By attacking Apple head-on, Samsung’s marketers thought they could
establish themselves as the challenger brand, turning the competition with
Apple into a Coke-versus-Pepsi war for the smartphone world. But how do
you attack Apple without looking petty, without giving it free advertising,
without acting like the smaller dog in the pack who barks the loudest and
then gets laughed at?
Wallace was pushing for the blunter Coke-versus-Pepsi strategy. But
Pendleton and others wanted to tone down the approach.
“You never attack the people who are buying the products,” he told
Brian.
Samsung’s approach? The customers were Apple’s victims. “I think this is
done with a wink and a smile,” Pendleton told Business Insider.
“It was very confusing for Samsung, the Apple of Korea...not to be
number one in the U.S.,” Brian Wallace said. It was as if “Steve Jobs had
gone to Paris and couldn’t understand why Apple was losing market share
in France.”
The team turned to a consultant named Joe Crump, senior vice
president for strategy and planning at Razorfish, one of the world’s largest
interactive agencies, to help them convey the depth of the brand problem in
America to Samsung’s senior executives. Crump had an idea to get that
across: He’d send camera crews around Times Square, each carrying two
duffel bags. The first bag, people on the street would be told, contained the
next unreleased iPhone. The other had a Samsung phone.
“What would you give us for each?”
Here was the response to the question when they thought the bag
contained the new, unreleased iPhone: “I’d give you my brand new
BMW....I’d give you ten thousand dollars....I’d give you my sister.”
And the response for the Galaxy: “I don’t know. Five bucks?” One guy
offered his half-eaten ice cream cone.
“The Samsung [response] was just blistering,” Brian recalled. “We had
to even take some of it out because it was just so harsh.”
A visiting delegation of South Korean executives huddled in a
conference room to watch the video of these Times Square interactions.
They were aghast. Suddenly Pendleton had their ear. The research—the
field testing—had been done for internal consumption only. It was designed
by Pendleton to get the South Korean executives to grasp the size of the
problem.