Samsung gets emotional: New campaign aims to celebrate motherhood

Samsung's new campaign drives home the point that its refrigerators will never fail their owners

How do you stand out in a category which is chock a block with players and there is very little technological differentiation between one brand and the other? You either turn goofy or try to tug at the potential consumer’s heartstrings. Samsung has increasingly followed the second path while offering a wide range at a competitive price. 

The company claims that it is the leading player in the frost-free and side by side refrigerator segments with a market share of 40 per cent and 47 per cent respectively. The overall refrigerator market in the country is expected to grow to $3.6 billion by 2020, according to India Refrigerator Market Outlook, 2022.

A new campaign aims to celebrate motherhood. Before getting into the nitty gritty here’s a short quiz: When was the last time you sat down and had a meal with your mother? When was the last time you missed a call from your mother and called her back at the first given opportunity to check what you might have done or not done? How often do you fight with your mother and take the lead to patch up? If the answer to each of these questions makes you feel guilty or remorseful, chances are you will identify with the new social media campaign launched by Samsung India. 

With Mother’s Day round the corner, Samsung India’s new campaign “Mothers & Daughters” depicts the bond shared by a mother and a daughter. Through questions like how often they fight and whether they cook for each other, the campaign tries to highlight the constant support a mother provides her daughter and projects the relationship into the relationship a family shares with its refrigerator. “Life at home revolves around mothers with not much credit given to her hardship. Through the advertisement, we want the daughters to acknowledge the contribution a mother makes in their lives,” says Ranjivjit Singh, chief marketing officer, Samsung India. 

The film has notched up over 1.4 million views since its inauguration. “We have got comments even from sons who say they are thankful to their mothers for her contribution to their lives,” says Singh.

To ensure the campaign strikes a chord with its target audience, the company chose the actors carefully. “We didn’t want just actors. We wanted the campaign to be authentic,” says Singh. Using people who had never faced a camera before was a tough task. 

“It took us a while to make the mother-daughter duo comfortable in front of camera. Most of the responses captured were spontaneous and not scripted,” says Aneesh Jaisinghani, executive creative director, Cheil India, the agency behind the campaign. Singh says while a proper questionnaire had been prepared for the campaign, as the film was being shot, there were some ‘natural’ moments that had to be kept as they were. 

“The campaign, is largely natural and raw. That’s the essence we wanted to capture and didn’t bother to edit,” he adds. Jaisinghani hopes “the term ‘non-stop’ will start resonating not just with a mother’s love but also with Samsung’s inverter direct cool refrigerators”. 

This is not the first time that Samsung has designed a campaign that highlights the mother-daughter bond. In a previous campaign launched to mark the arrival of its digital inverter refrigerators, Samsung India had focused on a daughter’s gratefulness towards her mother. Dismissing questions around the budget for the current campaign, Singh says it is more about the company’s “content strategy” than about hard selling one product. 

“We want people to associate with the humanness of the brand and show their mothers that they care,” he adds.