The question isn't how many, but the scale of the fuck-up, and what it represents about the company. Maybe 5 people would have known that this ad campaign was using a non-phone-produced photo. Apparently that is enough for you to indict the 300,000+ people who work there.

It's not indicting 300,000+ people, it's one person: the chairman of Samsung Electronics for not having set a culture where blatant lying results in negative repercussions.

Did you give him a chance to fire this marketing professional in Malaysia?

299,995/300,000 behave well. 5 people misbehave. Bad culture!

5 people got caught misbehaving.

> 299,995/300,000 behave well.

Can you prove that? These guys were caught, does it mean the others just haven't been caught yet? What about the G7 battery explosions? What about the washing machines catching fire? What about last time Samsung faked images? What about when they faked benchmarks?

What about the time ten months ago when the grandson of the founder was convicted on corruption charges? https://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2018/01/29/why-samsungs...

And many others just don't care.

When I'm shopping for a phone, I don't trust any of the company's own marketing collateral, I seek out independent reviews.

Even if the photos were genuinely from the phone, they'll have combed through thousands of photos to pick the very best ones, which is nearly as bad as using a stock photo.

It's not indicting people (except those directly responsible and those officially accountable); it's indicting an organization. It's what you should do; a corporation responds only to things that impacts its profits; complaining, if it leads to less people giving them money, is a correct way of sending a market signal. That's how capitalism is supposed to work.

Show me an organization of > 100 people where one person has not behaved badly. This isn't a very useful signal if literally every organization of any appreciable size is going to be punished.

Organizations are responsible for policing themselves. The only incentive they have for that is that the damage caused by "bad apple" may impact their bottom line. Per a book on risk management I'm currently reading, this actually is (or should be) accounted for in risk evaluation! So if we voluntarily refrain from punishing organizations for misbehavior of their people, we're severing the only feedback loop that keeps them from rotting completely.

I'm not saying no organization should be punished for the bad acts of members. I'm saying that one needs to consider the scale of the bad acts before pushing for punishment of an organization. Because there is always an opportunity cost, and you can't punish every organization that has someone who behaves badly(because that is every organization), so you need to pick and choose which ones are the worst offenders. And, personally, I don't think using a stock photo to show off the blur feature, instead of a photo directly from the phone camera, is worthy of punishing Samsung.

You can perceive the magnitude of it differently, that's fair. For me, it is a big issue, because Samsung made a bald-faced lie. This was no mistake, someone out there decided to lie to customers. For me, that's serious. Important enough that I'm that much less likely to buy a Samsung phone on the next iteration.

(But then again, I can't honestly exclude the possibility of buying a Samsung given the overall shitty state of Android smartphones. It's hard to find one that doesn't cause daily frustrations, and between various brands tried by me, my wife, family and friends, Samsung phones were so far the only ones that consistently didn't disappoint. So at this point I'm noting this incident as a bad mark on the brand, and I'll be reevaluating pros and cons when the time comes to buy a new phone.)