The Pepsi Man Is Coming to Save Samsung From Boring Design Leave a comment

Samsung has one of the largest product line ups of any tech model, but in terms of design, it’s persistently seen as an “also-ran.” Whereas different firms have solid distinctive and immediately recognizable design languages, resembling Nothing, Samsung has discovered itself behind within the model stakes. If you’ve received Apple as one among your largest opponents, that’s not an excellent place to be in.

That’s to not say there haven’t been enhancements within the final decade, and the occasional flashes of promise—most notable in its collaborations with exterior designers, just like the Bouroullec brothers, who usual the Serif TV for the South Korean firm. However that hasn’t stopped complaints of boring and unoriginal design, each internally and externally, and an inertia when it has led, leaving different firms to shut the hole.

Being outlined by efficiency over persona has hardly performed Samsung’s backside line any hurt—it not too long ago regained its lead from Apple in global smartphone market share and has been the global leader in TVs for nearly 20 years. However, in 2025, it seems to be there’s lastly a transparent want from Samsung to bridge the hole between kind and performance, by giving design the main focus it’s been missing for much too lengthy on the firm.

Again in April, Samsung employed Mauro Porcini, its first ever chief design officer. Porcini has spent greater than 20 years constructing award-winning design groups at 3M and PepsiCo, most not too long ago main a profitable global rebrand for Pepsi—the corporate’s first in 14 years.

For an organization as large as Samsung, this rent feels late. Apple created the identical place for Jony Ive a decade in the past, across the similar time it was reported that innovation at Samsung was being stifled beneath layers of management. With these structural points supposedly unpicked, Samsung now has work to do—one thing Porcini is eager to acknowledge.

Late to the Occasion

“We’re in a second of change, the place the way in which individuals work together with any sort of machine or digital gadget goes to be radically totally different within the coming years,” Porcini tells me. “These machines will change the way in which individuals stay, work, and join with one another—the way in which individuals fulfil their wants. For an organization like Samsung, having design on the prime, concerned in the way in which you outline the way forward for the portfolio primarily based on these wants—it’s extra vital than ever.”

The march of AI is, in fact, a useful hook upon which to tie this lengthy overdue transfer, however Yves Béhar, the founder and principal designer at Fuseproject who labored with Samsung on The Body TV, tells me this has been years within the making, and one thing Samsung had initially regarded externally to assist put the wheels in movement.

“Once we began working with Samsung on The Body [released in January 2017], the CEO on the time, HS Kim, got here to us and mentioned—look, we need to remodel ourselves from a shopper know-how firm, into an expertise enterprise,” says Béhar. “So we helped them set some ideas round that, and labored on getting that message out into the enterprise—of what it means to consider expertise versus tech. That is precisely what we did with The Body TV.”