Apple vs. Samsung: Business Strategy Comparison

Mission, Vision, and Strategic Alignment

Apple's business strategies are well aligned with the company's mission and vision statements. Those statements are best summarized as the desire to "create products that consumers will find easy to use and marry innovative technology to work productivity and personal entertainment" (Mallin and Finkle, 2011, p. 49). The synthesis of Apple's respective business strategies revolves around the confluence of work productivity and personal entertainment. More so than many organizations, Apple has managed to integrate these two realms and reap the benefits accordingly. Thus, it is able to maintain a desirable prominence domestically while expanding its global operations to include not only critical facets of research, development, and supply chain operations, but also a growing customer base. It was largely able to achieve such an admirable presence by expanding its business beyond mere personal computing — making such computing ubiquitous and shifting it into telecommunications and the audio entertainment industries through the introduction of iPhones, iPods, iTunes, and their accessories. Subsequently, its mission and vision are well aligned with the long-term goals and strategic direction of the company.

The existing business strategies, domestic and global environments, industries, and internal capabilities of Samsung involve a wide range of interests across vertical industries that are almost all focused on customer service. Virtually all of the technical innovations and products that Samsung provides are intended to assist people in some way — that assistance spans basic communication needs to medical attention. While such a business strategy of improving the quality of lives through customer service is vast in scope, Samsung's individual strategies are equally expansive in their focus on globalization. The company's numerous pursuits are found in many different countries, including throughout Asia, the Middle East, and the Western world. While the organization's basic strategy is to help people live better through customer service across numerous aspects of life, its mission and values center on making the world a better place. Although such a mission may appear vague at first, it actually captures the wide variety of interests and areas in which Samsung conducts business — including real estate ventures, skyscraper construction, and numerous other domains. In this respect, its approach to its various business strategies is well attuned to its mission and values.

SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

Apple's strengths include its varied businesses, which encompass computing, mobile devices, entertainment, and a variety of hardware and software to facilitate these ventures. It also has a keen pulse on popular culture as it relates to both the workplace and personal lifestyle — it is considered cutting-edge and dependable by many of its customers. Its weaknesses include the fact that its former flagship product — desktop computers — appears to be slowly phased out by a variety of mobile options. Its opportunities lie in the ever-increasing mobile and internet population, which presents numerous avenues for exploitation. Its primary threats come from competition, most eminently from Microsoft in the realm of personal computing. The company's strengths provide it with extreme relevance in contemporary society, whereas its weaknesses have pushed it to explore mobile options. Those options, such as the iPhone, have proved extremely profitable in the mobile industry, while ongoing competition forces Apple to continue innovating.

Samsung's strengths involve its vast product diversification and the numerous markets in which it has a formidable presence. Samsung is associated with almost every aspect of technology, as well as several industries entirely unrelated to technology. Its weaknesses involve high marketing costs and intense competition in the field of mobile devices. Its primary opportunities involve the Internet of Things. Its threats include competition from mobile rivals, most notably Apple, though a number of other smartphone vendors are challenging the duopoly between Apple and Samsung in this market. Samsung's opportunities in the Internet of Things make it extremely competitive and position it as a leading vendor for this largely untapped market. These threats force it to streamline processes and continue innovating in the mobile devices market. Its diversified strengths enable it to remain competitive across many different industries, while its weaknesses compel it to utilize more sophisticated marketing to stay relevant in mobile. Samsung holds an enviable position in the technology industry, but its competitive position requires it to reduce costs while dividing attention between marketing and research and development — creating innovations that will resonate with consumers and keep competitors at bay.

Cultural Adaptation and Global Partnerships

Apple has been able to implement strategies that adapt to cultural differences in order to facilitate effective operations within global markets and create strategic initiatives with improved innovation. It has done so by striking up a number of creative partnerships. IBM even partnered with its principal competitor, Microsoft, in order to make some of the latter's most notable products — Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office — compatible with Apple (Finkle and Mallin, 2010, p. 36). Such a move was a strategic innovation for the simple reason that Apple viewed Microsoft as a means to further its own computing aims, rather than viewing Microsoft solely as a competitor. Similarly, Apple has entered into partnerships with some of the most well-known technology companies — AT&T, Google, Yahoo!, and others — to further its own presence and to create innovations that ultimately benefit its customers. In the process, it also had to account for cultural differences stemming from its broadening global presence, which was manifested in its ubiquitous online Apple Store and ventures with CompUSA for the retail chain to provision Apple products exclusively in certain sections. Globally, the company employed workers and utilized supply parts from different areas of the world while adapting to labor processes and cultural norms relevant to those regions.

As a company originally founded in South Korea, Samsung has developed a capacity for tailoring strategies around cultural differences to exploit the global market in which it competes. The most compelling evidence of this is found in an analysis of its presence in the United States — particularly as it pertains to the marketing of its immensely popular Galaxy smartphones. Through a clever combination of advertising that includes online, conventional print, and physical sources, the company has been able to generate substantial hype and significant preorders for its Galaxy S6. At the time of writing, the company had registered 20 million orders for the phone (Spence, 2015, Forbes), with those orders coming from around the world — achieved entirely through its marketing techniques on a product not yet available for purchase.

References

Arthur, C. (2012). The post-Jobs Apple has a different flavour under Tim Cook. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/04/post-jobs-apple-flavour-tim-cook

Finkle, T. A., & Mallin, M. L. (2010). Steve Jobs and Apple, Inc. Journal of the International Academy for Case Studies, 16(7), 31–40.

Gladwell, M. (2011). Creation myth. The New Yorker, 87(13), 44–53.

Mallin, M. L., & Finkle, T. A. (2011). Apple, Inc.: Product portfolio analysis. Journal of the International Academy for Case Studies, 17(8), 49–56.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (2006). Global code of conduct. Retrieved from

Worstall, T. (2012). Has Apple become more ethical since Steve Jobs' death a year ago? Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/10/05/has-apple-become-more-ethical-since-steve-jobs-death-a-year-ago/