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

  • MasterCard logo + more

    MasterCard logo redesign struck a nice balance between  change and heritage. Wired magazine has more details on the MasterCard logo redesign and how it has changed or evolved over the years. More on branding related stories here.

    Snoop Dogg on a US game show via Zak Agency’s ‘cool sh*t‘ email newsletter. Legendary undersells the Doggfather.

    Masaaki Hiroi’s wooden toys look amazing. They are a great example of how Japanese artisan crafts continue to manage remaining relevant.

    Our Iain switched me on to Snoring (music to sleep by) from IGLOOGHOST. Which makes a lot of sense given the amount of focus on mindfulness and white noise generators in smartphone app stores.

    I went to see The Avalanches play their new album at Oval Space back in June and there were a number of people in the audience ignorant of their process and exceptionally vocal on social media.


    I honestly don’t know what they were expecting – Led Zeppelin type stage antics? They didn’t realise that The Avalanches are producers and turntablists. I guess this is what we get when people only know their music through their favourite playlists on Spotify rather than being able to read album notes.

    This was in advance of their new album drop Wildflower. The album is tremendous; Wildflower has been on heavy rotation in/on my iPod. It moves on from the ethereal quality that their first album had to something more confident in nature. Buy it, gift it to friends and relatives.

    The folks at who sampled put together this great run through of where all the pieces came from. Given The Avalanche’s creative process, this is a long but very worthwhile video walk through the Wildflower album.

  • Nice & other things

    Nice

    Nice murder-by-truck incident – My social media feed filled up with poor ad placements against news about the Nice murder-by-truck incident. Sesame Street’s handling of the event on the social media accounts was a paragon of how these things should be done on Twitter and YouTube

    Hat tip to our Ana

    Culture

    INDUSTRIAL JP / Record Label of Factory – really interesting Japanese record label that takes the principles of music concrete and turns them in to great house and techno tracks. The videos that accompany the tracks are hypnotic.

    My soundtrack for the past week has been The Avalanches new album Wallflower and this epic Paul Daley (Leftfield) mix from five years ago with an Ibizan vibe that belies cruddy summer weather we’ve been having

    This is what happens when you let Rus Khasanov loose with glitter and ink. The music is by Dmitry Evgrafov

    Web of no web

    Virtual reality lets Chinese customers shop Macy’s New York store on the world’s biggest shopping day – really interesting e-commerce offering. It is an illustration of how much China-international e-commerce is so important.

  • Weiying + more news

    China’s Tencent and Weiying Take $85 Million Stake in Korea’s YG Entertainment | Variety – China is the market for a lot of Korean TV. Gaining soft power through culture is part of the government’s aspirations – this deal makes both political and business sense. Korean production companies have found that their shows are often blocked by Chinese regulators. Instead the best way around this has been licensing the formats for a remake locally, which offers modest payments. Whether it is good for Korea in the longer term is another matter.

    China has a number of problems on its hands before it can replicate Korea’s success. China has a warped production model that works on patronage and ever bigger budgets and returns. Great for doing a large scale fight scene, not so good for romantic dramas. China hasn’t managed to build up a bench of likeable stars with international appeal in the same way that Korean has managed in a consistent manner. The desire of the government propaganda department blunts the appeal of dramas. Weiying will struggle to give China the kind of soft power that Korea and Japan enjoy respectively abroad. More on Korea related topics here.

    Discover Vietnam’s most chosen brands | Kantar Worldwide – well done Unilever. Unilever is especially interesting because of its success with both Vietnamese urban and rural consumers. However Nestle is a high-performing number 4. Unilever’s competition isn’t P&G, but local brands Musan and Vinamilk.

    How Akira sent shockwaves through pop culture and changed it | Dazed Digital – still an amazing film. I remember seeing it at the 051 cinema in Liverpool, some time before 1994 and it blew me away. It wasn’t just an engaging story but a well thought out future. Architecture wasn’t just new and shiny like Star Trek, but there were new and old side-by-side like London or Hong Kong. It was the future cyberpunk Japan that author William Gibson mirrored in his own early books. The impact of Akira encouraged me to watch more anime, when then led to my love of Ghost In The Shell.

    Tumblr is now blocked in China | Techinasia – surprised it hadn’t happened already given its meme and porn driven nature

  • The New Nokia

    The New Nokia can rise from the ashes of the old. Microsoft finally let go of its licence for the Nokia brand license on May 19, 2016.
    Slide03
    There is a lot of logic to this move:

    • Microsoft has already written down the full value of the business acquisition
    • It has got the most valuable technical savvy out of the team and moved it into the Surface business
    • It removes problematic factories and legacy products

    For the businesses that have acquired the rights to use the Nokia name and the factories the upsides are harder to see.

    The factories may be of use, however there is over supply in the Shenzhen eco-system and bottlenecks aren’t usually at final manufacture, but in the component supply chain.

    There is still some brand equity left in the Nokia phone brand. I analysed Nokia along with a number of other international Greater China smartphone eco-system brands using Google Trend data.
    Slide06
    There has been a decline in brand interest over the past 12 months for Nokia of 37%
    Slide07
    Nokia still has comparable brand equity to other legacy mobile brands such as BlackBerry and Motorola
    Slide08
    The brand equity is comparable to other value mobile brands. Honor; Huawei’s value brand has had a lot of money and effort pumped into it to achieve its current position.
    Slide09
    But it’s brand equity doesn’t stack up well against premium handset brands from Greater China. The reason for this is that smartphone marketing and fast moving consumer goods marketing now have similar dynamics – both are in mature little differentiated markets. Brands need to have deep pockets  and invest in regular advertising to remain top-of-mind across as large an audience as possible. Reach and frequency are more important than social media metrics like engagement.

    In addition to advertising spend needs to be put into training and incentivising channel partners including carriers.

    They are entering a hyper-competitive market and it isn’t clear what their point of advantage will be. Given the lock down that Google puts on Android and commoditised version of handset manufacture, the best option would be to look for manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies  – like Dell did in the PC industry. But that’s easier said than done.

    Garnering the kind of investment required to seriously support an international phone brand is a hard sell to the finance director or potential external investors.

    Slide13
    Growth is tapering out.
    Slide14
    The average selling price is in steady decline
    Slide16
    This is partly because the emerging markets are making the majority new phone purchases.
    Slide15
    Consumers in developed markets are likely holding on to the their phones for longer due to a mix economic conditions and a lack of compelling reason to upgrade.
    Slide12
    All of the consumers that likely want and can afford a phone in developed markets have one. Sales are likely to be on a replacement cycle as they wear out. Manufacturers have done a lot to improve quality and reliability of devices.

    Even the old household insurance fraud standby of dropping a phone that the consumer was bored with down the toilet doesn’t work on the latest premium Android handsets due to water-proofing.
    Slide20

    More information

    The answer to the question you’ve all been asking | Nokia – Nokia’s official announcement
    Gartner highlights a more challenging smartphone sector for Nokia than when it “quit” in 2013 | TelecomTV
    Nokia is coming back to phones and tablets | The Verge
    So the Nokia brand returns.. with a Vengeance | Communities Dominate Brands

    Supporting data slides in full

  • The helmsman + more things

    Sailing the Seas Depends on The Helmsman

    Sailing The Seas Depends On The Helmsman – There has been a minor drama playing out amongst westerners who analyse China. A theatre group put on a performance in the symbolic heart of the Chinese Communist Party. Sailing The Seas Depends On The Helmsman – is a Cultural Revolution era song which eulogises Mao Zedong’s leadership.

    The Helmsman or Great Helmsman was one of the many labels Mao picked up as leader of China.  This series of concerts were seen as a celebration of the Cultural Revolution and elevated President Xi to a similar ‘cult of personality’ within China. Some considered it to be a subtle way to sabotage Mr Xi. Either way it took pull to allow the group to perform in the Great Hall of the People. The scale of the presentation was spectacular and it’s quite a catchy tune – as you can see in the video created by the South China Morning Post.

    Morgan special projects

    I am not the fan of car designs that I was as a child and have never been a fan of Morgans. But there is a lot to admire in Morgan Motor’s Special Project team. The video outlines the process they went through in building a bespoke car for a customer.  Ask pretty much any other car manufacturer to do this and the money would literally be astronomical.

    It is ironic in a day of 3D printing and CNC machines that they use old school techniques that my Dad would have learned as an apprentice to create a special one-off car. There is also an interesting mix of materials in the design and the marine plywood-based seats caught my eye.  The designer gave careful thought to how the car would age.

    Objective See

    Objective-See – handy ransomware blocker for OSX (macOS), ideal for these troubled times when 2/3rds of UK business have come under some form of a hack.

    Everyday objects

    A blogger who goes by the name of ‘The Electronic Mercenary’ has set up a great YouTube channel where they x-ray everyday objects or components for your enjoyment.

    Check it out.

    I don’t often have much time for Samsung, their product advertising usually lacks subtlety and creative chops – you are not charmed by their marketing. Instead you are bludgeoned into submission with a media plan that has more in common with a Katyusha rocket system than persuasion. Occasionally they do some stunning emotive corporate marketing, this is the latest example. Separated Korean families unite in heartfelt Samsung spot | Marketing Interactive