Samsung Galaxy Note 4: Touching an emotional chord

For any brand, grabbing customer eyeballs right upfront and cultivating brand loyalty over time is a key challenge. More so for brands in the smartphone category where consumers are spoilt for choice. There are brands of all hue and cry - international and local, premium and affordable, plain-vanilla and feature rich. Samsung appears to have mastered the art of engaging buyers with a product portfolio that spans the gamut. With the launch of the Galaxy Note 4, the Korean smartphone maker once again hit the bull's eye, with smart features and an engaging brand campaign.

Launched in October 2014, ahead of festive season, Samsung went all out to promote the phablet. The brand campaign dwelt on how technology helped people improve their daily lives and showcased how feature-rich Galaxy Note 4 could help people find more balance in everything they do. It focused on various product features such as the S-Pen, the adaptive fast charging, its 16-megapixel rear facing camera, among other things.

Anupama Ramaswamy, executive creative director, Cheil India, the agency working on the brand's advertising, says, "The Note as a category has been around for a while and has a dedicated fan following as well. However, outside of the core Note lovers, not many were aware of the fantastic features that the phone came with, courtesy its unique S-Pen." Priced at Rs 58,300, Samsung positioned Galaxy Note 4 as a top end phablet with a 5.7 inch display. The phone packed in a 2.7 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 805 processor, the most powerful mobile chip in the world.

Since the launch of the first Galaxy Note in 2011, the brand has been promoted with global creative assets here in India. With the Galaxy Note 4, Samsung decided to break the formula and launch a local campaign. Not that it was an easy decision to follow through: When the creative agency began working on the campaign, it was saddled with a difficult question: how does one tell an engaging story while making sure that the features of the phone were well documented and understood? Cheil put out a simple yet demonstrative story involving a father and a daughter.

"So for the client as well as the agency, it was a big first, to release a local ad campaign for a flagship device. But the brand campaign touched an emotional chord with consumers," says Ramaswamy. So when Samsung said "do what's important to you" it immediately connected with the audience.