Ged Carroll

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

  • Gaytime ice cream and other news

    Gaytime Ice Cream

    Unilever under fire over Gaytime ice cream in Indonesia | PR | Campaign Asia – no idea where they got that idea, I imagine it could become a cult brand if launched elsewhere. Gaytime ice cream makes me think of a more innocent time in my life when, if I was home from school, I would be sat down with Marie biscuits and a cup of Barry’s tea by my Mum. This was a thinly veiled bribe to be quiet, which wasn’t really needed.

    The reason for this ritual would be a soap opera called Harbour Hotel and a chat show called The Gay Byrne Show. Both where on RTÉ Radio 1. Back then gay could mean happy; or in the case of Gay Byrne it was short for Gabriel. The radio meant that voices from home where beamed into our house around the clock via medium wave and long wave.

    https://youtu.be/hByFDVwiQq8

    Of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned it at my English school as there would have been an ocean of sniggers. The Muslim outrage at Gaytime also mirrors the PC revisionist view of The Flintstones ‘we’ll have a gay old time’ lyric in their theme tune. Apparently its original meaning of happy or fun, was interpreted as being intolerant of the LGBTQ community.

    Business

    The One Number You Need to Grow | HBR – original HBR article which introduced NPS

    Consumer behaviour

    Citizens’ Voices: Insights from focus groups conducted in England for the project, At Home in One’s Past. – Demos – Demos went fishing to understand the effects of nostalgia across Europe (the UK was merely the first interviews that they did).  Instead, Demos got insights into the motivations for Brexit. A lot of this lines up with what I wrote before the vote. What pops in this (subjective) qualitative feedback is:

    • The problems that the Labour Party faces with Corbyn and the general distrust of politicians in what should be ‘heartland’ seats
    • The continued credibility of Nigel Farage
    • The anti-German sentiment. The EU was seen as a German vehicle to win the war again by stealth – this has almost a Basil Fawlty quality to it. But at least some of the panelists believed it was true
    • How the political divisions around the societal change driven by Margaret Thatcher’s government reverberated into the Brexit vote

    Economics

    The continental divide? Economic exposure to Brexit in regions and countries on both sides of The Channel – Chen – 2017 – Papers in Regional Science – Wiley Online Library – interesting research on impact of Brexit across EU

    Retailing

    Amazon Is Thriving Thanks to Taxpayer Dollars | New Republic – The tech giant has received more than $1 billion in tax breaks. The government is also funding food stamps for many of its workers

    Poundland’s naughty elf campaign which riffed on British smut and the ‘Elf On A Shelf’ franchise affected consumer attitudes to the brand according to YouGov. The research is at odds with the overall positive response it got from Twitter (outside the London media-advertising industrial complex) – YouGov | Poundland’s X-rated ads generated publicity, but consumer perception has dropped

    Technology

    Noah Smith on Twitter: “1/OK, a thread about Bitcoin. (but really about nominal vs. real quantities)” – really interesting thread

    Three Thoughts on Day One at CES 2018 – not surprised that computing is moving to the edge as the network represents latency and potential unreliability – think about how cloud failure when it hit Nest devices and IoT obselescence

    Casio AL-1000 – the nixie tube display and ferrite core memory make it a thing of beauty to behold

    Web of no web

    LegalFling – Get explicit about sexual consent – blockchain start-up WTF

    Wireless

    WSJ City | Mega Chip Deal Alarms Some Chinese Smartphone Makers – OPPO and Vivo can be viewed as one company as they both have common owners and sprang from BBK. They are brands aimed at different segments of the Chinese market

    Huawei’s US market dreams ‘harmed again’ after AT&T walks away from smartphone pact | South China Morning Post  – “We have been harmed again,” Huawei’s consumer business unit chief executive officer Richard Yu said in a text message to the South China Morning Post – you can see from later articles how Huawei progressively got their act together in terms of media response though much of the coverage added a thin veneer of analysis whilst repeating the original WSJ article – China’s Huawei hit by last minute collapse of AT&T phone distribution deal | Reuters – the collapse of the deal with AT&T, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, will mean that Huawei will likely struggle to make a hit of its smartphones there as a U.S. mobile carrier would typically promote the products as well as provide subsidies and special package deals

  • Most popular blog posts of 2017

    How did I go to define the most popular blog posts of 2017. I looked at my most trafficked articles from January to June 2017 here.

    What did June to December look like?

    # Title Notes
    1 Is your PR plan good enough? A series of six posts and a work book on developing and assessing how thorough a communications plan is
    2 Thinking about Marcel Reflections on the challenges and opportunities posed by Publicis Groupe’s bid to build machine learning into the core of the business
    3 My decade of the iPhone Reflecting on the impact that the iPhone had on my smartphone usage. Probably not as much as you would have thought
    4 Out and about: Blade Runner 20149 Review of Gosling and Ford’s reboot of the Blade Runner story 30 years after the original
    5 That Trivago poster The meme created by blanket out of home advertising throughout London in September
    6 The Bell Pottinger Post I was a bit surprised to see Bell Pottinger go into administration after I wrote this post. Even the London finances were bearing up, the key challenge seems to have been NO interested from any agency approached in acquiring the London office.
    7 Living with the Apple Watch A reflection live with the Apple Watch 2. My first Apple Watch went on eBay within 48 hours of its arrival and my initial trials with it. How will the Mk II version cope?
    8 Can too much design thinking be a bad thing? There is a lot of mediocre thinking shrouded in design methodologies out there. But this post wasn’t about that. Instead I wanted to consider the process itself. Was there be constraints on the process itself?
    9 Technology is way ahead of interface designs Good user experience, ergonomics and the latest technology don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand
    10 Three takeaways from Cannes and Vidcon Blind trust in influencers as a marketing tool. The unhealthy state of the online advertising eco-system and transfer of value from agencies and media to two platforms

    What did the most popular blog posts  of 2017 look like overall?

    # Title Notes
    1 Living with the Casio GWF -D1000 Frogman watch Casio took their Frogman watch and improved it even further. Some of the technology is interesting mainly because they’ve managed to run it all off a diminutive solar panel. The bigger changes for me was moving world time from the ‘home screen’ and reengineering how the strap is fastened to the case in a much more robust manner
    2 Louis Vuitton, Supreme and the tangled relationship between streetwear and luxury brands Louis Vuitton has been dragged into the 21st century by its creative director. A collaboration with Supreme seems logical in retrospect for so many reasons
    3 Is your PR plan good enough? A series of six posts and a work book on developing and assessing how thorough a communications plan is
    4 Thinking about Marcel Reflections on the challenges and opportunities posed by Publicis Groupe’s bid to build machine learning into the core of the business
    5 Richard Edelman is wrong, PR isn’t at a crossroads… Richard Edelman commented on the trend for large marketing groups to consolidate PR agencies and integrate PR offerings into a larger marketing services stack. This mirrors changes that Edelman’s own company has gone through as multiple disciplines close in on a marketing singularity
    6 It’s time that we talk about micro-influencers Looking past the hype of micro-influencers to work out how it fits with brand planning scenarios
    7 Oprah Time: Blood and Faith – the purging of muslim Spain (1492 – 1614) by Matthew Carr I picked this book up on a trip to Madrid. Carr’s books looked at Spain’s history with the muslim world in an unsympathetic light. The issues of conservative populism and racism also feel very contemporary given political sentiment across Europe
    8 Magic Lantern Festival, Chiswick House Gardens Chiswick hosted a lunar new year oriented lantern festival similar to what you’d seen in Hong Kong and across China
    9 Have we reached peak streetwear? A follow-on post from my jog down memory lane about luxury and streetwear. I started thinking about it in terms of a market in its own right
    10 My decade of the iPhone Reflecting on the impact that the iPhone had on my smartphone usage. Probably not as much as you would have thought

    There is it is; the most popular blog posts of 2017.

  • Older iPhones + more news

    Apple CEO Cook breathes new life into old iPhones | Reuters – how Apple’s lower models contribute in markets like India. Older iPhones resold also drive services sales on an ongoing basis, whether the older iPhones are based on to children or sold on

    Culture

    Funko CEO reacts to stock’s 40% plunge on figurine maker’s first day as a public company | Geekwire – surprising given the prominence of geekdom in popular culture

    Gadgets

    aibo | Sony Japan – Matt’s commentary on this from his Web Curios newsletter ‘When I was about 20 I was obsessed with the idea of Sony’s Aibo, the robot dog that was JUST LIKE A REAL PUPPY  but with no hair or faeces or propensity to maul people.; now Sony have announced a rebooted version which is slightly less robotic and slightly more cute, and doubtless far more sophisticated in its ability to dance and caper and charmingly present to demand tickles that will never feel. The weird thing is, though, that now I am older I look at this and feel nothing but a deep and abiding sadness at the thought of the sort of people for whom this actually designed – not rich twats who want a toy, but the terminally lonely for whom a small robotic dog and stroking its plastic, unfeeling case in lieu of actual biological contact. Imagine that being your only interaction with another ‘thing’ for days and days and days on end. I don’t want to grow old.’ Not too sure if this a manifestation of his realisation of mortality that usually kicks in with the start of middle age. It does reflect the resurgence of Sony and how it thinks about consumer products for a greying market.

    Marketing

    See the cool kids lined up outside that new restaurant? This app pays them to stand there. – The Washington Post  – “They hire promoters and marketers and PR agencies to connect, but it’s a one-sided interaction that involves blasting out a message to get people engaged, but they don’t necessarily know if that message is being received.”

    WPP’s PR Units Slip as Sorrell Warns on ‘New Normal’ – O’Dwyer PR  – “It does seem that in new normal of a low growth, low inflation, limited pricing power world, there is an increasing focus on cost reduction, exacerbated by a management consultant emphasis on cost reduction and the close to zero cost of capital funding of activist investors and zero-based budgeters,” wrote Sorrell in WPP’s trading update.

    Online

    Damning stat Facebook tried to bury | News.com.au – 270 million accounts are duplicate or fake

    Software

    This app is like Shazam for fonts | The Next Web – genius, more design related content here.

    Berlin’s Ada Health raises $47M to become the Alexa of healthcare | TechCrunch – would the money be better spent on building skills into Alexa or Google Home?

    Wireless

    Q’comm Profits Dive Amid Patent Disputes | EE Times – ingredient brand most hated by its partners….

  • Out and about: Blade Runner 2049

    *** No plot spoilers*** Where do you start when talking about Blade Runner 2049 – the most hyped film of the year?

    Blade Runner 2049 starts up some 20 years after the original film. It captures the visuals of the original film, moving it onwards.  The plot has a series of recursive sweeps that tightly knit both films together which at times feels a little forced, a bit like the devices used to join Jeremy Renner’s Bourne Legacy to the Matt Damon canon.

    Blade Runner 2049

    The 1982 film took the neon, rain and high density living of Hong Kong in the late summer and packaged it up for a western audience.  Ever since I first saw  it represented a darker, but more colourful future. I felt inspired, ready to embrace the future warts and all after seeing it for the first time.

    The new film is a darker greyer vision largely devoid of hope. You still see the Pan Am and Atari buildings of the first film, now joined with brands like Diageo. The police cars are now made by Peugeot. It also captures the visual language of the book, something that Scott hadn’t done in the original to the same extent. In the book, Dick (and the Dekkard character) obsess on how the depopulated world’s crumbling ephemera is rapidly becoming dust.

    Visually the film dials down its influences from Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore and instead borrows from the crumbling industrial relics of the west and third world scrap driven scavenging from e-waste in China and Ghana to the ship breaking yards of Bangladesh. The filthy smog and snow is like a lurid tabloid exposé of northern China’s choking pollution during the winter. It paints a vision more in tune with today. Automation and technology have disrupted society, but orphans are still exploited for unskilled labour and vice is rampant.

    Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford do very capable performances. And they are supported by a great ensemble of cast members of great character actors at the top of their game. Dave Bautista, Robin Wright, Barkhad Abdi (Eye in The Sky) and David Dastmalchian (MacGyver, Antman, and The Dark Knight). The one let down is Jared Leto – who now seems to play the same character in every film since his career high point of Dallas Buyer’s Club – I suspect that this is as much a problem with casting as performance. I think he needs to be cast against type more.

    For a three-hour film it still manages to hold your attention and draw you in to its universe without feeling tired. It’s also a film that forces you to think, so if you are looking for visual wallpaper for the mind a la Marvel’s Avengers series of films it won’t be for you.

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  • Mosby + other things

    Mosby

    Mosby is a long haired Belgian shepherd. His owner put together a monologue and some carefully curated footage to come with simply great content. Mosby’s Motto is deceptively simple. I imagine that it required a lot of raw candid footage that was then skilfully edited down into this two-minute video. The copywriting around Mosby also taps into popular themes around YOLO and follow your passion 

    Wrestling vs. rap

    The hyperbole of wrestling commentary with the rhymes of Snoop Dogg, it sounds like a marriage made in heaven right?

    Leica manufacturing

    I am a sucker for manufacturing and process videos. This video by Richard Seymour (not the Richard Seymour, design god and the talented one in SeymourPowell, but a similarly named photographer) on how Leica turns out its M-series cameras

    Verbing Velcro

    Velcro using humour to make a serious point about their brand IP. They challenge that Velcro faces is the degree to which their name ‘verbs’ as Faris Yakob would put it. Think about the way people might label their pet a ‘velcro’ dog because it sticks with them all the time. Velcro has been used as a synonym for clingy. All of this is great for marketing, bad for legal affairs.

    Greg Wilson

    This week I have mostly been listening to Greg Wilson. Wilson was one of the first DJs at The Hacienda and has been doing great productions for the last decade. This mix of early house classics surprised me a little because of his programming style (what he chose to play, the order and how he segued between the tracks). Wilson’s style was much more akin to that of the disco era DJs – it was all about the smooth flow, less about taking people on a journey or driving the dance floor in a more kinetic style and it caused me to re-listen to tracks that I have been familiar with for the best part of three decades. The context of Wilson’s had shifted them so fundamentally. More related content here.