October 13 , 2009

Samsung mobile struggles to build brand awareness
New campaign reaches out to youth market

When people think of Samsung they immediately think of televisions. What most Canadians don’t know is that Samsung has been #1 in mobile handset sales for the last four quarters.

“We found ourselves having problems from a branding perspective because no one knew about our mobile division,” says Renee Sorese, Manager Strategic Marketing and PR for Samsung Canada.

Another challenge is that the Samsung corporate website is globally controlled, which makes it hard to create online destinations other than microsites which, according to Sorese, were a waste of marketing dollars.

“We decided to create a destination rather than a microsite,” says Sorese. “One that would allow us to maximize our contact with the customer and enhance the consumer experience.”

The new site, Samsung.com/mobile, reaches out to the youth market – a primary target for Samsung’s mobile offerings. The destination promotes their breadth of mobile phones and helps people to find the phone that is right for them based on how they want to use it.

“We highlight all the Tier 1 products on the destination site and offer a product selection tool to walk people through the selection process. The product info is light and we use lots of icons.”

But the real focus of the new site, says Sorese, is on social media tools.

“We looked at social media from a conversion perspective and decisded that it was a much more effective means of marketing our brand.”

According to Sorese, social media offers marketers a place to push people from traditional marketing campaigns and gives them more opportunities for cross-selling.

The new mobile campaign is in its second week and the French language version is set to launch this week.

“We haven’t really done much to promote it yet and we’re already seeing an increase in traffic,” she says.