Hey, Google: Maybe it’s time to take a lesson from Samsung

Whew! I don’t know if you heard, but Samsung held its first super-duper-neato special event of the year on Tuesday, and the company’s got a few new phones for us all to ogle.

The devices themselves seem fine enough, in their respective ways. I’ll sum ’em up quickly for you, because what I really want to talk about is something a bit deeper. So here’s the lowdown:

• The Galaxy S20 is Samsung’s new main 2020 flagship. It comes in three models, all with 5G in the U.S., and they’re all about as Samsung as it gets: big screens, small bezels, and All The Specs™ — loads o’ numbers that look impressive on paper (108 megapixels! 8K video! 120Hz screens! 16GB of RAM!) but ultimately mean very little when it comes to real-world impact. They’re also expensive: $1,000 on the lower end and all the way up to $1,600 for the maxed-out top-of-the-line model.
• The Galaxy Z Flip is a new horizontally-folding foldable phone — basically a better version of the recently released Motorola Razr, from the looks of it, and an interesting technological advancement but almost certainly something no normal person should actually buy at this point.

That’s the ultra-abbreviated version, anyway. The reality is that Samsung’s bound to sell a boatload of its Galaxy S20 phones, as it generally does with its primary new flagships — and that’s the area I really wanted to explore.

First, a quick pinch of context: Aside from creating appealing devices, Samsung has worked hard over the years to build up brand awareness and loyalty. Initially, that was driven by bold, memorable, and ubiquitous marketing — but then, at least in part, it turned into a bit of a self-propagating cycle. By that, I mean that the longer someone sticks with a particular style of Android phone and the more times they upgrade from one generation of that phone to another, the more likely they are to make that same sort of upgrade the next time the need arises.

Think about it: How many people do you know who bounce between different brands within Android? In my experience, outside of a small subset of enthusiasts, most people don’t even entertain the notion. They’ve had Galaxy phones for the past few cycles, so when the time to upgrade comes around, the only question they consider is which model and style of Galaxy phone they want to get. Just as smartphone platform preference has largely become tribalized, smartphone brand preference within Android seems to have turned into a mostly static quality.

And the effects of that go even deeper: When someone who doesn’t yet have a strong brand preference within Android looks to make a buying decision — an average phone-buyer, whether for individual or company-wide purposes — what do they think about first? More often than not, it’s what brand they know and see everywhere they look, both in the hands of their colleagues or companions and in the most prominent positions on store shelves. Once that cycle starts, it’s difficult to disrupt.

Samsung knows that, and it showed us this week just how carefully it’s working to reinforce that cycle — in a way that’s almost the polar opposite of what Google does with its Pixel line of phones.

Think about these bigger-picture takeaways from this week’s Samsung event and how much of a contrast they illustrate between Samsung’s smartphone selling approach and Google’s:

A widely cited adage states that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than retaining an existing customer. Samsung may not provide anywhere near Google’s level of post-sales software support — and hell, it even quietly sells its users’ data! — but when it comes time to think about a new phone purchase, Samsung clearly knows the value of reinforcing its relationship with existing customers and motivating them to stick with the Galaxy brand. Google, on the other hand, seems to make little more than a token effort.