Eric Kim

By Donald Macintyre/Seoul

Just a few years ago, Samsung was the brand you bought if you couldn't afford Sony or Toshiba. Suddenly it's the name that consumers all over the world--especially young ones--seek out for the most fun and stylish models of everything from cell phones to flat-panel plasma TVs. One of the driving forces behind that transformation is Eric Kim, who was reared by Korean parents in Southern California and returned to his homeland to work as head of global marketing for Samsung Electronics.

The company earned $2.5 billion in net profits last year while many retail-tech stars fizzled. Business in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1999, to $2.8 billion in revenues. When Kim, 48, arrived in 1999, Samsung was already turning out some cool products. But nobody had noticed. Its brand image was fuzzy and inconsistent from market to market. One reason was that it employed a gaggle of 55 ad agencies. Kim consolidated that work in a single shop, assigning Madison Avenue's Foote, Cone & Belding Worldwide to coordinate Samsung's global marketing.

The result was a daring (by conservative Korean standards) $400 million worldwide ad campaign featuring a surreal dream world inhabited by sexy, angelic models and sleek Samsung products. In one cell-phone commercial, a skier carves his way down a pristine slope of powder that morphs into the flowing locks of a white-haired snow goddess. Kim made another smart move by sponsoring big-ticket events like the Salt Lake City Olympics, gaining quick, cost-effective global exposure. "I convinced the company we had to have a single message," says Kim. "We were the new kids on the block, and the block was noisy."

Kim earned an undergraduate degree in physics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., a master's in engineering at UCLA and an M.B.A. at Harvard. He learned his current craft at such places as Lotus Development Corp., Dun & Bradstreet and Spencer Trask Software Group, a technology-focused venture-capital firm in New York City. Spencer Trask CEO Kevin Kimberlin remembers Kim as the rare executive who knows software and electronics and is also skilled in finance and marketing--and in closing tough deals.

His confidence in marketing and engineering led Kim to order a redesign of Samsung's Nexio handheld device. It was successful in Korea, but Kim's reading of the market research convinced him that it needed a better screen, a keyboard and a wireless LAN connection before its U.S. debut in December.

Kim's Korean heritage has helped him tremendously at Samsung. An American citizen, Kim left Korea at age 11. But he returned with the language proficiency and enough grasp of the subtleties of Korea's tradition-bound business culture to make his direct-approach, all-American management style palatable. Samsung marketing vice president Park Seung Soo calls Kim "a kimchi-eating American," referring to Korea's fiery national dish.

Kim's latest campaign is to cement the company's new upmarket image by getting Samsung products into more high-end distribution channels. He also wants to shorten the time it takes to get a product onto store shelves once Samsung has spotted a new consumer whim.

Kim spends weekends at home with his wife and two children and his hi-fi cranking out jazz and classical music. He is working on his golf but prefers to take visitors for hikes in the rugged mountains that ring Seoul. He always enjoys a good, steep climb. --By Donald MacIntyre/Seoul