Cult of Steve
ON DAY ONE AT Samsung’s U.S. headquarters, Pendleton gathered about
fifty people into a meeting. He approached the whiteboard and wrote:
“Samsung = ?”
“Who are we?” he asked. “What do we stand for?” Then he went around
the room and asked everyone to fill in their idea. “I got about 50 different
answers,” he said. For Todd Pendleton, it was alarming. “If we can’t answer
[that] as employees, consumers are not going to know who we are.”
After a long back-and-forth conversation, the fifty marketers in the
room converged on a Samsung strength.
“We were always going to have the best hardware, first,” he said. On the
whiteboard Todd wrote: “Samsung = relentless innovation.”
The group convened each week at Dallas’s Hotel Palomar, now renamed
the Highland Dallas Hotel, a boutique hangout in the city’s University
district. Here they plotted their understanding of how people saw and
understood Samsung’s brand on a perceptual map, based on the market
research they’d gathered.
On a chart of competitors in their space, with “style” for the vertical
axis and “innovation” for the horizontal axis, they placed Apple and Sony in
the upper-right quadrant, marking them as both stylish and innovative.
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.
In other words, consumers saw Samsung as having little of either. “Less
stylish, less innovative.” “More functional.” “Good quality and value.” With
Apple and Sony commanding and fiercely protecting that stylish and
innovative space, could Samsung find an opening?