The Challenge
Despite its global market leadership and strong technological heritage, Samsung has faced a persistent challenge in the Nordic region: competing with Apple not on performance, but on emotional relevance. Smartphones are deeply personal devices, and brand preference is often inherited through family behavior rather than rational choice. For Samsung to achieve lasting change, it needed to shift perceptions at a cultural level and become seen as “a brand for someone like me.” This required adapting the global strategy of Openness to a uniquely Nordic mindset, one that values authenticity, emotional credibility and meaningful self-expression in everyday life. At the same time, Nordic families are navigating rising concerns around children’s screen time, AI, and emotional wellbeing. Public debate increasingly frames technology as a cause of disconnection, diminished creativity and weaker family bonds. In this environment, traditional product advertising would lack both relevance and trust. The opportunity was cultural, not functional. By focusing on families and reinterpreting technology through a deeply respected family ritual, bedtime storytelling, Samsung could challenge prevailing narratives and show a different role for tech: not as a distraction, but as a facilitator of shared experiences. By collaborating with children and parents to co-create stories using Samsung Galaxy and AI, the brand entered culture rather than commenting on it.
The Solution
Screens are often blamed for limiting children’s development and fueling parental concern around screen time. The challenge was to shift this perception and demonstrate how technology could instead foster creativity, learning, and connection. By inviting kids and parents to create stories together using Samsung devices powered by Galaxy AI, we showed how AI can boost children’s creative thinking and how they can gain confidence in their storytelling, by turning their raw imaginations into entertaining, captivating storybooks, that were published as beautiful hardcovers to the public. Launched at Nordic literary festivals and scaled through ongoing workshops in schools, libraries, retail, and digital platforms, OLV, influencers, podcasts, the project drove widespread public participation, generating thousands of unique stories. The project successfully bridged digital creation and physical publishing, and turned screen time into quality time. It brought families together, empowered kids to see value in their creativity and strengthened emotional connections with Samsung.