The business challenge was simple: drive awareness of the new range of Samsung Foldables and get people to switch to Samsung. How to do this in an authentic way was the challenge.
To do this, we looked at Samsung’s overall brand value which is “Life opens with Galaxy”. Breaking this down, Galaxy was created to make impossible innovations possible and to connect devices, brands, and people without limits. A lifestyle open to all, exclusive to none so everyone can push forward equally.
Sound familiar?
Samsung’s ethos aligns perfectly with Gen Z’s motivations of individuality and openness. We know that they're potent pioneers in advocating for change, so we knew we had to utilize Gen Z as our advocates and get people to be open to change, be open to get out of the orchard and be open to experience Galaxy.
With that in mind, our goals were clear:
We started where everyone else starts – online looking at active conversations. Most of these switching conversations were on Reddit which presented us with a springboard for primary research. Here, we found that people have thought about switching but didn't have a safe space to discuss these conversations, as they were quickly dismissed within one's friends’ group full of Apple users.
This drove people to find a community of like-minded people thinking about switching, bringing us back to Reddit. The anonymous nature of the platform allowed people to talk about switching to Samsung without judgement and combined with the stat that the #1 reason why people come to Reddit is to be informed led us to our breakthrough moment: let's utilize the power of Reddit and its anonymous nature of raw and real discussion as a microphone to get people to switch to Samsung.
All of this led to the creation of Switchers Anonymous; a program designed to ease people off the fence and into the world of Samsung Galaxy.
Looking at active switching conversations, we could see that there were different stages of people thinking about making the switch. So we brought this to life and laid down the foundations of the program by introducing the Six Steps of Switchers Anonymous. Each step appealed to a significant part of the switcher journey, to motivate Redditors on the other side of the fence to make the leap.
With the foundation set, we brought the program to life with 6 episodes of original content. Each bringing Redditors into the “Switchers Anonymous” meetings— all directly inspired by active conversations on Reddit. To truly resonate with Reddit culture and Gen Z, we planted easter eggs throughout the episodes where common conundrums around switching were discussed with Samsung Galaxy being the solution.
The first phase of the campaign outlining the Six Steps of Switchers Anonymous truly resonated with the target audience by increasing brand favorability by 14.7 points*. The campaign also managed to motivate Redditors off the fence with purchase intent increasing by 11.6 points.
Follow-up community inspired episodes continued to drive brand favorability by 10.1 points and purchase intent by 10.2 points. Most impressively the Switchers Anonymous campaign managed to increase purchase intent amongst Apple users by 9 points, a bullseye to the campaign objectives.
Let’s not stop there. The Switchers Anonymous campaign was also loved by the Reddit community with the episodes racking up view-through rates 1.44x the platform average – not bad for episodes over 45 seconds long! And because they loved it so much, the conversation started flowing with Samsung generating over 90k mentions of their brand during the campaign flight.
*Source: Kantar, 2024
