global scale.”
For Arnell, Kim’s much-anticipated ad agency review in 2000, which
was getting headlines in Advertising Age and Adweek, was the end.
“Peter kept Eric waiting for almost an hour or so. He blamed the
traffic,” Thomas recalled. “Eric was really pissed off.”
The two parted ways. Eric brought much of the advertising work back
in-house to Samsung’s agency, Cheil.
—
BUT THERE WAS A deeper purpose to branding campaigns like this. Behind
the scenes, Samsung executives were benchmarking themselves against
Sony. But no one wanted to say it publicly and risk angering their Japanese
rival, which happened to be a massive buyer of Samsung parts for its
PlayStation and Walkman CD player.
But in April 2001, Kim gave an interview to Forbes’s Heidi Brown that
was the first public acknowledgment of the conflict.
“We want to beat Sony,” he told the reporter. “Sony has the strongest
brand awareness. We want to be stronger than Sony by 2005.”
The Forbes article made headlines in Japan, where Japanese business
readers reacted with great interest. Korea, after all, had a long and troubled
history with Japan, and few people thought a Samsung coup against Sony—
the Apple of its day—was possible.
Samsung executives, on the other hand, were freaked out about Kim’s
slip. Sony was Samsung’s customer, not just a competitor. How could Eric
Kim, an outsider, challenge a partner so boldly and publicly? And so Kim
was reprimanded. “The article almost got me fired,” he told me. “But it
rallied the troops!”
This was a dilemma that Samsung executives would continue to face
with companies like Sony, Apple, Motorola, and whomever else they
supplied but also competed with.
“Can you please not publish that?” Samsung’s PR representative once
asked me when, after an official interview with my recorder out, an
executive vice president for strategy began talking about how Samsung was
in a “weird situation” by supplying parts to HP and Nokia, two customers-
cum-competitors. I didn’t include the quote in my reporting, thinking at the
time that it wasn’t that interesting.