Flipping the script: Samsung research in Austria

x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.

For anyone over the age of 30, flip phones are likely to be a positive memory from their relative youth, but a relic of the recent past. The phones were incredibly popular in the early 2000s, but the onset of the BlackBerry – and then the iPhone – effectively ended their market superiority and heralded their disappearance from mainstream mobile phone production.

That is until 2021, with the launch of Samsung’s Z Flip3 and Z Fold3 foldable smartphones. Younger consumers had not had the experience of using the original flip phones, however, so Samsung wanted to know how the return of the foldable phone, married with the processing power of a smartphone, might be received by this group.

To help gauge the reactions of younger users, Samsung’s Austrian insights team set up its own pop-up community among Austrian Gen Z phone users to test the potential mass market appeal of the foldable phones.
Austria’s phone market posed another problem for Samsung that helped ...