Inside Samsung’s approach to data, AI, & cross-cultural marketing

I lead EU channel partner marketing at Samsung Electronics UK. I started my career a long time ago, working on brand marketing, campaigns, and product launches, and I spent time in retail too. At some point I realized that if you want to grow, you have to shift into strategy: build what I'd call an international career, where you support other markets and other teams outside your own role.

That's what happened when I moved into the European office in the UK and started working with other European markets. These days I work on data-collaborative projects, and I think this is where marketing is heading. The more you understand your customer, the better your decisions get.

Here's what I've learned so far about where this job is going, and the thing or two I've had to unlearn along the way.

Why marketing is moving from campaigns to customer ecosystems

When I talk about an ecosystem, I mean we're no longer running one campaign and moving on. We're building a system where we keep bringing new experiences to our customers, and that happens in a space that isn't just the brand. It's channel partners, retailers, and media platforms too.

That means shifting away from a one-sided view of marketing and finding a way to collaborate across all of that. When you work this way, with retailers and channel partners, you can bring personalized messaging and creative, and you get a new perspective on your customer.

In my current role, I work with audience insights to build a more personalized approach. The useful part of collaboration is that you bring different knowledge about the same customer from different sources.

Paid media used to mean showing an ad to someone who's 25 to 34 and interested in sports. Now it's about finding people's actual passion points and building a new experience around them. That's the ecosystem I work on, and it only works through collaboration with other brands.

Treating data as a strategic currency

10 years ago, we were just using Google and Meta, and we were targeting everyone because it was cheap. Nobody cared whether they reached the right audience. That's changed. Data is gold now, and whoever can analyze it and make decisions based on it is winning the market. It's become the competition itself: who uses data best, who segments customers in the best way for better targeting.

This is why I think we should treat data as a strategic currency. It's not just for internal reporting anymore; it's an external advantage.

When I talk to local markets, I tell them: you have such rich data, let's use it properly.

Data can show you:

Customer behavior
Price sensitivity
The channels customers prefer
Whether a customer is ready for a product upgrade

If your competition is using their own data this way, you need to be thinking about this too.

Data isn't just a table in Excel, even though, yes, it has to be stored somewhere. It's what you know about your customer's life cycle, such as the insight from their actions on your website, or how they react to your CRM communication, and how that feeds back into your paid media targeting.

We're talking about first-party data here. If a customer has opted into a brand's CRM database, that brand can target them directly, or build a lookalike model from them. Say you have 500,000 customers. You can build a lookalike audience: similar people who are already interested in the product - and reach them with personalized creative.

Brands are also collaborating on data with retailers and channel partners now. L'Oréal is one of them, and it's been an industry trend over the past couple of years.

This is where data clean rooms come in, a SaaS tool that's only a couple of years old, where you can match your first-party data with a retail partner's data in a secure, GDPR-compliant environment, and find a matched audience you can use for insight or targeting. There are so many ways to use this, and so much still to learn.

How AI is changing targeting, segmentation and decision-making

Data has to be protected and stored securely, so GDPR compliance and the legal frameworks around it don't go away just because AI is in the mix.

Where AI actually helps me is building lookalike audiences. Doing this manually works, but it doesn't scale: one data analyst can probably cover a couple of campaigns a month, and an international brand working across multiple regions would need that same person's time at every level. That gets expensive fast.

With AI, that same work looks different:

The data is ready in about half a day
You launch with an expanded, extrapolated audience
The targeting is precise
It shows up in the conversions and sales it produces

It proves its own worth.

AI also helps create key visuals and messaging now. That part isn't new to us anymore. We do it every day.

The reality of partner ecosystems and brand control across markets

Partner ecosystems have always been a challenge, because you're trying to protect the brand and its identity, but you also need to be flexible about how you communicate with partners and adapt to what they need.

Add multinational cooperation across different countries, and you get real cultural differences on top of that. Often the local team has more experience on the ground than the regional office does.

This is where collaboration matters again, because we're working toward the same goal: the best experience, the best products, for the customer, and finding the right way to present those products to the right audience. Nobody wants to spam people with something that isn't relevant to them.

Brand consistency matters here too. Local brand teams need to hold their ground and keep the brand consistent across markets. From the partner's side, I think marketers should explain how the brand needs to be perceived from the customer's point of view. That comes down to templates, frameworks, and guidelines. It doesn't come from pushing rules at channel partners, but giving them what they need to make a good decision for the shared goal.

I'd actually describe a partner as a point of sale. They have their own brand power and their own loyal customers, and for those customers, Samsung is just one of many brands on the shelf. What you can negotiate depends on the partner's size.

Brand perception matters a lot for a large multinational, because the brand has to be perceived the same way across every region; that's what its identity, its history, and its quality are built on. We give channel partners the right tools to use that brand identity for their own benefit too, because a strong brand can lift a partner as well.

There are things we negotiate, but brand identity isn't one of them. There are clear guidelines and clear brand mark playbooks, and we expect channel partners to respect those. I think it has to be built on respect from their side toward us too.

Why leadership today is about influence, not control

The thing I think marketers most need to unlearn is control. Marketing today runs on influence: on the decisions you make from campaign analysis, audience analysis, customer analysis, the deeper understanding that comes out of all of that. That's where marketers need to put their energy: deciding what matters right now, setting priorities, and getting teams and stakeholders on the same page.

Leading across cultures has taught me a lot of this directly. The most important thing is staying open-minded and supportive, and not judging anyone.

You might be the expert on your own market, but the people on the ground in a local market are experts in theirs too. For me, this comes down to a few things:

It's not a competition over whose ideas are better
It's about finding common ground and building on both sets of ideas, with input from local teams
That's how you build trust and respect
It's how you end up with better products and a better experience for the customer

Every market has its own cultural differences, and you need to be mindful of that, gentle about it even.

New technology adds another layer to this. Every month there's a new AI tool or a new version of some chat model, and when local teams are told to adopt something new on top of everything else they're already doing, it creates real stress.

This is where leadership matters most, because the leader has to step in, set the priorities, and give clear guidance on what matters right now. It takes emotional intelligence too. If someone's frustrated by a tool they've never used before and pushing back on it, the leader's job is to say: I understand you, I'm here with you, let's learn this together.

I'm so grateful my own line manager works this way with me. Whatever the new project or new tool is, I always know what my priority is, and if it's something new, we figure it out together instead of me being left to work it out alone.

Clarity is what actually brings people peace of mind. A good leader doesn't change everything at once or pile on new projects and new changes until the team is overwhelmed.

It's not enough to just set priorities; you have to stay consistent in them. If priorities shift every five minutes, people get lost and stressed, because they don't know if what they're working on will even matter by the end of the day. The best leaders narrow things down so people can focus on what's actually relevant that day, that week.

Earlier in my career, I was focused on getting my creative work recognized. I wanted to see it on billboards and be able to point at it. That mattered to me, and it was exciting.

But moving into more senior roles, I realized the job isn't only about execution anymore; it's about supporting teams and building the kind of ecosystems we've been talking about: helping people stay in sync internally, with regional offices, even with colleagues in Korea, and making their work easier on the local level.

The tools will keep changing. There'll be a new AI model tomorrow, but what matters for your career is learning to use those tools and the data and the input from other teams strategically, and being able to interpret it and apply it. That's how you prove to senior stakeholders that marketing isn't just about creative. It's about driving the business and the revenue.

If I had one thing to leave you with, it's this:

Don't be afraid to try new tools or new approaches. Test things, and if something looks worth trying, try it.
It's okay to make mistakes, just try not to make the expensive ones.
Be conscious of your team and support them as much as you can. Be human first, before you're a leader or a line manager.
Stay open-minded about what the rest of the business is doing: finance, social, commercial. The more you know, the easier it is to build the ecosystem we've talked about.

That's what makes it easier for your team and your company to reach the goals that matter.

Inside Samsung’s approach to data, AI, & cross-cultural marketing leadership