5 Wins Samsung Needs For Galaxy S4 To Succeed and Win the Battle

In New York on Thursday we will learn a lot about Samsung’s  marketing prowess and a little bit about the Galaxy S4. I suspect they will be telling a US audience that they will get an underpowered version of the Galaxy S4.

But leaving aside that glitch, Samsung has to do the impossible – convince us that it is stepping up from iPhone competitor to its own iconic status.

This is where it will inevitably fail but that’s a relative judgment. In front of the world’s press they have to show they have definitively out-competed Apple in the current smartphone paradigm, and that they can do.

According to IBB analyst Jefferson Wang, an adviser on disruptive innovation, Samsung have room for a couple of glitches even on Thursday. The real selling will take place when people walk into sales rooms across the country (and the world).

But, he says, Samsung will need to focus on the top 5 features of the phone, the ones that delight customers, encourage a purchasing decision, make them stick with the phone, and talk about it.

“What people talk about could be as small as faster loading,” he says, looking beyond Thursday. But those five headlines on Thursday really matter.

That not only means a well specified phone but also a level of software service that brings people close to Samsung.

We’ve heard rumors of a health monitoring package but know very little of it – it needs to be well thought through rather than just being a third party app or a make-shift sensor application. It needs to be better than Nike or MapMyRun or PatientsLikeMe. It needs to show that Samsung can do service and software.

I asked Jefferson would Samsung come up with a phone that is truly iconic on the hardware side and his answer was yes and no.

No in the sense that everyone currently works with the Apple paradigm. Yes, in the sense that this will be a great phone. But the phone will have issues, in part because Samsung’s QA with external suppliers does not rank as highly as Apple’s.

“In going for scale, in overtaking Nokia, Samsung made compromises,” he says. “But the first iPhones had issues, The advantages outweighed them. Now a phone company has about 12 months to develop a phone and 12 months shelf life. You cannot launch with zero defects. You have to manage that.”

So a lot depends on these five headline features we hear about on Thursday and on managing analyst expectations.

Say there’s health. And then there’s eye-scroll, a feature leaked by a Samsung staffer. Imagine trying to get that right on stage in front of an audience! But say it works well on the day. It’s possibly a gimmick but it already made headlines and it will again.

The hardware?

“It’s difficult to be Samsung,” says Jefferson, ” because they compete against the perception that Apple is the heart of innovation and at the same time, other device manufacturers have their own arms race going on with specifications. To be iconic they need the specs, the 8 core, instead of the quad core, that will get people talking. The idea they are winning the arms race.”

If the rumors we’ve heard so far are true then the phone will make headlines for its Octa processor and will inevitably perform better than its predecessors. Along with the 8 core there is a 13 MP camera and expectations are running high for screen performance.

Taken together with a health application and eye scrolling, that’s the five headlines they need.

That leaves the issue of whether Samsung can match Apple’s design innovations. In fact much of what the mobile sector does takes place within the paradigm Apple has created. And he’s ready to admit that Samsung will not be leaping a generation on Thursday. “ They can only compete strongly with Apple in this generation,” he says.

And no doubt they will.

Finally will the show go well? It has to be seamlessly well put together because inevitably the marketing of the S4 is already being compared to an Apple launch. Jefferson thinks customers will be forgiving even if the tech press is not. I tend to agree but I think what will seep through is any sense that Samsung are hacking it together.

Their phones are vulnerable to criticism – they turn off when they want to, for example. And in the race to find an iPhone successor they have been given an easy ride. Any lack of attention to detail for the unveiling and these faults will be elevated into a habit.

So it’s all set for Thursday.  The five points are there – we think. Service software, eye-scrolling, 8 core, cool screen, great camera. Faultless presentation?