“Nothing changed,” the marketer told me. “In autumn they made an
announcement [about going] back to the old clothing guidelines.”
Jay Lee was trying to reboot the company culture at the very time
Samsung was making shadowy equestrian deals on behalf of the president.
The company was increasingly trapped between tradition and the need to
modernize.
The older Samsung Men, who’d given their careers to Samsung and the
chairman, did not welcome the company’s new ways. Some doubted, in
private, the capabilities and vision of Jay Lee.
“It looks like any other Western company in some sense,” Nam S. Lee,
a former aide to Chairman Lee, groaned to me in a meeting at a Starbucks.
“For the older generation,” explained Ho Soo Lee, a former Samsung
executive vice president, from his new executive suite at another chaebol,
“the culture is sacred.”
The breakneck growth of Samsung during the Samsung-versus-Apple
wars had resulted in enormous success in some areas but a step back in
others. Todd Pendleton’s “Next Big Thing” marketing campaign had
successfully overturned the narrative that Apple was the lone innovator in
the smartphone space and that everyone else was out to copy it. But
Samsung’s old-school, pressure-cooker demands had already chased out
much of Pendleton’s team in the United States.
Pendleton’s spirits remained high. But he also wanted new challenges.
Disappointed that Samsung was reluctant to move into software and retail
by opening its own Apple-like stores on a vast scale, he departed Samsung
in April 2015.
—
AT THE SAME TIME, the public perception of Apple was changing. In
December 2016, the Supreme Court heard Apple v. Samsung, which was
now dragging on in its fifth year, and came close to rewriting the way
patent damages were calculated. It handed the final decision on the drawn-
out court case back down to a lower court.
Samsung’s argument resonated with a growing chorus of Apple critics:
American patent law, drawn up more than a century ago, is not attuned to
the complexities of modern technology. Samsung cited patents for a spoon
handle in 1871, a saddle in 1893, and a rug in 1894.