Well I think they did not in this case. Rumours were circulating that Samsung Beijing paid fans to attend the Galaxy S6 and Edge launch in Shanghai, China. A local paper further claimed truth to the allegation when it said up to 50% of the 1000 attendees who turned for the event were paid 30 yuan an hour to queue up for big fair.
However, Samsung has come out blasting the allegation and claimed that all the guests who attended the launch were formally invited alluding that they were mostly consumers and industry officials. The paper that ran the story has since retracted the article and published an apology. Now looking at the numbers it doesn’t add up., its not a difficult to get 1000 people to attend an event especially if its a flagship launch, and in China which has a population of over 1 billion why would you have to pay? Come on..,Samsung does not have to resort to any underhand tactics here.
Even the KL launch at Majestic easily saw over 1000 guests pack the hall and this was a closed event for media and VIP guests. But China is always an intriguing place, with Chinese phone makers going on a crusade to take on the global mobile business, paying-off media agency to carry tales is not uncommon. Could this be one of those incidents? We can’t verify this but the whole charade seems suspicious.
Of course Samsung is not taint free when it comes to shadowy operation, they did pay students in Taiwan to post critics on HTC smartphones online and ended up paying fines for the misdemeanor couple of years back. Apple has also been known to organise crowds for their launches and events, getting most of the employees to invade stores and event venues, although fans will shrug such news about the Cupertino titan. Large organisations will be operating covertly and no one will ever know, pressure in delivering numbers results in creative ways of manufacturing demand. It could be agency’s, or agency’s hired by agencies that will keep the mothership distant from any backalley doings when they are tasked to pile the crowd up.
But in the case of high stake winner take all poker game, nothing is left to chance, in this particular matter Samsung could possibly be innocent but an introduction of a premium flagship into the world market is like show hand, you just cannot take the risk. Launch and let market dictate is left to resource deprived smaller companies, bigger organisations test the market with pre-orders (to gauge the demand sentiment to manage production), using data analytics based on positive mentions of the brand models prior to launch dates and releasing leaks to arouse interest. Are they ethical or just clever marketing? Thats a story for another day.
