SINCERELY YOUR BRAND

Brands are constantly communicating with you. When you’re standing at the subway station on the way to work, while waiting for videos to load on your device, even when watching your favorite TV dramas, brands are conversing with you.

‘Hello, I am ( ), please won’t you get to know me, and perhaps love me?’

While there was a time when this kind of approach worked, most of us today see such brand promotion as annoying and desperate. When a brand is unique in itself and the message it’s promoting is clear, then it becomes approachable, attractive - and when that happens, we stop to listen, to hear what brands have to say. Sadly, with the decline of TV as the main communication channel for brands, such words of enticement and desire have failed to reach our ears, much less our hearts. According to one study, the average adult spends 9.8 hours consuming media content, is exposed to 360 advertisements (be it TV, radio, the Internet, newspaper or periodicals), with less than 50% of those ads (roughly 150-155) retained at a later time. Even those that leave a strong impact barely reach sales.

- Media Dynamics, Inc., 2014 -

Indeed! Smart brands know this and have found better ways of grabbing our attention. When brands speak to us in different and surprising ways, they begin to appeal to us in a unique way. Not just throwing the message out hoping something will bite, but through ingenious media channels with tantalizing ideas to entice the senses. Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic ethos, “the media is the message” and a later update of that same expression “the medium is the massage*” could not be more true in this day and age. Truly, the media is the message masseuse, NOW!

* Meaning, media’s sensorial effects on our perception and thoughts and how they are accepted into our hearts and psyche.

Samsung Electronics has always strived to be a different, and not your run-of-the-mill brand. When conveying a sales message or choosing appropriate media, conventional, or typical have been words we’ve tried to avoid. Rather, a sincere effort to capture the attention of the audience from their perspective; to inform and delight has always been our underlying effort.

Here, we’d like to introduce four brand campaigns that combine unconventional media and technology with deep insights to bring the experience of the brand closer to people.

An unseen battle is going on right on our streets. With the advent of wearable devices and IoT (Internet of Things) that battle has spilled into our office, home, devices, and even into our own bodies. Rather than infiltrate deeper, Samsung Electronics seeks to take a more meaningful approach to reach your hearts and minds. Instead of annoying messages, and jingles that are too in-your-face, we seek to share experiences that are thought-provoking and resonating.

‘Sharing a more meaningful experience’, that’s the message we at Samsung Electronics want to convey in our brand; a memorable way of speaking, a unique way of sharing. As the campaigns above show, Samsung’s communication experience is meant to be positive, and emphatic just as the products and design we create are innovative and unique.

TV Road is an upcycling campaign utilizing discarded TVs. As digital smart TVs begin to replace analog ones, the issue of waste, especially with regard to the environment, has become a serious concern. We at Samsung have long thought about what to do with the older TVs being replaced with new more environmentally sound TVs. ‘The TV Road’ paves the way for the environment as well as for all of us.

Since the launch of our high energy efficient TVs, we have been collecting older TVs from customers. After discarding environmentally hazardous metals and plastics, we created eco-friendly building blocks that not only drain liquids but are also anti-UHI (Urban Heat Island). With these blocks, we constructed a 1,315-meter cobblestone road and two structures (18 x 2.4m), which is why this initiative is called ‘TV Road’.

The TV Road quickly became an attraction and grabbed the attention of many. Each week, without any promotional effort, anywhere from 20,000 to 44,000 people came to walk on this road. While it’s hard to say there is any direct relation, our eco-friendly TVs increased in sales by 4 times, and the recycling of old TVs increased by 30% when word of this road went out. With such positive results, we are building new roads near amusement parks, landfills, and rehabilitation schools. If you visit the Worldcup stadium in Suwon, South Korea you can walk this contemplative road.

Smartphones are must-haves in our everyday lives.Batteries and keeping them charged are also a necessity no one can avoid. Being an industry leader, Samsung has often thought of solutions to safely dispose of dead batteries. In doing so, we couldn’t help but compare the dire concern of many animals becoming extinct or endangered due to reckless development. Raising awareness, or recharging concern for these endangered animals became an issue as important for us as recharging used batteries.

We applied illustrations* of four endangered animals, we thought needed the most attention, to our external battery packs. Namely, the desert fox, the giant panda, red panda, and the golden snub-nose monkey. We also developed an app: Charge the Life to go with these illustrations. When you plug in your battery pack to recharge, the app automatically starts up and an image of the animals appear on your screen. They react when you touch them – attracting the attention of others with their sounds.

As the batteries recharge, the animals also feed and regain vitality, thereby joining the two themes together. Awareness of our endangered eco-system, a somber reminder in an everyday task, is our way of contributing in a positive way.

* design & illustration by Sungshil Hwarang

CenterStage is the latest innovation platform in displaying home appliances at the retail level. Large format displays show you refrigerators in actual size with a vast array of interactive functions for customers to see the product in various settings as well as check out additional features of the product. The ‘change decor’ function changes the room from the kitchen, laundry room, and living room to view the product in different spaces. Also, you can save items to your wishlist or share them instantly with others.

Usually, customers will do Internet searches about products before coming to the store. Once they arrive, however, they’re usually met with appliances that are turned off with no interaction making their online research for naught. CenterStage is not content with just showing information you found online but enhancing it with virtual actual size imagery and interactive functions to further assist your purchase decision.

From June 2014 we have installed this platform in 15 of our exclusive stores with positive results. 73% of customers replied that CenterStage helped them in purchasing an appliance, and sales reports showed an increase in refrigerators and washing machines sales. An active user experience platform designed around the user have yielded positive results among customers. With a total space of just 4.5m2 and a product listing of over 70 items, CenterStage is set to appear in over 100 additional stores within this year.

In 2014, with the release of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S, we at Samsung decided to test the capacity of the super AMOLED display resolution by applying it to a DOOH(Digital Out Of Home) screen. Not just to test the 90% near natural color saturation of these displays nor the technology of the Galaxy Tab S, but to appeal to the masses in an indirect, emotional way. Those of us going about our daily lives in the hard, drab coldness of city life, we thought it would be nice to throw in a bit of color into our everyday lives.

Color Therapy is a billboard campaign in New York, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Singapore. Each city had a total of 150 images of constantly changing shapes and colors, all of them reacting to temperature, humidity and wind speed. For example, on a cold wet day, the billboard would light up with warm inviting colors while cool relaxing colors would regenerate on a muggy hot day. 900 different movies were produced and shown 72 times a day to lighten the mood of city dwellers.

Color Therapy has evolved the DOOH screen into a channel for healing and nurturing positive energy to those living in the city. The 6 installations developed by the world renowned artist Marcos Lutyes retains the identity of each city; for example, ‘Marco Scale Drops’ symbolizes rainfall in London. Based on the characteristics and climate of each city, unique visual and color combinations comfort our lives and nurture us in our own unique way.