In Australia, Apple has a cult following and Samsung struggles to get attention.

When the Galaxy ZFlip3 launched, rather than looking at incremental feature upgrades to convert our apathetic audience, we sought to ignite their imagination around what this new phone could do.

Leveraging a customer and product insight, and a partnership with an already loved brand, Dr. Denim, we side stepped the tech centric ‘feature war’, and instead created an idea that would allow us to be relevant in an entirely new category and with it reach an audience the category has always previously struggled to engage.

Samsung were launching their latest iteration of the flip phone, the Galaxy ZFlip3. As usual this phone would be launched with a traditional feature-led campaign. However, the Australian market has long been apathetic towards Samsung’s launches and this phone is anything but traditional. Beyond rational reasons of camera or battery, people buy this phone for the unique folding form-factor. There is nothing else quite like it on the market. This was on the cutting edge of fashion.

Our brief was clear: add an element to the launch that would stop thumbs, get people talking, and increase sales - particularly among the exceptionally loyal female Gen-Z and Millennial Apple users. We needed to take the phone away from functional and make it desirable.

To do that we would need bring the key benefit of a folding phone in a relevant and unexpected way.

Samsung were launching their latest iteration of the flip phone, the Galaxy ZFlip3. As usual this phone would be launched with a traditional feature-led campaign. However, the Australian market has long been apathetic towards Samsung’s launches and this phone is anything but traditional. Beyond rational reasons of camera or battery, people buy this phone for the unique folding form-factor. There is nothing else quite like it on the market. This was on the cutting edge of fashion.

Our brief was clear: add an element to the launch that would stop thumbs, get people talking, and increase sales - particularly among the exceptionally loyal female Gen-Z and Millennial Apple users. We needed to take the phone away from functional and make it desirable.

To do that we would need bring the key benefit of a folding phone in a relevant and unexpected way.

Our core target audience were fashion conscious Gen Z and Millennial iPhone users, they want to stand out from the crowd, value personalisation, and consider themselves trend-setters.

There were two distinct functional advantages to a folding phone.

1) A big screen made for smaller hands.

2) the ability to comfortably fit into any pocket.

For the fashion focused Gen Z+M audience, the latter struck a nerve, after all, big phones and small pockets were a pain point they experienced almost daily.

But they currently see Samsung as a functional, feature led brand, hence why Samsung’s launches experience much less fanfare than Apple’s, especially in spaces beyond the tech publications. We knew we needed to be bolder and more aspirational to garner their attention and reconsideration. We needed to create something that would spark conversation and desire.

When people search ‘my phone is too…’, ‘big’ is the number one query, so to launch the phone, we launched jeans that celebrated its small, folding form. So, we partnered with Australia’s most popular denim brand, Dr. Denim. The result was a limited-edition pair of ZFlip3 friendly jeans, selling for a provocative $1,499 (including a free phone).

This wasn’t going to be a ‘nice’ fashion launch. It would be an F-you to outdated and unfunctional fashion. The Galaxy ZFlip3 literally broke conventions, so in turn we destroyed and reinvented traditional jeans.

The jeans were redesigned with a bold ‘Z’ stitching across their front pockets sealing them shut and the back pockets were removed completely. With only a custom tiny pocket, we could prove that the Galaxy ZFlip3 was the perfect size for every pocket.

And created a disruptive film to launch the line and seeded it into fashion-focused publications.

“$1,499 jeans by Samsung for the Z Flip3” had the desired effect, instantly getting the internet talking. A tech brand selling designer denim proved to be novel and unexpected enough to capture attention.

The 3 weeks after the campaign (Nov 1 - Nov 21), visits to the ZFlip3 webpage increased by 118% with a key 170% proportionate uplift in Apple visitors.

In the 2 weeks after the campaign there was a recorded 51% uplift in ZFlip3 eComm sales.

Local earned media coverage in Australia accounted for $3,077,00 million in reach. The global audience increased this with an earned social reach of $11,188,451 across 12 countries.

We saw big numbers for paid social and YT, with 19.8M impressions, 8.8M view, with a majority positive engagement recorded.