“My first job was as an engineer,” he told me. He had a graduate degree
in engineering from UCLA. His former colleagues would repeat those
words, with either favor or disdain: “Eric was an engineer.” But he also had
degrees in physics and business from California’s Harvey Mudd College
and Harvard Business School.
Before Samsung, he’d been CTO of the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation,
a firm that crunched data on people’s credit history, and CEO of Pilot
Software, a business intelligence vendor.
“Now, the CEO wanted me to unify the entire brand under one
umbrella,” Eric said. “Samsung’s brand was scattered. Each regional office
was doing its own thing. If we wanted to become a global company, we
needed to direct these efforts from headquarters.”
Samsung needed one giant marketing cannon with which to blast its
messages out; right now, the brand sprayed its messages more like a BB
gun, spewing little metallic balls one after another, without overarching
purpose, direction, and vision. Samsung had fifty-five advertising agencies
under contract. American offices had three minuscule accounts of $20
million each.
“Eric wanted to start fresh,” said the vice president for new business
development, Thomas Rhee.
Kim and his new marketing office began traveling throughout the
company, convincing Samsung’s top officers of the merits of global
marketing.
“Marketing was viewed as a kind of sales-promotion function,” he said.
“My job was to change the mindset.” As he consolidated marketing under
his watch—the whole point of hiring him—he ran into resistance from the
C-suite down to the manufacturing plants. That resistance was especially
strong from the product developers and the finance people.
“K.T. hated his guts,” Pete Skarzynski said. “He didn’t want anyone
messing in his sandbox.” But the resistance came not just from K.T. but
from a generation of factory floor managers. They’d built their company
from the rough-handed factory floor. To them, Eric Kim was a silver-
spooned dilettante who knew little of the hardships Samsung had gone
through, and in their minds he was preparing to spend too much of their
hard-earned revenues on marketing.
“He got a reputation for wanting to dine at the finest restaurants,”
Skarzynski said.