The Gospel of "First": How LG Turns Korea's Postwar Invention Story Into a Modern Brand Promise
In the heart of Seoul's Gangnam district, on the fifth floor of a new LG Electronics flagship called "D5"—short for "Dimension5"—a heritage film plays on endless repeat. It is rendered in stark black-and-white, almost austere in its restraint: archival photographs composited with contemporary typography, moving at a tempo that suggests urgency without haste. Visitors pause. Phones rise. The film does not ask to be liked; it asks to be believed.
The title is THE FIRST: Origins, and it carries a specific weight in Korean corporate communication. LG is arguing that since 1958, it has kept making "firsts"—not as isolated achievements, but as a continuous line of everyday innovation that connects past, present, and future. Yet the most interesting thing about this campaign is not the word "first" itself. It is what the word is doing here: not as a boast, but as a piece of corporate communication meant to restore trust in an era when technology companies are increasingly met with suspicion, fatigue, and the sense that progress is happening to people rather than for them.
A Country Rebuilding Itself, One Appliance at a Time
To understand why LG's "firsts" land with particular force in Korea, you must first understand what "domestic electronics" meant in the decades after the war: not convenience, not lifestyle, but sovereignty. In that context, a radio is not merely a box of components. It is a signal that the country can make its own modernity.
In 1959, GoldStar—LG's predecessor—produced the A-501, widely recognized as Korea's first domestically manufactured vacuum-tube radio. From there, the corporate timeline reads like a national development montage: transistor radios and fans produced domestically; Korea's first automatic telephone exchange; the first domestic refrigerator; a 19-inch black-and-white television; a room air-conditioner manufactured in Korea; and the first Korean washing machine.
Even small details carry narrative power if you know where to look. In 1962, GoldStar exported 62 radios—for the first time—to Eisenberg, New York. For an American reader, it is an arresting reversal. Korea's early electronics story is so often told as a narrative of import and imitation. Here is a line on an official timeline that quietly says: we were already shipping our signals outward.
"The First" as a Design Language, Not a Timeline
Most heritage marketing fails in one of two ways. It either becomes a museum label—accurate but lifeless—or it becomes a self-congratulatory highlight reel—loud, brittle, easy to distrust.
LG's film attempts a third route: it does not simply list accomplishments; it translates them into a modern visual grammar. The style—stark monochrome, collage-like archival fragments, typography with a sense of tempo—suggests an attempt to make corporate history feel less like institutional memory and more like a cultural artifact. The approach is deliberately minimal: symbolic illustration, archival photographs composited to show historical flow with contemporary graphic intensity.
This matters because corporate communication is always a negotiation between claim and credibility. A company can say "we innovate," but audiences now hear that sentence the way they hear "we care"—as a default, not a distinction. Heritage, when handled carefully, can function as evidence: not proof of virtue, but proof of continuity.
The Consumer Response: When a Corporate Film Becomes a Memory Prompt
The campaign's engagement signals are unusually telling for a brand film. The heritage film ran on LG's official YouTube channel for approximately one month starting mid-September 2025, drawing roughly 250 likes and 500+ comments, with positive reactions accounting for 95% or more of the documented response.
More revealing is what observers noted in the physical space at D5: visitors repeatedly took what researchers call "verification shots"—the contemporary ritual of I was here, I saw this, it mattered enough to capture. This behavior hints at the campaign's real emotional mechanism. A heritage film succeeds not when viewers admire the company, but when they insert themselves into the narrative.
In Korea, consumer electronics have long been stitched into domestic life—into the rhythms of family, school, work, and rest. A refrigerator and a washing machine are not neutral objects; they are infrastructure for a certain kind of survival and aspiration. When a brand film evokes that infrastructure, it becomes a memory prompt. People comment not because they learned a fact, but because they remembered a life stage.
From Korea's "Firsts" to the World's Premium Screens
To international audiences, "LG" may primarily mean televisions—especially OLED. Here, too, the company's communications strategy is to treat innovation as a lineage rather than a one-off breakthrough.
LG positioned its OLED push in the language of first-mover status as early as 2013, describing the launch of its first curved-screen OLED television and emphasizing the aesthetic and technical logic of OLED: self-emitting light, thinness, contrast, design that can hang like art. A few years later, in a burst of almost theatrical engineering, LG unveiled a "Wallpaper" OLED model at CES—so thin (2.57mm for the 65-inch version) that it mounts with magnets, marketed as a "picture-on-wall" experience.
What the heritage film does is stitch these premium-era achievements back onto the earlier domestic timeline: from radios and black-and-white televisions made in a rebuilding nation, to screens that behave like architectural surfaces in a global luxury market. The narrative arc is not merely commercial; it is civilizational.
The Corporate Communication Play: Why "Heritage" Now?
Why build a flagship that reads like a cultural venue? Why commission a heritage film in a design language closer to editorial collage than to commercial gloss?
Because today, technology brands face a paradox. Their products are more intelligent than ever—artificial intelligence embedded in laptops, in appliances, in everything—yet consumers increasingly feel less in control. In that environment, the brand problem is no longer "do we look innovative?" It is "do we look like a force that still belongs in ordinary life?"
D5 is explicitly framed as a "brand experience" space, not merely a store. Its fifth floor is positioned as a brand zone, while lower floors transform product categories into guided experiences. LG's storytelling about D5 leans heavily on synesthetic language—light, scent, aesthetic satisfaction—an attempt to make technology feel human-scaled again.
In other words: LG is using heritage not to look old, but to look anchored. In corporate communication terms, the film functions as reputational infrastructure—an argument that the company's relationship with daily life is not new, not opportunistic, not merely algorithmic.
The Risk: Nostalgia Can Sour
There is, of course, a risk in selling "firsts." The word can sound like triumphalism, and nostalgia can read as evasion—especially if audiences suspect that the company is polishing yesterday to distract from today's anxieties: privacy, labor, sustainability, affordability.
The most durable version of this strategy pairs memory with responsibility: not just "we were there at your first," but "we understand what your next looks like—and we'll show up with restraint, not just ambition."
LG's campaign gets the first half right—memory, continuity, craft—and, based on early response signals, it is resonating. The next test is whether "heritage" becomes a platform for credible, present-tense commitments, rather than a beautifully edited past.
Because in the end, the strongest corporate stories are not the ones that say, Look what we did. They are the ones that make you think, almost against your will: Yes. I remember. And maybe I can trust what comes next.
Watch: LG's Heritage Innovation Story
LG's heritage campaign continues to evolve as the company navigates the intersection of memory, innovation, and consumer trust in the digital age.
