That was fine in Korea. But when the company landed in the western hemisphere, management assumed the GoldStar name would resonate with American shoppers. It didn’t.
“It sounded like a cheap Korean brand, [which] is what it was,” recalled HA Roth Consulting founder Hayes Roth, who’d served as executive director for corporate branding at Landor Associates when that firm counted LG as a client in the late 1990s. “They were clearly trying to reposition themselves against the Sonys, Panasonics and Whirlpools, who were dominating at the time.”
And so, in 1995, GoldStar disappeared from American stores and the LG name took its place. Yet unlike other initialed brands such as UPS (United Parcel Service) or IBM (International Business Machines), LG lacked any history in America that would explain the name. As Lee recalls, many consumers wanted to know what LG stood for. Speculating became a popular exercise.
“There have been many misunderstandings about the name,” he said. “LG—what is LG? Lower ground? Or ladies and gentlemen? [There were] so many misperceptions.”
The “Life’s Good” slogan—introduced on that Times Square billboard in 2003—eventually became the company’s effort to put those misperceptions to rest. And yet, somehow, that still wasn’t enough.
Today, Lee said, “everyone knows LG and the slogan ‘Life’s Good.’ However, we are not sure if our consumers truly understand the philosophy behind that slogan.”
Building on ‘LG-ness‘
Most major brands have a slogan, of course, an image-painting motto that hovers below the name. Famous ones include De Beers’ “A diamond is forever,” BMW’s “The ultimate driving machine” and Allstate’s “You’re in good hands.”
But these slogans are self-explanatory in a way that the amorphous “Life’s Good” wasn’t—at least not as completely as LG’s senior management would have liked. To them, explaining the meaning behind “Life’s Good” wasn’t simply adding some nice sounding verbiage to the annual report—it was an essential tool for doing business globally.
“To be successful in today’s market, a company must be able to connect with consumers at an emotional level,” LG states on its corporate blog. “With its reinvented brand identity, LG is already fostering a deep connection with customers, showing that compassion and humanity are as much a part of ‘LG-ness’ as the technological and design innovation that the company has long been known for.”
Those are weighty ideas to convey inside the average attention span, which is why Lee and his colleagues hope that optimism, as a theme, will do the heavy lifting.
