Samsung Electronics.

The short version

Four years at Samsung Electronics Turkey. I ran retail strategy & store development for the first two years, directing the national rollout of 150 brand stores, then moved into digital marketing and managed 100+ campaigns across many product divisions. I left in 2020 to take a role at BSH Hausgeräte which was the market leader in Turkey where I could own messaging strategy, not just channel execution.

What I actually delivered

Göbeklitepe campaign, 3 Marketing Awards (2019). Samsung was launching a new smartphone range with a brief to show image quality with multiple different features. I pitched a different idea: a 360-degree cinematic production of Göbeklitepe, one of the oldest UNESCO heritage sites in the world before it had been nominated, shot on Samsung’s own mobile phone as the first Insta-documentary. Most Turkish consumers barely knew the site by name but had never seen it documented this way. The campaign won three national advertising awards. The YouTube product comparison format I developed alongside it was adopted as the Samsung EMEA benchmark, making a campaign born in the Turkish market the template for the region.

+10% YoY online sales across four product divisions, +15% ROI. Two years of digital campaign management across TV, home appliances, monitors, and memory. More than 10 different product categories, 20+ different purchase triggers, various different competitor landscapes, one team. The sales and ROI gains came together, not as a trade-off.

150 brand stores in two years, +20% sales per square meter. Before moving to digital, I spent two years directing the national rollout of Samsung brand experience stores across Turkey. The commercial result came from a systematic redesign of the store layout, in-store display and merchandising architecture. The core insight: most retail setups optimize for how many SKUs fit on a shelf rather than how customers navigate a purchase decision. I fixed that by closely collaborating with resellers & regional sales teams.

How I worked

I operated across four product categories simultaneously, each with different strategic logic. A premium TV is a high-involvement, considered purchase. Memory is a low-involvement commodity (back in that days before AI hype arrived). Managing both at the same time, without collapsing them into generic messaging, is a discipline that sharpened my segmentation thinking considerably.

The Göbeklitepe project was self-initiated. I brought the concept to the brief rather than executing the obvious version of it. That pattern held throughout my time at Samsung: I proactively treated creative briefs as problems worth solving properly, not tasks to be completed efficiently.

Why I moved on

After four years I had gone as far as the role allowed. Samsung Turkey offered depth in campaign execution and channel management, but not ownership of brand positioning or messaging architecture. The BSH Hausgeräte opportunity offered exactly that: a global manufacturer, a brand communications remit, and the chance to work on how a company presents itself rather than how it spends its media budget.

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If you are building a marketing team in Hamburg and want to talk through how this experience maps to your open role, reach out directly. I respond to specific enquiries within 48 hours.