The meeting that lasted a year
It would take two decades for LG to formulate an explanation for “Life’s Good.”
Why so long? LG had launched the slogan in Australia in 1999 and it had been well received there, so there was apparently no immediate need to address it further. In the early 2000s, the company was also rallying its marketing efforts behind the LG name itself, which was still comparatively new. LG was also busy rolling out a host of new products—flat-screen TVs especially—and it’s not like the company wasn’t doing well as things stood. LG Electronics generated $3.5 billion in global sales in 2003, about $5.9 billion in today’s dollars.
For the record, a brand taking its sweet time to explain a slogan is not without precedent. For its entire history, Vans athletic shoes had used “Off the Wall” to connect with young consumers and only felt the need to explain it in 2017—51 years after the phrase first appeared.
Delay notwithstanding, once LG did decide to furnish some context to “Life’s Good,” it committed to the effort. LG’s senior marketers in Seoul, officials from the company’s global offices and creatives from agency TBWA\Chiat\Day New York would spend an entire year in a series of meetings, searching for a way to take LG’s corporate philosophy and distill it into something that would not only explain “Life’s Good,” but furnish LG with an ethos that Americans could relate to.
The power of positive thinking
For all that brainstorming, the results came down to a single word: optimism. It’s what LG wants consumers to feel when they see the LG logo or the “Life’s Good” slogan.
It’s also the underlying theme in LG’s newest ad campaign.
A 90-second spot titled “Life’s Good When You Dive in Smile First” appeared on Sept. 27. Directed by the Emmy-winning Nicolai Fuglsig, the “motivational brand film” shows the power of optimism in the form of a middle-aged man learning how to skateboard. At press time, the spot had already racked up 20 million views on YouTube.
Lee said that optimism will be the driving force behind all of LG’s advertising going forward. In the meantime, the story of why and how LG developed the theme is an opportunity to look not only at how a major brand sees itself, but also how it translates that vision into something that consumers can understand and absorb.
New name, same questions
LG’s need to better explain itself to American consumers points out an obstacle faced by international brands as they expand outside their home countries.
In 1947, as Korea slowly staggered to its feet after WWII and decades of Japanese occupation, an upstart called Lak Hui Chemical began making and selling cosmetics. Its first product, Lucky Cream, was such a runaway hit that “Lucky” would eventually take the place of “Lak Hui” as the company name. Meanwhile, by 1958, the corporation had branched into the appliances sector under the name GoldStar. When those two divisions united in 1983, the company became Lucky Goldstar and, a little over a decade later, simply LG.