Samsung group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul. Samsung was founded by Lee Byung Chul in 1938 as a trading company. Now Samsung has a vast product portfolio and its presence is in several different product categories. The brand image driver for Samsung are the Samsung Smartphones such as the Samsung note series or the Samsung galaxy series. Overall, Samsung is present in the following product categories.
1) Tablets
2) Mobile phones – Smart phones, normal phones,
3) Televisions – LEDs, LCDs. Plasma TV, SMART TV, HDTV etc
4) Cameras and Camcorders
5) Refrigerators
6) Air conditioners
7) Washing machine
8) Microwave ovens
9) IT – Laptops, printers and accessories
Based on SWOT analysis, Samsung’s strength is its reliability. The problems with their product is very trifling. Samsung is known for its service and people know that Samsung gives a very fast service for any of its product. Thus in the marketing mix of Samsung, the product portfolio is one of the strongest point for Samsung.
Price: Most of their product is inexpensive, and it can be one of the strengths of Samsung. However, they should use “price skimming” and ”competitive pricing” more effectively. For example they use “price skimming” for mobile products, but it is not effective. Their mobile industry is falling into the red. In “law-end market” of smartphone, three Chinese companies suppress the market, and in “hight-end market”, there is biggest competitor iPhone. If they can’t defeat iPhone by technical aspect, they should not use price skimming strategy.
Place: Samsung has a single distributor through whom they distribute throughout a territory. So all material of Samsung will be sold to a single distributor who in turn will sell it forward to retailers. This is a great strategy.
Promotion: They put their most efforts on this part. Since the company has spent lavishly on advertisements featuring celebrities and innovative marketing partnerships, people are familiar with the name “Samsung” around the world. But now, they should not spend money for it compared to previous days.
1) Tablets
2) Mobile phones – Smart phones, normal phones,
3) Televisions – LEDs, LCDs. Plasma TV, SMART TV, HDTV etc
4) Cameras and Camcorders
5) Refrigerators
6) Air conditioners
7) Washing machine
8) Microwave ovens
9) IT – Laptops, printers and accessories
Based on SWOT analysis, Samsung’s strength is its reliability. The problems with their product is very trifling. Samsung is known for its service and people know that Samsung gives a very fast service for any of its product. Thus in the marketing mix of Samsung, the product portfolio is one of the strongest point for Samsung.
Price: Most of their product is inexpensive, and it can be one of the strengths of Samsung. However, they should use “price skimming” and ”competitive pricing” more effectively. For example they use “price skimming” for mobile products, but it is not effective. Their mobile industry is falling into the red. In “law-end market” of smartphone, three Chinese companies suppress the market, and in “hight-end market”, there is biggest competitor iPhone. If they can’t defeat iPhone by technical aspect, they should not use price skimming strategy.
Place: Samsung has a single distributor through whom they distribute throughout a territory. So all material of Samsung will be sold to a single distributor who in turn will sell it forward to retailers. This is a great strategy.
Promotion: They put their most efforts on this part. Since the company has spent lavishly on advertisements featuring celebrities and innovative marketing partnerships, people are familiar with the name “Samsung” around the world. But now, they should not spend money for it compared to previous days.
One more considerable part of Samsung is its competitor. Their competitor might be Apple, LG, Sony, etc. That is right, but for the next decades, they should reconsider about their competitor.
When you hear the word “competitor” on your business, you might think other companies in the same field. That is true. However, the competitor is not always in the same field. “A battle” in terms of marketing is the customers certain moment when they think, “which product should I buy between this and that?”
Battle field is in customers’ mind. For example, you will buy TV product. If you ask someone, “what are the competitors of Samsung when you buy a TV?”, you will get answers such as LG, Vizio, Sony, Sharp, etc. However, do customers really worry about Samsung and LG? Each person has his/her own favorite brands, that is why they don’t worry about if they buy Samsung’s product or LG’s product.
The point is customers don’t care which company’s product they should buy, but they consider which product they should buy based on their aim to buy the product.
If they will buy TV to get information, the competitors of Samsung will be Apple because they have popular cellphones laptop. To speak of extremes, newspaper could be the competitor as well.
Based on this example, Samsung is putting focus on their phone products. The key test of whether Samsung can move from a close-and-gaining second to becoming truly dominant is whether it can deliver products that are truly game-changing. To really start pulling customers away from iPhones in droves, it needs to differentiate itself beyond marketing and a bigger screen.
It's aggressively investing in Silicon Valley with several big campuses to help it start to lead in software as it already does with hardware.
For all these factors, there is a number of important aspects that had to be remembered while implementing the strategy:
• Samsung’s competitive advantage related to the unique breeding environment for innovation and efficacy of the centralised R&D and production should have been preserved, thus all new product development had to be kept in the Korean headquarters;
• another competitive advantage of the company, the quality, should have been definitely maintained, too; it might have become a challenge if part of the production was to be moved to China, therefore Samsung had to ensure it could properly influence its Chinese partner (e.g. by remaining a majority stakeholder in the joint undertaking);
• while overall reduction of costs was not of key importance for Samsung, the partnership with a Chinese firm could have been, nonetheless, used for reduction of labour costs related to production of legacy products (in case of which the associated gain was to be most significant) with no risk of compromising valuable intellectual property; that way, another competitive advantage of Samsung, the industry’s best ASP to cost ratio, would be further strengthened.
Weakness is Samsung never introduces a new design on its own, it always waits to attack it’s competitors. Thus, it missed the first mover advantages.
Source
Source