LG Has Been Saying ‘Life’s Good’ for 20 Years. Now, It’s Finally Explaining What That Means

Twenty years ago, Times Square swelled with millions of tourists who’d flocked to New York to start their holiday shopping and marvel at 161 megawatts’ worth of electronic billboards. The world’s leading brands had all paid top dollar for a piece of this spectacle and, several stories above the sidewalk, they vied for attention: Toyota, Budweiser, Pizza Hut, Wachovia, NBC and scores of other household names.

Then, on the night of Dec. 17, 2003, a newcomer joined the lineup, flashing to life on a 50-foot-tall LED screen: LG Electronics. Debuting along with the billboard was a new slogan: “Life’s Good.”

The sign had cost a reported $10 million, but this was a branding rite of passage: LG’s competitors had all paid for their piece of Times Square, too.

Yet something unquantifiable was missing in that flashy debut. Sure, the slogan was upbeat and clever. “Life’s Good” was meant to explicate the “L” and “G” of the brand name, something that American consumers had been puzzling over. (More on that later.)

Even as the new slogan answered that one question, however, it raised others.

“I have to confess that we were not very successful in delivering the core message to consumers,” said Joonseong Lee, svp and head of global marketing at LG, speaking with Adweek from the electronics giant’s global headquarters in Seoul. “We only said, ‘Life’s Good.’ So, what does it mean? Is my life good? Is your life good?”

As Lee was to discover, confusion over the slogan even existed within LG’s own ranks.

“That question also arose from inside our company for a really long time,” he continued. “Someone asked me, “Life’s Good”? [It] sounds like a slogan for an insurance company—so what is the relationship? [Our] company is an IT company.”

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.

That was fine in Korea. But when the company landed in the western hemisphere, management assumed the GoldStar name would resonate with American shoppers. It didn’t.

“It sounded like a cheap Korean brand, [which] is what it was,” recalled HA Roth Consulting founder Hayes Roth, who’d served as executive director for corporate branding at Landor Associates when that firm counted LG as a client in the late 1990s. “They were clearly trying to reposition themselves against the Sonys, Panasonics and Whirlpools, who were dominating at the time.”

And so, in 1995, GoldStar disappeared from American stores and the LG name took its place. Yet unlike other initialed brands such as UPS (United Parcel Service) or IBM (International Business Machines), LG lacked any history in America that would explain the name. As Lee recalls, many consumers wanted to know what LG stood for. Speculating became a popular exercise.

“There have been many misunderstandings about the name,” he said. “LG—what is LG? Lower ground? Or ladies and gentlemen? [There were] so many misperceptions.”

The “Life’s Good” slogan—introduced on that Times Square billboard in 2003—eventually became the company’s effort to put those misperceptions to rest. And yet, somehow, that still wasn’t enough.

Today, Lee said, “everyone knows LG and the slogan ‘Life’s Good.’ However, we are not sure if our consumers truly understand the philosophy behind that slogan.”

Building on ‘LG-ness‘

Most major brands have a slogan, of course, an image-painting motto that hovers below the name. Famous ones include De Beers’ “A diamond is forever,” BMW’s “The ultimate driving machine” and Allstate’s “You’re in good hands.”

But these slogans are self-explanatory in a way that the amorphous “Life’s Good” wasn’t—at least not as completely as LG’s senior management would have liked. To them, explaining the meaning behind “Life’s Good” wasn’t simply adding some nice sounding verbiage to the annual report—it was an essential tool for doing business globally.

“To be successful in today’s market, a company must be able to connect with consumers at an emotional level,” LG states on its corporate blog. “With its reinvented brand identity, LG is already fostering a deep connection with customers, showing that compassion and humanity are as much a part of ‘LG-ness’ as the technological and design innovation that the company has long been known for.”

Those are weighty ideas to convey inside the average attention span, which is why Lee and his colleagues hope that optimism, as a theme, will do the heavy lifting.

“Optimism is not the easy way out—it’s a very brave thing,” Lee explained. “So together we came up with the concept of the brave optimist. LG is a group of brave optimists who believe this life will be good and try to make everyone’s life better. As a result, customers will get the benefit.”

Enter skateboard bro

LG’s video released at the end of September echoes Lee’s observations. The gray and chunky man whipping through the suburbs on his longboard is clearly relying on optimism as he takes a stab at what’s usually a younger man’s sport.

Meanwhile, the narration links the visuals to the slogan. “Optimism is a hard thing to choose,” intones the whisper-soft voice of the narrator. “But once you do, you’ll see why life’s good.”

To further convey its messaging, LG has also upgraded its logo. Though LG styled its emblem as a smiley face from the beginning, many consumers missed the cue. “Not many people realized that it was smiling because it was static,” Lee said.

To remedy that problem, future ads will feature an animated face that can “greet” viewers by winking and nodding at them. And while the logo itself is the same one that debuted in 1995, its color has been bumped up from a burgundy to what LG is calling “active red,” a hue that the company hopes will speak to millennial and Gen Z consumers.

“This smile and the whole visual is being true to our heritage,” added Hyoeun Kim, vp of global marketing. “The ‘Life’s Good’ message has always been there, [but] we’re going to rejuvenate it and revitalize it for the digital world, the young generation. We wanted to bring it to life.”

Can a fridge make life good?

But LG’s task is likely to be bigger than what a smiley face alone can accomplish.

As Lee conceded, younger consumers tend to develop deep emotional connections with devices like smartphones because they interact with them frequently and intimately. But LG exited the smartphone sector in July of 2021, leaving it with refrigerators and washing machines. Americans, Lee said, “don’t feel a strong attachment to these devices.”

“So, our challenge is getting engagement with those younger customers so that they can also get some emotional benefit and emotional feeling when they come to the age of using our products.”

Time will tell whether LG’s new optimism messaging will engender that sort of bonding, but Roth likes the concept.

“Whether this is based on research or just really good instinct, if there ever was a time when we need some optimism, I’d would say now is it,” he said. “To make that part of their story is timely, and a smart choice.”