This year has been pretty awesome for Samsung – they have seen huge success with the Galaxy SIII, surprise success with the Galaxy Note and Note II, as well as big wins in all of their other businesses. And as I have said, the Samsung Galaxy SIII is one of the best phones I have ever touched and deserves the accolades … and my wife says I will pry it from her cold dead hands!
We have also often talked about ads – Apple, Samsung and others (but mostly Apple and Samsung). Apple does loads of advertising, and has created some of the most high-profile ads of the last thirty years. Samsung has constantly been increasing their advertising for quite a few years – I remember working with them when they were mostly just a semiconductor maker, and slowly started exporting TVs and other products into the US.
Most recently Samsung launched their ‘biggest campaign ever’ around the Galaxy SIII, but I think if you asked most people who spent more on advertising, many would name Apple.
They would be wrong – by a lot! Over at Asymco there is an article called ‘The Cost of Selling Galaxies’ that compares advertising and marketing spends from Apple, Samsung and others. Here are some details:
It might be surprising to note that Samsung spends considerably more than Apple and Microsoft. But it also spends more than Coca Cola, a company whose primary cost of sales is advertising.
However, advertising is not the only form of promotional spending. Samsung also pays commissions and “sales promotion“. The following chart shows the value of these sales promotions relative to the ad spending budgets above.
The company also reports “Marketing Expenses” every quarter[1]. These figures appear to be the sum of Ad spending, Sales Promotions, Public Relations and a portion of “other” expenses as a part of SG&A.
When considering all marketing expenses, Samsung Electronics’ sales efforts begin to look quite astonishing.
In other words, Samsung is outspending Apple by a factor of three on advertising and marketing!
Many would counter that Apple has an army of bloggers out there giving them free publicity, but the people who click on things eventually decide what gets coverage, and certainly Samsung has much higher visibility on blogs than just about anyone other than Apple – which is due to interest from readers.
What do you think about this massive spend from Samsung on smartphones?