Category: beauty | 美容產品 | 화장품 | 化粧品

The beauty sector describes the industry that manufactures and distributes cosmetic products.

These include colour cosmetics, like foundation and mascara, skincare such as moisturisers and cleansers, haircare such as shampoos, conditioners and hair colours, and toiletries such as bubble bath and soap.

The manufacturing industry is dominated by a small number of multinational corporations that originated in the early 20th century, but the distribution and sale of cosmetics is spread among a wide range of different businesses. The largest cosmetic companies are Johnson & Johnson, L’Oreal Paris, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, LVMH, Beiersdorf, Estée Lauder, Shiseido and Chanel.

Some things are starting to change. The beauty industry as we know it was built on western beauty standards. Now it has to cater to black and other ethnic minority standards as well due to changing market and political realities.

Western country populations are aging. This means that the product mix needs to change for these companies and aesthetic standards need to evolve.

South East and East Asia has gone from being the poorest parts of the world to hosting the fastest growing economies. The ranks of the middle class have exploded in Asia as they declined in the western world due to globalisation.

This also means a very different aesthetic and expectation of what it means and looks like. These are also the the markets were the next generation of industry manufacturing giants will hail from. Shiseido from Japan has an early mover advantage, although others like Innisfree from Korea are expanding across Asia and beyond.

May 2024 newsletter – no. 10
May 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my May 2024 newsletter, I hope that you’re looking forward to the spring bank holiday, unfortunately if like me you’re in the UK – then that was the last public holiday before the end of August. This newsletter which marks my 10th issue. I wasn’t certain that I would get to a tenth edition of this newsletter.

The number ten has a high amount of cultural symbolism from the biblical ten commandments to the ten celestial (or heavenly) stems during the Shang dynasty that marked the days of their week. There were corresponding earthy branches based on 12 day groupings. While the stems are no longer used in calendars they still appear in feng shui, Chinese astrology, mathematical proofs instead of the roman alphabet, student grading systems and multiple choice questionnaires.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- I wrote a comment that struck a bit of a nerve about being asked to do a project ‘for my portfolio’.
- Omakase and luxury futures. In the face of all the changes facing the luxury sector, is the answer learning from the Japanese tradition of omakase?
- April marked the 20th anniversary of Dove’s campaign for real beauty. I took a slower approach than the LinkedIn hot takes to reflect on its legacy.
- Shutting down – when always-on becomes detrimental.
- Mobilizing for Monuments and other things that grabbed my interest.
- How behavioural science can help optimise the response to a coffee shop problem.
- I saw clear parallels between car touchscreens and the changes that digital music instruments went through in terms of design and adoption.
I have had Alex Kassian’s cover version of the Manuel Göttsching classic E2 – E4 on heavy rotation. It was released just in time for the Ibiza season and has Mad Professor remixes dubbing out the balearic vibes for all the deep house shamans.

Books that I have read.
- After Watches and Wonders 2024, I finally managed to get the time to read Rolex Wristwatches: An Unauthorized History by James M Dowling. Dowling is the person that the pre-owned watch market goes to for authentication of really old or unusual Rolex models. His history of the company, while unauthorised, had the collaboration of early Rolex staffers. What comes out is an interesting tale of adaption. Rolex started off as a UK reseller. The company innovated due to client needs and somewhere along the way because the luxury watch manufacturing giant we know today. What becomes apparent that their success was partly down to timing, circumstance and a belief that you change nothing, unless you’re making it better. The last point is something that product managers the world over could learn from.
- David McCloskey’s Damascus Station came highly recommended as leisure reading. My taste in espionage fiction is more towards Mick Herron and John Le Carre rather than the more action orientated. This book had enough intellect and imperfection to make me put up with the James Bond factor.
- I am at the time of writing working my way through Nixonland by Rick Perlstein – which I started before the student sit-ins against the conflict in the Gaza strip happened. More on this book once I have finished it.
- Pogue’s Basics: Essential Tips and Shortcuts (That No One Bothers to Tell You) for Simplifying the Technology in Your Life by David Pogue. I bought a copy of this for my Dad and re-read my own copy, I keep forgetting some of the life hacks that Pogue captured in this book. It’s a decade old and still tremendously useful.
Things I have been inspired by.

I like watches, the design and quality of engineering that they represent and even the sound of them ticking away, but I generally don’t enjoy Hodinkee interviews. However, when they interviewed sneaker legend Ronnie Fieg I watched it. Fieg’s story around his watches is amazing, with each watch marking a milestone.

TML Partners and Accenture Song have done an interesting report on ‘the future of intelligent marketing performance‘ – basically CRM and e-commerce based on a impressive roundtable of marketers. What immediately struck me was how many of the problems would haven written about in a similar way a decade ago. We are constantly in a state of digital transformation, that is starting to feel more like ‘digital treading water’ now. It is due to relatively short organisation memory and lack of a ‘learning element’ in organisations.

Back when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to work on Colgate alongside other agencies. The work that I was doing was in association with the dedicated agency Red Fuse which was the umbrella for all WPP work. I was eventually shut down from working on it by APAC senior management from my own agency at the time; due to internal agency politics that I long gave up trying to understand.

While I was working on the project, I got to meet Jason Oke who is now in charge of global client relationships at Dentsu in New York. Jason appears on the Google Firestarters podcast discussing how to get great advertising ideas made. Some of the thoughts are timeless and echo the advice of Ogilvy on Advertising. It’s well worth listening to.

BBH Singapore Cultural Bleats newsletter

Every agency has some sort of email newsletter, but one that stands head-and-shoulders above other agencies is BBH Singapore’s Cultural Bleats. I promise you once you get past the name, it’s brilliant. The premise of the newsletter is that they put together interesting cultural things to act as useful provocations. This is exactly the kind of thinking, curation and sharing that planning and strategy teams should be doing if they aren’t over-committed on Workfront. A prime example of the kind of thing that Culture Bleats might pick up on is how rich people no longer appear to eat due to Ozempic and meal replacements like Huel.

Dow and Procter & Gamble announced an agreement to make a proprietary way to recycle mixed plastics. I am all for improving recycling of plastics, but having a proprietary method adds complexity into a recycling system that’s already unfit for purpose. I hope that once commercialisation happens P&G will follow the example of Unilever who freely licensed its more efficient aerosol cans to other manufacturers who were interested in the technology.

The Norwegian government published the results of its Mannsutvalgets or Men’s Equality Commission. The report goes into policies across several areas here (in Norwegian). It has some interesting findings that echo think tank thinking about the intersection of social class and opportunity outcomes.

Some of the content around health is particularly interesting Dagens Medisin covered some of these findings, you can see a translation of their article here. However some of the findings in health did make me wonder. It notes that men in Norway live shorter lives than women and considers this to be an equality challenge. Most writing I have seen around the gender mortality gap see it as a biological given rather than a ‘gap’. It felt like greater research was needed to support this reframe in science rather than a well-meaning aspiration.

The report calls on the Research Council in Norway to take up the challenge of improving the knowledge base on many of the issues tackled in the report. The commission acknowledged data-related challenges and wanted revised statistics / indicators for gender equality so that they reflect the equality challenges of boys and men than are currently available.

If you have semiconductor clients and haven’t been on Malcolm Penn’s Future Horizons semiconductor industry awareness workshop, you’re in look he’s running it again on June 18th. I started my agency career working on technology hardware, gadgets and semiconductors – the Future Horizons course helped no end. I went on to work for numerous technology clients including AMD, ARM and Qualcomm.

Finally this essay on human creativity provided a lot of fuel for thought. It pulls together a multi-variant model for why human creativity is on the wane.

Factors included:
- A childhood lack of free time for play and imagination. Instead children have much more regimented structural lifestyles today.
- Massive access to more cultural artefacts than we could possibly consume from around the world at the touch of our fingers. The unknown space is now limited and so there is less opportunity to be creative within it.
- Science and technology innovation is connecting less disparate areas of knowledge in order to make a ‘thing’.
- Stimulation is focused rather than a wide range of stuff, rather than washing over us.
Things I have watched.

I have found myself watching less Netflix over time. Then Netflix moved from getting paid through the Apple app store to wanting a direct payment and bumped the price up. So a mix of inertia and not wanting to watch a compelling show or two has meant that I have consciously uncoupled from Netflix for the time being. I will probably go back when I have a good enough reason. In the meantime, I am buying the odd Blu-Ray or DVD here and there instead. It seems that I am not the only one who has taken this approach.

Amazon Prime Video seems to have a bipolar personality between Apple TV+ level tentpole content and a wide range of trashy films, some of which deserve the moniker ‘cult cinema’. Red Queen fits into the former category rather than the latter. It is based a series of books by Juan Gómez-Jurado. I have just started reading the book Red Queen, but the TV series is compelling. I didn’t realise that I had managed to watch four episodes in one sitting.

I went back to watch the Alain Delon Traitement de choc aka Shock Treatment. Delon plays Dr Devilers, the proprietor of a clinic on the Brittany coast. The clinic focuses on rejuvenating tired wealthy clients with spa treatments, special diets and infusions. The middle-aged patients at the clinic are true believers and as their treatment happens they become more child-like as the rejuvenation happens. The dark side of the clinic is that the serum comes at a price. A new patient finds out what actually happens and what plays out is a French New Wave allegory that touches on similar ethical health concerns, rather like the film adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener.

My internet went down and I managed to work my way through The Street Fighter Trilogy starring Sonny Chiba and made famous by the Tony Scott-directed True Romance. The Street Fighter series was a key influence with Quentin Tarantino, who wrote in their role as a plot device in True Romance and had Sonny Chiba appear in his Kill Bill series. All of the films feel a bit hackneyed in a post-John Wick world, but the first instalment is hard-bitten. Given the torrent of films coming out of Hong Kong at the time, The Street Fighter films stood apart with their unflinching violence displayed on screen. They became the first film in the US to receive an X certificate for violence alone.

Along with the Shaw Brothers boxsets and Bruce Lee’s filmography, the Street Fighter trilogy, is essential viewing for both Asian cinema buffs and martial artist movie fanatics.

How do the sequel films stack up? The second and third film in the series have a bit more playfulness and off-kilter aspects to them similar to films of a similar age made as spaghetti westerns. Sonny Chiba’s 1974 trilogy typify the martial arts craze that swept western cinema in the early 1970s onwards. In the UK, The Street Fighter was called Kung Fu Street Fighter. The likely reasons were two-fold, a similarly named Charles Bronson film and the glut of Hong Kong martial arts films being shown.

The Source is a French police procedural series that shows the cat and mouse game between a French Moroccan crime family and the police tasked to catch them. I am in a few episodes and really enjoying the show so far.

Useful tools.

Email charter

My friend Marshall mentioned this email charter on LinkedIn. Share it with anyone you work with to improve the quality and volume of team communications. Much of it is about level setting expectations. More about the email charter here.

Martin

Martin is an app that integrates Claude-3, Deepgram’s Novo speech to text service and GPT-4 Turbo to interact with Google personal productivity software including Google Calendar and Gmail. Conceptually it’s a better Siri-type digital assistant. I have heard good things about it, but don’t rely heavily on Google services myself, so your mileage may vary. More details here.

Magnet

Magnet is a handy piece of software that keeps your desktop organised. It was recommended to me by a friend who codes software for a living. It is particularly handy for keeping ‘presence’ based channels (like Slack, Teams, Mail.app together on one screen as a ‘war room” type view and having creation on another screen. It even works if you use your screen in a vertical orientation.

PamPam

A service that allows you to create and share maps. You can import maps in various formats or describe it in text for PamPam to render it. Strangely useful.

Scribd downloader

I am not sure how Scribd managed to digest so many resources and hide them behind a paywall. But this might be the antedote if you have something specific that you need.

The sales pitch.

I have had a great time working on a project with GREY & Tank Worldwide. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements for a bit of time that I have in early to mid-June; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my May 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the bank holiday.

Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
May 24, 2024
Dove 20 years of real beauty
I was privileged to freelance at Ogilvy on Dove a number of years ago and got to understand the brand a little better during that time. My work on Dove was focused on product advertising for Dove soap in Brazil, the US, Vietnam and the Philippines rather than adding to the master brand canon around beauty standards.

When the 20th anniversary of the master brand campaign rolled around my LinkedIn was filled with posts about 20 years of the Real Beauty (or changing beauty as its currently articulated) positioning for the Dove brand. I took more of a slow read/write approach to my take on Dove.

Dove origin.

The origins of Dove lie in the injuries experienced by American servicemen during world war two. There was a need for a milder soap to address the needs of burn victims, and the concept of having moisturising cream (or cleansing cream as it was called in the earlier ads) was included in the soap to rehydrate skin rather than leaving it excessively dry after stripping off the skins natural oils.

Dove was introduced as a consumer product in 1957. The original advertising focused on the functional benefits of the product.

Decades later and the Dove advertising continued to focus on the products functional benefits.

For instance this 1990s advert positions Dove against everyday beauty brands and premium brand Neutrogena.

Dove still does functional benefit advertising, but it’s the master brand level advertisements that tend to get the most attention.

2004.

It is worthwhile considering the context that Dove was entering into with its reinvention. While we were post-9/11 the culture still has the optimism of the early 2000s. Celebrity gossip and paparazzi photos and videos were still a thing. Facebook had been launched for Harvard University students. Myspace had launched a year earlier with a focus on music and blogging was gaining a head of steam as a social channel. Real Media had launched a streaming music service but Spotify was a couple of years away from launch.

iTunes music downloads, CD ripping and iPods were reinventing music. Television shows were used to find the next popstars, while Dido and Eminem were dominating radio play.

DVD series box sets were a thing. Season three of TV show 24 was the must see TV with Jack Bauer trying to stop a biological terrorist attack and deal with his own heroin addiction.

I was using a Nokia smartphone and a Palm Tungsten T personal digital assistant at the time.

Beauty soap category at the time.

Beauty soap was not a new category. Unilever had arguably marketed the first beauty soap called Pears. By the time real beauty happened Pears was no longer distributed or marketed by Unilever in the UK. As well as Dove, Unilever owned Lux which was seen to be a ‘milder for your skin’ soap. By this time, Lux was a heritage brand that my Grandmother had liked and its main market focus was Latin America, Africa and South / South East Asia. Lux has pivoted to a girl power like position against societal sexism in its brand purpose led advertising.

Procter and Gamble had their own Lux analogue called Camay that traded on the glamour of famous actresses and socialites. At this time Camay was not seen as contemporary in the UK, but was selling well in Eastern Europe. By a strange twist of fate P&G sold Camay to Unilever in 2015, it was available in Latin America.

Simple soap was a British market competitor that had been part of Smith and Nephew’s spin-off of their consumer products division to focus on their medical businesses including advanced wound management. Simple’s positioning was that it contained no unnecessary ingredients and that it was ideal for sensitive skin.

Nivea had cleaning products like shower gels rather than soap per se but was in the personal care space.

At the time, Dove like Palmolive and Simple might be bought by a housewife and used by all the family. My Mum and Dad still use Dove or Simple soap bars, based on which they find first on their supermarket run.

Real beauty.

Dove’s global brand team wanted to reposition Dove more firmly in the beauty category. The story that is promoted revolves around how the brand team presented the Unilever board at the time with interview footage from their wives and daughters about their opinions on beauty.

There were a few iconic images that came out of the campaign.

The tickbox images that appeared in a lot of out of home executions at the time.

The Dove evolution video which captured what lots of people knew in the media industry, but tapped into wider public discussions about the use of photo manipulation that were appearing around that time.

How real beauty memed.

Dove’s outdoor execution in the London Underground had wags using pens and markers to suggest the negative answers. I remember on the escalator in Holborn station seeing every advert with the box ticked. It even memed with online celebrity news site Holymoly launching the campaign for real gossip.

Dove Men+Care range.

Dove brand extension Dove Men+Care was launched in 2010 and now has a comprehensive range of everyday products. Unilever described this as a ‘white space’. But Nivea for Men had been in this space since 1986 and Nivea had sold shaving products to men as far back as the 1920s.

Dove Men+Care’s purpose wasn’t that clear when I worked on Dove as the master brand is so focused on empowering women and girls.

We believe that care makes a man stronger, and in order to best care for those that matter to you most, you need to start with care for yourself first.
Unilever website

This take from the Unilever website about what the Dove Man+Care brand stands for is still very generic and it could cover anything from Gillette or a Jordan Peterson sound bite to Andrew Tate’s various manosphere-oriented, fitness-focused enterprises.

The risk of a male counterpart.

It would be a major undertaking to build this into something a bit more pointed, yet fit for purpose. I could understand why it would be low on the priority list, particularly when Gillette’s effort was received so badly at the time.

We know from behavioural science that positive reinforcement works better than taking a negative stance. I have heard a couple of hypotheses put around at the time that:
- Men may use Gillette razors; but women in households buy them.
- Women represent the largest growth market for disposable razor systems due Gillette’s male market dominance, male consumers inertia to change brand once chosen and facial hair growth – meant that the Gillette brand team didn’t feel that they were taking a risk.
In both cases, men feature in the advert, but may not have been the ads target audience.

However I think that the media buying suggests these hypotheses were wrong. The ad was run during a prime TV spot on the Super Bowl. Critics point to Procter & Gamble taking a $8 billion non-cash writedown for the shaving giant.

P&G reported a net loss of about $5.24 billion, or $2.12 per share, for the quarter ended June 30, due to an $8 billion non-cash writedown of Gillette. For the same period last year, P&G’s net income was $1.89 billion, or 72 cents per share.

…The charge was also driven by more competition over the past three years and a shrinking market for blades and razors as consumers in developed markets shave less frequently. Net sales in the grooming business, which includes Gillette, have declined in 11 out of the last 12 quarters.
Reuters – P&G posts strong sales, takes $8 bln Gillette writedown (July 30, 2019)

From a societal perspective in general masculinity related topics is a cultural land mine; particularly when #allmenaretrash and similar h a s h t a g s are now commonplace, so it is harder to use in an effective manner the kind of nuance Gillette attempted.

Egard – a watch brand made this response video to Gillette.

Impact

Dove grew as a brand and became a form of social currency. It made the agencies involved (Ogilvy and Edelman) famous for years to come. What Edelman actually contributed to the creative concept is open for debate.

In terms of the Dove real beauty brand purpose, the results seem to be more mixed.

The current Dove master brand ad ‘The Code’ seems to be very similar to the original ‘Evolution’ ad, the only changes have been that Photoshop was being used by an expert and AI has now put it in the hand of teenage girls.

The distortion remains the same. The Girl Guides Girl’s Attitude Survey ran at the end of last year indicated that things have gotten worse over the past decade rather than better. And this was supported by another research driven article I read in The New York Times: What It’s Like to Be a 13-Year-Old Girl Today.

While the public discourse has changed behaviours haven’t and the wellbeing of girls and women seems to be in a similar or worse position today than it was 20 years ago.

Part of this is likely to be societal, we live in more anxious times and the status quo may have been even worse, had Dove not sparked the kind of public discourse it had.

Brand purpose?

At the time when Dove’s campaign came out, I can’t remember purpose really being a ‘thing’. The closest thing I could remember in the marketing zeitgeist is that people would occasionally talk about technology in terms of the pitch a young Steve Jobs made to PepsiCo executive John Sculley: do you want to sell sugared water all your life, or do you want to change the world?

There was talk about changing attitudes and creating a movement – but it was seen in terms of creativity, rather than a higher purpose.

At the time Unilever’s fragrance brand Lynx / AXE were running creative like this.

AXE / Lynx is still the world’s number one men’s fragrance brand, but its positioning has changed a bit.

When you smell good, good things happen. You’re a little more confident and life opens up a world of possibilities. We believe that attraction is for everyone and between anyone. It doesn’t matter your race, your sexuality, or your pronouns. If you’re into it and they’re into it, we’re into it. That’s The New AXE Effect.
Unilever website

Lynx and AXE content wasn’t that far out. Advertising in the late 1990s and early 2000s wasn’t so serene. You has several ad campaigns that were subversive or transgressive in nature.

A good deal of this was cultural zeitgeist. If you were a creative director in your mid-30s at the time, your terms of reference were very different. You would have likely enjoyed sub-cultures like the rave scene and independent music that drew from 1960s psychedelia and counterculture icons. You probably watched the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow film, one of their TV appearances or attended one of their live shows. Russell Brand was considered funny.

Brands getting attention and critical acclaim like Sony’s Playstation gaming console, Levi’s and Skittles were taking brand risks with campaigns that were far edgier than we’d be likely to see now. One direct mail shot from Sony Playstation designed to promote the Tekken 3 fighting game was sent out in a plain manilla envelope stamped ‘private and confidential’. Inside was a convincing medical card advising that the recipient receive immediate medical treatment for a potentially serious condition. Some of those mailed were waiting for hospital test results and complained to the authorities.

Meanwhile in the US, Mountain Dew was promoting pager plans as part of a co-marketing deal. But this was happening in the middle of a moral panic on pagers being a portal to drug dealer hook-ups and teen prostitutes receiving bookings from johns. Kids were being arrested and charged for possessing pagers in schools and colleges.

Failed online business Pets.com had a distinctive shouty voice that we probably hadn’t seen since Poundland’s ‘teabagged’ social posts.

Two examples give a good temperature check of what was happening in agency teams at this time up to just before 2010.

The Volkswagen ‘terrorist’ film that was used as a door opener by creative team Lee Ford and Dan Brooks. It leaked online, much to the bemusement of Volkswagen. Creatives thought it would be well received by a brand marketing team with a sense of humour. While VW didn’t like it, it did get them work with a large production house in the US and London agency Quiet Storm.

The second one was Lean Green Fighting Machine’s Facebook campaign for Dr Pepper in 2010, that referenced an online Brazilian porn clip known as ‘2 girls, one cup’. The client had signed it off, without knowing the context. Controversy ensued on Mumsnet and the agency was fired from the account.

Amidst all this cynicism, boundary pushing and counterculture; Dove’s real beauty would have been distinctive and differentiated. Even if it did run a risk of being perceived as cynical self-serving corporate schmaltz.

Brand purpose as an idea seems to have gained popular currency after Dove’s campaign for real beauty.

You can see in this chart based on Google Books data how the English language mentions of ‘brand purpose’ took off.

Data from Google Books Ngram viewer

Brand purpose critic Nick Asbury places the rise of brand purpose to the 2008 financial crisis and related events such as the Occupy movement, which supports the post-2014 surge in interest. 20 years later, Dove is now seen as being emblematic of brand purpose. Dove took on brand purpose as a concept over time, with the increasing prominence of the Dove Self-Esteem Project being a case in point.

More related posts can be found here.
May 5, 2024
Six hundred pairs + more stuff

Six hundred pairs of Nikes in a custom-built house

The six hundred pairs of Nikes are owned by a Japanese lady who now is head of marketing for Ugg in Japan. Previously she’d spent over 20 years in sales and marketing for Nike. Her house was designed around her shoe collection and the double height ceiling in the room to host the six hundred pairs is worth watching for alone. There are more than six hundred pairs. Some of the stories about the six hundred pairs of shoes are fascinating such as how Nike Air Max 95s were responsible for thefts and muggings in Japan.

Tom Ford

Everyone needs a Tom Ford in their life. From personal life hacks to interior design and grooming all in the space of a few minutes. This sounds as if the interview as done around about the time that Ford was bowing out of his fashion and beauty businesses.

Gibbs SR toothpaste

Along with Close Up and Aquafresh; Gibbs SR toothpaste was one of the toothpastes I remember most from childhood. Unilever bundled it eventually into Mentadent and it was quietly taken off the UK market in 2018.

I didn’t realise that Gibbs SR toothpaste was the first advertisement shown on British television. UK law had changed the previous year allowing for commercial television. The creative behind the ad was Brian Palmer of Young & Rubican (now VML).

So, I was listening to the Uncensored CEO podcast Jon Evans when he had Les Binet and Sarah Carter on. One of them mentioned that the above ad was tested recently and scored top scores. It might be novelty, but is unlikely to be nostalgia that drove this test score. What’s more interesting it that Y&R managed to get the creative so high performing decades before the kind of tools that we have now.

Hyper-reality

Keiichi Matsuda took what Apple would call spatial computing to its logical conclusion in this 7 year old film HYPER-REALITY. There are a number of clever aspects to it. Watch when the device reboots in the supermarket and the glyph wearing criminal who escapes identification by the system.

In reality, hardware will restrict how useable that these products will be. Which is the reason why the Apple Vision Pro looks so cumbersome. More related content here.

John Glenn

Great interview with Mercury and Apollo programme astronaut John Glenn covering different aspects of his experience as an astronaut. We hear how astronauts became so involved in the engineering and safety aspects of the Mercury and Apollo programmes.

March 9, 2024
Complaint resolution + more things
Complaint resolution

My mind cast back to one of the first modules I studied at college. There was a lecture on the role of complaint resolution as part of customer services. The idea was that effective complaint resolution engendered trust in a customer service function and was more likely to increase brand loyalty and recommendation to other people. In reality Ehrensberg-Bass Institute have explored this area in more depth and found that customer penetration is more important than customer loyalty.

US National Archives: Approaching Logan Airport. 05/1973 by Michael Manheim

I suspect that the benefit in complaint resolution is more around a premium brand positioning rather than the business benefits of loyalty. This is an interesting frame to consider AirHelp’s global airline ranking. Unlike SkyTrax that focuses on experience, AirHelp weighs its ranking heavily on complaint resolution.

British Airways came 82nd out of 83 airlines assessed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has flown with them over the past four years.

Many airlines that would have a high SkyTrax service ranking, didn’t perform as well on complaint resolution.

So there wasn’t a clear correlation between experience resolving lots of customer complaints or a highly evolved service offering.

Beauty

Asia’s beauty triangle and why L’Oréal wants to harness it to ‘uncover the future’ | Cosmectics Design Asia – focus on the ‘beauty triangle of China, Japan and Korea for innovation

Consumer behaviour

The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark S. Granovetter – written back in 1973 and still just as valid.

Energy

Emerging car brands scrutinised by Bloomberg and Grant Thornton | Manufacturer – “Chinese brands are dominating the scene with good products, big screens, and impressive interfaces.” However, the challenge arises when considering pricing, as Chinese EVs like the XPeng’s G9 SUV was 72,000 euros competing against the likes of BMW and Mercedes. So they’re going to find it very, difficult and it’s going to come down to price.” Dean pointed out MG’s success in the UK market was achieved by hitting exactly the right sweet spot in terms of pricing. The MG ZS, the second-best-selling battery electric vehicle in the UK, is priced at an average of £31,000, making it compelling in terms of competitive pricing especially in a country where consumers are not fiercely loyal to specific brands. – interesting reading. The way for Chinese vendors to win would be to have Chinese incentivised lease financing, particularly in a time of higher interest rates a la Huawei in the telecoms markets.

Honda will cease production of its first EV e car after dismal sales | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

Ethics

Bee Respect: Guerlain – interesting full-featured sustainability policy

Staff rebel at consultancy behind VW review of Xinjiang rights abuse | FT – Volkswagen using sketchy data practices, haven’t we heard this somewhere before?

Finance

China Turns the Tables on Wall Street – WSJ – I am not surprised, just wait until they see how Chinese overseas debt is handled let alone 3rd world sovereign debt

FMCG

China overtakes US as branded coffee shop capital of the world | Starbucks | The Guardian

Health

American men are dying younger. – by Richard V Reeves – I just don’t think this can be addressed in the current climate of othering and privilege. It would be like trying to hold a meaningful discussion on immigration a few decades ago.

How Taiwan’s disease detectives are keeping tabs on China | Telegraph Online

Hong Kong

Xi in Nanning; Shanghai and Beijing real estate tweaks; More Hong Kong bounties; Sim Love | Sinocism – the Hong Kong puts bounty on the head of US citizen who has criticised the Hong Kong government in the US. They are all ethic Chinese. So China and the Hong Kong government think that ethnic Chinese wherever they are should be loyal to their respective administrations – in essence their face is their passport. Not even Israel does something similar with the the world’s Jewish community, or Ireland with our diaspora.

Innovation

Quantum Breakthrough: Caltech Scientists Unveil New Way To Erase Quantum Computer Errors – Researchers from Caltech have developed a quantum eraser to correct “erasure” errors in quantum computing systems. This technique, which involves manipulating alkaline-earth neutral atoms in laser light “tweezers,” allows for the detection and correction of errors through fluorescence. The innovation leads to a tenfold improvement in entanglement rates in Rydberg neutral atom systems, representing a crucial step forward in making quantum computers more reliable and scalable.

Luxury

LVMH takes VivaTech 2023 visitors on a journey in its Dream Box and LVMH Court – LVMH

Suntory to double prices for premium whiskies in April | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

South Korea’s Coupang to acquire online luxury retailer Farfetch | FT

Marketing

The best of the Jay Chiat Awards: Campaigns that broke habits and reframed perceptions | WARC

Panadol chief marketer: How healthcare is ‘hotting up’, consolidating agency partners and why purpose can go ‘too far | Campaign Asia – rational for not spreading agency spend ‘too thin’ which explains holding company partnerships

Media

What the Epic vs Google case means for content | Ian Betteridge – well worth reading

Online

Meta forced to apologise to Qatari billionaire over crypto scams | FT

TikTok car confessionals are the new YouTube bedroom vlogs | TechCrunch – a combination of factors going on here. Here’s my top hypotheses:
- It is supposed to look ‘off-the-cuff’. I guess the keyword in that sentence is supposed.
- It feels less structured and less staged than the YouTube bedroom trope.
- Its a half-way house between being confident enough to film in public and filming in your bedroom.
- Many cars have smartphone stands, or have owners who have installed them.
- Cars offer some benefits in terms of acoustics. This would be particularly important if the content creator lives in a multiple occupancy household.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked people to blog as a way of celebrating his 40th birthday.

Retailing

Brands are blaming Temu & Shein for poor business performance | Modern Retail – you probably have a problem with marketing and communicating value if this is the case.

Technology

What leading Apple-in-the-enterprise execs expect in ’24 | Computerworld

GV Co-Leads Funding Round for Photonic Computing Startup Lightmatter – Bloomberg

Web of no web

How Meta’s New Face Camera Heralds a New Age of Surveillance – The New York Times

Wireless

6G: network operators want profitable returns on 5G first | FT
February 8, 2024
Sponsorship + more things

Sponsorship

Sports has created a sponsorship bonanza, with women’s sport being a particular beneficiary – Women’s elite sports to generate more than $1 billion in revenue in 2024 | Deloitte UK.

For some brands sponsorships aid in research and product development, motorsport and mountaineering are two sports where this the case. Other sponsorship deals, for instance college athletes and premier league footballers depend on the individuals effect as an influencer as much as their role on pitch. All of these complexities will affect the perception of the sponsorship value and effectiveness. Sponsorship being unmanaged and unmeasured isn’t a new phenomenon. – Sponsorship ‘unmanaged and unmeasured’, WFA warns – The Media Leader. Shirt sponsors are basically dependent on the amount of time on screen. Sponsoring celebrities like Jackie Chan is more about attracting eyeballs to the companies advertising campaigns.

(Jackie Chan represents a particular problem in this sector of sponsorship because he represented over 12 brands at the same time. From local companies that made game consoles suspiciously similar to Nintendo systems to Japanese multi-nationals Canon and Mitsubishi.)

Part of this focus on sponsorship measurement might be about the culture change digital advertising created: How the digital revolution led to a greater justification for advertising – The Media Leader. Famously, telecoms executives love of particular sports influenced sponsorship programmes of their companies. Sir Peter Bonfield was a keen sailor and BT sponsored the Global Challenge yacht race series.

Sir Chris Gent, over at Vodafone was a big cricket fan. The sponsorship would have been difficult to measure as a lot of the impact would have been in cementing existing relationships and facilitating new ones through corporate entertainment. With both, there would be some efforts to demonstrate the relevance of the sponsorship, but it was very much putting the cart before the horse.

Beauty

Avon Promotes CMO Kristof Neirynck to CEO

Consumer behaviour

Nostalgia is a curse in life and tech. – On my Om

Culture

Grateful Dead x Stundenglass Bong | Esquire – yes the Grateful Dead now have an official bong for resale, but the author’s deadhead memories are the thing to read on this article

Design

Tektronix’s Ceramic CRT Production And The Building 13 Catacombs | Hackaday

Energy

Virgin Atlantic is flying the first passenger plane using 100% alternative fuel from London to New York

Finance

This feels structural in nature and implies something is broken in Hong Kong’s capital investment and wealth management sectors: What Hong Kong’s banker malaise signifies | FT

Health

Let’s Talk About Obesity Drugs | Out-Of-Pocket – probably the best 101 on the current state of obesity medication as a market sector

Hong Kong

Deloitte and KPMG ask staff to use burner phones for Hong Kong trips | FT – Moscow Rules in Hong Kong

Innovation

Europe finally sets date for Ariane-6 rocket debut – BBC News

Ideas

When journalism is emptied of journalism – Nieman Storyboard

Luxury

Luxury borrowing from sports apparel and mainstream fashion with its use of NFCs – From Tod’s to Balenciaga, NFC chips are luxury’s secret weapon | Jing Daily

Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière | Vogue Business – Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière. The next product available to LV’s exclusive group of NFT holders is a mini trunk bag designed by the brand’s women’s artistic director. Only 200 are available, and the physical will land in March.

Media

Social media belongs to the creator economy—not users | Fortune – if that’s the case, expect regulation to come in much stronger

People Are Absolutely Roasting Sports Illustrated’s Ridiculous Excuse for Its AI-Generated Writers | Futurism

The Hundred-Year Battle for India’s Radio Airwaves | WIRED – state broadcaster All India Radio has 262 radio stations that reach almost every part of India, broadcasting in 23 languages and 146 dialects. There are over 388 private FM stations spread across the biggest and smaller cities – it is easy to forget that there are millions of people who still don’t access online media. And at the other extreme: Global SVOD subs to reach 1.79 billion by 2029 – The Media Leader

Netflix Gave An Unproven Director $55 Million For A Sci-Fi Series, And He Blew It On Rolls-Royces, Crypto, And Dodgy Stock Bets – surprised Netflix hasn’t optioned a documentary to tell this story

Online

Is Argentina the First A.I. Election? – The New York Times

Security

War has spread to a sixth domain: the private sector | FT this concern is coming into focus as there is greater awareness of shrinkage in military orientated manufacturing capability: People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone | Noah Smith

A Civil Rights Firestorm Erupts Around a Looming Surveillance Power Grab | WIRED

L3Harris to sell commercial aviation business for $800 million – Breaking Defense – renewed focus on their security business

Software

Magnific AI – I look at this and think of Blade Runner

the world’s largest distributed LLM training job on TPU v5e | Google Cloud Blog

2023 CommsIndex: Asia-Pacific Comms Heads Remain Wary Of AI’s Rise | PRovoke Media – clients are also concerned about potential job losses and skills gaps that may result from using generative AI tools to automate their work. The skills gap point doesn’t get sufficient discussion in talks about machine learning and automation

Style

Why Jerry Lorenzo and Adidas joined forces to create Fear of God Athletics | Vogue Business

Deep Dive: Two DTC Brands – 2PM – Allbirds is on life support while ON Running shoes sails ahead

Taiwan

Taiwan and the True Sources of Deterrence | Foreign Affairs

Tools

Clipdrop – SDXL Turbo – stable diffusion image creation

Kosmik • For All Mindkind – Pinterest and Pinboard meet Evernote

The Best Social Media Analytics Tool | Measure Studio – taking a good deal of the drudgery out of social media account reporting

January 8, 2024