If it was from Samsung. This could have come down to a single decision by a very low-level person, or likely a contractor. Samsung's marketing execs dropped the ball in not supervising the campaign properly, but I'm not ready to fault Samsung generally because of a dozen poorly-managed publicity shots.
Instead, I judge them by how they react to this mistake. Do they pull the photos or not?
Even if it made sense in some light, it's still a bad approach, because it means people with power and money are never held accountable for things that happen on their watch.
People will judge a company or restaurant or whatever more favourably if they correct a mistake to their satisfaction, rather than not making mistakes at all.
It’s makes me wonder how many companies are hacking this. Don’t worry about quality past a certain point. Say everything works 95% of the time. After that, just offer a generous returns policy, eg just replace the whole thing. Probability that 2 things are broken is very small, and you just made the customer think you’re better than you are, and it’s cheaper than improving QC. Everyone perceives you to be better than the company with no mistakes. Profit.
Let's call it for what it really is, then: lying in your face, at scale.
> We hold them to account by not purchasing their products.
Totally agreed. That's one of few ways to send them feedback directly. Other ways would include lawsuits or voting for regulation change.
Given that signal here is roughly proportional to amount of lost market share, complaints in this thread are a fully legit, if indirect way, of getting more people to maybe buy less of their products.
If this was the first incident, then I would tend to agree with you. But this is just one of a long string of similar incidents that together form a pattern that reflect on the company values.