As one of the world’s largest producers of electronics, it’s no surprise Samsung’s own mobile marketing is setting the bar. Whether it’s launching its new innovative take on the flip phone with bold new creative, or showcasing its products on reality shows, or digging into data to understand how to best speak to consumers, Samsung’s mobile marketing is on the frontlines of creativity. In this episode, we speak with Janet Lee, VP/CMO, Mobile Experience at Samsung Electronics America, to hear how she’s leading with interesting creative and data-led strategies. As mobile use continues to grow worldwide, we dive deep into how Samsung is building lifelong relationships with its consumers.
Damian (00:00):
I'm Damian Fowler.
George (00:01):
and I'm George Slefo.
Damian (00:02):
And welcome to the second season of the current podcast.
George (00:08):
The current is your deep dive into the future of TV, media, and data privacy. all explained in plain English
Damian (00:16):
We talk to the biggest names in digital marketing, and we're delighted to kick off this season with a remarkable guest. Janet Lee, the VP of mobile marketing at Samsung. She's a marketing veteran and someone whose passion for what she does is clearly an inspiration.
George (00:30):
No doubt. Janet can talk about everything from how Samsung's cameras makes people like me actually look attractive and how it navigated the initial rollout of its popular flip phone. We're going to start by talking about her switch from marketing perfume and skincare products to cutting edge tech.
Janet (00:55):
I've been everywhere and it's been a long time since I'd gotten into the profession of marketing. When I decided to become a marketer, my goal was always to be the best marketer. I know cause I really love the art of marketing. So when I moved from one company to the next, I was always driven by wanting to learn something new that I wasn't already doing in my existing role. So when I moved from Mattel to J and J, I was motivated by wanting to get the traditional CPG training, which I got in my short time at J and J. So after that, I, when I moved to L'Oreal, who was because I got into skincare at J and J and I really loved it.
Janet (01:43):
And then I moved to Arden, where I got into fragrance. So what's really interesting about fragrances. You're selling a bottle of liquid that nobody needs. So they're in fragrance, the focus is so much on creating that emotional connection and delivering on that emotional benefit. So come to Samsung, the tech industry in general is not a marketing led industry. So much of success depends on tech innovation. So, you know, now things are changing, but in the past, marketing is kind of an afterthought.
George (02:23):
Thank you for walking us through that Janet. So if you were to pour all of your experience from those different companies into a bowl, mix them together. What lessons did you learn from working from such a diverse group of brands that you're applying today at Samsung? Does anything stand out to you?
Janet (02:40):
There are a lot of similarities. And the reason is that the success of marketing is so dependent on how well you understand the consumer. So everything starts and ends with the consumer. So looking at just Samsung, I've been here for four years. I can already see that we've evolved in the way we talk about our products. Because in the past it was the process, somewhat linear. Your product has been developed, and then you figure out a way to talk about it. The communication, even to consumers, was driven by the focus in the tech innovation. So you come up with this cool feature that nobody else has. And you just want to talk about it, the question that consumers will ask us, okay, that's super cool. And some great R and D minds have come up with it. So what, why should I care? So now the focus is shifting from the technology, and then I think it comes from, you know, increasing understanding within Samsung that it does not matter how great your tech innovation is if the consumer doesn't understand it. So applying bad in-depth knowledge of the consumer and always just obsessing over the consumer needs and how they would understand your product that is key to success. And that applies to all categories.
Damian (03:56):
You talk about the kind of emotional relationship towards a brand. And you've mentioned that, you know, you want to put the consumer in the frame. That's not a pun cause I actually wanted to get to this amazing campaign that you ran in 2020. Could you explain the Genesis of that campaign? And how that kind of built that relationship with the consumer?
Janet (04:21):
I think these key commercial moments like mother's day father's day, dads and grads at graduation, uh, black Friday holiday, the initial instinct for each company is to kind of show, okay, this is the array of products that I can offer you for this commercial moment. But my thought always was that those are not only commercial moments, but they're cultural moments. So my team, and I said that those moments present opportunities to our brand to show who we are, what we stand for, what our values are. So rather than mothers a saying, you can gift your mom, you know, XYZ product. We wanted to bring our brand's unique point of view to that moment. So how do we marry the two mother's day, a key commercial moment for Americans and our product that is highly focused on camera smartphone, camera technology. So we discussed, what is that unique insight about camera pictures and mom?
Janet (05:29):
And we all discovered, oh my goodness. When I look back at my family, pictures, mom is always missing or she's she's in very few pictures. And another thing about mother's day is you're talking to the kids or the husband who are about to give their mom or their spouse, right? So we need to talk to them about the mom. So we said, put mom back in the picture, listen, guys, check. You will find that your mom is missing from many of the pictures, put her back and at the center. So that was the inside. We loved it. We felt really good about that. I mean, I think that's a unique POV. We're telling people, put mom back in the picture and we talk less about our product, but you know, the message came across to the consumers.
Damian (05:51):
Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that. You know, a lot of brands look to Samsung for guidance, um, on how to embrace trends. How is Samsung as a brand, you know, shifting, uh, its strategy to meet audiences, you know, where, where are they are? How is that changing your brand campaigns and the way you think about going to market?
Janet (06:10):
So right now in our local market, in the U S market, we work very closely with our media agency to constantly innovate and continuously improve our precision in finding the audiences that we want to target. So, I mean, you can call it many different things. You can call it performance marketing, you know, so there’s always that innovation cause we’re so performance driven, right? In terms of cost efficiency in terms of attitudinal shifts. So that is an ongoing thing. However, when it comes to creative, bulk of our creative comes from our global marketing counterparts and they not only serve us the U S market, but all markets. So we are kind of letting our media innovation drive the creative, uh, any changes, uh, or innovation in creative process. So that’s ongoing.
George (09:20):
Thank you for sharing that. And I want to touch on something, you guys are the fourth largest advertiser in the world and something, I don't think you guys get enough recognition for is how you guys manage various different crises. Can you give some insight about what it was like, you know, specifically with the foldable phone, like navigating the initial launch to, you know, delivering the actual product and, and, and, you know, showing those brilliant campaigns what was that like?
Janet (09:52):
We don't talk about it a lot, but it's about balancing speed to market and how close to what you believe is perfection at the time you want to get to, right. Samsung tends to be very experimental and we don't mind being the pioneer. Actually, we, we see that as our role in the tech industry to be the pioneer. And we are the ones who are going to push the envelope and bring innovation. So that reminds me of our recent campaign. When we launched our latest foldable phones, Z fold three, and Z flip three in August, we launched, we knew that we were struggling with low awareness of the foldable phone category.
Janet (10:53):
So we felt that even before launch, we had to have an aggressive awareness campaign. So again, what we did was we looked at the existing foldable phone owners and try to understand what their experience has been. And it was very interesting because on, and we partner with Reddit to do this, a lot of foldable phone owners, they complained that their, their life is bad because, you know, random strangers come up to them as, you know, having them on their shoulder, asking to show them their phone, you know? And it's interesting because even our executive leadership, when they travel, they said, oh, TSA agent will ask me, is that the new fold foldable phone? Can I see it? So it's, it's a very known everyday experience for foldable phone owners. So we created this whole campaign. We called it an unfluencer, uh, because there's one, one consumer who actually said something to the effect of, I have to look in the mirror and ask myself, am I ready for this life? Because the minute you walk out with that phone, you're going to be bombarded with questions coming from strangers it's to that extent that, you know, people are fascinated when they see the phone, again, they're on them, many of them in the world yet, and we're getting there, but we use that. And we, we actually chased all these consumers who commented on Twitter, Reddit got their consent to use their quotes in our campaign. So it was called our unfluencer campaign and it was, it was very relevant and, and, you know, resonated with our target audience,
Damian (12:37):
We talk about you know, how the space is evolving so fast and you've got to be aggressive, you know, and you've got to be ahead of the curve. And, and you've Samsung has kind of proved that it's really, uh, you know, ahead of that, that curve, the space is changing. You know, we, we hear this stuff about the metaverse and we hear about new partnerships, you know, and young consumers are, are ready to jump onto the next big thing. How much pressure is there, you know, for you to create partnerships, to get the brand, to the right demographic, to get the brand in front of the right people and just stay ahead of that curve.
Janet (13:09):
So it is all driven by our desire to deliver best mobile experience to the consumers. When we select partners, it's really based on what the consumers are wanting. We partner really early. I think it was when we launched note 10 with epic, to create, you know, bespoke skin within fortnight for note 10 users or our galaxy users, all of that, you know, our, our partnership selection decisions, and how we integrate for what an experience all depends on what the consumers are looking for. And we've been very lucky because we, I guess, must have built pretty good reputation as innovative experimental brand, because, you know, we've done cool things, obviously with epic and their IP fortnight, we recently have developed really strategic partnership with billboards. We are now, you know, because of our unfluencer campaign, even Reddit is looking at our partnership differently from, you know, just ad platform and advertiser. So we're not afraid to try something new if benefits the consumer.
Damian (14:36):
A great campaign that you launched in 2021, you launched a whole Hulu series, uh, around the galaxy S 21. Could you talk about the evolution of that and how that branded content integrate into the show and whether that's something you'll be doing in the future?
Janet (14:51):
When you think about, you know, smartphone camera or the pictures, you take on your smartphone, we don't necessarily dominate the consumer perception. So we knew very precisely. We, we are constantly doing consumer surveys and research. So we knew what the perception gap was between our brand and our biggest competitor. So we said, okay, how do we show our camera technology in a compelling way?
Janet (15:58):
And then at the same time when we launched S21, the whole ideal was, oh my goodness, this camera technology is so advanced. It is as good as your professional, you know, camera DSLR or all the equipments that a professional photographer would bring, in order to take, take pictures. So knowing that we said, okay, let's show it by inviting professional photographers to use our phone, instead of their, you know, I don't know, multi tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and show to everyone that the end quality of the product, the photography is just as good, right? So that was the whole idea. So Hulu partnered with us and the production company was Westbrook, and then our agency partners BBH. So we created episodes where we have all these photographers who are given a task or a mission, and then they deliver. And we, you know, we followed that very typical competition, reality show formula. You know, you go through process of elimination until you get to that last standing winner. So we did that and we did close our camera perception gap.
George (17:15):
Yeah, no, I mean, your, your cameras are really great. Whenever someone takes a picture of me with their Samsung camera, for some reason, I look more attractive than I actually am. I don't know what you guys are doing, but it's pretty cool. Uh, let me ask you this, like, uh, you know, the, the pandemic happened, you know, trends were accelerated. A lot of people say five years of innovation was condensed into six months. How has that impacted, you know, Samsung strategy in selling its product? Is it still like that traditional method? Are you guys experimenting with things like shoppable or using social as a channel to push your products? Is there any innovation happening there and it, and even if it's not happening today, like where do you see that going in the very near future? Do you have any insight on that?
Janet (18:03):
So inserting yourself in the process of the consumer's natural behavior, that's much easier than trying to shift behavior, right? So if someone is viewing products on social app, then I want to be there rather than telling the person you must go into the store, now try our product, right? So that's our approach. We leave it to the consumers to decide how they want to shop, and we want to make sure that we're there, you know, along the journey, right. We know that there is a group of consumers who are still much more comfortable going into their, you know, carrier store, talking to the sales rep to make a device selection and go through the activation process. We know that there are consumers who don't want to step out. So when you're making a, over a thousand dollar purchase decision, you kind of want to see it right.
Janet (19:00):
Then you don't want to leave the house. So we've launched Samsung live it's, uh, on our samsung.com platform, it's live commerce platform. And we make sure that we provide very upclose view of the product, you know, from every little corner. So the consumer feels like, okay, it's almost, I'm not touching it, but it's almost like being in store and I can see the product. So we try to mimic as much as possible the in-person experience or viewing. So that's one way, we were first to launch shop capability within tech industry anyway. We offered pre-order option on Facebook and Instagram, and we added shop capability. So on our Instagram months ago, even prior to full launch. So we're trying to be everywhere, you know, across different touch points because we need to support the consumers chopping Kavier rather than trying to shift it, you know, one way or another. Right.
Damian (20:16):
how are you trying to kind of draw in people who may be already using a different product. How do you kind of get to those people?
Janet (20:26):
We need to understand there are many different subsets within the user base of any given brand. So even Samsung galaxy users, um, depending on which variable you use to subsegment. So they're hardcore Samsung loyal list diehard. They've been with us with, you know, through many generations. So they're really loyal consumers. There's a group who are somewhat open, they're open to many brands, then the decision key decision driver, maybe value or the latest and greatest tech. So we tried to understand all the different subsets of any base, and we decide which subset, uh, of any given base we want to go after. And when we try to switch over from other brand basis, we focus on the decision driver. So when we launched something like foldables, we don't necessarily say, oh, I want to go after that competitor space or this competitor space.
Janet (21:32):
We say, regardless of brand loyalty, if a consumer is looking for latest and greatest, if someone is motivated by innovation, then that person will come to foldables or consider foldables. So we highlight that, and there's obviously value-driven consumers who are, who are for the most part brand agnostic. As a brand owner or business owner or business manager, you need to kind of think about the cost of acquisition and how long you can retain the consumer and figure out the best way to calculate the true value of that consumer base. Right? And it all has, it's very complicated, as you can imagine, your business objectives, short term, longterm midterm, you know, so if it's short term, yes, you wouldn't mind grabbing all those people with aggressive value, but then if you think about long-term, I don't know if it's the best thing to do. So it all depends on how you're, I guess, incentivized as a business manager, but those from other brands basis, those who are open to Samsung, interestingly, are the high end users. Those who are confident in their knowledge of technology in their eye for innovation. So those people are more likely to come over to galaxy.
Damian (22:57):
And that's it for the current stay tuned because next week we'll have Hamid Safi VP of e-commerce at liquid death mountain water.
Hamid:
The idea of being everything to everyone is just not in the DNA of this brand. This brand is really about bringing fun to a category that has never really seen it.
George (23:06):
The current is produced by wonder media network. Our theme is by loving caliber. The trade desk team includes Cassie Crosby, Yvonne Sikich, Kat Vesce, and Ilyse Liffreing. And remember,
Janet (23:20):
We need to support the consumers shopping behavior rather than trying to shift it.
Damian (23:27):
I'm Damien
George (23:27):
and I'm George,
Damian (23:30):
and we'll see you next week.