從策略行銷角度來分析三星發展品牌過程

Abstract

Samsung Electronics Co., one of Samsung’s subsidiaries, is now one of the world’s leading top-tier companies in semiconductor, digital media, telecommunication, and digital convergence technologies. It is the world’s largest IT company by sales revenue in 2011 for the first time. Samsung Electronics enjoys a strong market leader position in most of its product lines. It is the world’s largest producer of DRAM, SRAM, and flash memory. In 2012, Samsung Electronics became the world's number one mobile phone manufacturer by unit sales, overtaking Nokia, which had been the market leader since 1998. It is the market leader in TVs and monitors. Samsung is the world’s second-largest chipmaker after Intel and it is well known around the world for its electronics products and is also one of the most successful brands in the electronics industry. This thesis is based on two main questions: (i) How Samsung developed and grew its brand to the top? and, (ii) Can Taiwanese companies do it? The study includes four literature reviews and a methodology of case study of Samsung, attempting to analyze Samsung Electronics’ global branding strategies and marketing operations from 1987 until now, which presents extensive and detailed review of the development of Samsung brand from Samsung Electronics status quo to back then when Samsung was doing OEM and ODM for other major brands. The internal management decisions has great impacts on pushing the change forward both internally and internally. Back in the early 1990s, people thought of Samsung as a cheap, generic brand with poor quality, which was famous for its microwave oven. The perception was especially strong in the U.S. market back then. I intentionally divided the development of Samsung brand into five stages to have a clear segmentation of Samsung’s ongoing marketing progress. Starting from chairman Kun Hee Lee’s “ New management initiative,” Samsung Electronics redoubled its efforts on enhancing product quality and design strengths. Then former CEO Yun Jong Yong initiated the downsizing and restructuring of Samsung organization to focus on major businesses with competitive advantage and survived from the impact of Asian Financial Crisis. Succeeding former internal revolution change, Eric Kim’s marketing initiative helped Samsung to establish internal marketing evaluation and management mechanism. Externally, Samsung gradually transformed its brand image into strong and favorable and built up a positive and accessible premium position in consumer feeling and judgments by good product and brand performance. After 2005, Samsung branding power started to exert all over the world with high brand resonance and prevalence of digital convergence.

It is Samsung’s total portfolio that allows it to take the lead in the consumer electronics area. Samsung can now be the master of each technical change because of its lead in basic component supply (monitor, chip, memory), which most of its competitors lack. Besides, the combination of resources including R&D, talents, key technology, innovations, know-hows, the combination of each factor, process and stage, etc, which are valuable to both to Samsung and consumers. If these conditions hold, the firm’s bundle of resources can assist the firm sustaining above average returns. What’s more, the real driver of the cost of a modern consumer electronic product is in the core components. As long as Samsung maintains forefront of component technology, Samsung Electronics can be both a winner in consumer electronics segment and component manufacturer. Given the below thesis analysis, we can draw a conclusion that Taiwanese companies cannot be like Samsung but Taiwanese companies can still learn from Samsung experience in its way of resource utilization, strategy planning, and global marketing operations.