South Korea’s largest company, Samsung, came face to face this week with exactly the nightmare scenario that students are often pitched with in MBA classes.Say you’re battling to compete with a super-successful rival (let’s call it Apple), and you launch a flashy new product (say, the Galaxy Note 7) to compete with their top-of-line item (say, the iPhone 7).Initially it works: customers love it, your fans publish rave reviews, and there’s a queue round the block.Then, two months after the launch, your fancy new product begins exploding in customers’ hands.Samsung’s first error was launching a "limited recall" of 2.5m of its new phones in September, rather than the entire range. What happened is that the phones kept exploding, doing further damage to a brand already taking serious heat.This week, Samsung threw in the towel, finally recalling all its Note 7 devices.Headlines this week screamed: "Samsung in flames" — and critics weren’t just talking about the phones. On the day it was ...
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