Samsung Losing Hearts and Minds to Apple Despite Advertising Onslaught

While Samsung in papering the world with Galaxy S IV advertising, Apple this week posted some impressive gains in mindshare as tracked by the Argus Insights Experience Equity metrics, seemingly at the cost of Samsung’s mindshare.

Measure of Smartphone Brand Mindshare using consumer reviews of recent product purchases. Notice the increase in Apple and subsequent decline in Samsung.

Blackberry and Nokia continue to hold to a sliver of mindshare while it seems the market is waiting for the new batch of Googola phones to be released before engaging again. HTC is down a bit as the fervor over the HTC One dims and other HTC handset do not yet fill the gap.

Most surprising is the increase in Apple, almost entirely due to increased mindshare for the iPhone 5. We believe, based on our mining of the social media data on each Smartphone brand, that recent iPhone 5 promotions by Best Buy and others drove increased adoption of the iPhone 5 in the face of the storm of Galaxy ads that Samsung has been raining down on the market. This flurry reinforces that consumers still value the Apple experience but would rather not pay Apple prices, the same we reported on tablets a few weeks ago. What does this mean? Apple’s quarter will be stronger thanks to Best Buy and Samsung is still waiting for those millions of Galaxy S4 handsets they stuffed the channel with to make their way into the hands of consumers…