I’ve been in South Korea this week checking out a bunch of cool AI and robotics stuff that you’ll get to hear all about next week.
But in the meantime, I thought I’d share a little nugget of information that I picked up along the way — LG doesn’t actually mean ‘Life’s Good’.
I may be labouring under a misapprehension here, but I assume that some Aussies thought that the LG slogan was also what its initials stood for.
With what feels like a lifetime of the “what’s good” tagline being attached to every ad and piece of marketing material, its firmly ingrained in the sub conscience of consumers.
In the very least, I certainly never stopped to wonder if it perhaps meant anything else.
As it turns out, it does.
LG actually stands for Lucky GoldStar. This is a nod to two original company names — Rak-Hui (pronounced ‘Lucky’) Chemical Industrial Corp, which was founded in 1947, and GoldStar Co. Ltd.
These two companies merged in 1958 to become Lucky-GoldStar, which then rebranded to LG in 1995.
Although LG is known primarily for electronics in the west, it has a great deal more subsidiaries, with LG Electronics being only one of them. Some of these are LG Chem, LG Display, LG Household & Healthcare and LG Solar.
And despite the fact that LGs home is Korea, a small part of this story belongs to us Aussies. The ‘Life’s Good’ slogan was conceived by the Australian LG team for the local market back in the day. It was so popular that it ended up being adopted globally — and becoming synonymous with those two little letters.
The author traveled to Seoul as a guest of LG.