Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Real Reason Samsung is getting SUED.”.
So you might have already heard about this Samsung situation. The company is getting sued for misleading customers and this whole case goes deeper than the surface level. So when you go into a store and buy a flagship phone nowadays, you’ll probably be told at some point that the phone is water-resistant. All that means is, it is undergone of vigorous testing to make sure that it can tolerate fresh water with no issues, and they might dunk the device and spray it with high pressure Jets and then, depending on how much it is torture the device can withstand. It is awarded an IP rating. It could have very slight resistance to water and get something like an IP six two rating, or it could be a much more well-rounded device and get an IP six eight regardless.
It is easy to forget that, no matter how well a phone does in this testing, it is only ever being tested in fresh water. The obvious thing would be to extrapolate this to assume that swimming pools are fine, that the sea is fine, but this is where it starts to break down a swimming pool, or at least most swimming pools contain massive amounts of chlorine, which is there to break down. Bacteria, but can also very quickly start corroding. The rubber seals on your device, the very ones that are there to keep the water out and the salt in Zee water is even worse. So the Australian Competition authorities, which are there to make companies, behave themselves and kind of to protect the consumers that end up buying these phones, other ones that have built the case. They’Ve basically dug up a whole number of cases where Samsung has advertised their phones being used near swimming pools near the sea, as if this was the usage case scenario that they endorsed. In fact, one advert literally just shows a guy fully immersed in a pool using his Galaxy phone as if he was just chilling on a bench.
I would say this. I’Ve actually personally been on quite a few of these sets where smartphone campaigns are being filmed and a lot of the time. The creative teams that are in charge of the creative campaigns have nothing to do with the people that actually built the phone, and so I could see a situation where the engineering team has correctly stated that these phones are water resistant. But then the marketing team and the agencies they employ to build these commercials have misunderstood this, to mean water proof, internal miscommunication would be my initial suspicion.
Unfortunately, there’s a couple of problems with this idea that actually made the situation for Samsung. Even worse, you see when the Australian authorities were putting this case together. They found over 300 situations where Samsung had advertised these kinds of scenarios and they are present across all sorts of formats. You’Ve got full-scale video adverts, you’ve got product webpages and even paid influencer campaigns that are all pretty clearly showing these phones in and around the sea, and I guess the real problem comes with what they did about it.
Part of what Samsung is being accused of is not just selling this phone in the wrong kind of light, but refusing responsibility for phones damaged because of it and on one hand you can kind of forgive them for that. It’S pretty standard for smartphone warranty to not cover damage by liquids, but if Samsung is going to show people they’re, actually our phones are safe to use around all bodies of water, then I think they need to be ready for when customers actually try it to then Deny these customers help, because apparently this liquid damage is not covered by our warranty policy is almost denying that there’s any problem at all with the marketing. Now I’m not gon na stand here and defend. What’S happened, it’s not a great situation, but at the same time, this Samsung case is only a really small part of a bigger problem in the smartphone market. The last five years, especially have been this kind of whirlwind of extreme marketing, of stretching the truth and doing everything you can to downplay your competitors. So let me explain the real problem. There are more smart phones now than they ever have been. The long-standing companies are producing more models than they used to, for example, Apple has gone from 1 a year to 3 and there are also now so many new players that it’s hard for anyone who’s, not a massive smartphone fan to keep track, and so in a Situation like this, where the message is that you’re trying to put out as a company are getting drowned by the sheer volume of competition, the answer is to shout to make claims to really exaggerate.
Just how good your phone is. You might know that Sony when they released their z3 smartphone did so alongside an official unboxing video performed in what looks an awful lot like a swimming pool. Technically the phone was probably okay, because in that scenario they would have controlled the water conditions very carefully, but is it misleading? Definitely – and it’s not just a miscommunication when it comes to water resistance ratings, it is small fan marketing in general, you might remember Huawei’s Nova 3i, for which the trailer literally showed a guy you the phone to take a selfie, but instead of then seeing the actual Selfie that fern took while it shows us a shot taken on a DSLR camera. It’S treading a line.
They haven’t explicitly lied, but they’re definitely suggesting that if you took a selfie on that phone, it’s gon na look something like this one and I’ve used the phone. It is definitely not you’ve got AT .