Always in the news, Samsung has been shaking up its executive world and operations, especially here in the U.S. after the poor acceptance and sales performance of the Galaxy S5 last year. Samsung, like all Korean businesses, likes to make all decisions at the main headquarters in South Korea, even as their expansion of new offices in the U.S. grow – letting go of that ‘parental control’ is never an easy thing to do, especially with the Korean business mindset. This makes it very difficult for Samsung to accept and implement ideas from their U.S. executives and very frustrating for their U.S. workers. After the departure of Todd Pendleton, the man behind Samsung’s “Next Big Thing” campaign, Samsung has just hired Marc Mathieu as their Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung’s North American Operations (pictured on the left) and Jesse Coulter (pictured on the right) as their Chief Creative Officer for Samsung’s North American Operations.
Samsung has been plagued with executive departures over the past year – some at Samsung’s insistence and others were decisions made by the executives themselves. This can happen in any large organization – Samsung employees nearly 300,000 worldwide -however, some of it is because Samsung is relocating their U.S. Mobile marketing group from Richardson, Texas to a new building in New York’s Meatpacking District, where most of Samsung’s U.S events take place, or to Samsung’s North American headquarters in New Jersey.
Samsung said Mathieu “brings nearly two decades of expertise building and positioning some of the world’s largest brands. He most recently served as the senior vice president of global marketing at Unilever and previously held the position of senior vice president of global brand marketing at Coca-Cola.” According to Samsung, Coulter who most recently was the co-chief creative officer for CAA Marketing at Creative Artists Agency, “where he led numerous award-winning campaigns for brands such as Chipotle,” will report to Mathieu.
Samsung has tasked their new hires, especially Mathieu, to help turn things around against their archrival, Apple. Samsung said about Mathieu that he is, “to be an incubator for marketing innovation and home to the U.S.-based creative, digital, content services and brand marketing teams.” Samsung believes that this will open up a new chapter in marketing at Samsung and with their advertising budget, it will be exciting to see what this new team has in store to build up smartphone sales…after all, change can be a good thing.