Why Samsung Is Taking Tech from Functional to Emotive

At the start of 2024, Samsung announced the appointment of Deborah Honig, its first-ever chief customer officer for the UK and Ireland. With a focus on delivering an innovative, customer-first experience, Deborah’s job is to work on a broad span of the Korean-born global tech company’s offerings, bringing its product technology together on both a functional and emotional level.

Deborah is tasked with evolving the overarching brand offering, helping to define its purpose in the everyday for work, rest and play. And if you look at the creative work that’s been coming out of the brand recently, it’s clear what the focus is.

Having spent the first part of her career as a management consultant at McKinsey where she was part of the consumer practice and advised global businesses on strategy, marketing and commercial leadership, Deborah went on to work for some of the world’s most loved brands including Nike, Amazon, M&S and Starbucks.  

To find out more about Deborah’s perspective and agenda for the tech brand in the UK and Ireland, LBB’s Alex Reeves sat down with her.

Deborah> Creativity, more generally from a marketer's context, is really about us finding new ways to express ideas, to connect with our customers. As Samsung, the creative opportunity today is really to do that by shifting from a company and a brand that is really known for technical innovation – able to speak to people on quite a technical, sophisticated level – into a company that can translate that technical progress and innovation into something that is really simple, digestible and meaningful for someone's everyday life, whether they're at work, rest or play. That requires creativity to do, whether in the language, the cultural reference points, or the medium we're going to use – how we do that appropriately with different consumer touchpoints and channels. 

That's probably the biggest challenge for our marketers in terms of how they have to think creatively. Because our technical innovation is vast, it cuts across a huge portfolio of products. We are leading the market in so many ways. You can see that with the first generation of truly AI-powered benefits on our smartphones that we brought to market in January. We're cutting edge. How do we communicate that? How do we actually reach customers? 

Deborah> Fundamentally, I think that's why the company consciously chose chief customer officer [as my job title]. It involves all the roles of a CMO, but it also is about thinking about some of the other elements that sometimes aren't incorporated into that thinking. It's really about how we put the customer at the heart, think about what they need, and then work back from there into developing the products (which happens in Korea fantastically) to serve those needs. But also then bringing to market and communicating with people in a way that helps do that. 

Where do we focus our effort? A great example of that is the ‘SmartThings’ platform, which is also in my remit, and that is because it truly connects all our products across all our product divisions together for a consumer to have one app to help power their lives. And not just Samsung products, but also integrated with 3,000 other smart home products that people might already have chosen to adopt. 

Some of the direct touchpoints that we have with customers – we fully control that retail touchpoint. And that's also within the remit because that's our opportunity to both drive the pinnacle of the experience, but also to experiment. Then when we find out what's really resonating; we can roll that out over other channel partnerships and touchpoints. So, having that in my remit gives us that flexibility.

Deborah> I'd say I'm pretty diverse in my preferences. I love music, I love film, I love art. It's why I'm in this work. It's one of the reasons I was drawn to this role. I love the way technology is fusing into all that and powering what's possible. That's one of the things that has always driven me. 

I also come from a very big sports background. I was an athlete, competed in a number of sports, including sailing at quite a competitive level, and then moved into coaching. The power of sport and the creativity that comes out in terms of how you bring out your best, a team's best, and how you motivate them – that's why I am drawn to brands and companies that can actually play that impactful role in consumers' lives, whether it's by the breadth of the portfolio that they offer, or by being in a category that can move from something that's more functional to more emotive. Because what's more emotive than something that can power your creativity or enable your creativity, or give you time to do the things you want to do creatively?

Deborah> If I go all the way back, I would say one of the moments is starting my work with Starbucks. Working for someone like Howard Schultz, who had his vision about creating a third space, seeing the creative ways that we were going to bring that to life. the importance of community and the purpose in [what is] actually, at the end of the day, selling cups of coffee – that was quite a formative period. It was about inspiring community and connectivity one cup at a time, having that really clear vision, and a leader that thought about how we communicate through all channels with the customer. 

Another is being at Nike at a time when there was a lot of controversy in the world about levelling the playing field and people being treated with equality in both gender and race. We took a creative choice to stand behind that, and to challenge things that were happening around race, but also for women to get behind those campaigns. I'm sure you saw the campaign with Serena Williams. There were a lot of incidents where truly there was a bias against female emotive behaviour on the court, when we had plenty of examples of male emotive behaviour on the court celebrated. We built a campaign around it and said, ‘you know what, celebrate it, be proud, we support you’. 

Now, at Samsung, our portfolio touches your home and your work. You carry most of it with you every day and in our homes. Samsung is pioneering innovation at a time when tech has the opportunity to be more emotive and relevant in people's lives than ever. It recognises that there's such power in the connectivity of the portfolio we bring to people's lives. And we're in a position to start communicating that and work with customers in a more direct way to do that. 

Through the period I've been at Samsung, I’ve been able to see both the shifts in thinking, and also to drive some of that by showing how when we bring our portfolio together and we really talk to customers about their life more comprehensively, we can make a real impact.

Deborah> You want to have a partner that's both going to challenge you and inspire you. That is really important. Otherwise, you're just basically scaling up your team, rather than adding something new. And if you're working with a creative partner that's just scaling your team, there is a danger that you won't have as much of a role to play as you go forward, particularly as things like productivity in some of the basic marketing processes get automated. Part of this is future proofing, but even today. That's one.

 

Two is that you work iteratively and that you have that trust face-to-face with them where you can do that. Because no good idea is fully formed in its first inception. You can get to a point where you're quite far along and you do find that something actually isn't right – either new insights come along, or in seeing it at that stage your partner might see something that you didn't. And they have that integrity and that position to rethink this and come up with something different. 

Last, they need to constantly come with unique points of view. And that's a tall ask in the industry. As new technologies are coming out, for them to think about how they use that to scale what is unique about their creativity or insights so that they can keep pace with that will be key. 

Deborah> The Pedigree campaign that won the out of home [Grand Prix in Cannes], I thought, was fabulous for a number of reasons. But in particular, its ability to take its purpose and then put it at the heart of a creative marketing campaign that will drive commercial ROI for the business. To take that purpose – make sure that every pet lives a healthy life and to help pets that are in need of a home – and bring that to life in its marketing was just fantastic. And on top of that, it  was able to use AI to take amateur photography to make that a living, real-time campaign, and the data insights allowed it to target specific dogs against specific owner types. I think that's a great campaign.

As a marketing team, we were recently looking at the Asics work, which was quite fascinating because it was using something unexpected to make the point that's really core to its value, and makes them stand out in a crowd. Its idea of health as an overall concept – mental health, physical health – it used the fact that the fad is always these quick-fix diets or 15-minute exercises to make you look skinny. The team did a great play on it – they brought out the SEO search terms, and inserted people doing activity that was more about their mental wellbeing than about their physical wellbeing and that interaction. That was a great example of creativity, but also playing on something that's currently in culture.

Deborah> We're quite excited about a campaign that will do a lot for helping people understand how you and AI are one, and how the technology that we're bringing to the market can play a role in their everyday lives – the ups and downs, across different families. We're looking forward to seeing how consumers react to that and how we evolve that so we can have a real impact.

Deborah> I think it's both this challenge and opportunity that AI is presenting to us. Especially as a tech company that is leading the way on bringing AI products to market, it's about staying ahead, asking how we democratise, and demystifying that, so the benefits really do resonate with customers and they can get it in their hands, allowing them to make the most of the technology. And, it’s about making sure we do that in a way that builds trust and transparency, because while it's a known topic in the news all the time, for most consumers that we've spoken to recently, it's still a bit of an idea rather than lived reality. Even though AI is already part of some of the technologies they use today, they're not aware of the role that it's playing. 

So, now we need to lean into that fact, and we need to educate and communicate in a way that's really understandable. In the same way we went from just talking about specs– technicalities behind our products – to saying ‘instead of 512 gigabytes, that's 100 movies in your pocket’. Instead of spending a lot of time thinking about the motor power and the technology behind the vision in our Jet Bot, we’ll say it can figure out what surface there is and use the right suction or surface cleaner and move around an object. It can clean up that room while you're reading a story to your child. Take it to a different level. That's the puzzle piece we're really working on right now. And then how to make sure that as we figure it out in our own channels, we effectively do that for other channels as well.

We've already seen the proof points – when you do communicate in a way that people get, they adopt. In January we launched our Galaxy AI and we've recently rolled out One UI, which meant you could take those features and adopt them on older technology. We've already seen a huge uptake in features like Circle to Search, which allows you to search in app with one swipe of a finger, with things like Live Translate, which I use it at work with Korean colleagues – real-time, I can understand what they're saying, we get the benefit of speaking in our native tongue was so we can communicate better. We're already seeing huge adoption in that. I mean, we've had 8.8 million people download the One UI since we launched it – the population of New York City. We're already seeing the benefits of communicating with people more tangibly and simply in our products.