By Ilia Papadimitriou
We use our cell phones every day to talk with people thousands of miles away, read the news, play games or even for work. Imagine yourself holding the cell phone, which is an expensive and well-known one and a fire starts out of blue! This is what happened in 2016 with Samsung Galaxy Note 7, and a fellow colleague talked about in his article “When a battery starts to burn”.
In addition, there are stories, over the internet reporting that Iphones have also big issues with their battery life or even more, they got on fire several times, too. In 2013 Apple faced a big crisis which have started years ago but maybe because of the company’s actions the situation remained unsolved until they became a headline!
Samsung and Apple are the two main cell phone manufacturers, they are marketable and they have devoted customers.Someone can tell that these two companies are the two main competitors in tech industry, namely in cell phone launches. They also have to face similar issues and crises. But do they handle their crisis with a common attitude or they strategies are as different as their software? And, which company will be the winner of a battle in the public relation field?
The case of Samsung
Days after the problem appeared, namely the crisis started on 26th of August, 2016, Samsung upload a press release on the 2nd of September. According to the well known crisis response strategies of Coombs (2007), the crisis type that Samsung faced belongs to the accidental cluster, because a technology, namely the phone’s battery, failed and this caused an accident. In addition, Samsung followed Coombs response strategies, by apologizing to their clients, providing them the opportunity to take a refund, and most important they the responsibility and they reminded to their clients their good past and their commitment to them.
The case of Apple
Iphone 4 released on 24th of June, 2010 and it was one of the best launches that Apple ever had. However, after its release many clients recorded incidents of fire due to a problem in their chargers. Some of the incidents are mentioned in the official Apple website as a question. Most of the questions remained unanswered, which could harm company’s reputation. Social media and internet, in general, give the power to customers to destroy company’s reputation. According to Sung (2014), social media play an important role on the agenda setting of the traditional media. In addition, Horn et all (2015), argue that it is vital for the companies to respond to their clients and especially in negative comments.
There are stories of clients all over the internet that refer to the denial of the company to refund them or even admit its responsibility. This situation eventually became a headline, and to be specific, in one of the biggest markets in the World, China! Apple’s tendency to hide behind their finger couldn’t work anymore. Public relations professionals failed to stop the crisis in a previous stage and they let things to escalate. However, after the headlines and the crisis boom in China, they took responsibility and they reacted in accordance to Coombs strategies.
Which one wins?
Coombs
(2007), highlights the importance of the quick response in a crisis. As
we see, Samsung’s practitioners applied the theory and they respond quickly to
the threat while Apple’s public relations professionals seemed to have a
different perspective.
According
to Claeys and Opgenhaffen (2016), practitioners apply theory to their
practice when the company is willing to take the responsibility for their
failure and they follow a path that tells “the truth will get out”. However,
companies tend to wait as long as possible to react, which is contradictory to
Coombs response strategies. They usually do not accept the responsibility and
they are mostly concerned about the legal implications of their actions.
On one hand, Samsung response to the crisis helped them gain the trust of the public and their reputation immediately and more than the 60% of their clients would buy again a product from Samsung and about 40% of all respondents of a study answered that they may buy one of their products.
On the other hand, we can see in the figure that Apple was keep losing clients the period before their press release and their response to the crisis. They managed to boost their numbers after their release and their willingness to solve the problem but they could do it sooner. They also covered their problem with the release of the new iphone. They lacked to understand the importance of the situation and they didn’t hear their clients problems. Or they chose to hide behind their finger as they did all these years hoping that this incidents will never gain the world’s attention!
To conclude, maybe giving time to problem could work in some cases but public relations professionals need to be very careful and cautious. It is more than obvious that in this battle, Samsung won! But is it a clear winning? Apple managed to fall through the net so many times before by doing nothing so is this one accident enough to say that their strategy is worse than Samsung’s?
About the author:
Ilia Papadimitriou is a Research Master student in Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. She was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, where she completed her Bachelor studies in International and European Studies. She is mainly interested in Corporate Communication. She likes pink and she drinks tons of coffee.
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