PROFILE: LG's Kenneth Hong talks global marketing from Korea

South Korea is a unique market and business environment in Asia, boasting its own distinct history of development and underlying business culture. Inward-looking, but still ambitious for further growth, it stands apart from both the developed markets of Japan and Singapore and the region’s emerging superpowers.

Kenneth Hong, director of global communications at LG, says that makes the electronics giant an equally challenging and intriguing brand to market internationally. Despite a background that stretches back to 1958 (when it was founded as Goldstar in Korea), it is only relatively recently (from
around the turn of the 21^st Century) that the brand has been pushing its global credentials. Hong says that ongoing push in to international markets has given the company a surge of energy. “It feels like a new company; like a startup."

Hong was raised and educated in the US, with a Korean family background.  He studied international politics and moved to Seoul “on a whim” in 1997.

“At the time, it was just another country to go to,” he said. “I happened to speak Korean and thought it was a good stepping stone for an international career.” That has proved true, with that initial step leading to a series of communications and marketing roles in not only Seoul, but also Hong Kong, Shanghai and Bangkok.

Prior to his current position, Hong even worked on the agency side of the communications business, with a role at McCann in Thailand. He was lured back to Korea for the key marketing job at LG in November, 2008. 

He describes the brand as very consumer-focused and friendly. “That is always part of LG’s DNA  - it’s always got to be somewhere close to the people,” he said.  But it has only been in the last five or six years that “the people” in this instance has referred to consumers all over the world. The challenge for Hong and his team has been to take the brand’s “life’s good” message from Korea to that much wider audience.

“The global marketing is implemented from Korea,” he says. “That’s a very normal thing from a Korean conglomerate perspective.”

Regular changes and management reshuffles are also part and parcel of the LG organisation, but Hong has been able to maintain the same role for the past three years, although there has been some impact on the function he leads.

When Bon Joon Koo, a member of LG’s founding family, took over as CEO in November last year, he paid special attention to the group’s marketing strategies.

“New management always brings in new philosophies, and new ways of doing things,” Hong said. While the company retains Y&R as an agency of record in Asia-Pacific, there are also opportunities for smaller agencies on a project-by-project basis.

But whether it is for a one-off project or a longer-term retention arrangement, what LG looks for in an agency partner has remained constant through the management changeover.

“We need someone who’s coming to us with something fresh all the time,” he tells Campaign. “It’s got to feel different and unique.”

Consistency across the 90 different markets in which LG operates is also an important factor, hence the group tends to look toward multinational agency networks.

“(Our partners) needs to know what’s happening on the other side of the world and remain consistent with that.”

Given this, Hong says LG in recent years has looked at holding company networks with agencies that work together across the media, creative and communications disciplines.  Presently, its roster has a distinct WPP flavour, with Y&R as its network agency of record, and most public relations work handled by a combination of Hill & Knowlton and Ogilvy PR, which WPP calls the 'LG-One' team.

Hong says LG’s marketing has helped to put it in a strong position in most of the markets it serves, either as a market leader or close challenger. “We’re already number one in appliances, but always looking over our shoulder,” he said. Furthermore, he said LG was aiming to be the world’s leading 3D television brand by the end of next year.

“We learned a lot from the Japanese business philosophy,” he said. “We weren’t the first in that game, but we like to take something that works and make it better.”

The position is good also for Hong himself, he says. Asked what the future holds over the next five years, he says he is interested in remaining in Korea and LG.

"the best thing about working for LG is that it continues to feel like a new company," he says. "I'm learning new ways to do things every day — something I hadn't experienced in the previous 10 years."