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.

  • Sina Weibo microblogging service

    China has its own unique ecosystem of web properties and Sina Weibo is the latest of them. It has a passionate blogging culture where some blogs by celebrities, experts and populist pundits can attract an audience of millions. Sina.com is a portal and blogging platform. They also have the most popular micro-blogging service. I thought I would have a poke around it and try to work out how it was to use despite my complete lack of ability to speak or read Chinese.  Here is my account details, feel free to friend me.

    So what’s Sina Weibo like?

    Whilst Sina Weibo is similar to Twitter it is a much more fully-formed service. Signing up was pretty straight forward and Weibo tried to recommend 20 existing members that I should follow, my favorite being the feed for a branch of the Chinese police. They have a name which Google translates into English as ‘Starsky Guardian‘ – that alone is a cool enough reason to follow them.

    I quickly managed to get the service to accept the RSS feed from this blog and convert it into alerts on the Weibo service. (In order to give a potential audience something to read, I have started carrying bilingual titles to my posts in pidgin Chinese courtesy of Google Translate. I try and boil the title down into a simple concept of two or three words and then hit the translate button). Something that I would have done on Twitter through a third-party service like ping.fm, dlvr.it or twitterfeed.

    Weibo also has a built-in URI shortener, but it has no analytics for seeing how many people click on a link. So marketing campaigns on Weibo could be harder to measure than on Twitter. As far as I can tell Weibo gives you a lot less opportunity to alter the look-and-feel of your account to reflect your personal brand than the likes of Twitter.

    Another absence that I noticed about Weibo was the lack of spam invites or follows from people wanting to sell me Viagra or fake watches. I suspect that Sina.com must carefully tend its community, partly to ensure government compliance, but a secondary benefit is fostering a better community online.

    In conclusion I think that  Sina Weibo provides consumers with a superior experience to Twitter, but as a marketer Twitter offers more opportunity for brand communicators. More online related content here.

  • NFC + more news

    NFC

    Digital Evangelist: What would I rather pick up my phone or my keys as I leave my house? – Ian on NFC. NFC or near field communications. Like most technologies NFC has been a long time coming. It sprang out of work that was done around RFID (radio frequency identification), where a passive device is powered and communicates with a powered transmitter. Its the tag that’s in library books or items to prevent shoplifting.

    Standards for what we now know as NFC were set in a technical outline by Philips and Sony back in 2002. Two years later they established the NFC forum. A year later and Sony launches an NFC shell add-on for its Nokia 5140 ruggedised mobile phone. Nokia, France Telecom and Samsung experiment using NFC to pay for public transport and mobile payments. China Unicom rolls out NFC in public transport across Beijing and Chongqing. This year Nokia launches the first NFC compatible smartphone and Nice experiments with being a contactless city with bankcards and mobile phones.

    China

    FT.com / China – China launches own online mapping service – its a bit poor, but this is a first iteration. China has concerns about state secrets leaking out

    Batman Wins Chinese Lottery – WSJ – absolute genius, love it

    Consumer behaviour

    For Millennials, Brands May Be as Important as Religion, Ethnicity | Fast Company – wasn’t this the case for generation X and even boomers as well? Brett Easton Ellis built a writing career on documenting the brands of disaffected youth. Yuppies were status brand obsessives. William Gibson and Douglas Coupland fetishise brands or deliberately create a brand void in their works. The move from glasses to bottled beer in European bars and clubs was about the bottle label being a brand totem for the user

    Innovation

    Three Innovation Trends in Asia – Harvard Business Review – interesting article. What the middle-market segment looks like in different Asian countries is particularly pertinent especially as it gets hollowed out of the developed world

    Japan

    HISTORY of HEIBON PUNCH 平凡パンチの歴史 – fascinating cover designs. Heibon Punch was a homegrown Japanese men’s magazine a la GQ that finished in the mid 1980s. Love the 1960s jazz record series they put out with Quincy Jones

    U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patenting – NYTimes.com

    Luxury

    New luxury trends emerge in China: News from Warc.com – maturing market?

    Great new fashion innovations for 2012 | FT.com – interesting ideas that seem to owe a lot to streetwear brands. Experiments in materials by Thakoon, DVF and Proenza Schouler are a chip off the old block from the work that Massimo Osti pioneered at CP Company, Stone Island the collborations with Sugergra and Levi’s. The multi-garment garment is straight from Acronym’s play book

    Luxury Gets More Convenient – WSJ – counter-intuitive. Koreans buying Gucci in the 7-Eleven

    Online

    Google Stop Indexing Blogger (Blogspot) Posts – need to get this sorted sharpish, at least they can’t be accused of being biased!

    Retailing

    Chinese Online Shoppers Have High Standards – China Real Time Report – WSJ

    Software

    Microsoft Launches Office 365, Bringing Millions Into the Cloud | Fast Company – it looks like Ray Ozzie’s work was done at Microsoft

    Technology

    Op-Ed: Optical Media Not Dead Yet – dead in technology circles a relative thing. Sony only stopped selling cassette Walkmans in Japan on Friday

    Web of no web

    Microsoft Buying Canesta to Bolster Gesture Technology – NYTimes.com – minority report here we come

    Wireless

    China Mobile: Not in the Comm Biz – WSJ – in the information services business apparently. Some good telecoms numbers here

    Project to Test Home & Electric Vehicle Network Standards for CO2 Reduction | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting project extending smart home thinking to a smart life

  • Dopplr death & more news

    Dopplr

    The slow death of Dopplr | guardian.co.uk – on its own the death of Dopplr is not really news, the interesting timing  of this article by The Guardian put out this evisceration of Nokia’s web service ambitions. I’m not saying that Jemima Kiss got it wrong, but the timing was interesting: published last Friday – right on the eve of Nokia World. Dopplr is similar to other startups that have gotten lost after having been acquired. Dopplr allowed users to create itineraries of their travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts’ travel plans in order to arrange meetings at any point on their journey. It was known for the quality of its user experience design in comparison to other apps.

    China

    String of Holidays in China Bring Time Off, With Complications – NYTimes.com – complex yes, but I can’t help feeling for the bureaucrats who came up with this who thought that they were doing the best they could for the people and now must be as popular as tax collectors

    Economics

    Inflation in China Is Rising at a Fast Pace – NYTimes.com – the downside of continual double digit growth

    Environment

    MIT: We’ve Got Plenty of Uranium | Fast Company – nuclear power not the washout environment naysayers think

    FMCG

    Deal Profile: Unilever to Buy Alberto-Culver for $3.7 Billion – WSJ – interesting move that strengthens Unilever by taking out a competitor. It does make me wonder about all the brands that Unilever sold a few years ago though

    Japan

    Japan Surrenders – The Atlantic – interesting though very American focused article on changes in Japanese society over the past three decades

    Marketing

    Some of Sharecare.com’s Health Advice Will Be From Advertisers – NYTimes.com – this was where I thought Hunch and Yahoo! Answers could have done more. Ideal opportunity for branded content as trusted brands are experts in some areas and expertise could help imbue trust in a new brand

    Media

    Jason Calacanis: Revenge is a new editorial project to rival TechCrunch | guardian.co.uk – interesting that he is going down an email newsletter route. It potentially cuts social sharing a la Twitter and Facebook as well as social bookmarking off at the knees

    The real cost of free | guardian.co.uk – Cory Doctorow in praise of free and dealing with ill-informed critics

    Online

    Yahoo: Is Carol Bartz in the process of being replaced? – Quora – insightful answer. Possibly yes as part of a process to take Yahoo! private. The critique of Bartz is telling:

    • She has not articulated a coherent product or vision for the company
    • She wasted over $120M on an ad campaign (no material impact on any user engagement metric)
    • She promoted executives like Hillary Schneider after failing miserably with APT (Yahoo ad exchange system).
    • Yahoo left between $500M to $1B of value on the table as part of the search agreement with Microsoft (Carol made Hillary the POC for the Yahoo deal team – lets just say that Microsoft had their way with the Yahoo deal team)
    • She used odd (my gentle way of saying they didn’t work) PR tactics to recast Yahoo in the tech and business community

    Alibaba and Yahoo quagmire: a battle of the wills | FT.com – the FT is very slow to this story. I suspect that this isn’t only about corporate wills, but also about Ma pleasing the Chinese government as well and if he manages to get even richer by doing so: win-win

    Combing Your Friends’ Tastes, Not the Whole Web’s – NYTimes.com – social search market analysis

    Software

    N900 plug-in for OSX iSync – makes Nokia N900 into a a viable option

    Technology

    China Catching India As Asia’s Service Provider? – WSJ – China’s technology service industry catching up with India

    Web of no web

    DOCOMO and University of Tokyo to Conduct Joint Research for Urban Planning Based on Mobile Spatial Statistics | Press Center | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting work here, kind of reminds me of The Dark Knight were Batman maps out the building in Hong Kong using mobile phone signals and captures mafia money man Lau

    Wireless

    Nokia’s problem – QuirksBlog – interesting thoughts on Nokia from a software developer

  • Made in China brand thoughts

    Made in China tends to mean cheap, and possibly nasty. But that doesn’t mean that it will always be the case. Companies like Apple go Made in China because there are manufacturing capabilities in Taiwanese owned factories that aren’t anywhere else.

    Thinking about the future of Made In China; it makes sense to go back into industrial history.

    Its hard to think now that ‘Made in Germany‘ did not stand for excellence, especially when we think about brands like Zeiss, Leica, Miele, Siemens and Daimler-Benz. But at the beginning of the 20th century ‘Made in Germany‘ stood for cheap and tasteless products.

    China is in a similar situation, despite being the workshop of the world for all intends and purposes and coming out with some of the world’s most iconic and innovative devices ‘Made in China‘ is still perceived as poor-quality and cheap. All of Apple’s products are made in China but proclaim ‘Designed by Apple in California‘. So maybe China could learn something from early-20th century Germany?

    Germany got out of its low quality reputation over a few decades (about the length of the Chinese economic miracle) by forming an organisation with a mix of members drawn from artists, designers and big industry called Deutscher Werkbund.  The Deutscher Werkbund was originally a combination of a lobby group, standards body and catalyst for good design across all disciplines. It encompassed product design, factories, typography and industrial standards. Their members did landmark work for industrial titans like AEG, Bosch and Volkswagen.

    Quality was at the centre of everything that they did. Products became sophisticated in their design. They put a lot of thought into how an identity was instilled through design into the most boring of objects.

    An unintended side-effect of the  effort of the Deutsche Werkbund was that Germany had a sound industrial infrastructure that the national socialist government took advantage of. The German government closed down the Werkbund in 1938. But it also laid the foundation of the German post-war miracle, the government reinstated the Werkbund in 1949.

    China has a government that can make things happen, the companies, the engineering talent, legions of artists and many great designers – it is just a matter of putting these groups together and giving them the permission to do something really great. More on design here.

  • Kin logo

    Whilst I won’t be dashing out and getting myself one of the Microsoft | Sharp Kin phones. I did like the Kin logo. The logo seems to be completely unrelated to the devices. It’s an atemporal brand design it would be easy to produce on screen, as an app icon or in print and also looks as if it draws heavily on Asian influence. 

    You wouldn’t need to be able to read the characters to at least recognise the brand. With that in mind it would work in markets around the world. 

    All of that is makes for a really challenging design brief and the work done on the Kin logo is very impressive. 

    I’d go as far as to say that the Kin brand and products are unworthy of the Kin logo design 

    Microsoft Kin logo

    There is a noticeable stylistic similarity to the S|Double Studio logo from Shawn Stussy’s new clothing label.

    s|double

    And the S|Double logo reminds me of Asian seal designs used to sign documents and mark the ownership of artworks. 

    seal

    This is roughly what my given name would look like on a seal or chop in Chinese characters. 

    There is also a resemblance to Chinese design motifs in Chinese new year and wedding decorations. The one that immediately comes to mind for me is the double happiness character set that is incorporated into designs. 

    Such motifs are used in a repeated pattern across fabric weave, interior design prints and carvings. There is a certain irony in that the Kin logo: one of the most modern of graphic design assignments going back designs and principles that are millennia old. 

    I am curious to know if the Kin logo harking back to those designs was intentional, based on design research, or if it was happenstance. Both are probable likelihoods for this project.