Category: branding | 品牌推廣 | 브랜드 마케팅 | ブランディング

The dictionary definition of branding is the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.

I have covered many different things in branding including:

  • Genesis – the luxury Korean automotive brand
  • Life Bread – the iconic Hong Kong bread brand that would be equivalent of wonder loaf in the US
  • Virgil Abloh and the brand collaborations that he was involved in
  • Luxury streetwear brands
  • Burger King campaigns with Crispin Porter Bogusky
  • Dettol #washtocare and ‘back to work’ campaigns
  • Volkswagen ‘see the unseen’ campaign for its Taureg off road vehicle
  • SAS Airline – What is truly Scandinavian?
  • Brand advertising during Chinese New Year (across China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia)
  • Lovemarks as a perspective on branding
  • BMW NEXTGen event and Legend of Old McLanden campaign
  • Procter & Gamble’s Gillette toxic masculinity ads
  • Kraft Mother’s Day campaign
  • Kraft Heinz brand destruction
  • Porsche Design in the smartphone space
  • Ermenegildo Zegna
  • Nike’s work with Colin Kaepernick
  • Counterfeit brands on Instagram, Alibaba and Amazon
  • Gaytime Indonesian ice cream
  • Western Digital
  • Louis Vuitton collaboration with Supreme
  • Nokia
  • Nike Korea’s ‘Be Heard’ campaign
  • Mercedes SLS coupe campaign
  • Brand collaborations in Hong Kong
  • Beats headphones
  • Apple
  • Henrion Ludlow Schmidt’s considerations of branding
  • Cathay Pacific
  • Bosch
  • Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid
  • Microsoft Surface launch
  • Oreo Korean campaign
  • Chain coffee shop brands and branding
  • Samsung’s corporate brand
  • North Face’s brand overeach in South Korea
  • Mr Pizza Korean pizza restaurant and delivery service brand
  • Amoy Hong Kong food brand
  • Chevrolet Corvette ‘roar’ campaign promoting a build your own car service
  • Media agency interviews & things that made last week

    Media agency interview with Simon Peel of Adidas

    There is a certain irony in a media agency that promoted just the kind of short-termist platforms for advertising, interviewing Simon Peel. Still we have the echoes of a disruption narrative ripping through advertising spend and and brand equity like a hot knife through butter. More on simon here.

    Subprime car loans

    The FT on the subprime car loan problem from an economic perspective that’s frightening in its scale. This is one of the biggest threats to the move to electrification in cars. Admittedly this threat compounds problems such as:

    • Energy density which leads to the range anxiety of the cars
    • The escalating price of lithium
    • The finite supply of lithium
    • The difficulty in recycling lithium ion batteries
    • Electric power grid infrastructure
    • Charger maintenance

    Ko Hyojoo

    Asian Boss have done this great film with Korean long board rider Ko Hyojoo

    US personal hygiene Irish Spring doing some interesting (and cheap) activations in sports. Irish Spring Celebrates College Football Rivalries 11/27/2019 | Media Post

    Vangelis

    A couple of years old now, but this a great short film highlighting the cultural impact on music of Vangelis’ soundtrack to Blade Runner.

    Vangelis was a famous electronic artist before he worked on Blade Runner. He had made a number of solo albums as soundtracks for animal documentaries and the Chariots of Fire soundtrack. He was also working as part of Jon and Vangelis on successful albums throughout the 1980s. But his work on Blade Runner seems to have been the film that crystallised his place in electronic music culture. Blade Runner wasn’t a runaway success at the box office, but instead took over time on video rental as word of mouth went around. Eventually it was released in a number of different edits that helped boost its popularity. By the time DVD as a format came around, it was one of the first obvious choices for the format.

  • Dark mode + more things

    Opinion | Living in Dark Mode – The New York Times – of the Hong Kong liberation movement was a plot device in a William Gibson novel, I would expect him to write a character like Karen. (Paywall) – dark mode is a great metaphor for the dystopian ennui. Yet I find it much easier to work in dark mode on my computer, which provides an interesting contradiction to idea

    Hong Kong Protests (October 31)

    As facial recognition tech races ahead of regulation, Chinese residents grow nervous about data privacy | South China Morning Post – interesting that concerns are starting to appear around privacy and biometrics

    Will Reddit Ads or Facebook Ads Have Lower CPC? – yes

    The white working class is a political fiction | The OutlineIt turns the working class into something people are, not a function of what they do. It becomes a cultural description totally divorced from labor and wealth, only to be gleaned from outward displays of “class” that come with intelligence, appearance, taste, and all those things that make up meritocratic ideas of “workers.”

    The Uber Bubble: Why Is a Company That Lost $20 Billion Claimed to Be Successful? – early similar to a lot of dot com businesses

    An update on YC China – Silicon Valley retreating from China.

    Daring Fireball: Tim Cook Appears Alongside Trump in Re-Election Campaign Ad Shot in Mac Pro Plant in Austin – ironic given Apple’s actions in Hong Kong

    How a Zara shirt raises ethical issues in sustainable fashion — Quartzy – (paywall)

    Is TikTok really a national security threat? | Slate – yes it is

    Dynamic Norms Promote Sustainable Behavior, Even if It Is Counternormative – Sparkman & Walton – Association for Psychological Science paper on dynamic messaging

    Mobile: Social – Unpacking what holds the loyalty industry back… from what it could be. | LinkedIn – wider implications around people who’ve been conditioned by mobile ( and other technologies towards internet, multi-channel TV etc) to expect instant gratification in general

    Zuckerberg’s Anti-China Rhetoric Roils Facebook Employees — The Information – Facebook is grappling with its large community of Chinese employees, some of whom are becoming more vocal and critical in internal company forums over what they claim is a bias against mainland China. (paywall)

    Chinese netizens think Mark Zuckerberg betrayed China – The Facebook CEO has been widely admired in China, but his more recent negative comments about the country aren’t going over well | Abacus – why should Zuckerberg care

  • Galloway on Louis Vuitton & more

    Section 4’s Scott Galloway on Louis Vuitton. Professor Scott Galloway talks about the way Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer consumer’s needs and tastes.

    Modern consumers are younger and based in Asia rather than the traditional older luxury purchasers in Europe and the US. This has meant that digital became more important, as had casual luxury over formal luxury.

    All of that innovation was extended by Louis Vuitton with streetwear type drops rather than seasons. Shops are a brand experience in their own right. Including online games and pop-up Instagrammable stores. They focused on products that can be driven into the market faster with an agile supply chain.

    Casual styling allows you to go to smaller goods with a lower price point and replaceable more often.

    The line between streetwear and luxury has been blurred. More on luxury related issues here.

    A great mix of the hits of European disco producer Daniel Bangalter (Vangarde). Daniel Bangalter started with a husband and wife team, writing and producing their songs. Around this time, he partnered up with Jean Kluger. Their first project was a pseudo Japanese band called the Yamasuki Singers. It was the early 1970s and a bit strange. Kluger and Bangalter then went on to produce Ottowan including D.I.S.C.O. They also produced the Gibson Brothers song Cuba. You can hear the influence of his sound (and probably at least some of his studio equipment) in the Daft Punk sound.

    Daft Punk includes his son Thomas Bangalter. Apparently Daniel helped Daft Punk when they were starting out.

    Mark Ritson on 50 years of Effies. Some of the content is as worth watching as listening to Ritson’s commentary.

    Scott Galloway on online business. Some interesting points here

    Fabio Wibmer does to the Austrian city of Wien (Vienna) what Bullit did to San Francisco.

  • Choi Hyun woo & things that made last week

    Choi Hyun woo

    TV shopping channels are huge in Korea. Asian Boss did this great interview with Choi Hyun woo, one of the most successful shopping TV pitchmen (pitchwoman) in Korea.

    Looking at data from home shopping company CJ ENM Commerce division, sales are starting to focus more on premium and luxury products from international brands like Karl Lagerfeld and Vera Wang. Overall TV viewship has been declining; but TV home shopping has been steadily growing.

    Good document on how consumer behaviour and technology will affect the future of retailing and e-commerce by Sparks & Honey. Its a book rather than a presentation.

    Amazing bit of creative work by Alzheimer’s Research UK.

    We’re in a golden age of TV drama and it looks like thins are only going to get more interesting with this trailer from HBO’s adaptation of The Watchmen universe. This seems to go in a very different direction to the original Watchman series. It is picks up from the end of the original book when a ‘trans-dimensional’ invasion fails. It doesn’t have the cold war orientation of the original series and is instead a show for our times. The HBO series focuses on issues of race and class. It looks as if it could be more entertaining than the original film adaptation that felt a bit flat.

    https://youtu.be/-33JCGEGzwU

    McDonalds have pushed these ads about trust and they play on human truths like the discomfort of formal restaurants or the tyranny of choice in grocery stores. A classic example of this tension is that many people I know refuse to eat on their own in a restaurant. I don’t have that hang up at all. McDonalds deserves credit for really listening to consumer insights and playing them back tot the audience for added brand resonance.

  • Laundry category innovation + more

    Laundry without guilt

    A load of laundry without a load of guilt | Trendwatching – white good manufacturer looks to combat micro fibres. Laundry is a major CPG category and this project offers a potential for partnership with manufacturers, beyond the usual ‘X manufacturer recommends X laundry detergent’.

    Anti-solar panel

    Transmission lines and railroad near Salton Sea. District of Los Angeles smog obscures the sun, May 1972

    The Anti-Solar Panel – A Device That Generates Electricity From Darkness – at a very early stage. What’s interesting the potential for energy handover with other alternative sources to provide constant current

    Branding

    Why strategy should embrace execution | WARCThe Nike ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ campaign was a really long process – about a year. In the beginning we had a vision to get really local. Then about halfway through the process, the terrorist attacks happened in London. And a picture emerged of a man fleeing the scene with a beer in his hand. Everyone inside London said that’s what it means to be a Londoner: no matter what happens, they hold onto their beer. And off the back of that, I wrote the line ‘nothing beats a Londoner,’ which wasn’t supposed to end up as the final line but it did. It just gave the creative more depth and a place to springboard from. It changed the energy of the work.

    Consumer behaviour

    Baby Boomers click with online shopping – Trend-Monitor – interesting statistics around overall spending versus millennials

    The more voters hear no-deal warnings, the more they support it | The TimesMuch of this is simply because voters have heard it all before. Trust in politicians and the media, also seen as responsible, is at record lows. The legacy of the 2016 referendum campaign runs deep. Promises from both sides, from the infamous £350 million a week to forecasts of a recession, still endure as easy-to-reach examples as to why you should not trust anything a politician says.  For up to about a year after the referendum, a handful of voters would repeat a number long forgotten in Westminster — that the Remain campaign had said leaving would make households £4,300 a year worse off. This was the archetype of nonsense, largely because of its precision. How could anyone know in such detail, to the nearest hundred, with such certainty, what the effect would be? It can only be a lie. But the aversion to anti-no-deal messages is about more than distrust. Where there is support for no deal in the country, it is fused to a deep sense of patriotism. A feeling that we are British, we have endured so much and thrived, of course we will be okay if we leave without a deal

    The last days of the middle-class world citizen | Financial Times – interesting mix of Extinction Rebellion type environmental despair, economic globalisation, populism and dot.com busts (paywall)

    Design

    Hong Kong students invent self-sanitising door handle | Dezeen – interesting, it is said that brass fulfils a similar self-sterilising role as well

    Legal

    WSJ City | Nike CEO was briefed by banned coach on doping effects – this looks damning for Nike

    US blacklists 28 Chinese entities in latest trade war escalation | Financial Times – interesting that all the companies are focused on surveillance or machine learning (paywall)

    Luxury

    Tiffany deletes ad that looks like Hong Kong protest message – Inkstone – China is getting too sensitive la. FFS its huge, powerful, has nuclear weapons. It needs to grow a skin rather than being raw to the touch

    Off-White, Vetements and The Paradigm of Luxury“Disruption is evolution. Defining the word ‘luxury’ might be a start for defining disruption and evolution as the word and the concept of luxury has different meanings following the demographics of peoples and cultures according to age, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, income, and education”

    Extreme micro-living in San Francisco | Financial Times – luxury upwards storage. What about the economics of furniture versus technology? (paywall)