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

  • RSS dead nonsense + more

    RSS dead nonsense

    Is RSS Dead? A Look At The Numbers | MakeUseOf – interesting stats on RSS – a very-much alive format. RSS dead is nonsense, I use it everyday. It is invisible plumbing. Reports of RSS dead is due to the demise of Google Reader. I can’t recommend RSS reader Newsblur enough. More related content here

    Business

    Adidas Group Forecasts 15 Percent Annual EPS Growth Through 2020 | Team Business – interesting definition of open source

    China

    China Focus: Top political advisor highlights CPC leadership, “Four Comprehensives” | Xinhua – comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society, deepening reform, advancing the rule of law and strictly governing the Party

    Culture

    ‘We Came to Sweat’ Tells the Story of New York City’s Oldest Black-Owned Gay Club | VICE – interesting artefact of club culture

    Economics

    Chinas slowdown has suddenly become a “fiscal shock” | Quartz – interesting economic data, the property price change doesn’t surprise me, Chinas slowdown is likely to be temporary

    FMCG

    Kraft and Heinz Merger a Cost Cutting Story | Euromonitor International – cost cutting could also be from a marketing perspective

    Innovation

    Venture investor Bill Gurley predicts startup failure – Fortune – we may not be in a tech bubble, the venture capitalist said, but we’re in a risk bubble

    Luxury

    “Dressing down” is only a status symbol for the elite – Quartz – flagged up by our Becky

    Online

    Facebook Unveils Immersive 360-Degree Video for News Feeds | WIRED – interesting moves to come up with immersive (non game) content

    Philippines

    Homegrown smartphone brand beats Samsung in the Philippines | Techinasia – part of a wider story about how Samsung is getting rolled back out of high growth markets in smartphones

    Security

    Ex-NSA director: China has hacked ‘every major corporation’ in U.S. – CNN Money – strident allegations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 5Is have also done the same thing

    Software

    Messaging Apps Offer Do-It-All Services in Bid for Higher Profits – NYTimes.com – interesting article on how WeChat and LINE are blazing the trail for western OTT messaging platforms in terms of innovation and business models (paywall)

    WeChat is how content goes viral in China | Resonance China – from a marketing perspective this confirms the decline in Weibo as a platform. It also provides challenges due to the lack of visibility for brands in comparison to Weibo

    What’s missing from this 13-year-old girl’s iPhone home screen? – Quartz – interesting but not necessarily scientific. It does make me wonder why color coding doesn’t happen in app groupings UI specs

    Technology

    No, Really, the PC Is Dying and It’s Not Coming Back | WIRED – dramatic title, 5 per cent drop in PC sales numbers. It ignores the role of the personal computer as a business workhorse and as a creative tool

  • Robot nation in China factories +more

    China’s Factories Are Building a Robot Nation – Caixin – it is amazing how manual things like smartphone manufacture is. Apple moved production to China because pick and place ‘robotic’ automated machines had been used in phone manufacturer, but couldn’t handle the jewellery like manufacturing. Pick and place had been used in Japanese consumer electronics manufacturing since the early 1980s. We’ll see if the China robot nation works out in manufacturing. More related posts here

    Google and Apple may be forced to pay more tax in Russia | Gigaom – it makes sense

    Pablo by Buffer – Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds

    Satya Nadella is cleaning up Microsoft’s ‘dirty little secret’ (MSFT) | Business Insider – the challenge is how do you give enough cloud away to encourage trial and adoption. It was easier with package software or OS where you just targeted C-suite and management consultants. I don’t think is necessarily that negative a story for Microsoft

    Vince Vaughn and Co-stars Pose for Idiotic Stock Photos You Can Have for Free | Adweek – genius collaboration with iStockPhotos

    Fund that hasn’t picked a stock in 80 years beats 98pc of peers | SCMP – Voya Corporate Leaders Trust Fund

    What Is the Future of Chinese Trade? | Yale Global – interesting analysis of the Chinese economy

    Brands must target digital strategies to local culture in Japan | Luxury Daily – great insights from L2

    China manufacturing shrinks again in Feb. | WantChinaTimes – partly down to the timing of spring festival

    Chinese shoppers are angry that their luxury Japanese toilet lids are made in China | Quartz – which says a lot about ‘brand China’ for its own consumers

    AirCloset is a subscription fashion box startup with a twist | Techinasia – interesting wear-and-return model

    Panasonic Developing ‘VR Goggles’ – Nikkei Technology Online – interesting that they can be worn as glasses implying a major reduction in weight in comparison to competitors

  • Marketing singularities

    This post was prompted by a couple of conversations over the past few days that culminated in the idea of marketing singularities.

    Conversation number one

    A friend pointed out that they’ve got a new job, just received a document on what we’re doing from my global social agency ‘X’. What’s your opinion of them and where do you think client and agency responsibilities should lie? Question number two didn’t really get answered as ‘X’ is a social agency? was a much more interesting talking point. Would they be any good, when did they become a social agency? What just happened? The upshot of it is that social is a thing that everyone is now an expert in.

    surveillance sticker art

    Conversation number two

    I was in conversation with a potential technology vendor for a specific project and I outlined the point solution that I liked about their product, which was something that made them a particularly good fit for said project. They then explained to me why they were so much more than the point solution I required and were in fact a complete CRM-type solution.

    Other peers (let’s not call them competitors, as they have a slightly different world view and do slightly different things) have been acquired by CRM or software vendors. Those that were too big to buy have done deals to integrate their offering as a kind VAR-like partnership.

    Structure

    What these two conversations are indicative of are a pair of marketing singularities.

    Think of marketing as a broadly horizontal industry sector rather than the vertically integrated leviathans that are often brought to mind by the words Martin + Sorrell or the letters W, P +P respectively.

    I would consider the marketing groups to be more analogous to conglomerates than integrated marketing creatures. Competing clients and bespoke client needs create the need for different marketing brands and single purpose agencies but for many parts of the business they tend to operate independently from a day-to-day operation. Collaboration and genuinely integrated working are journeys to be yet taken rather than destinations that they will be soon arriving at.

    WPP are an interesting organisation in that as a conglomerate they have tried to build a vertical stack of agencies and technology vendors. They own a variety of technology companies particularly involved in the purchasing of online advertising (programmatic advertising or real-time bidding as it has been called in the past).

    There has been concerns amongst amongst the ad worlds largest clients that groups may use their privileged position as vendor and agency to play against their clients. Major brands seem to have developed a distrust of both agency trading desks and the lack of transparency into market data. Instead of giving agencies an unfair advantage and allowing them to play both sides of the trade, they are bring the trading desk in-house.

    So there is both client pressure and expertise factors that come into play which suggest the horizontal model is likely to be dominant for some time to come – now matter how many spreadsheets using a Monte Carlo method are developed by investment banks predicting a sure-fire success.

    However within this  horizontal model there some consolidation happening. On the one hand tools are rushing towards total customer information awareness. The key problem is one of structure, tools are used to selling into one kind of person (someone like me), not re-engineering a business from the ground up. Secondly relationships with agencies are not going to provide the kind of trust and access that would be required to fulfil the full potential of this vision.

    You could imagine the conversation in the board room

    Hi Mr CEO, Sterling Cooper Draper Price, the marketing agency the last CMO appointed want to re-engineer our business with their social software.

    Wait a minute Mr CTO, when did we have Sterling Cooper on board? What happened to McMann and Tate?

    They were fired two years ago by the last CMO, who left six months ago

    Our current CMO handed in her resignation yesterday, to start her own yoga retreat franchise. No doubt the new one will want their own agency…

    Ok, so a bit of poetic license is used in this thought experiment, but the point is suppliers like marketing agencies tend to be changed more frequently than the vendors of key business systems. Something has to change radically for this work.

    Whilst on the agency side of things everyone has tried to ‘own’ the social space as there is client fatigue over what that now means. And while social is now something everyone does at a marketing agency level, there are less individuals who are willing to admit that they have a specialism in it; as it seems to have about as much long term career growth in it as being a CB radio operator. More marketing related content here.

  • Ogilvy social trends + other things

    Ogilvy social trends

    Marshall and James delivered their Ogilvy social trends presentation on a webinar. Included in the Ogilvy social trends presentation is

    • Disposable / transient content
    • Brand banter
    • Sub-dividing communities using greater ad targeting
    • Twitter zero as the organic reach on the platform plunges towards zero
    • Platforms battle for video dominance
    • Rise in privacy facilitating services
    • Digital and identity are blurring the lines between aspiration and self actualisation

    Here is this year’s Ogilvy social trends presentation:

    Vintage logo design

    Flickr user Eric Carl has put together an amazing album of vintage logo design from the 1970s and they are truly splendid in monochrome. They are like set of post modern mons – the iconic symbols that Japanese clans used to represent themselves. They also feel timeless rather than trend driven.

    Great to finally see something we’ve been working on for a good while break cover. I have been working on a global website redesign and digital strategy for the Family Brands unit at Unilever. This is their worldwide margarine (and related cooking ingredients including cream analogues) product portfolio of products. A second project that I have been involved in is a set of adverts that will be rolling out globally. This is debuting in Mexico. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy it as the new, new thing beckons.

    In the words of Bill Hicks business-to-business marketers run the risk of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

    More information
    The Cluetrain Manifesto
    New Clues
    #NewClues and #VRM – Watching The Watchers