Seoul Man, page 10
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.
On the plane ride back to Korea, I bumped into Vice Chairman Chung waiting for the bathroom and he told me that he was very comfortable saying the speech as I’d edited it. I went back to my seat happy to have weathered my first big test. And happy to be heading, as odd as it still sounded in my head, home to Korea.
6
THE KOREAN CODES
A few months before I left Hyundai and Korea, I was dining with my team. One of my junior female team members, whose English was quite good and who had lived for a short while in the States, was sitting to my left, next to the napkins. I asked her to pass me one.
She did and then asked me, “Did you ask me to hand you the napkins because in your culture it’s considered rude to reach in front of someone while they’re eating?”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”
“In our culture, it’s considered rude to interrupt someone while they’re eating to ask them to hand you something,” she replied. That was why Koreans had been jabbing their hands in front of me at meals for the previous three years, I realized.
But there it was, finally explained to me so clearly that even I could understand: each culture—Korean and American, Eastern and Western—had been behaving in a way it believed to be polite, only to actually be behaving in the rudest way possible to the other culture. It was a small example of what I came to realize was the larger truth: Korean and American, East and West, have entirely different ways of looking at and understanding the meaning of the same thing. And although each side probably believes its intent is clear to the other side, oftentimes it could not be more opaque.
I came to explain it this way: if you set a glass on a table in between an American and a Korean, they will both see a glass. But it will mean very different things to each of them. To the American, the glass will mean “thing that will soon provide me with a refreshing beverage.” To the Korean, the glass will mean “thing that I must fill and serve to my seniors to show my respect for them.”
This concept, thought of in another way, is not unfamiliar to us in our highly politicized America. Republicans and Democrats will look at, say, the same social problem yet have two totally different interpretations of how it came to be and how to solve it.
If the Napkin Episode, as I came to call it, had happened a few months after I’d arrived in Korea, my three-plus years there might have gone more smoothly for me and for everyone around me.
It’s not just that Americans and Koreans speak different languages. The language is only the mechanical representation of the divide and is in fact the easiest chasm to bridge. I had always considered myself a superior communicator. I had made my living at a high level doing just that for two decades, making complicated stories clear and easy to understand for a general readership.
But in the East, my record was mixed. To the English-speaking foreign journalists who visited Korea, I was still a good communicator. They often found me a welcome relief from my colleagues, whose Korean-accented English the foreign journalists—who were not native English speakers, either—sometimes found difficult to understand.
But to my Korean colleagues I was a poor communicator, at least for a large part of my stay there. Part of the problem was my quirks. I sometimes use double negatives. I’m sorry, but I can’t not do it. For a native English speaker, this was not a problem. For others, it was a source of pure confusion. The bigger problem was that I didn’t think through how to respond when I didn’t understand something I was being told. “So, wait,” I’d respond in exasperation. “Are you telling me it can’t be done?”
“No, sir.”
“No, it can’t be done, or no, it can be done?”
“Yes, sir.”
I was putting my poor colleagues through an Abbott and Costello routine, and no one was laughing.
I still remember how puzzled I was the first time one of my team members referred to my “American accent.” “What accent?” I said. “We don’t have accents. Brits have accents. Australians have accents. Even Canadians. We don’t.” To me, the British accent is a deviation from the norm—accent-free American English. But to a Korean, and to most of the world’s population, American English is just another kind of English accent.
This realization shocked me more than it would have had my ignorance been only linguistic. But embedded in my response, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was my belief that America is the industry standard for the world. Not just for English but in everything: politics, power, sports, entertainment, finance, you name it. It’s America’s world and everyone else is just playing in it. It didn’t take long living on the far side of the world to disabuse me of this notion. Yes, America was still by far the world’s richest and most militarily powerful country, and American movies got big audiences in Seoul. But over here, Beijing and Tokyo had much more impact on Koreans’ daily lives than Washington. No one followed the NFL. Whole epochs of American and Western history were unknown. In the wake of the Great Recession, there was a general feeling that the West was in decline and that the twenty-first century would belong to Asia, not America.
I was feeling more than befuddlement over the way I sounded. This was a symptom of a much deeper dislocation I was feeling and confusion over the way I thought about America’s place in the world.
It turned out that the biggest reason for my poor communication wasn’t my American accent or lack of Korean fluency. It was my inability to understand the basic codes of Korea: Confucianism and Koreanness.
If you’re going to live in Korea, it is important and simply good manners to at least try to learn these codes, or understand that they exist, even if you don’t learn to speak Korean. If you’re going to do business in Korea or with Koreans, it is vital.
Confucianism, named for sixth century B.C. Chinese philosopher Confucius, is a quasi-religion but mostly it is a way of ordering society via a hierarchy based on age, wealth, social status, birth, gender, and other factors. An example of this is filial piety, the devotion to parents and elders, usually meaning obedience well into a child’s young adult years. Today’s Confucianism is known as neo-Confucianism, a form that has purged the mystical elements of Taoism and Buddhism that crept into the original doctrine during the Chinese Han dynasty in the first two centuries of the first millennium A.D.
I knew a Korean woman who went to graduate school in the U.S. who was required by her parents back in Seoul to have a video conversation with them every night at the same time—and she obeyed. Even modern Korean women will rarely go against their parents’ wishes, especially their fathers’ wishes, when it comes to spouse selection.
Confucianism does not limit filial piety to strictly family relations. Expanded to a concept of “respect for the elder/senior,” it suffuses Korean society everywhere: from the workplace, where junior employees often see their bosses as fathers and vice versa, to business contracts, which are rarely equal. This is the gap-eul relationship of Confucianism, or “higher to lower.” In every relationship, one person is superior and the other is inferior, either in age, rank, income, status, whatever. In geopolitical terms, this goes back to ancient times when China was the gap, or the superior, to which Korea, the eul, or the inferior, paid tribute to the Chinese royal court. It carries forth even to modern Korean contracts, where companies are gap and employees are eul. So you always know where you stand. It is one reason why a Korean might ask your age shortly after meeting you. They are not being rude, although they may seem to be by Western standards. Instead, they are trying to determine your age relative to theirs and thus your hierarchical relationship to them—partly, at least, to know how to address you. The Korean language, like Japanese, has multiple levels of speech, which range from highly honorific to intimate, depending on whom you are addressing. These manifest in verb endings. One verb ending is used in conversations between male coworkers, another between female coworkers, another when older people speak to younger people, another when a shopkeeper is speaking to customers, and so on. That’s why it’s said the Korean alphabet is easy to learn but the language is difficult.
Anyone who has ever flown on one of the great Asian airlines or stayed at a big hotel in Seoul or Tokyo has been the beneficiary of the Confucian gap-eul relationship. The consumer, especially the business- or first-class one, is the gap and the service providers are the eul. This explains the constant bowing and smiling, the graceful and measured gesturing reminiscent of a spokesmodel and the ever-attendant service so complete that Westerners unfamiliar with it can mistake it for obsequiousness.
Relationships are so important in Korea that they can overshadow personal identity. For instance, it’s much more common to hear women refer affectionately to each other as eonni, Korean for older and younger sister, rather than use each other’s names. A younger brother would usually call his older brother hyung in public rather than use his name, which would be considered a challenge to his authority. Girls who want to flirt with a boy will call him oppa, or “older brother to a girl.” One adult Korean-American woman swore she didn’t even know the names of her aunts and uncles because she only called them by their family titles. In the West, our names are our identities. In the East, identities are inextricably tied to our relationships to others.
Koreanness is the result, at least partly, of the application of Confucianism to the Korean people and how they have conformed to it. It is also the result of a highly competitive and homogeneous culture, where the pressure to fit into the crowd—a crowd that is always striving to be smarter, better-looking, more prestigious, and richer—is enormous.
A present and constant confluence of Confucianism and Koreanness, and one that was causing me the most friction at work in the months after I arrived in Korea, was the custom of hoesik (pronounced “hway-shik”), or “staff dinner.” It turned out that the welcome saturnalia my team threw for us at the end of my first week at the company was not just for special occasions. It was simply the way business dinners went in Korea.
Westerners get just as drunk as Asians. But I soon learned there was a purpose to the Asian drunkenness—or, as they like to call it, the “drinking culture.” It was supposed to lead to closer teamwork back at the office, better productivity, and the creation of real affection between colleagues. The biggest struggle Westerners tend to find with this practice is not just the excessive drinking but the shattering of the boundary between professional and personal lives. In Korea, at hoesik, you bond with one another over delicious beef sizzling on a hot-coal grill at your table, emptying one green bottle of soju after the next, repeatedly toasting each other, ribbing and laughing with each other, and then following it up with karaoke, of course. The next morning at work, everyone commiserates in the smoking room at work with the same hangover. As it was explained to me by a fellow Hyundai executive: “Everybody same level of drunk, everybody same.” If you didn’t get drunk, or refused to drink, you made everyone else uncomfortable, disrupted the harmony, and puffed yourself up in their eyes. Hoesik is driven by the relentless Korean competitiveness. One drinker may ask another, “How many bottles of soju do you drink?” The other may reply, “Four!” And the first will shoot back, “Per hour?”
