Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (13 page)

After working on the speech for a couple days, instead of passing all my edits back up the chain of command, I e-mailed the vice chairman directly, unknowingly violating cultural policy and knocking a bunch of noses out of joint. During my interview in July, the vice chairman told me I could contact him directly, so I took him at his word. He responded immediately and we worked on the speech.

Once I was finished, I took what seemed to me the very natural step of telling him I’d like him to read it out loud and identify any words or phrases that he was uncomfortable with. I also told him I’d like to hear him give the speech to me. He agreed. As his head of global public relations, it was my job to protect my vice chairman and make him look as good as possible.

During our rehearsal in his office at Hyundai headquarters, the vice chairman sat behind his desk and read the speech aloud a couple of times. Then he asked me to read it so I could show him where pauses and stresses should fall. He said he felt comfortable with it.

When I told my colleagues that I’d asked the vice chairman to
rehearse, they could not believe it. It was like I’d asked Confucius himself to drop and give me twenty push-ups.

When my counterparts at Hyundai Motor America found out that I had gotten the vice chairman to agree to a rehearsal, they praised me for a great breakthrough, an achievement that would make all the PR departments look good. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the last time I worked with the vice chairman one-on-one with a speech. Although the vice chairman appreciated my willingness to contact him directly, my naïve action was not appreciated by a number of people because I had broken the chain of command.

I came to understand, as I came to understand corporate life in general, that it wasn’t so much a turf issue as it was a looping-in issue. Put simply, the vice chairman and I had approved changes to the speech that the marketing department and my boss didn’t know about. Afterward, I followed the chain of command when writing speeches for the vice chairman. This is the nature of all big companies. I know it makes things run smoother and everyone gets in the loop and everyone’s turf is protected, but I can’t help but feel like something straightforward and even intimate is lost.

LIGHTS UP

The media days of a big motor show are held immediately before the show opens to the public. Every automaker invites automotive journalists to the booth where the company’s cars are debuted, although calling it a “booth” is a big understatement. Today’s auto show booths are multimedia performance stages with sound and light shows, live entertainment, two-story digital screens, concert-loud speaker systems, giveaway swag, and—oh, yeah—cars.

Each automaker has a set press conference time, usually fifteen to twenty minutes, and they are stacked back-to-back, usually at adjacent booths, so the media can travel from booth to booth and see every press conference. Usually, each automaker’s press conference consists of a couple of short speeches, some video, an entertainment element, and the new product reveal.

The day before an automaker’s press conference is rehearsal, often a twenty-hour day inside the gaping convention halls that host auto shows. Automakers are practicing at show volume all at the same time. Videos on massive screens and walls play while up-tempo music blares from all sides and mashes together into a cacophony. Every automaker likes to add an element of showmanship to their debut, so last-minute details—bands, singers, dancers, dancing sheets, choreographed car ballets, you name it—are rehearsed and fine-tuned. Some elements are scrapped altogether and new things are cobbled together at the last minute. All of this is occurring as every other automaker at every other booth, dozens within eyesight and earshot, are doing the same—some secreted behind huge curtains—and as workers are assembling booths and the hall itself at the last minute, with rolling cranes and forklifts and duct tape everywhere. It is a maelstrom of light, noise, and action, the smell of rubber and leather, and a real adrenaline rush. It’s showbiz.

The auto industry’s yearly calendar is driven by the world’s major motor shows. Each year kicks off with Detroit in January, followed by Geneva in March, alternating between Beijing and Shanghai in April, New York in May, alternating again between Paris and Frankfurt in September, and then closing with Los Angeles in late November. Each of the shows takes on and proudly displays its national identity. Almost each one is, and is designed to be, a powerful home-court advantage for the native automakers. Detroit is about the Big Three. Frankfurt: VW and
the German luxe brands. Paris: Renault and Peugeot. This is one reason why many auto journalists and industry folks like the Geneva show best of all. Like its home nation, the Geneva show is neutral. Switzerland has no national automakers, so no one gets a home-court advantage. Every automaker more or less has the same square footage and the same chance to attract attention. And because Geneva is on the border with France, the entrecôte is delicious. The motor shows in Beijing and Shanghai, like China, are brassier than any others in the world. A writer once remarked about China: It often mistakes gigantism for greatness. As standard practice, every automaker at every motor show surrounds its new cars with attractive female models. (The São Paulo show is the winner in this category.) At the Beijing show one year, one Chinese automaker surrounded one of its new cars with
ten
scantily clad dancing female models. And a mime. Because that wasn’t enough, they were all painted gold from head to toe. At another Chinese show, we had to cut short a media interview with one of our executives, because even when shouting he couldn’t make himself heard over the pounding music at the Chinese automaker’s booth next to ours, cranked up to distortion levels.

Detroit is probably the world’s second-largest motor show, in the ways these things are measured, after Frankfurt. At the Hyundai booth the day before the Detroit show in January 2011, John Krafcik, who helmed Hyundai’s U.S. subsidiary from 2008 through 2013 and doubled Hyundai’s U.S. market share, rehearsed repeatedly. Krafcik, a former MIT and Ford star, has a boyish look and enthusiasm despite his white hair. He is an expert communicator and became a favorite of the U.S. motoring media, elevating Hyundai’s brand status to new heights and, most important, giving a face to an often faceless company, at least outside of Korea. Krafcik is an expert communicator because he works at
it. At the rehearsal for the Detroit show, where he would speak after Vice Chairman Chung, Krafcik went through his speech several times. The vice chairman did not. He was too busy, I was told. He felt he would be ready. I said okay and crossed my fingers.

The next day arrived and it was Hyundai’s turn for its press conference. In my head I had been repeating the key takeaways of the vice chairman’s speech since I got up that morning and opened my hotel room curtains to the wintry suburban tableau outside my window. Was there any fine-tuning I could do? Were there any words the vice chairman would stumble over? If his speech was a flop, Hyundai’s new vision for its brand would suffer a false start and be lost in the din of our competitors’ press conferences, most of which would be given by their executives: big, enthusiastic, native-English-speaking CEOs. Maybe our soft-spoken Korean wouldn’t stand a chance.

To add some dazzle to the vice chairman’s presentation, Hyundai was debuting a fun new sports coupe called Veloster, a funky thing with one door on the driver’s side and two on the passenger’s side. This was a wholly unexpected kind of car from Hyundai, which was known as the sensible-shoes carmaker. Veloster would be one of the product vanguards of Hyundai’s brand elevation.

Moments before the Hyundai press conference started, as more than three hundred media people packed the booth, the vice chairman walked in, his wireless mike already in place, and sat down in the first chair in the front row. I stood in the back, watched, and silently rooted for him.

The show opened with lights and sound, a get-amped feel. When the vice chairman was introduced, he walked to his mark on the stage and began with some welcoming pleasantries. Then he hit the red meat of the speech.

“Today, customers do not believe that expensive cars with unnecessary technology are premium,” he said. “Instead, they want their core needs fulfilled at an accessible price and with a car that exceeds their expectations; a car that reflects their values and the times in which they live.”

If journalists asked me later to elaborate on this idea, I found an easy visual answer: I held up an iPhone. The iPhone, I said, works out of the box, is beautiful, is intuitive, and doesn’t confuse a user with too many gadgets and gimmicks. Bonus: it makes you feel cool to use it. That’s what we wanted Hyundai cars to be. In the past, automakers just kept larding shiny trim and sometimes goofy features on cars in the hopes of making them “premium.” Consumers have seen through this. They want what they want, they want it to work, and that’s it. Simplicity, elegance, functionality. That’s what the vice chairman was talking about in his speech.

“They want a new kind of premium,” Vice Chairman Chung continued. “We call it ‘Modern Premium.’” There. He had introduced the brand philosophy that would guide the company forward.

Then he threw the media a curve: “Our goal is not to become the biggest car company,” he said. This was surprising, even shocking, especially given what Korea had just spent the past fifty years doing. Everyone just assumed that Hyundai’s goal was to be the next Toyota—to keep pumping out solid, high-quality affordable cars until it hit number one in global sales.

Instead the vice chairman said, “Our goal is to become the most-loved car company and a trusted lifetime partner of our owners.”

This was the key thought and the engine that Hyundai needed to propel its brand higher in value. In a larger sense, it was indicative of the upshift Korea as a whole was beginning to recognize
it must make in order to begin the next chapter of its growth: to change the focus from quantity to quality.

A company emphasizing “brand” may sound like PR flimflam, but I can assure you it is not. It is as valuable to a company as any tangible asset. Entire sprawling consultancies are built on forensically analyzing companies’ financials, products, physical assets, management, distribution, marketing, and a dozen other factors and assigning an overall dollar value to the brand. When you read that Toyota’s brand is worth $30 billion, that’s not just a figure some guy pulled out of the sky. A team of MBAs from a company like Millward Brown spent weeks poring over Toyota’s quarterlies and annual reports, examining the company’s debt, assessing its position in the marketplace, watching workflow, interviewing executives, and so on.

That’s because brand makes sales. People don’t buy Apple products just because they look cool. They buy them because they love the brand. It’s the same reason a rich guy doesn’t say, “Look at my new watch.” Instead, it’s “Check out my new Rolex.” Customers develop an affinity for a brand, and it keeps them buying within the brand. If you don’t believe this, see if you don’t notice a few Apple logos stuck to car windows like sports team emblems the next time you take a drive. When was the last time you saw a Team Microsoft window sticker?

Most consumers probably thought of Hyundai cars like washing machines: a necessary purchase based on price, not brand name. If Hyundai was going to take its brand upmarket, it had to change that. The Hyundai brand must begin to mean more to consumers than just reliable, cheap cars. Hyundai must have a character trait. Ours would be trying to get people to form an emotional attachment to the Hyundai brand—literally, to fall in love with us.

General Motors, in its heyday in the 1960s, when it had a
staggering half of the U.S. auto market, did a brilliant job of this, driven by Alfred P. Sloan’s famous phrase “A car for every purse and purpose.” GM customers would be cultivated as young men by Chevrolet, the cheapest and sportiest of GM cars. As the men aged and grew in wealth and status, they stayed within the GM family of cars, trading up for more and more prestigious brands. The Chevy owner traded up for a Pontiac, then a Buick, then an Oldsmobile, and finally, when he had “made it,” a Cadillac. For other kinds of buyers, GM’s marketing was genius at creating brand loyalty. My father, for instance, topped out as an Oldsmobile man. From the 1960s until GM killed the brand in 2004, my dad would buy only white four-door Oldsmobile Delta 88s, the brand’s large family sedan. During his prime years as a traveling salesman, he traded them in every two years. There was no telling him that his Delta 88 was the same under the skin as the same-size Buick and Pontiac. He was an Olds man and nothing would change that.

Here’s how I came to explain the concept of buying a brand to journalists who visited Hyundai: Let’s say you’re in the market for a midsize family car. Normally you’d compare car to car, putting a Toyota Camry alongside a Hyundai Sonata alongside a Ford Fusion and choose based on whatever your criteria are. I told the journalists, if we do our job right, you’ll say: “I need a new car. Let me first look at Hyundai and see what cars they have that might fit my need.” You go to the Hyundai brand first and see if we have a suitable midsize family car. If we do, great. If we don’t, okay, fine. You exit the brand and look elsewhere. But we got you to shop the Hyundai
brand
first before looking at our competitors.
That’s
what it means to improve a brand value.

The vice chairman finished his speech without a hiccup. He got big applause and the lineup of colorful Velosters on stage behind him graced the next day’s
Wall Street Journal
. Maybe he
really was a one-take guy. I was so proud of him. I’d never attempt a speech in Korean. I walked up to him, smiled, clapped him on the back, and said, “Great job!” The corner of my eye caught one of my senior team members wincing as I did this. Do. Not. Touch. Vice. Chairman! But I didn’t care.

The company had put its vision out there: it was clear how high we were aiming. The motoring media took our message—delivered on the Big Three’s home court—mulled it over, and opined. Some thought we could pull it off. Others were skeptical that we could do it, but even they respected our brass for trying. And no one laughed at the idea that Hyundai could be something more than it was. As the first step in Hyundai’s attempt to raise its image, Detroit had to be considered a success.