![]() In other words, consumers saw Samsung as having little of either. Samsung, on the other hand, still lacked brand power: It was raised only slightly on the style axis, while it was far to the left on the innovation axis. On a chart of competitors in their space, with “style” for the vertical and “innovation” for the horizontal axis, they placed Apple and Sony in the upper-right quadrant, marking them as both stylish and innovative. “If we can’t answer as employees, consumers are not going to know who we are.” “I got about 50 different answers,” he said. “What do we stand for?” Then he went around the room and asked everyone to fill in their idea. He approached the whiteboard and wrote: “Samsung = ?” headquarters, Pendleton gathered about fifty people into a meeting. Dale provided air cover from headquarters, giving them an unusual degree of latitude and space to get their work done. They were worried about meddling from South Korea’s bureaucracy. “We had to be somewhat insular to be able to pull some of this stuff off,” said a team member. The two marketing executives brought aboard thirty-six marketers and treated the office as a black-box operation. ![]() Pendleton and Wallace quickly got to work. As a tech specialist, the company reached out to a former BlackBerry digital marketer named Brian Wallace. Todd, however, had never worked at a tech company before and didn’t know the industry. He had been offbeat and irreverent in the ads he crafted and sharp and to the point in the way he communicated. Pendleton had been an unconventional marketer at Nike, an impresario and master brand builder. ![]() When Dale put out a call for a new chief marketing officer, a headhunter zeroed in on Pendleton. “I want someone who’s got tattoos all over his arms and earrings!” He had been tasked with turning things around in America, Samsung’s toughest market, given the iPhone’s huge popularity. “We need more creativity!” Dale Sohn, the CEO of Samsung Telecommunications America, the Texas mobile phone office, exclaimed in a meeting in 2010, according to a senior manager who was present. “It’s a giant phone that Steve Jobs made fun of. “I am talking to you on a phone right now that Apple just copied,” said Brian Wallace, Samsung’s former vice president for strategic marketing. “They wanted us to use butterflies,” said former marketing vice president Clyde Roberson. The South Korean headquarters, meanwhile, sent over goofy and culturally inappropriate commercials that incited rebellion among the Americans on staff. Rather than pitch consumers on why Samsung was great, marketing stories were framed around the telecom carriers-“telling a story around their network and why their network is great.” Samsung didn’t use people in its commercials-“just product and voiceover and talking about the product benefit,” said Samsung’s chief marketing officer, Todd Pendleton. Samsung’s greatest strength was its ability to manufacture superior hardware, faster than any of its competitors, through its vast, strict, top-down management system and its superior supply chain.īut the work of the marketers at Samsung was frustratingly subpar. It’s a giant fuckin’ phone that Steve Jobs made fun of. “I am talking to you on a phone right now that Apple just copied,” Brian Wallace, Samsung’s former vice president for strategic marketing, told me years later. Samsung’s management team didn’t take Jobs’ attack lightly. He also blatantly mocked Samsung and other competitors, calling their larger phones “Hummers.” “No one’s going to buy that,” he said at a press conference in July 2010. “We are going to patent it all,” Jobs once said. Samsung executives felt Apple was trying to create a monopoly with generic patents like the iPad’s black rounded rectangle shape, a patent so silly that a court threw it out. ![]() Samsung quickly countersued for infringement of five patents relating to its wireless and data transmission technology. In April 2011, Apple filed multiple lawsuits, spanning dozens of countries, against Samsung for patent infringement. Since Apple was copying Samsung’s patents, they argued, Apple had to pay Samsung. In the end, Samsung’s lawyers reversed the offer. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images (left) Simon Dawson/Bloomberg Right: Chang-Gyu Hwang speaks at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March 2015. Left: Steve Jobs unveils the new iPhone 4 at an Apple conference in June 2010.
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