obscure Android me-too phones. Now it was a two-horse race. Apple was
Coke. Samsung was Pepsi. Everyone else had fallen by the wayside.
But as Todd’s team celebrated a deluge of press reports against Apple,
the mood at the U.S. headquarters was quickly tempered.
Executives at Samsung’s headquarters in Seoul, initially silent, suddenly
took notice. Concerned emails from South Korea popped up with grimmer
media reports attached. Samsung, declared Ben Bajarin, writing on
Tech.pinions, appeared more interested in winning over iPhone users than
in targeting first-time shoppers looking for a smartphone.
In very short order, Todd and Brian were told by the executives in Seoul
that they were going to be fired, according to Brian.
“Todd and I were fired probably six times,” said Brian. More than a
dozen former colleagues concurred with this version of events. One
remembered Pendleton telling the story differently, claiming that the
Korean headquarters and American mobile office had a good relationship,
though he acknowledged tensions at what he called the “working level.”
“Don’t quit, don’t quit,” Dale Sohn told team members who marched
into his office, frustrated at being punished for a job well done.
“Todd went rogue. He spent too much money,” a South Korean
marketer said of Pendleton’s team.
Frustrated that the U.S. team was acting on its own, the South Korean
executives demanded Wednesday-night conference calls (Thursday
morning in South Korea), commanding oversight of the American
marketing team.
“Every time we broke a rule, we’d get yelled at by the headquarters,”
said a marketer on Pendleton’s team. They didn’t trust the American
marketers. To them, Pendleton’s instinct to make fun of Apple was nothing
short of dangerous.
—
WHEN SAMSUNG’S WORLDWIDE MOBILE marketing chief, D.J. Lee,
traveled to Seattle, Brian Wallace was assigned to give him a PowerPoint
presentation to show off the team’s marketing successes. He didn’t realize
the cultural minefield he was entering—outdoing your boss would make
him or her look bad. In his 1996 book Trust: The Social Virtues and the
Creation of Prosperity, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama defined