Samsung Executive Cites Anti-Apple Ad as "Tipping Point" for Brand

In an interview with Australian newspaper AdNews (via The Next Web), Samsung Australia's chief marketing officer Arno Lenior offered retrospect on the Korean company's 2012 "Next Big Thing" ad that mocked Apple loyalists, saying that it signaled Samsung "coming-of-age" as a brand, and "marked a tipping point" for the company's standing in consumer electronics globally. Lenior also stated that Samsung still sees itself as a "challenger" and invests heavily in research and development to stay ahead.

That really did mark quite a tipping point for us globally. We were able to tell a cheeky story – if you think about it, we’re a Korean company starting to really mess with the order of things.

We’ve been able to do some good things from that [campaign]. The interesting thing about it from my perspective is that some of it is not the best work you’ve ever seen, some of it is the best work you’ve ever seen, but it’s getting people talking, that’s what I really love about it.

You’ve got fanboys after fanboys going, ‘You can’t put that out there’, and then the Samsung fans saying, ‘Yes, you can’, and they’re starting to have that conversation, which is brilliant. So that piece of content has been amazing for us, both globally and here in Australia.

Earlier this month, a survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) ranked Samsung’s Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II phones ahead of Apple’s iPhone 5 in customer satisfaction. Since 2011, both Samsung and Apple have been in a long, ongoing legal battle over patent and design issues, with the first U.S. trial awarding $1 billion to Apple in 2012. However, a judge voided nearly half of that amount in March, and a new trial between the two companies is set for November of this year.