BCG's presence in South Korea's capital city dates back to work undertaken in the mid-1980s through the extended services of the BCG Tokyo and Hong Kong offices. Since opening, BCG Seoul has enjoyed rapid growth. Its office is on the top floor of the Gwanghwamun Building in Seoul's financial district and offers panoramic views of two ancient royal palaces, the Kyong Bok and the Duk Soo. The main conference room looks out onto the Cheonggyechun Stream and BCG Seoul has a view of the Blue House, the impressive residence of the president of South Korea.
BCG Seoul's client roster is a blend of both local and international clients—some private, others government-run—representing a range of industries including, but not limited to, financial services, industrial goods, consumer goods and technology and communications.
BCG Seoul provides our clients with a breadth of functional expertise in areas ranging from corporate development, general strategy, IT strategy, and organizational and operational change.
The economic contractions experienced by the Korean economy in the late 1990s gave us an excellent opportunity to better help our clients navigate the uncharted waters of slow growth and forced restructuring. We have developed a variety of techniques to help them manage their businesses, including value-based management.
The BCG Seoul team has also worked on a number of e-business related cases in the past few years. A recently completed project is the national business-to-business strategy building project. BCG Seoul worked closely with the Korean government to develop the basic framework of business-to-business in Korea.
BCG Seoul's staff works hard to deliver value to clients that are dealing with a diverse set of business challenges. The promise of this office's future is reflected in a dynamic core of young people who match professionalism with excellence in delivering superior client service. They apply an equal amount of energy to enjoying the many cultural opportunities and interests that this Asian capital has to offer.
Most of the staff is native Korean, many of whom were educated in the United States and other overseas universities. BCG Seoul also participates in the Ambassador Program, which sponsors exchanges of consultants among BCG offices, welcoming colleagues from the Americas, Europe, and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region.
All together, the staff can be described as international and open-minded, and the work environment is friendly and caring. To help foster a tight social community, BCG Seoul hosts officewide events throughout the year, such as the movie and dinner club, the charity club, and the culture club. The team also organizes visits to local performances and hosts an annual end-of-year holiday party and a summer workshop, which draws together the BCG staff and their families at an overseas destination.
- Consumer goods
- Financial services
- Industrial goods
- Technology and communications
The client was a branch of a global non-profit organization to benefit needy children. The local branch was relatively new and did not have a clear corporate identity or strategic plans in place. Our client wanted to develop a marketing strategy that would help them grow and leverage its global network. Even though this organization had a strong presence in Europe, the name's recognition rate was among the lowest in Korea.
The team approached the project with a holistic view of the donor experience—motivation, identification, donation, monitoring, and exit. Along each step, we identified places to improve the donor experience and then examined where our client had issues. The team developed a total of 26 initiatives to address the key issues and created some of the large-impact strategies.
Steven 
