Samsung is looking to make hard gains on Nokia – with a $25 phone targeting teenagers and aimed at instilling brand loyalty.The Korean brand is looking to gain market share of the low end segment of the phones market – a space dominated by Nokia – by selling a loss leader.
This is part of the electronics giant’s strategy to lure young teens buying their very first phone towards the Samsung brand hoping it will help nurture brand loyalty for life.
This strategy helped catapult Nokia, king of low end Smartphones, to its position despite being an almost complete loser in the high end phones space on its Symbian platform.
Finnish brand Nokia cemented their reputation with low end devices in the nineties, releasing a stream of low cost phones which helped develop a following amongst younger users.
“Those phones are not really profit oriented.
“We are not selling $25 phones to make a profit; we want to make sure the first phone they grab is Samsung,” Won-Pyo Hong, Samsung’s Executive VP for global product strategy told Reuters.
The makers are hoping to make sales of mobiles of more than 300 million this year, which doesn’t include Smartphones which they hope will almost treble to 60 million.
And it seems Samsung aren’t alone in their teen targetting.
Taiwanese rival HTC have just launched two new Smartphones aimed at the Facebook generation, called the ChaCha and Salsa.
The devices gives Facebook an exclusive function button, which lights up when updates are received.
