You'd write off an entire massive company for the mistakes of Hauwei Egypt or Samsung Malaysia? It's not like this is central company policy, it's the people localizing the marketing.
It seems sufficient to write off any trust you might have in that brand's name on account of the name only. That is, if Samsung's governance can't keep its employees or subsidiaries from lying with its name attached in the past, there's no reason to think they'd be able to do it in the future. This also incentivizes Samsung to police its underlings.
Of course, you might have other reasons to like Samsung's stuff (reviews, prior experience), and you might also be stuck trusting no one because all large companies have similar issues (so you're forced to buy from untrusted brands).
But, yes. It doesn't take much for me to keep a note in my head "these guys are dishonest". OK, I may not boycott the company entirely, but it drops their perceived ranking in my mind wayyy down... which is exactly the opposite of what marketing is supposed to do, right?
Of course not - except in this case it’s multiple subsidiaries (Brazil, Malaysia, ...) which points to a systemic belief that faking a major feature is acceptable.
If you’re going to advertise your camera, and you do it by showing off a photo taken with anything other than the actual camera, that’s fraud.
If this was the first incident, then I would tend to agree with you. But this is just one of a long string of similar incidents that together form a pattern that reflect on the company values.
If it was from Samsung. This could have come down to a single decision by a very low-level person, or likely a contractor. Samsung's marketing execs dropped the ball in not supervising the campaign properly, but I'm not ready to fault Samsung generally because of a dozen poorly-managed publicity shots.
Instead, I judge them by how they react to this mistake. Do they pull the photos or not?
This sort of thinking on brands is always a puzzle to me. Samsung certainly takes credit for every good thing done by their employees and contractors. Why does a radically different standard apply when they do something bad?
Even if it made sense in some light, it's still a bad approach, because it means people with power and money are never held accountable for things that happen on their watch.
I’ve read the same kind of ‘logic’ applies to lots of situations.
People will judge a company or restaurant or whatever more favourably if they correct a mistake to their satisfaction, rather than not making mistakes at all.
It’s makes me wonder how many companies are hacking this. Don’t worry about quality past a certain point. Say everything works 95% of the time. After that, just offer a generous returns policy, eg just replace the whole thing. Probability that 2 things are broken is very small, and you just made the customer think you’re better than you are, and it’s cheaper than improving QC. Everyone perceives you to be better than the company with no mistakes. Profit.
It works at a job too: you get more attention rushing in as the hero to fight fires on a system that's blowing up than you do building it so it just works and scales better in the first place.
We hold them to account by not purchasing their products. But we call out the mistake for what it is: underhanded marketing. It isn't like they installed spyware or were handing personal data to foreign governments.
> But we call out the mistake for what it is: underhanded marketing.
Let's call it for what it really is, then: lying in your face, at scale.
> We hold them to account by not purchasing their products.
Totally agreed. That's one of few ways to send them feedback directly. Other ways would include lawsuits or voting for regulation change.
Given that signal here is roughly proportional to amount of lost market share, complaints in this thread are a fully legit, if indirect way, of getting more people to maybe buy less of their products.
The question isn't how many, but the scale of the fuck-up, and what it represents about the company. Maybe 5 people would have known that this ad campaign was using a non-phone-produced photo. Apparently that is enough for you to indict the 300,000+ people who work there.
It's not indicting 300,000+ people, it's one person: the chairman of Samsung Electronics for not having set a culture where blatant lying results in negative repercussions.
Can you prove that? These guys were caught, does it mean the others just haven't been caught yet? What about the G7 battery explosions? What about the washing machines catching fire? What about last time Samsung faked images? What about when they faked benchmarks?
When I'm shopping for a phone, I don't trust any of the company's own marketing collateral, I seek out independent reviews.
Even if the photos were genuinely from the phone, they'll have combed through thousands of photos to pick the very best ones, which is nearly as bad as using a stock photo.
It's not indicting people (except those directly responsible and those officially accountable); it's indicting an organization. It's what you should do; a corporation responds only to things that impacts its profits; complaining, if it leads to less people giving them money, is a correct way of sending a market signal. That's how capitalism is supposed to work.
Show me an organization of > 100 people where one person has not behaved badly. This isn't a very useful signal if literally every organization of any appreciable size is going to be punished.
Organizations are responsible for policing themselves. The only incentive they have for that is that the damage caused by "bad apple" may impact their bottom line. Per a book on risk management I'm currently reading, this actually is (or should be) accounted for in risk evaluation! So if we voluntarily refrain from punishing organizations for misbehavior of their people, we're severing the only feedback loop that keeps them from rotting completely.
I'm not saying no organization should be punished for the bad acts of members. I'm saying that one needs to consider the scale of the bad acts before pushing for punishment of an organization. Because there is always an opportunity cost, and you can't punish every organization that has someone who behaves badly(because that is every organization), so you need to pick and choose which ones are the worst offenders. And, personally, I don't think using a stock photo to show off the blur feature, instead of a photo directly from the phone camera, is worthy of punishing Samsung.
You can perceive the magnitude of it differently, that's fair. For me, it is a big issue, because Samsung made a bald-faced lie. This was no mistake, someone out there decided to lie to customers. For me, that's serious. Important enough that I'm that much less likely to buy a Samsung phone on the next iteration.
(But then again, I can't honestly exclude the possibility of buying a Samsung given the overall shitty state of Android smartphones. It's hard to find one that doesn't cause daily frustrations, and between various brands tried by me, my wife, family and friends, Samsung phones were so far the only ones that consistently didn't disappoint. So at this point I'm noting this incident as a bad mark on the brand, and I'll be reevaluating pros and cons when the time comes to buy a new phone.)
We don't owe companies anything. I'm a big proponent of not putting up with shitty design, and after a lot of bad experiences with Microsoft they're dead to me. I don't mind missing out on a good version of Windows sometime in the future, it's not worth dealing with their current awful software. Same goes for Samsung with the permanent Bixby button and Touchwiz UI. I'd rather reward good design like we have on the Google Pixel and iPhone X{'','R','S'} lines.
Personally, I've written all companies by default. Seeing things like that from both outside and sometimes inside, I came to conclusion that most sales&marketing material is simply full of shit, and unless your company gives me evidence otherwise, I'm assuming anything not casually verifiable is likely to be a lie.
Also, RE Samsung vs. Samsung Malaysia, etc. - that's a flip side of having a brand. If you want various groups of people to inherit good reputation from the common pool of a brand, you should also expect they'll all inherit bad reputation too.
