Samsung’s marketing lead on the value of having product in her title

It is always a statement of intent when a marketer has product added to their job title. It is a sign of trust from the business that marketing needs to be involved in bringing products to the market from inception, as opposed to being handed something at the end of the process and being told to sell it.

As vice-president of product and marketing at Samsung Electronics UK&I, Annika Bizon is one such marketer who has that remit. She says having both aspects in her control makes for a more joined-up organisation that is all pulling in the same direction.

“Every single element that the consumer touches should be joined together,” she tells Marketing Week. “What are we trying to say with our product innovations coming through and how do we tell the story?”

Bizon loves “entrenching” herself in the product development – more so than “most marketers” would even need to, she says, because it helps her understand the product and, in turn, be able to sell it better to consumers. She believes marketers need access to all the pieces in the “jigsaw” in order to do their job effectively, especially in a world where broad stroke marketing no longer bears fruit.

“In a world where everything is becoming a lot more personalised, segmented, and we’ve got all these different tools, all of that needs to come together,” she says. “And that doesn’t mean everybody’s sat in every meeting. It doesn’t mean that at all. But the strategy is ultimately the product.”

Data from Marketing Week’s Career & Salary Survey shows marketers are twice as likely (88.7%) to have influence over advertising and communications as they are over innovation/NPD (48.5%) or other decisions about product (48.8%).

‘The triple win’: Why marketers have an ‘essential seat’ in the NPD process

Of course, price and promotion are just two of the levers that marketers can pull in order to create growth, and the other two Ps of price and place are equally as important in creating a strong message.

Bizon notes that her team has influence over price promotions, in conjunction with the commercial team, as that helps make sure they can put the “right power” behind those campaigns to make them work. The omnichannel team also sits within the function – something that keeps the team focused on how the message it puts out will work depending on where the customer is hearing it.

“How do we tell the story in the contact centre? How do we tell the story in retail? How do we tell the story online or on social channels?” she ponders. “All of those things have to have some consistency around them because they’re all different customer touch points that need a message and a very clear line.”

Making AI ‘normal’

The product that Samsung is trying to sell at the moment is AI. The business has unveiled a slew of AI product offerings over the past 18 months – something that has helped it get the jump on its big rival Apple, which has been slower to move in this space.

Bizon claims that over 6 million Samsung customers are now using its AI features. No mean feat of adoption with technology that has proven divisive and, at times, confusing to consumers.

“That’s a huge amount of people to keep adopting a new behaviour on a regular basis,” she says, adding the slow introduction of new features from circle search to live translate help to make it feel “normal” to its customers. “People don’t think they’re using AI or not using AI,” says Bizon. “And they don’t necessarily need to know that. They just need to know that the tools that you get on a Samsung phone are good.”

It is also about where the brand turns up to engage with audiences in the right way. The Galaxy brand has always skewed slightly older towards the millennial market, but Bizon and the brand are keen to tap into Gen Z with its foldable phones and AI product features. Reaching that audience, however, can be challenging and it is something that the brand wanted to do with authenticity in mind.

I am not suddenly handing over the creative keys to AI.

Annika Bizon, Samsung Electronics

Of course, authenticity can mean very different things to different people, but for Bizon it’s about putting the community ahead of the brand. “You have to understand where you pull back on the reins and let the community do the talking for you,” she says. “And it’s hard as a big brand [to give up that control] but you have to let the community tell you what they need and then lean into those spaces.”

This led to the brand’s partnership with Skateboarding GB – an idea that came from a member of the team who is a fan of the sport and mentioned how skaters will prop up their phones to record themselves doing tricks – and which has boosted engagement among younger consumers in that space.

And while Samsung has not struggled to implement AI tools into its product offer, it has also found ways to embed them into the marketing function. Bizon notes that much of the work it is doing at the moment is around optimisation and speeding up processes, but she is already impressed with how it has helped the team tackle its more mundane tasks. Whether it becomes a creative partner, though, she is less certain.

“I am not suddenly handing over the creative keys to AI,” she states. “However, what I am doing is looking at where I can take the mundane of what my team is doing and optimise against that. Because that means we can move people onto things that actually make a fundamental difference.”