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

  • Advertising isn’t the problem, telecoms are

    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad blockers, at least not the sole problem. A few days ago I explained why I thought that tracking was the problem that ad blockers are designed to deal with. From a consumer point-of-view the time it takes to load a page is unacceptable for a significant minority of internet users.

    This comes at a time when mobile telecommunications services have become commoditised. For £29/month I get unlimited data, unlimited SMS texts, unlimited voice, free roaming across a number of countries around the world and 8GB of data when my phone is used as a modem for a laptop.

    So how could a mobile carrier upsell me? The answer lies in going back to the late 1990s. In the UK, there used to be a mobile carrier called one2one. The service provider had a poor network, but needed to engage with business users and tech forward consumers. They did this with series of tariffs under the Precept brand. These tariffs had a couple of differentiated services in common:

    • A shorter gap between replacement handsets
    • A priority and normal number, so that you could prioritise callers
    • Improved voice quality using a better Codec called Enhanced Full Rate or EFR

    Move forward the best part of two decades – handsets are now affordable to be purchased upfront for tech forward consumers, though Apple and Samsung looking to duplicate the car leasing model in the US. They are likely to roll it out internationally at some point.

    The equivalent of priority numbers is multiple identities or accounts, differentiation that steps out of the mobile provider remit and into services provided via applications, for instance multiple email addresses.

    Voice calls are becoming increasingly disinter-mediated through OTT messaging services.  But ad-blocking on the network level offer a clear analog to the deployment of EFR, providing faster page load times for web content.

    There are also benefits in terms of network utilisation and bandwidth capacity. This is especially important in countries like the UK where it is nigh on impossible to get planning permission for mobile masts due to consumer protests. But the most attractive part of ad blocking at the network is the product differentiation it affords mobile providers.

    More information

    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers | renaissance chambara
    UK Gov’t Launches Anti-Adblocking Initiative, Compares It To Piracy | Slashdot
    Three Group to tackle excessive and irrelevant mobile ads | Three UK media centre
    One 2 One offers free daytime calls and souped-up GSM | V3
    The UK’s £150m Mobile Infrastructure Project “not as successful as envisaged” | TelecomTV

  • MWC 2016 as a case study on talkability, brand mentions and brand performance

    Mobile World Congress (or in industry parlance MWC 2016) is where the telecoms industry goes to set out its stand. It has gradually changed from being a conference where the big issues of the day are hashed out, to more of a trade show a la CES or CeBIT.

    From a brand point of view, it was of interest to me for two reasons:

    • It offers largely culture neutral brand discussions, many of which occur online
    • I have an interest, having worked on a few mobile brands during my agency career (Palm, Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Samsung, Qualcomm, Telenor Myanmar and Huawei)

    I pulled this slide ware together for a talk I am giving at an internal event at an agency.

    The first data that I have put together is looking at the amount of mentions that occurred regardless of the channel. It is a relatively easy data point to pull out of monitoring systems very quickly.

    Obviously the value of mentions will depend on how many people view them, what is the context that the mention appears in. What was the content around it? Who said it, are they expert or trustworthy? So looking purely at the number of mentions would be crude, offering little value apart from nice PowerPoint slides.

    Breaking the mentions down by platform gives an idea of relative marketing communications competencies of brands. So looking at Huawei and Xiaomi shows contrasting approach to building talkability and conversations. Huawei focuses on traditional media channels where as Xiaomi focuses on social.

    By comparison LG and Samsung seem to have a more holistic approach.

    I then moved on beyond the mention data to try and look at relative authority of whoever mentioned the brand and looking at the relative distribution by brand and channel.

    I had done some initial analysis on the event in general here. These numbers showed how well brands had built high authority communities and the discussions around them.

    What was quite surprising was the polarised authority of mainstream media sources. Newswire syndication had destroyed authority of many online traditional media channels. A second cross brand observation was the relatively low authority of the blogosphere.

    These slides only start to delve into understanding talkability and are time consuming to create in comparison to looking at raw mention numbers, but offer superior strategic insight for both earned and paid media approaches for future launches.

    I did some broad profiling of online conversations around MWC here.

  • What does ZBB mean for agencies?

    After talking with a friend I pulled together a brief presentation for them which explained what Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) practices at a client were likely to mean for an agency.

    The key takeout for me are is one of attitude. ZBB isn’t about cost cutting but about spending the money in the most effective way,  where it matters the most. ZBB has benefits that can applied outside marketing on complex projects. 

    And there in lies the problem with the way ZBB has been adapted by some consumer brands. Looking from the outside in at 3G Capital and its work at Kraft and Heinz brands, it seems that ZBB is being used for short term cost cutting, rather than resource allocation. 

    Whilst this might be justified in terms of Jack Welsh-style shareholder value. The reality is short term pay-offs robbing long term potential. This is what happens when you let finance focused MBA graduates a la Scrooge McDuck attempt to do a brand marketers job. What looks good on their spreadsheet looks retarded when viewed through the lens of marketing science. 

    For agencies, ZBB means that the client is making an active effort to keep marketing thinking fresh. It means a pragmatic approach to innovation based on benefit rather than running around screaming innovation. 

    It also means knowing when you’re not the right agency for the job and having partners that you can work with. Which is why we’ve seen ad agencies like Mullen Lowe bulk up on digital and earned media chops. Finally if you see that your client is using ZBB just to cut, cut, cut. Plan for another client because at least one of two things are happening:

    • You aren’t coming up with ideas that meet the needs of the business, so ZBB dictates that investment will be moved away from your programmes
    • The client has a short-termist mindset in using ZBB. You might not be in danger of losing your business, but they might be in danger of losing theirs to the competition 

  • Drones + more things

    Amazon bookstores: It’s the drones, stupid – I, Cringely – the big problem I see is the last 100 yards. Drones might be fine in theory to get to a property but what about getting to the home owner or responsible custodian of the parcel. I think these are a point, rather than universal solution, a bit like the Waitrose deliveries scooting  around Milton Keynes.

    Jan Koum – one billion users. couldn’t be more proud of our small… – interesting things about the Whatsapp numbers is the low average number of messages sent per day, per user less than 1.5 messages per day.  More on WhatsApp here.

    Grumpy Old Man Hates Massaging Sexy Models – YouTube – it’s recruitment ads mixed with old school Lynx adverts

    Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto and associated materials about Yahoo! circa 2006 – great materials (PDF)

    Deal Shows Investors Are Willing to Make a Blind Bet on Uber – The New York Times – how can they do due diligence?

    Why the death of the Firefox phone matters – CNET – less likely to see web-based functionality, also Android | iOS oligarchy

    This Robot Changes How It Looks at You to Match Your Personality – IEEE Spectrum – fighting uncanny valley

    Google confirms Hangouts will now use peer-to-peer connections to improve call quality and speed | VentureBeat – Skype had only been doing this since the early noughties…

    A Day in the Life of a Media Consumer – Yahoo Advertising – really nice consumer insights here

    Help Make “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” a Reality « bunnie’s blog – I love the way this is so gloriously analogue

    The Apple Watch got me hooked on mechanical watches – Marco.org – which goes to show that marketing them as a watch doesn’t make sense

    The Nashville insurgency | Macleans – amazing story of how country music has been swallowed up by a Stock Aitken and Waterman hit factory-type formula

    The Beginning Of The End For GoPros At Music Festivals – Magnetic Magazine – Periscope and music festivals don’t mix

    This tiny Japanese bookstore only stocks one title at a time – Quartz – interesting anecdote to the ‘tyranny of choice’, I wonder if the customers actually read the book?

  • Topless model + more things

    Twist ending of moving company’s sexy topless model ad has a silver lining 【Video】 | RocketNews24 – one of the better 15 second spots I’ve seen involving a sexy topless model. This is one of the few times that you will see the words sexy topless model in one of my posts.

    IBM, Ustream-BM, we can’t believe Ustream is now owned by IBM • The Register – this feels a bit Yahoo!-esque as a deal. U-stream is a solid video streaming platform and I am not convinced IBM is a good custodian

    25% of US companies in China are planning to leave, says AmCham survey – this is interesting as the Chinese government is trying to jump start domestic consumption. The argument China would make is that these people will lose out. However, the wider tonality of the government towards foreigners and western culture in general. There is a stronger tone of Han nationalism. More China related posts here.

    Weibo to copy Twitter, abolish 140-character limitw – Tech in Asia – paid up members are a relatively small group of influencers, celebrities and brands. Chinese people have been doing long Weibo posts for years as graphic files. It was a central part of the content strategy that we were doing for CIVB when I led a digital team in Hong Kong.

    Why Google Quit China—and Why It’s Heading Back | The Atlantic – interesting that Western European government intervention is cited as a justification in this.

    Music Geeks Are Retrofitting Old iPods to Keep the Perfect MP3 Player Alive | Motherboard – its the iPod I wished Apple made. I have got a couple of them from eBay.  It would be great if we could also have an LTE compatiable version of the Nokia 6310i to use as a modem for my laptop and as as an app free weekend phone.