Samsung's new vision to create digital lifestyle for consumers

After being the favorite IT hardware company of channel partners for mass-market products, Samsung now wants to be known as 'Aspirational digital lifestyle company'. The company's head honchos recently had rounds of discussions at the New Delhi office before freezing on this new strategic vision and to finalize the transition plans.

Confirming this news, Vivek Prakash, VP, Samsung India Electronics said, “Samsung's vision for the 21st century is to lead the digital convergence revolution. We hope to create a 'Digital Life' for our customers by introducing innovative, superior quality products for them and bringing them close to our customers.”

To accomplish this vision of making technology a part of the daily life of the Indian consumer, Samsung has charted a two-fold strategy for the year 2005. Firstly, it will be rolling out the country's largest IT retail infrastructure initiative. The plan is to open 600 IT retail outlets by March 2005. These retail outlets will be in various formats such as the table top, shop-in-shop and brand shops.

Through these retail outlets, Samsung wants to bring technology closer to consumers, allowing them to touch, feel, and experience the same. The table top format will display Samsung's high-tech products in various showrooms. Shop-in-shop will occupy a particular part of a retail outlet and create its own space. “We will also use our retail infrastructure of Digital Home and Digital Plazas, which will now become truly digital convergence showrooms,” said
Vivek.

The second step of this initiative is to introduce the latest digital technology products to the Indian consumer. The recently launched SyncMaster 730MP, having an integrated FM radio, digital memory card reader and a full-fledged 17” LCD TV functionality with remote; or the X-30 note-PC, which is the world's thinnest and lightest 15.4” wide format display mobile computing platform, are some examples of digital lifestyle products.

“These products represent the absolute high end of technology and design. All these and various other products from Samsung will truly fulfill the digital lifestyle aspirations of the consumer,” said
Vivek.

With the new initiatives, Samsung expects the acceptance of its high-end products by a wider range of customers, as they will now be able to understand and experience these products directly.

NELSON JOHNY

MUMBAI