Samsung's new ad contains hints about Apple, is this competitive promotion always effective?

This article specifically introduces the business war between Samsung and Apple, and introduces the effect of Samsung's use of sarcastic marketing against Apple. It is recommended for friends who are interested in brand marketing to read and learn.

High-end business wars often adopt the simplest approach.

On May 16, Samsung released a short film titled "Creativity cannot be crushed", which was questioned by netizens for implying Apple's controversial "Crush" advertisement two days ago.

Just from the title, we can indeed get some clues, especially since this is not the first time that Samsung has followed the hot topics and "stepped on" the fruit.

Next, let’s follow TOP’s perspective and see whether Samsung’s wave of connotation-based publicity and promotion is satisfying again?

01 Samsung’s road is both wide and narrow, as it sticks to the principle of “not being crushed by creativity”

Apple held a grand iPad new product launch conference on May 9, but despite the excitement, the promotional video "Crush" for its iPad Pro caused strong protests from people in the European and American art circles. Apple subsequently urgently removed the video and apologized.

The video content of "Crush" is simple, just like its meaning "compression" itself, focusing on close-ups or panoramic shots of an industrial hydraulic press crushing everything on the table, and finally a latest iPad Pro appears.

From a creative perspective, this presentation is novel and bold, especially in that it vividly showcases the iPad Pro's full range of functions, slim body, and powerful performance.

Of course, in addition to receiving positive reviews, the video has also received criticism, with the controversy focusing on

• Some of the squeeze images in the video are too depressing and gloomy, causing psychological discomfort to the viewers ;
• Are the crushed objects in the advertisement real shots? If so, it goes against Apple's environmental protection philosophy ;
• The video shows that creative tools with intact functions and appearance, including guitars and cameras, are smashed to pieces, which not only destroys the creative tools and the fruits of human wisdom, but also truly presents people's blind pursuit of technology today .

Perhaps due to the constant condemnation from netizens at home and abroad, Apple actually made a rare public apology.

Tor Myhren, Apple's vice president of marketing, said in a statement to AdAge that "our goal has always been to encourage diverse expression and bring our ideas to life through iPad. This video did not hit the mark, and we're sorry."

After watching Apple’s rollover video, let’s take a look at Samsung’s 40S short video released following the trend.

The film continues the "abandoned style" theme. Following the footsteps of the heroine, the audience can see objects scattered on the ground and a broken guitar. She picks up the guitar, presses the tablet keys, sits in front of the hydraulic press stained with paint, and plays the guitar contentedly while looking at the music score.

The ad uses close-up shots of the Samsung tablet and the guitar as well as an overall soothing rhythm to promote the Samsung tablet Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra while making fun of the controversial points of the above-mentioned Apple ad.

However, TOP believes that Samsung's timely move to take advantage of hot advertising is "broad and narrow."

First of all, "wide" refers to the idea that Samsung conveys through this advertisement that "technology is a tool to support and enhance creativity, and creativity cannot be crushed." In the short film of less than a minute, people are left wanting more and suddenly enlightened.

Correspondingly, "narrow" is also obvious, which means that it only grasps the opposite of "Crush" and extends it. It has certain limitations and abstractness, and the intention of wanting to "cash on the popularity" is extremely obvious.

02 Mocking Samsung, a big company, and grasping the essence of teasing marketing

However, judging from the reactions of netizens, everyone is no longer surprised by this wave of teasing about Samsung. After all, it has not been long since it last teased Apple for its alarm clock not ringing.

During the May Day holiday, someone discovered a short video posted by Samsung's official UK Instagram account in which a puppy wearing a hat was jumping around with a remix of Samsung's default alarm ringtone as background music.

The text in the center of the video reads "Don't worry, our alarm clock rang", and the title of the video is "Samsung users woke up on time today", which directly mocks Apple's alarm clock problem that has been complained by workers.

In fact, Samsung has been dissing Apple for more than a decade. Since the first iPhone was launched in 2007, Samsung has been secretly fighting with Apple.

In 2011, the startup animation of Samsung Note II included a funny and insulting advertisement of an Android man peeing on the Apple logo on the ground, directly ending the more than ten-year-long "companionship" between the two.

On YouTube, some netizens even thoughtfully created a video list called "Samsung makes fun of Apple", which is a collection of mockeries of Samsung's advertising and marketing over the years.

Among them, the most impressive notch screen satire came from its "Ingenius" series released in 2018.

Through conversations between customers and employees, the series "attacks" the iPhone from all angles with seven ads.

In the ad, Samsung recreated an Apple store on a one-to-one basis, presenting conversations between employees in Apple uniforms and customers who came to consult, comparing the download speed, camera quality, adapter, fast battery charging, multi-tasking applications, internal storage and notch screen of the Apple iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9, in order to highlight the necessity of switching to the Samsung Galaxy series.

This is truly a true interpretation of "the person who knows you best is your opponent."

In the following year of 2022, after Samsung began to focus on foldable screen mobile phones, it mocked Apple for not having any foldable devices yet.

The first half of the video is still output through dialogue. A young man sitting on the fence looking into the distance talks to a man who seems to be an Apple clerk about "what are you doing". The young man says, "But Samsung has foldable phones and epic cameras." But the clerk says, "We are waiting for these devices to appear," which indirectly implies that Apple's product innovation in recent years has not been significant.

The promotion of folding screens in the second half is even more funny and weird. A girl using an iPhone didn't care about the folding function of the phone at first, but after seeing people around her using Samsung's folding screen, the folding image was deeply rooted in her mind, and made her pay attention to various folding scenes in life.

Of course, Apple has fought back before. In 2017, Apple produced a special advertising short film called "Why Switch", which compared security performance, music, running speed, personal privacy and other aspects, trying to tell consumers that switching to the iOS system is the right decision.

He also mocked the entire Android family in the video. It is true that we should not underestimate every business war.

However, Samsung then struck while the iron was hot and reshot the video with a similar performance technique, and zoomed in close to the face: No matter how fast you run, can it be faster than flying?

03 Is it a real apology or real plagiarism? Is Apple’s marketing now exhausted?

Of course, in addition to Samsung's focus on product functions and innovations, some netizens also questioned the originality of the "Crush" video after Apple issued an apology statement.

According to the content posted by Weibo blogger @熊小默, Apple's concept of choosing hydraulic press crushing this time is very similar to the LG mobile phone advertisement 16 years ago and OPPO's original concept of "compressing all good things into one device" 6 years ago.

From the above two videos, we can see that although the video of LG mobile phone is short, the core compressed scenes, close-up fragmented shots and even selected objects such as musical instruments, cameras, paints, etc. are highly consistent with those in the videos previously released by Apple.

Thanks to the promotion of the Reno series, OPPO's overall performance has become more technological and sophisticated, and it more intuitively shows how designers responsible for creative production outside the assembly line integrate beautiful things into a device.

One of them was released earlier than Apple’s controversial video, and the other has a richer meaning. Taking all of this into consideration, TOP Jun has no shortage of doubts: Has Apple’s creative marketing run out?

As we all know, Apple is able to establish a unique product advantage in the minds of users because of its uniqueness in marketing.

This is inseparable from Mike Markkula's initial guidance to Apple. As an early investor in Apple and also the vice president of marketing, when Apple was just starting out in 1977, he set three marketing concepts: empathy, focus, and impute, which have been applied to the forefront of product marketing ever since.

He also defined three types of advertisements in the life cycle of Apple products: introduction, specifications and stories. They can be simply understood as promotional films, brainwashing films and feature films. First, they tell the audience how good their products are, then they make everyone feel that their devices are outdated, and finally they use content marketing to tell the story of the product itself.

When Jobs was alive, his "Get a Mac" series, which was staged for three consecutive years, used anthropomorphic Mac and PC images to communicate with each other, which greatly improved people's impression of Mac. (It can also be regarded as the originator of mock marketing)

In the post-Jobs era, Apple's advertising strategy began to return to its original simplicity, focusing on storytelling and describing the product itself, and no longer showing comparisons with other products.

A close look at Apple’s iPhone advertisements in recent years reveals that they focus on product features and storylines.

On the one hand, it has a strong control over the rhythm and visual impact of the picture;

On the other hand, it mainly presents the product functions through advertisements, such as facial recognition function, privacy protection function, precise search function, etc.

For example, in recent years, in China, Apple has collaborated with director Peter Chan, actors Zhou Xun and Fan Wei to shoot short films during the Spring Festival to showcase the powerful shooting functions of the Apple iPhone.

Although Apple launches new products every year, compared with the increasingly eye-catching satellite positioning and AI function selling points of domestic mobile phones in recent years, Apple's functional updates have been criticized by users as "toothpaste-squeezing". This also explains to a certain extent why its advertising creativity is no longer eye-catching - because there is limited room for creativity and imagination.

Finally, do you think Samsung's mocking ads are a good thing? Do you think Apple's creativity is going downhill?

Author: TOP Jun; Source public account: TopMarketing (ID: 1082248)