LG Electronics’ tacit marketing tactics (), which seem to follow Jesus’s teaching that “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,” are so anachronistic that users go online to give LG a piece of their mind.
A cartoonist posted a satirical online cartoon titled “Some Electronics Maker’s Manga (by Nigimot),” inspired by The Kyunghyang Biz’s interview with LG Electronics’ marketing team. The cartoonist said the LG marketing team gave an insanely hilarious interview to the local media outlet.
<> LG remains tight-lipped about the unbearable lightness of its latest laptop.
Unveiling the new Gram 15, LG has billed it as a 15.6-inch, super-thin laptop with a larger screen but the same 980-gram weight. However, some users posted photos of the Gram 15, saying that it actually weighs 963 grams; other bloggers say that LG sometimes shocked the market with products with unbelievably impressive specs but LG doesn’t know about it. Many bloggers criticize LG for being absurdly nonchalant about its technological feats.
However, LG’s marketing team explains that the new Gram was billed as a lightweight laptop weighing 980 grams because LG took into account the weight of paint and the scale’s margin of error. What if LG marketed the Gram 15 as a laptop that comes with a screen one inch larger than its 13-, 14-inch predecessors but weighs 10 grams less. There is one thing that shouldn’t be forgotten in the marketing world. Whizzy new products’ strongest weapon is their unprecedentedness.
<>LG, stop playing hide & seek with consumers.
In November 2015, a blogger wrote “I’ve brought uber-shocking information” after he learned that LG’s mid-range monitors (in the roughly $200 price range) support hardware calibration, which only high-end, several-thousand-dollar monitors had featured. Another blogger said that he couldn’t believe that LG made the pricy hardware calibration function available in its low-cost monitors so that he actually purchased an LG monitor and read user manuals carefully to find out about hardware calibration support.
He wrote that the instructions on hardware calibration were so elusive in the manuals that he played hide and seek for a while. “It is indeed capable of hardware calibration. If I called an LG service center to ask about hardware calibration, they would ask me “What is that,” the blogger giggled.
However, LG’s marketing team is laidback as usual. It says that LG included hardware calibration support in its mid-range monitors on a trial basis to see whether there is demand among general consumers and instructions on hardware calibration are available on the website and in product catalogs.
<> LG forgot to mention 20k gold plating.
The LG marketing team’s bizarrely low-key marketing strategy has continued with the LG V10 smartphone, available in black, white and beige. White and beige V10 smartphones sports a 20K gold-plated stainless steel frame, but there is no mention of a 20K gold-plated stainless steel frame in the manuals. The LG V10 can play DSD (Direct Stream Digital) music files and comes with the latest version of LG's Quad Beat earphones tuned by AKG. Such insane features haven’t been properly trumpeted, many consumers grumble.
LG posted 56.5 trillion won in 2015 sales, down 4.3 percent from a year earlier. It operating profit also tumbled 34.8 percent to 1.2 trillion won. LG badly needs to think about the lexical definitions of public relations (PR) (the practice of managing the spread of information between a business and the public) and marketing (the organization of the sale of a product, for example, deciding on its price and how it should be advertised).
LG’s marketing team should feel ashamed of being labeled as meek, self-effacing and fumbling. Consumers hope that LG’s marketing team will prove its worth this year before it’s too late.
