By Oh Young-jin
Losing is winning.
This Orwellian proposition (remember “war is peace”) may sound far-fetched but, in today’s world of business, it can go a step further, making losing more lucrative than winning, when combined with a right dose of corporate acumen.
Then, wrapping everything up in a sporting event would turn the whole affair into one moving, heartstring-tugging human interest story.
Don’t dispel it as nonsense because here is one example that fits this unlikely scenario.
That example is Doosan Bears, a Seoul-based franchise in the Korean professional baseball league, run by Doosan Group.
The Bears lost its best of five playoffs with Samsung Lions, and with it hopes of winning the championship title were dashed.
After the loss in the fifth and final game, Bears’ parent conglomerate put out a full-page advertisement in major newspapers, with the headline, “The love you have shown dwarfs our efforts.”
The five-paragraph text in the Doosan ad starts, “We should have met your warm support and won the Korean series.” It goes on, “We are sorry for our fans who rooted for us until the last minute of our defeat.”
In conclusion, “Your support has been etched on our hearts. We ask you to watch us refuse to give up and win for you.”
It is not the first time that a conglomerate has put out a “We-feel-sorry-but-ask-you-to-keep-loving-us” ad after sports franchises they sponsor lose in an important match.
But this Doosan ad is different from others because it targets a specific group at the same time conveying a subliminal message of sorts for a broader audience.
The ad intends or is having an inadvertent effect of bringing Doosan fans together, making its future Korean series victory a cause. Its fan base in Seoul is the broadest, if not the most loyal.
Their cross-town rivals LG Twins are nowadays like the New York Mets in their worst days, virtually handing over its fans to Doosan.
Although SK Wyverns, based in Incheon and competing for fans in Seoul and its neighboring areas, have won the pennant race and is set to face Samsung in this year’s final, the consensus is that they have not consolidated a fan base as strong as other franchises.
A post-loss random poll of seven people at a recent dinner of the Business Department at The Korea Times showed that three were either dyed-in-wool Doosan fans or a former LG fan who supports Doosan because the Twins failed to make it into the playoffs. The remaining four don’t closely follow pro-baseball.
Doosan’s drama this year started with a full-fledged semifinal battle with the Lotte Giants, who enjoy the fever-pitched enthusiasm of the fans at its home base in Busan. Each of the five games in the best of five series, was played out like a tome in a multi-volume historic saga that saw Doosan come from two down to win the following three games to secure a playoff berth.
However, there is more than meets the eye to this Doosan analysis.
For three years or so, the conglomerate has been staging a public relations blitz through a series of advertisements with the broad theme of “Humans determine the future.”
The latest series, both in print and television commercials, are centrifugal, one showing a young female student reading alone between shelves in a library and another with a young man hitting balls in a batting cage.
For the ad with the female student, the subtitle reads, “We couldn’t find the right words to encourage you. It is not because of a lack of words but because you don’t need them. You are beautiful as you are because you are doing your best.”
For the batting cage ad, the message is “Only those who can admit their mistakes can keep their word” (Obviously, he swung at the ball without making contact). Doosan has had its share of misfortune in its 100 year history but this ad campaign is obviously bringing the group closer to the hearts of consumers, and at the same time smoothing the edges from its transition from a light industry chaebol group to a heavy industry conglomerate. An inquiry has been made about who is behind this new ad campaign that apparently gives a youthful image to one of the oldest conglomerates in Korea.
Company spokesmen said that the ads were made by Oricom, a Doosan subsidiary specializing in advertisements, and involves the firm’s top leadership, without saying whether it is Doosan Infracore Chairman Park Yong-maan, the U.S.-educated 55-year-old first corporate leader to tweet in Korea, or Group Chairman 67-year-old Park Yong-hyun, a former surgeon and Yong-maan’s elder brother.