Corporate Calendars for the New Year

The Hite Company’s new company calendar contains naked women with the big logo “Hite” on their bodies and other unconventional pictures. Its theme is “naked bodies with tattoos.”

What is also noteworthy is that twelve months from January to December are all on one 60 centimeter by 90 centimeter page.

The producer of the calendar is Kim Jun, a contemporary artist who has receives global attention. He said, “I took different and artistic approach toward it. It turned out to be a very interesting work.” He used computer graphics software to produce it.

The Hite calendar follows in the footsteps of the high quality calendar made by Pirelli, an Italian tire manufacturer. The production of Pirelli’s calendar costs tens of thousands of dollars since it uses top models such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, and top producers. The calendar is not only a collectors’ item, but also a piece of art that sells at a high price at auctions.

Many Korean companies produced their own art calendars for 2006.

Art Is the Main Concept-

The first page of SK Group calendar reads, “Business is less about making profits than about building relationships with people.” It is the lesson that the father of Lim Sang-ok, a main character in the novel “Business Morality” written by Choi In-ho, tirelessly emphasizes.

SK has opened up a new frontier called “literary calendars.” The company chose Land, a 2003 novel by Park Kyeong-ri, the works of Park Wan-seo in 2004, and the Taebaek Mountains as the subjects of its calendars this year.

For its 2006 calendar, it chose “Business Morality” by Choi In-ho, and put its “Happy Wing” logo in the calendar for the first time.

Samsung Group makes high quality calendars as presents for VIPs every year. This year it chose “Video Art” by Baek Nam-jun, a world-renown video artist, as its subject. Every page of the “Video Art” calendar is printed in archee, a quality paper, and is like art.

The Hanwha Group used panoramic pictures of flowers taken by Lee Ji-nu, a famous photographer.

Asiana Airlines chose the theme: “Beautiful Earth seen from the sky” and put pictures of beautiful landscapes such as the green plains of Bavaria, Germany in its calendar.

Calendars as Marketing Tools-

Cho Yang-ho, the chairman of Hanjin Group, who has a profound knowledge of photos, made a New Year’s calendar with landscape pictures taken in an out of the country this year.

It has been five years since he began to give New Year’s calendar containing pictures taken by himself to CEOs of foreign companies, diplomats in Korea, and acquaintances.

His 2006 calendar contains 12 pictures taken during his journey in the U.S., Japan, Switzerland, and France.

The Hyundai Motor Company put pictures of 16 kinds of cars and 26 products in its New Year’s calendar and uses it as a publicity tool.

The calendar’s December and January pages, when promotions and personnel appointments occur, show middle-to-large sized cars such as the Equus, while the July and August summer vacation season pages have photos of RVs such as the Tucson and Santa Fe.

Sang-Soo Kim ssoo@donga.com