You did indeed read that headline correctly. A global “branding” company that specializes in “building world-class brands through elegantly simple, unexpectedly fresh strategies, stories and experiences” released a comparison of Samsung Galaxy and Apple iPhone. The survey questioned 400 people to come up with the results.
According to Talk Android, Siegel+Gale, a global branding company, has taken the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle as something of a company motto. The company not only emphasizes simplicity for its clients but has created a Global Brand Simplicity Index which can be downloaded here. One of the outcomes from the company’s survey was that the Samsung Galaxy beat the Apple iPhone for simplicity and ease of use.
The results are somewhat counter intuitive because Apple rated fifth on the Global Brand Simplicity index and Samsung came in at fourteenth. When the company took it down to the product level, that’s when Galaxy, which uses the Android operating system, overtook iPhone, which uses iOS, as the winner. Below are the criteria for the Global Brand Simplicity Index score:
The Brand Simplicity Score was calculated with the following inputs:
• How each brand was rated on the simplicity/complexity of their
products, services, interactions and communications in relation to their
industry peers. User/Non-user ratings were weighted to give more importance to the user experience and remove any possible bias for higher proportions of users for some of the brands.
• How consistently the brand experience and communications were rated across respondents (the standard deviation of the ratings)
• How aligned non-user and user perceptions were, privileging aligned
perceptions (the difference between user and non-user ratings)
• The simplicity score for the brand’s industry or category(ies)
While the iPhone was considered to be intuitive and easy to use, the Galaxy proved to have easy to use advanced features that included “high-speed file transfers to instant photo tagging and sharing.” Apple won the customer service portion of the comparison but the Galaxy’s compatibility with nonproprietary apps and accessories topped the difference in customer service according to the chart.
The chart has a tendency to look as if it is *ahem* comparing oranges to apples rather than a true across the board comparison. Nevertheless, it seems that overall, survey respondents rated Samsung’s smartphone higher than Apple’s.
“Samsung Galaxy is a significant threat to iPhone because it is able to do more—and do it more simply—than iPhone,” says one respondent
Samsung is a client of Siegel+Gale’s so you can look at it a couple of ways. Siegel+Gale’s message of simplicity worked on the Galaxy but not Samsung as a whole. After all, Apple did score significantly higher than Samsung on the Index. Google, Android’s progenitor, beat both rather handily coming in at number one. So maybe Android had more to do with the win than Samsung. Or maybe not.
Does this survey change your mind about either cell phone?
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