Ged Carroll

Category: china | 中國 | 중국 | 中華

Ni hao – this category features any blog posts that relate to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party, Chinese citizens, consumer behaviour, business, and Chinese business abroad.

It is likely the post will also in other categories too.  For example a post about Tong Ren Tang might end up in the business section as well. Inevitably everything is inherently political in nature. At the moment, I don’t take suggestions for subject areas or comments on content for this category, it just isn’t worth the hassle.

Why have posts on China? I have been involved in projects there and had Chinese clients. China has some interesting things happening in art, advertising, architecture, design and manufacturing. I have managed to experience some great and not so great aspects of the country and its businesses.

Opinions have been managed by the omnipresent party and this has affected consumer behaviour. Lotte was boycotted and harassed out of the country. Toyota and Honda cars occasionally go through damage by consumer action during particularly high tensions with Japan.

I put stuff here to allow readers to make up their own  minds about the PRC. The size of the place makes things complicated and the only constants are change, death, taxes and the party. Things get even more complicated on the global stage.

The unique nature of the Chinese internet and sheltered business sectors means that interesting Galapagos syndrome type things happen.

I have separate sections for Taiwan and Hong Kong, for posts that are specific to them.

  • Scratching + more things

    History of scratching

    A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators

    Consumer behaviour

    Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?

    Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music

    Marketing

    Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.

    FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.

    Media

    Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers

    TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea

    Retailing

    Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents

    Security

    From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?

    Software

    Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would  fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.

  • Green labels + more news

    Green labels

    There are more than 450 meanings behind “green” labels – Eco-conscious shoppers have probably noticed hordes of new “green-approved,” “100% natural” eco-friendly goods—claiming to be “certified” by some organization or other—popping up on store shelves. Green labels have many problems. One of them is that environmentalists can’t agree on what’s green so green labels are challenged. Let’s take take hybrids versus old cars on carbon footprint – since most carbon release is in manufacture, yet the hybrid cars would sell on green labels. Or electric cars overall, we don’t understand the energy requirement to recycle them yet they will get green labels. Ands thats before you look at how electricity is generated where they are being sold. Chinese electric cars may get green labels, but the majority of China’s electricity generation comes from coal-fired power stations.

    Business

    I, Cringely Amazon’s cloud monopoly – I, Cringely – Bob Cringely provides some interesting insights into the market position of Amazon regarding cloud services. It also highlights the challenges that Alibaba, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP in addressing Amazon’s cloud monopoly

    Yahoo, NHL Ban Employees from Paid Fantasy-Sports Sites | WSJ – ethics (paywall)

    Consumer behaviour

    68% of Chinese men are smokers—and millions will die because of it | Quartz – most of the cigarette brands are owned by state owned firms and China has a surplus of males to females. More China related posts here.

    Innovation

    Weekend edition—The lure of Mars, citizen Schmidt, lobster mysteries  – Hot on the heels of the release of the action movie The Martian—and the discovery that the red planet still has liquid water—NASA has unveiled a bold three-stage plan for getting humans to Mars – interesting lessons in messaging and storytelling from this

    Marketing

    adam&eveDDB, Temptations Dress Up Cats for the Holidays – Ad Week – blatant link bait

    Has Essena O’Neill signalled the end of influencer marketing? | Econsultancy – probably not, influencer marketing is too much ‘on trend’ but it does beg the question are the fees worth it?

    Online

    WeChat reading rates are dropping. How much, and why? – In mid-2015, the number of views of WeChat subscription accounts started to decline. Some popular accounts saw a decline of more than 50% in readership. More on WeChat here.

    product insights from wechat — Medium – interesting WeChat insights

    Technology

    Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain? – NYTimes.com – so your cryogenics is probably wasted

    Web of no web

    Watch How to Eat a Virtual Cookie | MUNCHIES – how is a virtual cookie possible? By altering the taste of food with different visual cues using virtual reality techniques – literally creating a virtual cookie.

    Wireless

    iPhone Vs Samsung: Apple is still the marketshare leader | BGR – Apple still commands more than 90% of all the profits in the smartphone market

  • The Boardroom + more stuff

    What The Boardroom Thinks About Data Breach Liability | Dark Reading – cybersecurity risk vs cost of insurance premiums is the sums that the boardroom will be making. Expect the insurers to force innovation and better practices on large corporates rather then doing it off their own bat, a case in point being Sony Entertainment breach and TalkTalk. There was surprisingly little impact on the boardroom given the seriousness of the cases

    Tablet users indifferent to upgrades | TechEye – because they work well on their current consumption media use cases

    Huawei who? We probe the sleeping storage dragon’s brains • The Register – nice summary of where Huawei is from in terms of history and culture

    Vulnerable Coffee Machine Demonstrates Brewing Security Challenges Of IoT | Dark Reading – not terribly surprising that the internet of things has such poor security. There is no incentives for vendors to harden the tech at all. The problem is that in categories like TVs, you no longer an purchase a ‘dumb’ option. More on IoT here

    Microsoft says that collecting user data is ‘not an issue of personal privacy’ (MSFT) | Business Insider – oh really???

    Facebook Prods Users to Share a Bit More – WSJ – interesting data point

    Neuropolitics, Where Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind – to save articles or get newsletters, alerts or recommendations

    Young shopper: south korean’s young shopper – What they expect from retailers | GfK – great insights on Korean consumers

    Microsoft Surface Book teardown reveals almost impossible-to-repair design | ExtremeTech – 1/10, just waiting for Greenpeace to realise that there is campaign mileage in low teardown scores

    Samsung Sells More Phones — but for Less Money – WSJ – the brutal commoditised business of Android handsets (paywall)

    Internet firms to be banned from offering unbreakable encryption under new laws – Telegraph – you have no right to privacy but really bad people do

    ‘Candy Crush’ owner King sold to Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn – FT.com – (Paywall)

  • Magic Leap + more things

    Magic Leap has shared an interesting concept video. Magic Leap that has technology which provides a more immersive experience, layered on top of the real world. It would be impressive if Magic Leap manages to pull it off. A demo are notorious for being the technology equivalent of snake oil salesmen who sell but can’t deliver. There’s even a name for it: vapour ware. I have no idea yet if Magic Leap is vapour ware. But the engineering challenges in terms of optics, software, power management and hardware are immense. More on web-of-no-web type experiences here.

    Once they have nailed the device, there is a requirement for content development. Lots of it. This also has implications for story telling.

    The Rise and Fall of China’s economy is a provocative title. The title was designed to be really good link bait rather than accurately reflecting the content of the video. The video actually does give a good background on how the Chinese economy has developed on a macro-level in a way that the interested non-economist would understand.

    I like the way Nestle has brought on board a gingerbread man character to advertise Coffee Mate in the US. There has been a move away from mascot-type figures in marketing in general. This is a really nice counterpoint to that trend.

    Nikon seem to be reaching out to millennials with this profile of a skateboard photographer, it is likely to appeal to a contingent of generation X too.

    It targets a very different type of photographer who would wouldn’t be impressed by the traditional photography ‘personalities’ from Rankin to Dave Lee Travis (Leica paid him good money back in the day, apparently he was interested in bird-watching).

    This is a world away from the first skating video shot by Stacy Paralta back in the mid 1980s, with grainy low-fi VHS cameras.

    Really nice mobile experience: Sync! Illumination lets you watch Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade from home on multiple phones

  • WeChat Life Report

    Chinese consumers literally live a WeChat life as shown by this great  collection of consumer behaviour data on WeChat. Over the past year WeChat has expanded the services that it provides to include Skype like conference calls, which changes and expands the behaviour in this report. (Presentation on Slideshare)

     

    Key takeouts

    • The ubiquity of WeChat can’t be over stated with over 93% usage in tier one cities. It will grow over time in lower tier cities for a couple of reasons. There will be a network effect that will reach out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers and countryside. Secondly, WeChat services will start to permeate out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers. You will then have a virtual cycle due to network effects and ever-increasing ubiquity
    • Call and message data shows how it binds the diaspora back to friends and loved ones in China. The Chinese talk about ‘near and far networks’. But WeChat closes the gap, meals can be shared with photos and videos. Voice messages popular with older users also helps with asynchronous communications over difficult time zones
    • Chinese people tend to exercise during the week, rather than at the weekend according to WeChat fitness data. The idea being for rest is an insight and an opportunity for fitness and sports apparel companies
    • Male shoppers spending 30% more than female shoppers  was an interesting statistic emblematic of WeChat life. Generally men are not as enthusiastic a shopper as women are. They have to save for a home, a car and marriage. My take was that women offer WeChat a growth opportunity in payments; if it can address the underlying cause of this disparity
    • The average social circle on WeChat at 128 is very close to the Dunbar number

    More on WeChat here.