With the two Galaxy Note 7 recalls, there have been rumors that the South Korean technology company will be abandoning the Note brand all together. If not done correctly, this could lead to a loss of brand equity and confused customers. If done well though, this might be the first step in putting this incident behind them and jumpstarting the brand.
Instead of simply dropping the Note brand and picking some other random name, Samsung needs to give meaning to the names of its product lines. Take the Galaxy brand, including phones, tablets and watches, for example. While as marketers, we can probably figure out why the company chose that name, consumers will not put in that effort. They simply do not have the time or interest in doing so. A company is responsible for making the brand abundantly simple and easy to understand. Some companies that have done this well are Apple, which stands for innovation, and Airbnb, which stands for community.
So what does Galaxy stand for?
Galaxy stands for connectedness. Using those products means having access to the entire galaxy. It means having all of your mobile devices share information so that you always have it at your fingertips.
If Samsung wants to be successful in the mainstream market and not only with the tech-savvy, Samsung needs to stand for simplicity as well. While ambitious, this would mean renaming all of the products in the Galaxy product line. Naming products with letters, such as Samsung Galaxy A8 or Samsung Galaxy J1, is likely to intimidate consumers. It looks like computer talk and they don’t understand it. Large companies realize this and have acted on it. Take Android updates, for example, they are named after candy in order to minimize technical terms that have a tendency of scaring run-of-the-mill users. Apple has done this as well, most notably with its iPhone. The description of the product is in the name. It cannot get simpler than that. If someone tells themselves that they need a phone, going for an iPhone is the simplest choice.
Next Steps
Samsung needs to show customers that it is a relevant modern company with great products intended to simplify your life instead of complicate it. In order to foster this image, Aziz Firat is arguing for a simplified Samsung brand. He argues that Samsung uses too many fonts and styles, further confusing customers. In order to combat this, he calls for a simple logo to unify the entire company. He called for this rebrand back in 2014 showing that it is long overdue.
Samsung needs to get out of the product era and start focusing on the relationship marketing era. Rebranding its Galaxy line and bringing it under a simplified and unified company brand is the first step to making consumers understand why the company does what it does. Once they have earned consumer trust, the company will be better positioned to compete with companies such as Apple.
While the recent scandal involving the Galaxy Note 7 is a great argument for getting executives to sign off on a rebrand, the company has been in dire need of it for a while. As Brendan Behan once said “there is no such thing as bad publicity”. Everyone is waiting on Samsung to fail, making it the perfect chance to turn things around. Ideally, this rename will only be the beginning of the Samsung rebrand.