Earlier this month, LG officially announced its decision to shut down its mobile sector for good, leaving its customers — whoever they are — in extreme disbelief. Truth be told, it hardly came as a surprise to anyone — the company has been reporting quarterly losses since 2015. In fact, quite a lot of people were bemused to know that LG was actually still in the business until their recent announcement. As a tech enthusiast myself, it pains me to know of any company’s decision to exit the market. However, I cannot say that I didn’t see that coming either. Here’s why.
Target audience
Every manufacturer in the market has its own target audience it strives to appeal to. And in the case of larger companies, there can be more than one. OnePlus, for instance, tries to appeal to the tech enthusiasts at the core, as well as those who want a premium product at a slightly lower price than the other more established brands. LG, meanwhile, seems to lack that vision. Take the LG Velvet, LG’s last attempt to release a product appealing to the average consumer. While it boasts an astonishing design, it failed to appeal to its audience courtesy of some of LG’s weirdest decisions. For $700, you only get a 60 Hz display and a mid-range Snapdragon 765G. To put things into perspective, at the time the LG Velvet was launched, you could already buy a Xioami Redmi K30 5G for about half the price. Yet the Xiaomi features the very same Snapdragon 765G SoC and a higher refresh rate screen to boot. Such weird decisions have largely crippled the sales of LG’s phones for so long, it was expected LG will quit the market sooner or later.
Marketing
Despite being regarded as one of the least important things by most consumers, its significance and impact on a particular company’s success could not be more understated. Being able to successfully market your products to your target audience, as simple as it may sound to the layman, is not an easy nut to crack. Every company has its own strategy and methodology to break through this increasingly crowded market. It may be even argued as one of the aspects a particular company’s identity revolves around. Samsung, with its massive marketing campaigns and inundating online advertisements, may give a very different impression compared to that you get from OnePlus, a company almost fully reliant on smart PR campaigns on the social media platforms and early teasers of their products capabilities.
And if LG’s target audience wasn’t clear enough, their endeavors to market their products were far more underwhelming, as of late. More often than not, people just get surprised that LG is still in the business. Comparing their efforts to those of OnePlus, a relatively less established contender, is quite unfair, let alone comparing them to more established contenders such as Samsung or Huawei. Not to mention their quite confusing naming scheme — that ThinQ moniker was as confusing as to how it’s spelled.
Innovation
Lately, LG took the decision to focus on innovative features under the Explorer series. In more layman’s terms, LG’s plan was to throw whatever they have in mind at the wall and see what sticks. While the prospect of striving to be ahead of the competition sounds quite attractive, it requires a lot of R&D investment. To sustain that business model, a more guaranteed regular income source must be secured, which is exactly what LG failed to do. Samsung, for instance, can throw all that they have at the wall and don’t care since they have their less risky source of income in the S and Note lineup, as well as their other midrange lineups. A real-life example of that is Samsung’s Fold series. We didn’t see Samsung bursting into flames when the first Galaxy Fold was met with a lukewarm response at best.
LG, on the other hand, decided to take the plunge and throw all their bleeding-edge ideas into their main flagship phones. LG’s G8 had this bizarre VeinID, which is basically an array of sensors and a time-of-flight sensor designed to scan the consumer’s veins in their hand. It all sounds very futuristic and all, but then comes the question of its practicality; what makes it better than other biometrics identification? Beyond the nifty hand gestures, which failed half of the time at best, there were no other advantages. If that was a Samsung phone, losing money on such an experimental phone won’t matter. But in the case of LG, losing money on this phone is a big blow, since this is the company’s main flagship of the year.
On the flip side, LG was in some ways very influential with this particular strategy at times. For starters, the LG G2 was the first phone with double-tap to wake, a feature we all take as granted nowadays. The LG G3 was the first mass-produced phone with a QHD display. Perhaps LG’s most notable contribution to the betterment of the smartphone market is the introduction of the wide-angle lens via the LG G5. Not so long after, the LG V40 was released, the first phone with 3 rear cameras, featuring both a telephoto and a wide-angle lens. These are instances when LG’s gamble paid off. However, being the first is not always the best. LG’s G5 was the first somewhat modular phone, a prospect much of the tech enthusiasts craved for so long. Yet it was an epic fail. A self-healing phone, as bizarre as it may sound, was the main feature of the LG G Flex. The problem is not related to trying to be innovative, rather being able to sustain that ambition. Sadly, that’s exactly what LG failed to do.
Verdict
It’s never nice bidding farewell to any company, let alone a company in the size and stature of LG. Having such fierce competition is what pushes every company to the absolute limit, offering the best they can. With LG’s exit from the smartphone market, that’s one less competitor in the field. Who knows what could have happened had LG decided to stick around for a bit longer? What kind of exciting concepts we could have seen? How many rollable or even more bewildering concepts we could have witnessed? What would have the LG Wing’s sequel looked like? If we crop out to the bigger picture, I think it is fair to say that, as harsh as it may sound, LG might have been digging its own grave for a while. Hopefully, that could serve as a warning to those companies which have been struggling for quite a while.
Featured-Image: CNET
