“Comparative Study of Apple Iphones and Samsung Handsets and Finding the Customers Perception About the Same…”

Introduction There’s some evidence that Apple Inc. ’s strategy to increase its share of the fast-growing smart phone market in India may be working. Apple’s shipped 252,000 iPhones to India in the last quarter of 2012, three times the number in the previous three months, according to new data by Singapore-based mobile research firm Canalys. The figure was more than double from the same quarter a year earlier, the data showed. Apple launched the iPhone5 in India in November to coincide with the Hindu festival of Diwali, when consumers usually splurge on lifestyle products.

At the same time, Apple changed its distribution strategy for India, aiming to get its product to a wider range of customers. Rachel Lash ford, Managing Director for mobile at Canalys, says Apple’s larger sales in India are down to brisk sales for the iPhone 5 and the decision to expand it distribution network. An official with Apple in India declined to comment. In September last year, the Cupertino, Calif. -company tied up with specialized distribution companies such as Ingram Micro Inc. and Redington India Ltd. to get its phones across to retailers.

The strategy helped Apple expand into smaller Indian cities and towns. Previously, Apple used to distribute its phones in India through a partnership with mobile phone carriers like Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Aircel Ltd. This distribution model, in which the carriers bundled the phones with data services, didn’t work well for Apple in India. Despite the uptick in sales, Apple’s got a long way to go to catch up with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. , the market leader in India. In the October-December period, Apple’s share of the 5. million smart phones shipped to India was only 5%, data from Canalys showed. During this period, Samsung, the market leader, commanded 40% of the smart phone market in India, Canalys says. The relatively high cost of the iPhone compared to Samsung’s products is a major reason for the gap, Ms. Lashford says. “Until Apple is able to reach lower price points, it will continue to be overtaken by competitors in India,” she said. The base price of a three-year old version of an iPhone in India is 26,500 ($493).

The latest model iPhone 5 costs 45,500 rupees for the basic 16-gigabyte version. This compares with Samsung’s portfolio range in cost between $130 and $700 in the Indian market. To address the pricing concern, last month Apple started taking out advertisements in newspapers allowing customers to buy iPhones in interest-free installments. Consumers make a down payment of Rs. 16,990 and pay the remainder in six or 12 installments. “What Apple is driving in India is something similar to what is happening in the U. S. ” a person familiar with the matter told India Real Time. “In the U. S. , a consumer can buy an iPhone which is bundled with a telecom service provider at $199 and pay the cost of the phone over two years,” the person said. “This is the only mechanism available for Apple to jumpstart volume in India,” said Himanshu Chakrawarti, chief executive of mobile retailer The Mobile Store Ltd. , an Indian retailer. Without installments, iPhone sales will be limited to a niche segment that can afford top-end phones, he added.

The installments might help boosty Apple’s sales further in the current quarter. Mr. Chakrawarti said January sales of iPhones at his company’s stores jumped three times from December. Satish Babu, founder and managing director of Chennai-based retailer UniverCell, said sales of iPhones jumped 20%-30% after it introduced the installment-plan earlier this month. Still, some analysts aren’t convinced about Apple’s new strategy. “Apple needs a good, but sub-$200 retail iPhone to grow in volumes in India’s market at Samsung’s pace,” says Neil Shah, senior analyst with U.

S. -based research firm Strategy Analytics. To supplement its distribution strategy, Apple has also been increasing its headcount in India, with staff numbers jumping over 30% from six months ago to nearly 170 people, another person familiar with the matter said. History and Background APPLE After high school, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes.

Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography. In 1974, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left Atari to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling the continent and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computers. The duo started in the Jobs family garage, and funded their entrepreneurial venture after Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak sold his beloved scientific calculator. Jobs and Wozniak are redited with revolutionizing the computer industry by democratizing the technology and making the machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers. Wozniak conceived a series of user-friendly personal computers and with Jobs in charge of marketing-Apple initially marketed the computers for $666. 66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple’s second model, the Apple II, sales increased by 700 percent, to $139 million. In 1980, Apple Computer became a publically traded company, with a market value of $1. billion on the very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Scully of Pepsi-Cola to help fill the role of Apple’s president. Jobs with Apple I Woz and Steve with Apple II Steve with the new Apple Logo According to Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, “Steve didn’t ever code. He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design… ” Daniel Kottke, one of Apple’s earliest employees and a college friend of Jobs’, stated that “Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person. He is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 342 United States patents or patent applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages. Job’s contributions to most of his patents were to “the look and feel of the product”. Most of these are design patents (specific product designs; for example, Jobs listed as primary inventor in patents for both original and lamp-style iMacs, as well as PowerBook G4 Titanium) as opposed to utility patents (inventions).

He has 43 issued US patents on inventions. The patent on the Mac OS X Dock user interface with “magnification” feature was issued the day before he died. However, Jobs had little involvement in the engineering and technical side of the original Apple computers. Even while terminally ill in the hospital, Jobs sketched new devices that would hold the iPad in a hospital bed. He also despised the oxygen monitor on his finger and suggested ways to revise the design for simplicity. SAMSUNG Samsung Electric Industries was established as a subsidiary of Samsung Group n 1969 in Suwon, South Korea. Its early products were electronic and electrical appliances including televisions, calculators, refrigerators, air conditioners and washing machines. In 1970, Samsung Group established another subsidiary, Samsung-NEC, jointly with Japan’s NEC Corporation to manufacture home appliances and audiovisual devices. In 1974, the group expanded into the semiconductor business by acquiring Korea Semiconductor, one of the first chip-making facilities in the country at the time.

The acquisition of Korea Telecommunications, an electronic switching system producer, was completed at the start of the next decade in 1980. By 1981, Samsung Electric Industries had manufactured over 10 million black-and-white televisions. In February 1983, Samsung’s founder, Lee Byung-chull, made an announcement later dubbed the “Tokyo declaration,” in which he declared that Samsung intended to become a DRAM (dynamic random access memory) vendor. One year later, Samsung became the third company in the world to develop a 64kb DRAM.

In 1988, Samsung Electric Industries merged with Samsung Semiconductor ; Communications to form Samsung Electronics. Samsung Electronics launched its first mobile phone in 1988, in the South Korean market. Sales were initially poor and by the early 1990s Motorola held a market share of over 60 percent in the country’s mobile phone market compared to just 10 percent for Samsung. Samsung’s mobile phone division also struggled with poor quality and inferior products until the mid-1990s and exit from the sector was a frequent topic of discussion within the company.

Samsung Electronics acquired a 40 percent stake in AST Research, a United States-based personal computer maker, for $378 million in February 1995. In 1996, the company devised a plan to sponsor major sporting events, resulting in it becoming an official sponsor for the 1998 Winter Olympics held in Nagano, Japan. Samsung’s flagship mobile handset line is the Samsung Galaxy S, which many consider a direct competitor of the Apple iPhone. It was initially launched in Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea in June 2010, followed by the United States in July.

It sold more than one million units within the first 45 days on sale in the United States. The company’s I9000 Galaxy S and S8500 Wave smart phones were the winners of the 2010 European EISA Awards in the smart phone and social media phone categories. The I9000 Galaxy S was recognized for its superior-quality screen and excellent connectivity whiles the S8500 Wave for its Bada operating system with unparalleled social networking and location-based services.

While many other handset makers tend to focus on supporting one (or at most two) operating system, Samsung has kept supporting a wide range of operating systems in the market. Although the Galaxy S adopts Google Android as the primary operating system, it also supports other competing operating systems such as Symbian, Microsoft Windows Phone, Linux-based LiMo, and Samsung’s proprietary Bada. Samsung sold 235 million mobile handsets in the year 2009.

At the end of the third quarter of 2010, the company had surpassed the 70 million unit mark in shipped phones, giving it a global marketshare of 22 percent, trailing Nokia by 12 percent. Overall, the company sold 280 million mobile phones in 2010, corresponding to a market share of 20. 2 percent. Partially owing to strong sales of the Samsung Galaxy range of smartphones, the company overtook Apple in worldwide smartphone sales during the third quarter 2011, with a total market share of 23. 8 percent, compared to Apple’s 14. 6-percent share.

Samsung became the world’s largest cellphone maker in 2012, with the sales of 45 million smart phones in the first quarter. Rationale of Study The area considered in the research is comparative analysis of advertisement campaigns of Apple (iphones) and Samsung, in Indian Market will find Consumers opinion on the advertising campaigns effectiveness & can see its impact on sale of consumer’s product and to know about the perception of customer towards preference on both companies’ products. Objective of the Study ?To identify the strategic advantage of advertisement campaign. To study the effectiveness of advertising campaign adopted by Apple and Samsung in India. ?To find the new possible opportunities in Indian market for products of both the Brands. ?To analyze the advertisement campaign strategy of Apple and Samsung. ?To compare the advertising strategies followed by Samsung and Apple. . Research Methodology Research Design This research is descriptive as well as exploratory in design based on convenience sampling to satisfy the title. Data Analysis Techniques Statistical tools like regression, use of technology, SPSS, EXCEL etc. and other methods of presentation like diagrams, charts, and graphs have been used to draw a precise conclusion. Sources of Data (a) Primary Data Sample survey through questionnaire has been administered to the target respondents at various locations in Indore city for comparative study of consumer behavior and perception. (b) Secondary Data Gathered information from published journals books, and concerned research reports, annual reports of the company’s periodicals, seminar papers, business magazines, dailies, and internet.

Sample Size This research is restricted to a sample size of 200. Since the study deals with comparative study of advertisement campaign of products, the sample size of this magnitude serves the purpose. Sample Description The sample under study consists of those people who are using the mobile phones of Apple and Samsung. Limitation of the Research The study is mainly based on survey method of research. Therefore, the limitations of survey method are expected to influence the outcome of the research