Hello.
Two events came together at once. The first one looked like this. At the Moscow exhibition of Honor Magic6 Pro, held by MTS, words were said that there are more than 120 models on the market costing more than 80 thousand rubles, the main segment is developing and growing. Five years ago there were less than two dozen such models. At some point, someone asked how many of those hundred smartphones were selling well. The response was evasive and sympathetic. And here, perhaps, we need the freedom to say the obvious. In the main category, the iPhone is the main brand and the choice that the buyer wants, followed by Samsung with a large margin. Everyone else collects the crumbs from the table of these two giants.
The second event is a stream on our channel about development tools, including Aurora. Our reader asked why Aurora does not have its own face, a person who is ready to promise something, to promise something, to be a public speaker on behalf of the company, to be someone like Steve Jobs. A somewhat naive, but well-founded question. And these two events are directly connected; they shape the perception of the market and the brands on it.
I step into an elevator in Hong Kong, an office building combined with a shopping mall. On the buttons with floor numbers are the names of companies, and for the Apple store it is just a logo, which is known to almost everyone.
Back in the days of Steve Jobs, Apple excelled in marketing its brand, and secondly its products. The company logo is familiar; no need to explain who it is for. It has become a cultural phenomenon that lives its own life. The company diligently increased the weight of its own brand, so that at some point it would work independently for the popularity of the brand.
For example, if you look at the signs that advertise various illegal service centers around the planet, you will see that they show the silhouette of a familiar smartphone, which is the iPhone. A small image on an electronic business card? The same iPhone. Once upon a time, Nokia occupied the same place in culture; the power of the brand in the mass consciousness is still so great that artists create bricks with the image of Nokia 3310.
In addition, when the Chinese company HMD Global leased the Nokia brand for five years, it received real sales. The buyer often did not understand whose product he was buying; many accused careless journalists of lying about the death of Nokia, because these phones exist and are being sold. A good example of how a dead brand de facto created sales. I will say more, even today the Nokia brand is expensive because it was so popular at one time. Although time is unstable, and its value falls from day to day. We can safely say that Nokia and Apple are legendary brands; they have created images that stimulate people’s senses.
And here you have to understand that this is the result of investments in promoting brands and products made under them. Love of customers, the knowledge of these brands did not appear overnight and out of nowhere, behind them are annual investments of billions of dollars in marketing. And this is exactly what Samsung does. I will explain the difference with a simple example.
You can create a smartphone that will be better than the same iPhone in every way without exception – it will take better pictures, have a larger number of different features, an excellent screen, and the list goes on forward. But if your brand is weaker than Apple, and this is true for all companies without exception, you will have a very hard time. You will, literally, bang your head against a concrete wall.
Independent companies assess the value of brands, the methods vary, just as you can take the price of an intangible asset lightly. But note that this is a very important value and it is obvious. It is also worth looking at the picture above of the top ten brands in the world ranking table.
Apple is in first place with an interesting evaluation of its brand, Samsung is in fifth place, and its price is lower. If you look in the ranking of electronic manufacturers, the same smartphones, Sony is the closest (36th place). And Sony’s size in smartphones tells very well that even the strength of the brand without the company’s product did not help much. However, things are interconnected here.
Samsung has historically lost to Apple in the traditional smartphone market, but as soon as the paradigm changed, the company created a new segment of the main market (models with flexible screens), as sales increased , and Samsung took these over to its side. who had been with Apple for several years. The decline of the Apple brand without Steve Jobs is getting worse.
Steve Jobs was the face of the company, and after his death the main question was how much the user would continue to associate the company with him. Many feared that this was a strong bond and that after the death of the company’s founder, people would move to other brands. But this did not happen, because the power of the brand was much higher, it began to live its own life.
Today we see the consequences of delay, many see Jobs as an icon, and there are increasingly half-joking phrases indicating that this would not have happened under Jobs, that everything would has been different and the list goes on. Jobs can be found in the name of a service center in a small town.
Or you can see his quote in a bookstore.
I have no doubt that Steve Jobs is very important as a brand in a consumer society even today (look at others, for example, the artist Keith Haring – his business is alive and well, although he is long dead). These people have become brands and they continue to create money even when they are absent from our world. Other people build myths around them and exploit their images.
And answering the question that was asked during our stream about why Aurora does not have a face of the company, a person who can take on various public roles, I think the answer is obvious – more on the person, you must have pockets without measure. from which is money for external image. This is not the merit of the person or the quality of the product, but a function of the money invested.
Look at the rivalry between Apple and Samsung, Apple has had almost all sales of flagship devices for a long time. Samsung slowly enters this market, having spent crazy budgets, but it did not seem to achieve meaningful results. Progress became evident with the release of smart phones with flexible screens. But this is only part of the story; Apple’s brand strength and inertia are considered comparable to those of Nokia.
Let’s go back to the beginning of our conversation, when we remembered that there are more than a hundred main models on the market, and this is only in Russia. The same Honor Magic6 Pro takes excellent photos; in a blind test it outperformed both the S24 Ultra and the Pixel 8 Pro, which means it can beat any iPhone without exception.
But will this help the model sell well? Unfortunately, no, because you still need brand strength to sell high-end devices in large quantities. In the market of Android devices, 90% of the sales of models costing more than one hundred thousand rubles belong to Samsung, and in the remaining ten percent everyone else competes (and they also competing with the same iPhone). And even Huawei, which has been investing day and night in marketing for several years, cannot overcome the growing balance of investments from Samsung and, especially, Apple. Yes, Huawei has very good sales in the main segment in Russia, and that is a lot of money, but it is still a small fraction of Samsung’s share.
We often forget or don’t know how much companies invest in their brand perception, how much they pump it up. But this is exactly what you need to think about, especially when brands become a part of life. There are many ghost brands in China that have disappeared everywhere in the world, but here, as if in a nature reserve, they exist. Once they succeed all over the planet, they will still be in individual reservations, and will be used by completely different people who have nothing to do with the old companies. And to the ideas that were once placed in such products. But brands still live, create added value, and sometimes even get a new breath (a good example is the Marshall brand, a bad example is Grundig).
So, when you think that this company or that company does not have a good product, against the company, then think that a little more is needed – investments in the brand, which can be added in one day the brand must be built long and hard. Use every opportunity for this. For example, the same Tecno brand is very lucky, and in Russia it is becoming aggressive and becoming famous. The boys were in the right place at the right time and took advantage of their opportunity. But they also have a growth peak ahead of them, when they have to find out how to improve understanding of the brand and make it desirable to more people. And this is no small task; there are no ready-made recipes.
PS The Apple brand, in my opinion, is being eroded today, its attitude is changing, and no one will forgive the problems and shortcomings as it was before. A good example is the slow sales of Vision Pro, lack of interest in the product. Reason? The brand is not as strong as before; they couldn’t explain to people that buying Vision Pro is essential for the rest of their lives. The natives suddenly stopped buying beads – he said rudely, but true. After all, the colonization of new territories always meant the sale of an idea, read – a brand. And here this is no longer visible, and this is one of the signs of the same erosion I mentioned above.
What brands do you think are famous today? Tell me what comes to mind. Thank you.
