Ged Carroll

Search results for: “drum and bass”

  • Brand purpose

    What is brand purpose?

    For senior marketers who came up with a Jack Welsh influenced shareholder value focus, brand purpose was a seductive concept for otherwise empty and meaningless careers that could even be considered ‘bullshit jobs‘. Brand purpose campaigns are not coming from the need of consumers mostly but from the desire of marketeers to do something good of their day, of achieving something more than just selling a humdrum product.

    In essence it is the same drive that motivated the apochrical question from Steve Jobs to future Apple CEO John Sculley

    Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?

    John Sculley recalling Steve Jobs pitch on a documentary profile of Jobs that was part of the Bloomberg Game Changers series.

    In recent years over 90 percent of Cannes Lions winners were found to focus on brand purpose. In 2016, the Singapore office of advertising agency Grey created a fake brand purpose campaign for Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) designed to dupe consumers and award judges. The I Sea app was supposed to crowdsource help to spot refugees, but it was built on fake data.

    Brand promise

    Historically the focus has been on the brand promise – the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service. An example of this would be First Direct – a branchless bank providing its services by telephone and internet instead. It is a retail bank division of HSBC that was founded back in 1989.

    Brand purpose, goes way beyond brand promise and is is the brand’s reason for being beyond making money, sales or profit – it’s a framework that guides business decisions and thought processes. A brand purpose is supposed to connect with consumers at a more emotional level. It is why the brand exists and should guide the brand’s mission that differentiates it from others.

    By 2014 you had marketing royalty like David Aaker endorsing brand purpose, or as he called it Higher Purpose. It was further popularised in management by the 2017 publication of The Guiding Purpose Strategy: A Navigational Code for Growth is a book by Markus Kramer and Tofig Huseynzade. Kramer and Huseynzade looked at purpose at an organisational level and how it should be brought to life through brand management.

    Corporate and social responsibility (CSR) is not brand purpose

    It is distinct from earlier concepts like CSR or corporate responsibility as US organisations often prefer to say. The easiest way to demonstrate this is by example. One of my first clients was Verizon Wireless the US mobile carrier. They used to donate pre-used cellphones, together with free services to charitable organisations like women’s shelters in the New Jersey area where they were headquartered. While they meant well, this clearly wasn’t the key focus of their business, but did make use of edge effects brought about by customers upgrading their phones.

    I helped them template this activity in markets were they had an international presence at the time:

    • Czech Republic
    • Greece
    • Indonesia
    • Italy
    • Mexico
    • Slovakia

    The role of CSR can be for many reasons:

    • Being a good corporate citizen
    • Being closer to the community to better understand the environment
    • Pipelining new talent for the business (like Shell’s Young Engineer programme)
    • The act as a counterweight to negate negative effects of having the business in the area. A classic example of this would be education and health clinics for communities where there is oil drilling

    Is brand purpose effective?

    We know that purpose lead marketing is 30% less effective than non purpose campaigns according to Peter Field, so purpose shouldn’t be seen as a money making decision. In fact, being prepared to forgo money if necessary is a hygiene factor in a brad purpose. Ethical behaviour won’t necessarily generate revenue.

    Brand purpose is most likely to demonstrate effectiveness internally, where it can get people to do more for a company they believe in and matches a set of internalised values. Internal altruism and work life are aligned – they aren’t working in a bullshit job.

    Risk management

    Business risk management has a number of challenges with brand purpose. The moral challenges and perceived required speed of reaction poses problems for brand purpose risk.

    Glocal nature of purpose

    There have been a procession of (foreign) multinational companies that have committed costly perceived slights in China. Western businesses such as Nike have generally erred on the side of a Chinese brand purpose for profit and a perceived lower risk of reaction from western customers. For example Nike Withdraws Products After Brand Partner Vexed China for Supporting HK | Jing Daily or how western brands responded to China’s Xinjiang boycotts including concealing past corporate statements or flip-flopping like Fila, H&M and Hugo Boss.

    TL;DR – brands are most afraid of offending: Chinese consumers > western consumers > developing world consumers – though this may change with de-globalisation.

    Bringing a knife to a gun flight

    The Unilever board have been pummelled by shareholder reactions to its brand purpose driven approach

    Unilever seems to be labouring under the weight of a management which is obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business. The most obvious manifestation of this is the public spat it has become embroiled in over the refusal to supply Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the West Bank. However, we think there are far more ludicrous examples which illustrate the problem. A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot. The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913 so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert — salads and sandwiches).

    Terry Smith, Letter to Investors (January 2022) United Kingdom: Fundsmith Limited.

    Fundsmith is one of the top ten largest shareholders in Unilever at the time. This then set the tone for activist investor Nelson Peltz to secure a seat on the company board

    Having a position

    Having a position is a risk in itself. Some brands notably Dunkin Donuts Refuses to Get Woke: ‘We Are Not Starbucks’ just focus on their brand promise. They keep consumer expectations realistically low. Contrast this with Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s who took a position on the Palestine question and the invasion of Ukraine. In the case of Israel, Ben & Jerry’s independent board has taken Unilever to court over an attempt to stop sales inside Israel.

    Purposeful consumer behaviour

    Consumers generally have good intentions. They mostly consider themselves charitable, an example of the Lake Wobegon effect named after the fictional town featured on the US radio show A Prairie Home Companion. In reality, only 20-25 percent of consumers donate to charity. Consumers green tendencies seem to vary with the state of economy according to longitudinal research conducted by Gallup, regardless of their generation. Price is still the key consideration for consumers, but brand purpose can increased the perceived benefit for a consumer when considering similarly priced products.

    Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

    Garrison Keillor

    Purpose is perceived as being of key importance to consumers because of misinterpretation of of market research and poor research design such as making a false association between the correlation of successful brands and assuming purpose as the causality.

    Consumers don’t think every issue have the same weight, they are likely to feel more personally connected to health, economic and societal issues. Political, business or legal issues of brand companies are considered to be ‘hygiene’ factors.

    Purpose-washing

    One of the key challenges with brand purpose is that many brands have approached in a superficial manner at best. Superficiality might be one of perspective, for instance, Nike supported Colin Kaepernick and other progressive causes, but also funded right-wing Republican Party politicians. Progressive leaning consumers may feel betrayed or gaslit.

    Les Binet of Adam and Eve outlined a good test of brand purpose

    Purpose bullshit detector. Ok, you have a brilliant new purpose drive marketing initiative.

    1) Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?

    2) Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?

    If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.

    Les Binet on Twitter

    Purpose-washing isn’t new and can see its roots in the ‘greenwashing’ of the mid-1980s where companies claimed ‘green behaviours’ that were designed to cut costs, or create the illusion of caring for the environment.

    Brand purpose examples

    Brand purpose examples become difficult. Patagonia would be amongst the first brands that would be used as an example. It’s an unusual company that inspired other brands like Warby Parker and Toms. Things start to fall down when you look at large corporates.

    PepsiCo tried to pivot towards nutrition as a brand strategy and purpose focus in the early 2010s under then CEO Indra Nooyi, yet still relies on sugar filled drinks for its business.

    I worked at Unilever on Family Brands, what people in the UK would know as Flora margarine, when the company mandated that every brand had to ‘find its brand purpose’. Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ success sparked a change over at Unilever.

    Dove’s brand vision / purpose is interesting because it came out of a consumer insight. After surveying 3,000 women across 10 countries the brand team found only 4% considered themselves beautiful. Further research found that a majority of girls had anxiety about how they looked.

    We believe beauty should be a source of confidence, and not anxiety. That’s why we are here to help women everywhere develop a positive relationship with the way they look, helping them raise their self-esteem and realise their full potential.

    Our Vision – Dove.

    Note that while Dove has a successful men’s range of products, men and boys self esteem or confidence isn’t a concern of Dove’s brand purpose despite academic research suggesting similar issues.

    Then CEO Paul Polman focused Unilever on its Sustainable Living Plan and brand purpose was at the centre of it.

    Those that didn’t have one were to be sold off. We focused the flora relaunch around being ‘Powered by Plants’. The reality is that I was working on a product known by different brands in much of the 23 or so countries that it was sold in. In the UK, there was the health aspects of Flora versus butter and the vegan credentials. In Kenya and other parts of Africa it was about nutrition for children in the family and the superior shelf life compared to butter. Despite its brand purpose, yellow fats were perceived to be a lower growth sector and the business spun off to Upfield. Money trumped purpose, although Polman has continued to advocate for a change in business practices with his book Net Positive.

    Unilever has stumbled with its brand purpose focus, being too focused on it for active investors and insufficiently focused on it in the eyes of other stakeholders, including company insiders.

    The pharmaceutical industry is beset with conflicting views regarding brand purpose. The companies will view their products has having a live changing or life saving brand purpose, where as external views will be more concerned about predatory pricing and the non-inclusive access that is a side effect. For instance, one in five people with diabetes in the US have rationed their insulin usage due to high costs.

    Secondly you had lifestyle medicines, notably Pfizer’s Viagra, but still no breakthrough AIDS vaccine. Finally there was the exploitative nature of Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson providing opioids for pain relief that drove a crisis in addiction.

    Many commentators would cite Nike but the examples are problematic:

    • Their FlyEase design approach that enables disabled people to participate in sports, is a great example of accessible design. But disabled customers have found them hard to obtain as they flew off the shelf. Accessible design benefits able-bodied consumers too
    • Plus size activewear could be just about capitalising on the obesity epidemic, rather than truly inclusive sports participation
    • Supporting Colin Kaepernick and taking the knee for racial justice is at odds with other Nike behaviours including the nature of their supply chain. While anti-sweatshop campaign dented Nike’s reputation in the 1990s, it still has appalling labour conditions today.

    What about Mattel who have been trying to bake representation into their products. For example Hot Wheels releases a remote-controlled wheelchair that flips & spins – brand purpose or will Hot Wheels have its ‘Joey Deacon’ moment?

    Brand purpose thinking from academia and the advertising industry

    Articles like this one in AdAge have helped to drive the brand purpose movement: Gen Z doesn’t want to buy your brand, they want to join it | AdAge – This group isn’t waiting for brands to lead on issues. Instead, they’re leading. Since movements rarely come with a business case or cost-benefit analysis, marketers must consider how they can partner with Gen Z to become more involved and deliver on the promise of purpose (paywall)

    Brands take note: The purpose of purpose is purpose – Most of the data used to support the case for brand purpose is verbal, spoken data which lays itself open to the ‘intention-action gap’ that exists between what people say they will do and what actually transpires. That gap is particularly large with topics like brand purpose because social desirability bias leads respondents to, knowingly or unknowingly, overclaim the importance of purpose in their purchase decisions in order to look less like a wanker. But there is a bigger, more pressing question now being asked of brand purpose. As we enter a recession, we know – from bitter past experience – that customers will change their behaviour in the tricky months ahead. In May, Kantar was already showing a significant proportion of the market (albeit, again, with spoken rather than derived data) switching to lower priced options. Such moves are not a uniform downgrade of every brand for a cheaper alternative. In order to justify the continued purchase of some premium brands that are deemed different and meaningful enough to retain their place, customers trade down on weaker, less essential fare – Mark Ritson takes a pragmatic view on brand purpose in this Marketing Week op-ed. Meanwhile Byron Sharp over at the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science has even greater concern about brand purpose: Purpose could be ‘the death of brands’, warns Byron Sharp 

    Richard Shotton on brand purpose: ‘marketers have fallen out of love with marketing’ | The Drum

    The Future of Purpose – TrendWatching – Trendwatching’s take fits in with Richard Shotton’s view …in 2020, consumers will embrace businesses that BREAK the CODE of the brand DNA or their entire industry in the name of a more ethical or sustainable consumerism.

    Think a superband that doesn’t tour, a fashion magazine with no photoshoots, or an airline that tells passengers to fly less (see innovation examples below).

    • Yes, this is a highly actionable trend, and a tactical chance to prove to consumers that you really get the scale of the challenge ahead. But it’s being driven by deep shifts in the nature of status, innovation and transparency…
    • Unconsumed Status. Status has always been a key driver of consumption behaviors. But via rising awareness of social and environmental damages, the nature of consumer status is changing radically. That means rising numbers fulfilling their status quest by seeking out new brands and new modes of consumption that reimagine, or even invert, old attitudes and priorities.
    • Clean Slate Mindset. Today, purpose-driven insurgents can become mega-brands that shake the mainstream faster than ever. Tesla is rewriting the rules of automotive; Impossible Burger those of meat. That’s driving expectations across all industries that legacy codes can and must be rewritten in the name of a better consumerism.

    Brand purpose. The biggest lie the ad industry ever told? – Tom Roach 

    Mark Ritson: A true brand purpose doesn’t boost profit, it sacrifices it | Marketing Week 

    “Brand purpose” is a lie – a lot of truth in this Fast Company op-ed and this article from 2017: Truthiness in marketing: is the evidence behind brand purpose flawed? | The Drum 

    Study of award entries reveals tighter budgets and a struggle to achieve ‘brand purpose’ – Mumbrella Asia 

    This Brand is Late Capitalism | Rachel Connolly 

    One last thing

    I have a related post on environmental and social governance (ESG) which looks to apply the doing well, by doing good philosophy that is also behind brand purpose.

  • Ikea Symfonisk speaker and other things that caught my eye this week

    A great YouTube teardown of the Ikea Symfonisk bookshelf speaker. The speaker works with a Sonos equipped home and was designed in conjunction with Sonos. The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker is part of a range. They’re built for convenience rather than high fidelity.

    Don’t expect it to last long after its warranty is over. The Sonos product design on which it’s based doesn’t deserve the premium that has been put on it historically. The Symfonisk looks like a low quality product which exists to help Ikea and Sonos cross-sell and upsell consumers on other products.

    The Trump supporters protest ‘Stop the Steal ‘looked to an outsider like an absurdist performative art performance that went wrong with criminal damage and five dead at the time of writing.

    https://twitter.com/dublonothing/status/1347078502412009476

    If like me, you were left wondering what just happened? And then asking yourself what on earth is QAnon? Bellingcat has you covered.

    At the moment American politicians are calling it a coup attempt and asking for the participants to be locked up and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I get it. What the politicians are failing to do is come up with the better, more attractive belief system than QAnon. I think that’s a problem. It’s why over 25 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the far right is stronger than ever.

    Jailing participants creates as many problems as it solves. It provides martyrs to a cause, like McVeigh became. But not jailing them says that their conduct is within the realm of respectability. As for a better idea, you could do worse than look at the Depolarization Project.

    Stop The Steal, January 6, 2021 St. Paul, Minn.
    Protestors out side the Governors residence in St Pauls, Minnesota as part of the Stop The Steal protests / coup attempt.

    Drum and Bass seems to be having a renaissance, with it getting more prominence in the likes of Mixmag and elsewhere. A great example is this recent guest mix by Carl Cox for Edible Beats.

    Sony’s Trinitron was a byword for the best quality TV experience when CRTs ruled display technology. This history of the technology shows Sony at its engineering best for decades.

  • Brand winter & how to cope

    I started thinking about ‘brand winter’ when I read about TBWA Hong Kong and their ‘Brave Bear Pack’ offering. Campaign Asia describes as a new product focusing on growth hacking and cost efficient tools for surviving the financial winter brought on by Hong Kong’s anti-ELAB protests.

    I thought financial winter was an interesting metaphor to use in Hong Kong. I get the analogue of the ‘bear market’. But the winter in Hong Kong is very dry (rather than humid), cool and exceptionally pleasant for the most part.

    They probably feel that the ‘Brave Bear Pack’ opportunity has been amplified by the late 2019 novel Corona Virus outbreak.

    According to TBWA the services they are bundling in this are:

    • Demand mapping – which seems to be database / CRM / social marketing data. Looking at market size and going after niches or pockets of the market not previously addressed? A B2B analogue would be ABM (account based planning)
    • Acquisition System Architecture – seems to be marketing automation based on the descriptor
    • Efficient Content Production – presumably to provide the content for the Acquisition System Architecture?
    • Affordable Big Format Film Production – crowdsourced film a la Mofilm, with what I presume is a TBWA mark-up. Again I suspect that the primary role of this is to provide content for the Acquisition System Architecture?
    • Chatbot marketing (on Facebook and WeChat respectively) which is so two years ago
    • Crisis management – TBWA seem to be white labelling Ketchum to do planning and execution- pretty standard stuff in the PR world. A quick look at LinkedIn indicates that Ketchum’s Hong Kong office has a very small, junior team to handle any crisis that might come up

    I found it a depressing read. The tactics focus on the bare minimum to harvest sales from existing brand equity and and realised that we’re entering a brand winter. This is down to two factors acting as a catalyst: technology and economic decline.

    What do I mean by a brand winter? It’s a time when marketers focus on performance marketing exclusively. The most obvious influence in terminology was the financial winter analogue used in media coverage. I guess it also resonated past discussions I’d had about the circular funding cycle that artificial intelligence has gone through. Decades like now of massive investment, followed by funding droughts or ‘AI winters’.

    Technology factors for a brand winter

    During the last couple of economic recessions, after the dot com bust and the 2008 bank crisis new performance marketing platforms have come to the fore.

    The dot com bust heralded the rise of Google’s search advertising. The 2008 bank crisis saw Facebook and YouTube shake up online display advertising.

    What all of them had in common is their ability to drive an action (like a sale), but weren’t so good in building distinctive memorable brands.

    The second aspect, was that they could be very targeted using data. The idea is that the more targeted the message and the audience that its shown to; the more effective that it would be. Sounds like common sense doesn’t it? The actual results are counterintuitive. TakeMahabis the slipper brand that tried to build itself just on online media went into administration. Uber has tried to build a brand on price and online growth hacking still hasn’t made a profit.

    But this pivot has resulted in the creative side of the advertising industry being gutted.

    1707 - ad industry

    This presents four problems for marketers:

    • Effective marketing campaigns have found by research to consist of roughly 70 percent brand building and 30 percent performance marketing across both B2B and B2C marketing. Brand building’s full impact can be measured over decades or longer. According to qualitative research by Kings College London on China; Swiss and Japanese watch brands were sought after by post cultural revolution consumers. Brand equity endured despite the worst excesses of Chairman Mao and his red guards.
    • Digital marketing isn’t as effective as one would believe. Digital marketing is only as good as its data and its measures have been defined largely by the media platforms themselves. TV advertising is several orders of magnitude cheaper in terms of reach. Ad fraud is rampant and major brands pushed for better standards led by P&G and Unilever.
    • The plethora of channels has meant that many brands have spread their creative like a thin smear of peanut butter across toast. Again research indicates that this approach is counter-productive. Yet brands have adopted big production capability in-house to feed social channels and online advertising formats. This work is often done at the expense of creativity and ideas
    • Over targeting is counter productive according to research done by the Ehrensberg Bass Institute and captured in Sharp’s How Brands Grow. Instead the authors recommend a ‘smart mass approach’

    Marketers have given digital a greater amount of latitude than it deserves due to C-suite level concerns about digital disruption, stoked by their management consultants. When economic head-winds are met shorttermist thinking fit nicely with this performance marketing bias despite the issues outlined.

    Economic factors for a brand winter

    I won’t go into the background of the 2019 Hong Kong protests as that has been well-documented elsewhere. What I am interested for this post in is the economic impact.

    P1088698
    Studio Incendo: P1088698

    The 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests seemed to impact a number of sectors:

    • The FT talked about the serious downturn in life insurance policy sales. Life insurance policies are used by mainland Chinese to build up assets outside of China in dollar-denominated investments
    • Data released last year indicated that for the month of October 2019, retail sales were down 24%
    • Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group is looking to close 15 out of 91 stores in Hong Kong
    • Swiss watch sales in Hong Kong declined 4.6%
    • The leisure sector is down on earnings and Ocean Park is in serious financial trouble
    • Occupancy levels in Mandarin Oriental hotels went from 71% to 49%

    Products and services that are aimed at the mainland Chinese market have taken the brunt of the damage.

    Learning from the successes of the past

    I wanted to draw lessons from two events.

    • The first was the Great Depression and how it profoundly affected FMCG brand marketing
    • The second event is the 1967 Hong Kong riots

    The Great Depression

    The Great Depression has slipped from popular consciousness as the silent generation that lived through it have left us. The Wall Street Crash, the New Deal and the Jarrow march are far away from our collective experience.

    Dorothea Lange: Toward Los Angeles, California, 1937
    Dorothea Lange: Toward Los Angeles, California

    You may as well be talking about the Wild West or Victorian child labourers climbing up chimneys to clean them.

    In reality the Great Depression lasted from 1929 until World War 2. Global GDP dropped by 15 percent. Many countries looked to austerity policies to see themselves through. It didn’t work out that well as it depressed demand. And it was a similar case for companies, they cut back on marketing and a demand drop followed.

    By comparison Procter & Gamble (P&G) took a contrarian approach. P&G had been founded almost a century earlier. It hit its stride during the late 1850s as the American civil war raged. By 1911 its Crisco vegetable based shortening was launched. P&G were quick to realise the potential of the nescient radio stations springing up in the US and around the world.

    They were instrumental in coming up with a new brand marketing format of sponsored programming based around a long running drama called soap operas. Consumers may have been struggling to make ends meet; but soap operas allowed them to develop increased brand affinity.

    P&G also used the Great Depression to expand internationally by buying a UK-based soap maker. Because of this contra-cycle investment and spending in brand, P&G became one of the world’s largest companies with operations pretty much everywhere apart from Cuba and North Korea.

    In a mirror of this strategy, P&G are now investing in creating content for streaming television services which have emerged over the past few years, in a similar manner to the way radio grew a century earlier.

    The takeaway from P&G is that contra-cyclical investing for larger brands can pay dividends as the media landscape has less competition in terms of brand building communications. Secondly, adoption of technology makes sense IF the media can aid long term brand building activities.

    1967 Hong Kong riots

    In 1967, Hong Kong was a British colony on the edge of China. China had just entered the cultural revolution and ideological fervour was in full swing.

    Hong Kong was a hodge podge of identities, and that’s not even including ethnic minorities (Nepalis, caucasian people of different nationalities and south Asians who came across the British Empire).

    • Native Hong Kongers
    • Middle class, business owners and entertainers who fled places Shanghai towards the end of the civil war
    • Former nationalist soldiers who settled in Hong Kong (like their compatriots who ended up in Taiwan and Burma)
    • Mainland Chinese who left China during the hardships and famine due to the Great Leap Forwards. They entered the territory illegally, often swimming across the Sham Chun river or even the Hau Hoi Wan estuary.
    Hong Kong - Communists and Police
    Roger W: Communists and Police, Hong Kong 1967.

    Hong Kong was a tinder box. Work was plentiful but life was hard for the blue collar workers who struggled to make ends meet. What happened next depends on who you believe.

    Trouble was brewing, there had been unrest across a number of sectors:

    • Shipping
    • Taxi drivers
    • Textiles
    • Building materials

    The previous year there had been riots protesting a rise in ticket prices on the Star Ferry.

    At the time Hong Kong was a centre of plastics production, textiles and light industry. Much of the light industry started off literally as cottage industries. Plastic flowers were assembled from parts at home and workers were paid by piece work. In the 1950s, the government got rid of these low rise low quality housing. They built high-rise public housing and multi-storey public factories that rented units to light industries.

    The start of the riots was down to an industrial dispute at a plastic flower manufacturer based at the San Po Kong Factory Estate in Kowloon. The factory was owned by a local industrialist called Duncan Tong (唐鼎康). Tong had a number of manufacturing businesses including the Playart die cast car brand which competed with Hot Wheels and is still popular with collectors.

    On May 6, picketing workers clashed with members of the management. It got sufficiently violent that the riot police were called. When the police arrived they were pelted with cans and glass bottles by picketing workers and their peers in other neighbouring factory units. The police arrested 21 demonstrators who were represented by the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (HKFTU). The HKFTU is a Beijing-aligned group of trade unions.

    Many more were injured in the violence. Local union officials went to the police stations to protest the arrests and ended up being arrested themselves.

    Leftist protestors with strong sympathies towards Beijing protested in solidarity with the arrested workers the following day.

    Over 100 protestors were arrested and a curfew was imposed by the authorities. This then sparked a low level insurgency. Over 1,100 bombs were planted, 51 people were killed, over 800 people were injured. Almost 5,000 people were arrested and over 1,900 of them were successfully prosecuted. It was only the intervention of the Chinese premier who finally put an end to the violence in December that year.

    Business leaders like Li Ka-shing and Harilela invested in property when the 1967 riots depressed prices. They then went on to replace British taipans as the main drivers of Hong Kong commerce.

    The takeaway is that chaos has consistently provided opportunities for businesses with enough capital to take advantage of them. But what’s needed more than money is the eye for opportunity.

    What does the solution for a brand winter look like?

    In the case of Hong Kong, if we look at FMCG brands, there has never been a better time to build a local brand. Advertising inventory in out of home spaces or on streaming media are going to be cheaper due to the lack of demand.

    Both ‘yellow and blue’ orientated media offer opportunities if handled in an even handed way. Investing during the contra-cycle in brand offers businesses an opportunity to capture long term profits rather than short term sales.

    More information

    There didn’t seem to be anything on the TBWA Hong Kong website, but they had this post on their Facebook page.

    TBWA HK offers service pack to help brands through the financial winter | Campaign Asia

  • 2018 Brand Action Library & things from last week

    The 2018 Brand Action Library by Planning Dirty has been published. I contributed one of the sections. You can view it and download it here. The 2018 Brand Action Library is a collection of campaign case studies for inspiration sorted by vertical market. it was collaborative efforts with planners and strategists from around the world, coordinated by Australian strategist Julian Cole. 

    Here’s the things that made my day this week –

    The Nonetheless podcast is looking to inspire female students to take up careers in STEM subject areas; as way of broadening and deepening STEM skills throughout America. As part of this, they’ve created great posters to download.  Find out more about the podcast here. You can find out more about Cynthia Breazeal’s work on her personal MIT website.

    01 Cynthia Breazeal

    Salvador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Animated Film, Destino, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd | Open Culture – it is worthwhile reading Open Culture’s bit on the backstory of this animation. They’re right, this does fit really well with Time off Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon album

    I have been listening to a vintage concert by Hijack in Montreux. The Montreux Jazz Festival played host to the South London rap group. The film captures them at their height. While the Britcore scene faded away into history, it left an enormous influence on the next generation of turntablists. The britcore sound of which Hijack was an exemplar is rougher, faster and harder than US productions. The closest America had to offer was Public Enemy’s wall of sound, which still lacked the energy and pace of Hijack. It feed into the breakbeat culture of rave and drum and bass music scenes. Smooth, nice and groovy it isn’t. 

    Great brand film by Mercedes-Benz; presumably aimed at reframing the whole debate around women drivers. The film was made by R/GA, New York.

    Finally Miu Miu’s autumn winter collection film is really nicely done.

    More luxury related content here.

  • Desert Island Discs

    A while ago my friend Ian Wood did a kind of desert island discs meme asking friends on Facebook what six tracks were the soundtracks to their lives. Here were mine. What would be in your Desert Island Discs?

    Jim Reeves – Senor Santa Claus – My Dad was a Jim Reeves fan and Christmas as a small child meant the smell of hot electrics from his DIY Christmas lights triggered by a contact rotated by an electric motor connecting with a circle of brass contacts and lots of hard-wired Christmas lights. No solid-state components or micro-chips involved. All the parts came from an electrical parts salvage shop in Birkenhead which featured dismembered military kit and early computers. Burning carbon bushes and motor grease is as much the smell of Christmas to me as the spices of Christmas pudding. This was accompanied by selections from my Dad’s reel-to-reel tapes of Jim Reeves.

    Johnny Cash – Walk the line – Another track from my Dad’s tape collection, I used to like the back beat on this Johnny Cash track. Live at San Quentin is the best live album issued ever. Better than Woodstock, better than Bruce Springsteen Live/75-85.

    Tyrone Brunson – The Smurf – Whilst I’d liked the disco I’d heard and found Kraftwerk’s The Model intriguing because of its alien feel, secondary school was when music started to get important and electronic music was where it was at. I was left a bit cold by the whole new romantic vibe. Instead I was impressed by electro and the little hi-energy I heard. If one track exemplified this then it was Tyrone Brunson’s The Smurf, this fired my interest in DJing.

    James Brown – Funky Drummer (part 1) – The Art of Noise and Paul Hardcastle drew my attention to sampling but the diversity of tracks that the funky drummer break appeared on hammered it home. I remember hearing it in my fourth or fifth year of secondary school on the In The Jungle Groove compilation and it blew me away.

    Phuture – Acid Tracks – I could have put hundreds of house tracks up here but I kept it down to two. Acid Tracks is timeless, hard-as-nails, alien funk that hasn’t been bettered. It reminds me of running around the country trying to get vinyl records: Liverpool, Warrington, Blackpool, Doncaster and occasionally London. The bad aspect to this was that many of the records were bootlegs and in the case of Trax Records even their own pressings were often crap, recycling older vinyl and repressing over the top! You would also rifle through rock record resellers and mail order catalogues to see if you could find a gem that they didn’t know the value of (though they eventually got hip to it). It is hard to get that sense of achievement now when any track can be Googled or Baidu’d.

    Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy – this went in for a couple of reasons. Massive Attack were known as Massive because of Gulf War I hammering radio play and the band’s name resonating with a BBC newscaster’s description of ‘the attack was swift and massive’ (this also played hell with Bomb the Bass’ second album release). The lush sound of the album track was part of the audio background for my first proper job as a lab assistant for a plastics company that no longer exists. I worked on resin formulations for a wide range of products: bullet-proof glass, Bentley head lamp surrounds and bonding materials for the body panels of TVR sportscars. I had a Pro-Walkman and a set of Sennheiser HD414s that I used to listen to music to on the way into work in a Ford Transit crew bus.

    I have a lasting memory of this video being on a laser disc player in the pub where I went for a lunch to celebrate my last day at the job, as I had secured a new one closer to home

    Secondly the remix 12″ of this track with the Nellee Hooper club mix is a classic that remained in my record box; Oakenfold got covered in glory for his mix, but the Hooper mix is the one to have, I’d bring it right up on the Technics pitch control to drop in house sets.

    Joe Smooth – Promised Land – If any one track represented house music it would have to be Joe Smooth’s Promised Land with Anthony Thomas on vocals. Smooth is an unsung hero of house music, first a DJ peer of the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, then a producer working with many people on the DJ International roster. My abiding memory from this track is watching a couple of the most macho football casuals hugging each other on the dance floor of a wine bar I was DJing at when I dropped this track. On the video the guy with the flat top and mullet combo is Anthony Thomas, the nerdy looking guy is Joe Smooth.

    Manuel Göttsching – E2-E4 – I’d love to pretend that I was sufficiently with it to have heard of E2-E4 when I was 13, but I didn’t I heard it. When it started to get sampled by other people; notably Sueno Latino. I hunted down and was blown away by the album (its a 59-minute piece of music but the video clip gives you the gist of it and probably the longest Desert Island Discs recording). It beat out Klein & MBO as my last track since it sounds fresher, but is a good reflection of the past and present electronica that I listen to. Göttsching apparently came up with the music as he wanted something to listen to on a flight.

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