Situation

Samsung is launching their fifth iteration of one their Foldable devices - the Galaxy Z Fold5 and wanted to appeal to Gen Z as their main target audience.

Brief

How do we generate brand awareness and consideration about the new Galaxy Z Fold5 and its features while convincing fence sitters to finally make the switch to Samsung?

How do we reach Gen Z in a way that is authentic and one that speaks to their individualistic behavior and use them as advocates for influence?

Objectives

Increase awareness and consideration of the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5

Increase purchase intent from Apple users and get them to make the switch to Samsung.

Welcome to “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 six 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.

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 shared that they were quickly dismissed by their friend groups (of Apple users).

This reality 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– combined with the statistic 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, getting people to switch to a new life with Samsung.

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, 2023