“That’s just Korean stuff,” one of them said dismissively.
When Bruce met Samsung’s internal design staff, he quickly learned
about their mindset.
“Management tells us Sony is successful,” another American designer
was told. “So if we want to be successful, we have to do things like Sony.”
Because they didn’t trust their own designers, Samsung design offices
were hiring foreign studios like Porsche Design to import their house styles
to Samsung. As a result, rather than develop a house style of their own, a
phone might look like Motorola’s, a television remote control like Sony’s,
and a car prototype like Nissan. This scattered Samsung’s identity across
product lines, confusing customers.
“I saw the same effect in Seoul, a city built to show it had overcome
hardship,” Bruce told me. “Seoul was a charmless city of gray and white
buildings—almost Soviet in its architecture; it was sacrificing its heritage
and identity in the race to modernity.”
Old architectural treasures—traditional wooden homes and Victorian-
style colonial structures built by the Japanese—were being razed at an
alarming rate, replaced by corporate housing developments. The city itself
was becoming an island of luxury—Louis Vuitton shops and plastic surgery
clinics—as Seoul’s rising middle class began to seek rounder eyes and
sculpted noses, choosing from what seemed like a catalog of Western traits.
Samsung lacked identity, Gordon could see, but perhaps its identity
crisis was a national one.
On one of his cross-country tours, the helicopter touched down on Jeju
Island at Samsung’s Shilla Hotel, a honeymoon resort where the consultants
would start planning the new design institute.
“The paparazzi rushed up when we landed at the hotel,” Bruce told me.
“They wanted to snap [pictures of] Miky with the three of us. It was quite a
sight. And Chairman Lee [wrote] articles about the importance of design in
the JoongAng [Samsung’s newspaper] while we were there.”
Dining in a private room in the hotel, where Samsung had hosted
former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev the previous night, Peter Arnell
and Gordon Bruce got acquainted. They were asked to work together on a
two-pronged strategy to build both Samsung’s products and brand.
Though their relationship was cordial on the surface, tensions between
the marketer and the product designer would stretch its bonds.