Even though the jokes about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s tendency to spontaneously combust have mostly died down at this point, people have far from forgotten the huge fiasco with the phone’s release. The subsequent mishandling of the situation by Samsung themselves added a lot of fuel to the fire, and in the end many people were left convinced that this was the end of the company on the smartphone market.
The problem was made worse by Samsung’s decision to synchronize the naming of their models, as they wanted to bring all devices in line for the big release. As a result, many people apparently now associate the Galaxy S7 with the exploding Note 7, causing a lot of confusion on the market, but also undermining the company’s position with the Galaxy line as a whole.
Surprisingly, the controversy has mostly died down by now, and people seem to have largely forgotten about the incident. While there’s no doubt that the discussions will start again once Samsung make an announcement for a new device, things are mostly calm for them right now.
There are already talks about how the Galaxy S8 is going to push the series forward with some innovative new features, and the device will supposedly be a huge, risky leap for the company. Some are skeptical of this approach, claiming that Samsung actually need to settle down for a while right now, and focus on releasing something that is a lower risk but guaranteed to work properly.
But the company seems to be more concerned with making progress, which is certainly not a bad thing as long as they’re able to pull off the next release properly. There are no indications that Samsung are planning to make any changes to the Galaxy line’s naming scheme, so they are likely still going to go with the controversial name.
There’s nothing that a little marketing can’t fix though, and Samsung are definitely not strangers to this concept, so we suspect that they will make an aggressive advertising push with the release of the new set of devices next year. Some experts apparently suspect that the push is going to arrive much sooner as well, and it’s possible that we’re going to see Samsung running a very active promotional campaign for their upcoming devices in the next few months.
Some are claiming that this is not very likely, on the other hand, knowing the typically secretive nature of Samsung when it comes to their upcoming projects. The company doesn’t like to share a lot about their progress, and when they do, it’s typically a calculated press release that arrives not long before the actual device hits the market.
With that in mind, it’s hard to predict exactly what Samsung are going to do next, but the company does at least seem determined to retain their position on the smartphone market, and they are going to fight quite actively for that. We’ve already seen reports that they’ve made some restructuring of their business as a result of the huge recent controversy, so they seem to be moving in the right direction.
Letting go of managers is far from a perfect solution though, and the company will have to put some serious effort into convincing their customers that they’ve changed, and that the incident with the Galaxy Note 7 will not be repeated. It certainly doesn’t help that Samsung never came clean about what exactly happened behind their doors, and what caused a problem like this in the first place.