The situation with the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has been a complete disaster for the company, and things just keep getting worse. In an attempt to calm their fans down, Samsung have announced a deal for returning a phone to them; however, some have criticized them for the small value of the returns.
Specifically, Samsung are offering up to $100 for a returned Galaxy Note 7, and the money can only be used in the purchase of another Samsung phone. Considering the original price of the recently released device, this still leaves customers at a huge loss.
As of now, the device is in an official state of recall. This is an important note to make, as they seemed to steer very clear of actually using the word “recall”, but at this stage they have no choice and have been pushed into a corner.
According to many, the main problem in this situation wasn’t so much the fact that the Note 7 had a defect – these things happen, after all. But in the eyes of many fans, the way Samsung handled the situation was completely unreasonable and not at all what one would expect from a company that cares about their users.
The incident where a company representative accidentally sent out a message implying that they would try to slow down the customer’s complaints further made the situation a very damaging one for them, and Samsung’s overall silence has truly aggravated some people.
Their reputation has taken a hit from some unexpected directions as well. Recently, most major airlines around the world have started to specifically warn their passengers against using a Galaxy Note 7 device at the start of every flight.
Having the sentence “please turn off your Samsung Galaxy Note 7 due to a risk of explosion” drilled into one’s mind time and time again will surely have some damaging effects on the company’s overall reputation. After all, many smartphone users aren’t actually tech-savvy people, any some don’t even make a distinction between the separate lines that Samsung offers.
Ironically, Samsung chose to skip a number in the Note line in order to align it with their main flagship, the Galaxy S7. And since both devices have the same model number now, many people associate the S7 with the battery issue even though it has no such problems.
Many consider the Galaxy Note brand to be completely dead at this point, and see no chance of Samsung ever releasing another device under it. However, they might take the original concept and rebrand it under a different name, as some companies have done in the past successfully.
For now though, Samsung’s primary focus shouldn’t be on their next Galaxy release. They should be more concerned with sorting out the situation with the Galaxy Note 7, and making it up to their users somehow. There doesn’t seem to be any clear winning move in sight for them, and the situation is definitely very tricky.
According to many, things wouldn’t have gotten that bad if Samsung had simply responded in an appropriate manner from the very beginning. But this whole incident has only served to demonstrate how large corporations approach situations like these behind the scenes. If they think they can get away with it, they most likely will try to. Some claim that the market as a whole will have to change to prevent such incidents from happening again.