Korea’s LG Electronics is charging ahead with an aggressive marketing campaign to improve market share of its brand.

The company launched its G4 in SA on Thursday. The smartphone takes direct aim at rival Korean brand Samsung.

“We’ve been actively marketing the brand since quarter four of 2013, so it’s been a long process for us, slowly stepping up,” said LG Mobile South Africa GM Deon Prinsloo.

LG is aiming at primary mobile subscriber contract customers who traditionally are willing to pay premium prices for the latest devices.

Prinsloo said that after years of being regarded as a budget manufacturer, LG was beginning to see the results of a brand re-positioning.

“The results have been there: we were nowhere in the post-paid market in 2013, first half. We launched the G2; the market received it very well.

“The G3 did double the sales that we did on the G2, and the opening orders from networks on the G4 is more than double what we did with the G3,” Prinsloo said.

The G4 will be available on all mobile networks from 19 June, and Prinsloo didn’t hesitate to talk up the brand’s value in the eyes of consumers.

“It shows us that consumers are now starting to anticipate and wait for the next product in the G legacy of LG devices.”

Customers who bought the G3 are likely still early in their contract cycles, but Prinsloo rejected the idea that it was too soon to launch the G4.

“In this industry the product is really replaced almost every 10 to 12 months — that’s really the product cycle to bring out the next version.”

LG is also responding to rivals that build a customer support ecosystem for smartphones.

“We’re the only manufacturer today in the mobile environment that has a completely free toll-free number,” said Prinsloo.

“Imagine my mobile phone has an issue: I can’t phone into a call centre from my faulty mobile phone; I normally phone in from a fixed line and that’s one of our big differentiators,” he added.

Prinsloo said that services such as cloud storage could also be bundled with the G4 and that the company has its own service network to repair smartphones.

“We also have a service backbone in place with all major networks and our service solutions that can nationally pick up the product from the consumer, have it repaired and returned as well.” — Fin24