgate with humorous pictures and captions. However, their strategic use in value proposition is revealed when scrutinized. These tweets does not contain any information of the iPhone, they use the word ‘bend’ and the ‘Bendgate’ hashtag to allow customers subconsciously relate the image to a comparison with the bent iPhone. This avoids covertly advertising for competitors while still achieving the goal of altering competitors’ brand image. Moreover, they each emphasized on a strength of their own that is related to the topic of bending, which converts the weakness exposed of iPhones to a strength of their own products. Samsung and LG both emphasized on the naturally curved design of their products, while HTC proposed the strength of materials of their products.
In this battle of customers minds caused by information overload, iPhone’s Bendgate gives its competitors a great opportunity to lower customer’s perception of Apple’s brand image, and strength’s their own brand images to climb up the ladder of brand values. They successfully seized that opportunity and killed two birds with one stone.
Work Cited: “Samsung, Other Brands Troll Apple over #bendgate.” ABS-CBN News. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Oct. 2014.