Where as
the old battleground for ultimate supremacy for consumer’s hearts and minds, as
well as their wallets, was in the home computing market with the Mac vs. PC
debate. During that time Apple had a brilliant marketing campaign basically
pitting the two against each other showing off their strengths versus their
competitors weaknesses. I found that kind of a lopsided battle because they
were essentially fighting solely against an operating system, where they had a
family of products and hardware that ran on similar software since Microsoft
didn’t make any of the hardware that their OS was running on, enabling Apple to
trounce all over them and will the battle in a landslide.
Recently
the battleground has shifted to people’s pockets not in the monetary sense but
in the mobile phone market battleground. Apple has had a solid lead for years since their
debut of the iPhone in 2007 coinciding with their partnership through AT&T being the only
carrier to have the device. All other carriers have been playing catch up,
until now! Apple and Samsung have been battling it out for cell phone supremacy
since 2010 with the introduction of the Samsung Galaxy S series phone. Dragging
each others name through the mud in the process. Apple has taken Samsung to
court on many occasions over copyright and patent infringements on their iPhone
product line. In many cases Apple have won and been granted injunctions on the sale
of Samsung products in certain markets globally. Looking at that tells me one
thing, that Apple sees Samsung as a threat to their business.
Samsung
just released their Galaxy S4 series phone globally. Samsung got really tired
of their competition pushing them around and took a page out of Apple’s book
and decided to fight fire with fire, replicating the strategy Apple used in the
Mac vs. PC ads showing their strengths and pitting them against the competition.
Samsung has just released a series of ads attacking iPhones “cool factor”
amongst younger buyers who are the majority of new cell phones buyers here in
the states. In their newest ads Samsung suggests that only old folks own an
iPhone, and make some pretty good and funny points too goo.gl/5Iijy. In the ad there are
parents and students at a college graduation party and the young kids are using
their Galaxy S4s to take part in all the action http://goo.gl/8oguS. The ways in which this occurs
are hilarious; such as taking a photo and offering the parents to see if they
can smell the photo because it looks that good, or using the phone as a remote
control for your TV. My favorite though was with the Galaxy phones you are able
to bump phones and share content and when a parent tried to do the same thing
with here iPhone 5 she was rejected and told she couldn’t do that. It is
marketing like that at the most opportune time college graduation season, where parents are looking for
cool gifts to get their kids for graduation and simultaneously always looking
for grains of approval from their upstart, self-righteously technological
children that this campaign works wonders http://goo.gl/Q2vkN.
Samsung is
hot on the heels of Apple when it comes to cell phone market share globally,
and this round of advertising really shows that they are willing to pull out
all the stops and ignore what’s happening to them in the courts to try and one
up the competition who has dominated for so long. Samsung is pulling another
Apple move in which they are partnering with Best Buy to bring the Samsung
Experience to consumers http://goo.gl/CXS6K. This is a strategy designed to combat Apple’s growing
number of Apple Stores by having a physical booth in retail stores in which to
show off their family of electronic products.
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