Last Updated on | Published: July 3, 2022 |
Do you know how difficult it is to beat the local brands in South Korea? Not even Apple MacBook can.
Taiwan and South Korea are famous for their semiconductor industry and electronic devices. South Korea is well-known for Samsung and LG. ASUS and Acer are from Taiwan that produce electronic devices and hardwares.
The 3C global market has always been very competitive. However, Samsung and LG had always secured the laptop market shares at home, once reaching 80% in combination. For the first time ever, their combined market shares dropped to 46% and ASUS became the 1st place as a foreign brand with 31.6% in 2022 Q1 commercial laptops in South Korea!
How Did It Happen?
I came across this news on a Taiwanese social media platform called Dcard. A Korean who studied in Taiwan posted “I’m Korean, I think Taiwan’s companies are insane!”. He attributed to ASUS’s success to the marketing strategy, especially pointing out this YouTube Video (Please turn on English subtitles):
This video has over 2.1 million views and 7.2K comments at the time of this post! This is really rare for a foreign brand in South Korea.
Why Is This Video Successful?
In this 6-min short video, there’s so much more than advertising ASUS! It’s sarcastic about the social phenomena in South Korea.
Here are just my observations, and I’m also curious about Koreans’ real thoughts.
Collectivism
Collectivism prevails in Asia in general, as opposed to individualism in the US or most of the western countries. That is, the group priority is more important than the individuals. (Off track a bit, I think that’s why “family name” always goes FIRST in most of the Asian countries.) Korea is known as one of the countries that show a strong collectivism. The video satirizes that Koreans are afraid of being different because they care about other people’s opinions so much. It’s built upon a funny made-up setting that “Stopbugs” only allowed certain laptop brands like MacBook and Samsung. Yet it’s so true in reality that it became a pressure to bring other laptop brands to a chic cafe in South Korea.
Emotional Awareness for Minority
Although the functionality and performance of ASUS laptops are embedded in the dialogues, the climax came when ASUS users unveiled themselves and united, finally getting the equal rights they wanted. That emotional punch could also be extended to other collectivism-enhanced discriminations that Koreans feel related to.
Famous Korean YouTuber
To be honest, I think the brand marketing of ASUS or Acer has been weak, but this time ASUS played smart by collaborating with a famous Korean YouTube channel that has 3.15M subscribers. If it were a marketing team consisting of Taiwanese only, it would not be as successful or not at all. Many Koreans praised the creativity of the author(s) in the comments of the video. This video actually transformed ASUS branding weakness into an emotional support that can resonate with Koreans.
Thoughts
The success of a product essentially comes down to the quality and price. Simply attributing this to one YouTube video is a bit exaggerated. The cost-effectiveness of ASUS high-performance laptops stood out in the 2022 Q1 competition despite the fact that the Korean government supports and subsidizes its local brands. The pockets of the consumers just don’t lie. ASUS also made a lot of efforts in education, corporate and rental markets. Nonetheless, all the hard work would have been in vain if the marketing failed.
How about the US? According to Statista, HP (35%), Dell (26%) and Apple (24%) are the top leaders in a 2022 survey of laptop ownership in the US. Although this video is targeting South Korea, I do feel it’s more or less universal but in a different way. For example, it’s very likely you would observe more (or almost?) MacBooks at a Starbucks. For the US, this phenomenon is not about collectivism. It’s more about the “superior feelings” of consumers getting from certain products and services that result from capitalism and materialism, which in turn create some sort of unexpected discrimination. Do you think this ASUS marketing video would also be a success in the US?
*** Disclaimer: I’m not an ASUS user and this article is not paid or affiliated with ASUS.***
