Samsung spent a decade mocking Apple, and Apple stayed the reference

In November 2011, as people queued for the iPhone 4S, Samsung released an ad for the Galaxy S II titled “The Next Big Thing Is Already Here”. It showed fans waiting outside a store while passers-by already held a phone with a larger screen and faster mobile data. Apple and the iPhone were never named, and every viewer knew who the joke was about. The pattern continued for years. In November 2017 a spot called “Growing Up” followed one man through a decade of iPhone frustrations, including the missing headphone jack, until he switched to a Galaxy. In 2018 the “Ingenius” series staged a parody of the Genius Bar, where a staff member fumbled questions from customers comparing the iPhone X with the Galaxy S9.

Some of those jokes came back. In August 2019 Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 10 without a headphone jack, and “Growing Up” disappeared from its main YouTube channels. Around the Galaxy S21 launch in early 2021, which shipped without a charger in the box, some of its accounts removed posts that had mocked Apple for doing the same. The habit has survived: in May 2024, when Apple’s “Crush” ad for the iPad Pro drew criticism and an apology, Samsung answered about a week later with “UnCrush”, tagged “We would never crush creativity”.

Riding a wave someone else paid for

Samsung was the world’s largest smartphone maker by annual shipments every year from 2011 until 2022, according to IDC. In its advertising, though, it spoke as a challenger, because the meaning of the premium smartphone (design, simplicity, the status of being early) had been built by Apple, with years of launches and enormous budgets. The books call Samsung’s move adversarial bandwagoning: riding a rival’s value by attacking it. Each ad borrowed Apple’s salience, used the frame Apple had made familiar, and offered the Galaxy as the smarter choice inside it.

The move is fast and cheap, since the expensive part, teaching the public what a great phone should feel like, has already been paid for. Its cost is structural. A brand that defines itself against a default makes the default the centre of every conversation, its own included. For a decade the most memorable Samsung ads were, in a sense, about Apple.

The jokes become commitments

The headphone jack and the charger show a risk specific to this posture. Mocking a rival’s decision quietly turns the opposite decision into one of your values in the eyes of customers. When engineering, cost or supply later pushes you the same way, the old ad starts arguing against you. A joke about a rival’s product decision is also a promise about your own, and it stays online long after the roadmap changes. Deleting the posts removes the evidence from your channels and leaves it in everyone’s screenshots.

A value built by attribution, generated from what the company itself does, can evolve with the company. A value built by contrast belongs partly to the rival, and the rival’s next move can change what it means.

Building an engine of its own

The useful question for a challenger is when the borrowed frame stops being necessary. Samsung did build things no comparison could explain: its foldable phones, launched with the Galaxy Fold in 2019, gave it a category where it set the terms and Apple had no product to mock. That is the healthy pattern the method describes, alternating a round of bandwagoning to gain reach with a round of attribution to make value properly yours.

The UnCrush ad suggests the reflex is still there. In 2023, according to IDC, Apple passed Samsung in annual smartphone shipments for the first time, which makes the challenger posture more literal than it used to be. Whether Samsung answers by contrast or by building its own frame is the decision worth watching.

If your marketing mentions a competitor more often than your own values, train your team to tell which of your values you generate and which you borrow from the rival you keep naming.