A survey from IDC hit the inboxes of tech journalists nationwide this afternoon. It was meant to assess the damage to Samsung’s brand following the Note 7 recall, and see how consumer confidence had been damaged.
In order to work out the drop in consumer confidence among the at least 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 customers who have had their phone recalled, IDC managed to survey a whole 24 Note 7 owners.
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There is a tiny amount of useful data in this survey, but the headline that everyone seems to be running with is “Half of Note 7 Customers Have Switched to the iPhone 7!” This is bad.
We don’t know exactly how many Note 7 customers had their devices switched out, but we know that during the first recall, Samsung had to recall 2.5 million phones. Given the tiny number of Note 7 owners IDC managed to find (presumably, by standing on a street corner for 15 minutes giving out free cookies), that puts the margin of error somewhere around 20%, on a generous estimate. This is what statistics people refer to as “bad.”
The rest of the survey goes on to suggest, using a slightly better sample size, that most people will keep buying Samsung washing machines and Samsung TVs, because no-one buying a washing machine really cares about what happened to a bunch of smartphones in South Korea. Really, the only interesting thing is that 13 percent of the people surveyed hadn’t heard of the Note 7 recall at all.
Anyway, using the opinions of the 24 Note 7 owners, IDC was able to predict the future, saying that “Although the recall may have an adverse impact on the brand in the short term, the truth is that Samsung remains the clear market leader in the worldwide smartphone market. Moving forward, Samsung will need to put the Note 7 to rest as quickly as possible and focus all efforts on producing a stellar Galaxy S8 come next spring. If successful, consumers will quickly forget the Note 7 fiasco if the upcoming S8 can deliver on all fronts.”
The more you know.
