Samsung’s brand value recorded some respectable gains over the course of this year – and despite the course of this year. According to a new study from consulting agency Interbrand, the overall worth of Samsung’s name now stands at 67.7 trillion won. That’s just under $57.3 billion, two percentage points up compared to last year.
Single-digit changes in brand value are inevitable when you’re one of the world’s largest companies. But this particular result is far from average. In fact, Samsung will likely chalk this down as a win, and it would be right to do so.
After all, the current global market instability affected countless of businesses, particularly luxury goods markets. Which are the cornerstone of Samsung’s operations, starting with consumer electronics and smartphones, in particular.
Samsung struggled to stabilize as much as anyone else once governments around the world started mandating lockdowns in March. Its first-quarter financials still largely avoided the negative effects of that development.
Last month, however, Samsung released its financial report for the second quarter of the year. And while it did reasonably well, that’s largely on account of efficiency improvements to its chip and display businesses. Neither of which are anywhere close to being the most important factors contributing to a metric as arbitrary as brand value.
Brand value is a deeply flawed metric, but that’s precisely why it’s such a major 2020 success indicator for Samsung
Of course, the concept of a brand’s worth is also based on one’s balance sheet; Samsung has one of those, and it’s pretty heavy, ranking as the 18th largest in the world at about $300 billion. But brand value is fundamentally geared toward the B2C segment.
It’s’ concerned with one’s interactions with consumers, how consumers perceive their brand and products, and the like. Needless to say, business hasn’t exactly been booming for Samsung in the consumer space this year. Samsung’s smartphone operations were a particularly hard-hit area.
In other words, this improvement in brand value compared to 2019 indicates consumer outlook on Samsung is still rising.
So, even if they weren’t buying as many of its products in recent months, they will likely once again be flocking to them once things return to normal, whatever that new “normal” may be.
That’s just a reminder of how little the average person understands about tech. The Exynos 990 may be an utterly unremarkable chip and the Galaxy Note 20 may have a high price tag (which is by design, to be frank, could be the intent is to upsell people to the Ultra) but Samsung is improving its worth in the eyes of consumers.
For the time being, that’s all that matters and any cracks you might have just glimpsed were already papered over by the time you turned around.