Dale had been heading Samsung’s mobile sales and marketing unit in
Richardson, Texas, since 2006. He had been promoted to CEO of the unit
shortly before Pete Skarzynski decided to leave the company in 2007.
Dale had his complaints about his American marketers.
“The approach was very traditional...selling products on an individual
basis but not really telling a unified Samsung story,” he said. Samsung was
producing a dozen phones a second, but it had no brand, no identity that
stuck out in the minds of consumers. The early sales and publicity
momentum around the Galaxy and its brand was already spiraling
downward. Dale knew that his employer was “in trouble,” as he put it.
Dale, who joined Samsung in the early 1980s and rose to export
manager, spent time taking wholesale orders in Texas, putting the client’s
logo on products, and sending them off to various vendors. Samsung, he
knew, was invisible to the end user. And its executives had gotten too
comfortable in this obsolete arrangement. The result?
“We were reading forecasts on our wholesale buyer, the carriers,” he
said, skewing Samsung’s product offerings. The idea was to convince
consumers to go into a Sprint shop and ask for a Samsung.
Samsung employees were surprised that Dale, a rough and tough
traditional Samsung Man, was the one kick-starting Samsung’s next big
transformation.
The “Dale Sohn regime,” as one person called it, brought mixed
feelings.
“When you worked with Dale, you got used to being berated in public,”
explained former acting CMO Paul Golden. Said Pete Skarzynski: “He
brought in a lot of Korean managers....[The makeup of the office] changed
quite substantially.”
Office morale, Pete recalled, had fallen during his last year there. Dale
yelled, chided, and told people they were fired but then called them to
come back to the office. He called weekend meetings that felt more like
exercises in patriotic solidarity. According to former CMO Bill Ogle, as
punishment for failing to triple sales—his American team only doubled
them—Dale ordered his executives to work Saturdays from Memorial Day
to Labor Day.
He unveiled inspirational slogans and banners that were standard
practice in South Korea but had the American employees scratching their
heads.