
According to one of the executives at Samsung, the line of ads which mock Apple’s iPhone and its devotees marked a tipping point for the South Korean electronics firm, one that sparked conversation that has propelled Samsung’s brand on to become one of the most valuable in the world. Samsung and Apple account for more than 100% of the profits in the smartphone industry when considering the losses of other manufacturers. The South Korean manufacturer is the top handset maker in the world in terms of overall units sold, though it significantly lags Apple in terms of profit from those devices.
When Samsung began mocking the industry-leading iPhone, “that really did mark quite a tipping point for us globally,” according to the company’s chief marketing officer Arno Lenoir. According to Lenoir:
We were able to tell a cheeky story, if you think about it, we're a Korean company starting to really mess with the order of things.
I don't think the public sees us as a market leader just yet, and I quite like that. I like being thought of as a challenger brand – I think even though we will be in most segments a market leader, we will always be acting like a challenger. And that comes back to that perpetual state-of-crisis mindset.
We look at things like the S&P 500 companies in 1997. 87 percent of those companies are no longer in existence, whether they've been bought or merged or just failed.
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