Friday, April 19, 2013

Samsung Admits to Posting Fake Reviews Again!

Earlier this week, it was discovered that Samsung Taiwan hired students to post fake negative reviews about HTC’s smartphones on Taiwanese websites. Following the discovery of Samsung’s practices thanks to documents published by TaiwanSamsungLeaks.org, Taiwan’s fair-trade officials started an investigation.
Responding to these allegations, Samsung issued a comment to media outlets, admitting that the company had indeed engaged in such dirty marketing tactics:
HTC said that it regrets its competitors “malicious attacks” and doesn’t rule out a legal action against Samsung.
The Register has some of these anti-HTC comments that were posted by Samsung:
In the cache of forum posts, one user complained that his girlfriend’s HTC One X phone was always on the blink, while Samsung’s Galaxy Note phone was described as far better than HTC’s Sensation XL handset. Another post even asked if anyone who owned a Samsung phone had been given a job promotion.
The whole thing is obviously bad for Samsung from a PR standpoint, but the company has frequently come under severe criticism from press on several occasions:

Samsung certainly isn’t afraid to take unconventional marketing routes like staging a broadway show for the launch of a product, or launching the same product in a helicopter in a different country. And while employing new marketing tactics is nothing wrong in itself, paying people to badmouth competing brands certainly is, and we wonder if this was a global “initiative” that targeted Apple as well.

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