There’s no secret that LG has been trying to copy Samsung to the smallest detail for a long time now. They both live in the same country, and I’m pretty sure there’s quite a bit of corporate spying going on between each, long before their products are launched. That’s why LG manages to launch very similar phones, TV’s and other products, almost in the same time with Samsung or months after them, even though the time between starting to plan a new product and shipping it could be 12-18 months.
This time, LG has copied Samsung in a different way, though, and it could even be called borderline trolling. Samsung put a Galaxy S4 ad in Times Square in New York, to let everyone know that the Galaxy S4 is launching soon, and LG put an ad just above them, that looks almost identical, to confuse people and make them look only at their ad, and see that they could just buy the LG Optimus G instead of waiting for Galaxy S4.
The move is certainly funny, and it’s a good way for LG to get viral with it, while reminding people that the Optimus G exists, and they could consider it as an alternative to the Galaxy S4. But unless the Optimus G is significantly cheaper, I doubt that many people will do that, since the Galaxy S4 will have newer hardware and software.
In the same time, this move doesn’t put LG in a very good light. It just shows how obsessive they are about copying Samsung and trying to block the consumers from buying Samsung’s products, by making them confused with similar designs and ads. I was hoping that since the Nexus 4 LG would start taking a new direction – their own direction – without being so much in Samsung’s shadow anymore. But this proves that perhaps they are still not ready to let copying Samsung go.
Unfortunately for them, it’s going to be a prerequisite if people are going to take them seriously in the future. The Galaxy S3 was successful because it wasn’t such an obvious copycat of the iPhone anymore (even though I don’t like its design). If anything, LG should copy that kind of thinking from Samsung, instead of copying their products or its marketing campaigns.
[Via Engadget]