Influence of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7's battery problem on consumer perception and intention to purchase Samsung smartphone in the future

Recently, Samsung Electronics encountered a crisis period from the Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s battery problem, which was their flagship smartphone. The model had an issue on batteries that bursting into flame. Samsung had started recalling all products and offered a new replacement; however, the same problem was still occurred. As a result, Samsung announced the official announcement stating that they would permanently discontinue the production and sales of its Galaxy Note7 on October, 11. This negative information toward the consumer definitely had affects to Samsung brand image. This study aimed to explore the effect of this situation, especially on consumer perception toward Korean electronics brand and intention to buy Samsung smartphone in the future. The finding from this study can be used as a case study for any brand suffering from negative information about its brand. The data were collected through three methods, which were a secondary research, an in-depth interviews and a survey. Due to a time constraint of the research, a convenience sample was used in this study with five in-depth interviews and 332 respondents from an online survey. The target respondents were current Samsung smartphone users in Thailand who had heard about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s battery problem. The data from both in-depth interviews and questionnaire survey were analyzed by both qualitative and quantitative methods. Smartphone usage behaviors were grouped into five factors and were analyzed by cluster analysis, in which it could be classified into four clusters, which were focusing user, light user, entertainment and socialized user, and all activities user. Each cluster did not have much different on attributes that had significant change after noticing the Galaxy Note 7’s battery problem. Perception on almost all attributes toward Samsung had significant change, excepting after sales service. However, surprisingly, the level of intention to purchase Samsung smartphone in the future of all clusters was still high at over 79%.The recommendation from this study is to focus on rebuilding confidence on the cluster of work focusing user and all activities user first as they accounted for 64% of total sample. Moreover, Samsung should keep developing its products and services in order to create loyalty customers that can bring it pass through this problem.