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.

  • Bullet time + more things

    Bullet Time – Logic Magazine – Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. Started in Japan, but popularised massively in China. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan — washes over whatever happens next. The bullet time interface reminded me of the realtime information one would see in things like trading desks. Its an emotional barometer amongst your people for real time content.

    Mark Ritson: Binet and Field aren’t perfect but it doesn’t make them wrong | Marketing Week – well deserved defence of Les Binet and Peter Field by Mark Ritson. Models are never perfect

    Why Strangers Are AirDropping You Memes and Photos – The Atlantic – everything old is new again as Bluetooth sharing ‘Bluetoothing’ gets a refresh. Taylor Herring used this to share a job advert at the recent PR Week Awards

    Does the UK Benefit From Chinese Investment? – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – short answer no – it’s actually harmed by it as investment is power projection and compromises the UK’s strategic capability

    Mark Read: CMOs have become too much like chief communications officers | PR Week – A lot of CMOs have become too much chief communications officers, not chief marketing officers,” Read said. “Our job is to help to put the ‘market’ back into the word ‘marketing’. “Communications has an important role, but it needs to be “the right element” within the wider marketing mix, according to Read: “Marketing means: what markets are we in? What products do we offer? What prices do we do? How do we understand and anticipate consumers?”

    Despite Fears, Aviation’s Future Will Be More Automated | Time – so why the move towards more automation in cars such a good idea based on what we know about airliners from this article?

    The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs – The Atlantic – context specific

    WalktheChat | WeChat Live Streaming Case Study: 48% Sales Conversion Rate! – really interesting read. China’s mix of live-streaming and e-tailing is shopping TV for the 21st century

  • John Shaft & things that made last week

    Samuel L Jackson has a second go at playing re-conned blaxploitation private investigator John Shaft. This time it seems to be a bit more self conscious and ironic in tonality. Think Jackson’s first outing as John Shaft mixed with Snakes on a Plane

    Gillette Spain comes up with an advert that looks at masculinity without offending their customer base with heavy handed patronising messaging or ‘brandsplaining’ as I like to think of it.

    https://youtu.be/A5PHG9AHdhk

    A couple of weeks ago I showed the controversal advert featuring William Chan to promote Chanel’s J12 watch. There are parodies across the web of Chan’s Chinglish and general weirdness of the ad. This is my favourite one.

    Singapore newspaper TODAYonline | In Hong Kong, foreign maids are racing to reclaim their voices – foreign domestic helpers live outside society and at worst they are horribly mistreated, suffer from loneliness or are victimised with scams and MLM schemes. It’s great to see a positive story about this community managing to do fantastic achievements on their own terms.

    What we’d know as Eid in the UK, is known in Malaysia and Singapore as Hari Raya. You get seasonal tentpole ad campaigns. Here are some of the ones that I liked the most.

    Happy Hari Raya!

  • Qualcomm licensing + more

    Judge Koh: Qualcomms Licensing Practices Destroyed Competition, Harmed Consumers – Disruptive Competition Project – as best as I can understand this, the analogy of Intel and AMD comes to mind in terms of the kind of case Judge Koh has described her thoughts. But the case is different which is what makes this a bit odd. Especially odd given that there is so much more to criticise on Qualcomms licensing practices. In particular the coercive cross licensing conditions that are part of Qualcomms licensing practices. More on Qualcomm here.

    Blockchain officially confirmed as slower and more expensive | FT Alphaville – Oracle et al should be showing this to clients

    Field Notes: Highlights from Huawei – Andreessen Horowitz – My family uses Apple’s phones; Apple’s ecology is very good. When family members travel abroad, I would gift them an Apple computer. One can’t narrow-mindedly believe that if you love Huawei then you must only use Huawei mobile phones. – Chairman Ren says that when he and his family are looking for premium smartphones they use an Apple

    TV makers to reduce display panel stocks, says IHS Markit | EE Times – expectation of economic contraction

    China’s robot censors crank up as Tiananmen anniversary nears – Reuters – there’s a definite tension between western media fake news and Chinese censorship coverage. Not that there’s moral equivalence, but a lack of awareness about the thread connecting the subject areas

    Dunkin Donuts Refuses to Get Woke: ‘We Are Not Starbucks’ – Sometimes the brand purpose is what it says on the tin

    Uber introduces quiet mode for premium customers | Canvas8 – you need an app to mediate a simple request FFS

    Global Competition and Brexit | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core – highlights the importance of globalisation in driving populism in post-industrial economies. This is probably why Trump and American politicians are in the trade cold war for the long haul and likely to see similar in the EU – its only a matter of time

    Nigel Farage seeks to establish a viable far right UK party — Quartz – If you don’t read anything else about Brexit and think that the current populism will peak and subside with Brexit ponder “Anyone who is not the governing party is going to benefit from the governing party inflicting food shortages. Medicine shortages will be very immediate. All of which he will be able to blame on Brexit not being done properly, and at least some people will be receptive to that message.”

    China showing signs similar to Japanese housing bubble that led to its ‘lost decades’, expert warns | South China Morning Post – I’ve heard this more than once, though there are two things to consider: 1/ the Bank of Japan was much more hands off than Chinese monetary policy 2/ China has opacity of data and more levers to pull in its favour in property market. Bigger issue is corporate and government debt

    Exclusive: Behind Grindr’s doomed hookup in China, a data misstep and scramble to make up – Reuters – While it is known that data privacy concerns prompted the crackdown on Kunlun, interviews with over a dozen sources with knowledge of Grindr’s operations, including the former employees, for the first time shed light on what the company actually did to draw U.S. ire and how it then tried to save its deal. Reuters found no evidence that the app’s database was misused. Nevertheless, the decision to give its engineers in Beijing access to Grindr’s database proved to be a misstep for Kunlun, one of the largest Chinese mobile gaming companies

    Mediatel: Newsline: Sex sells, right? – So, with that in mind, can sex still have the selling power for advertisers that it once did? 
    “Ultimately? Yes and no,” Jem Fawcus, CEO of brand strategy partner and insight agency Firefish, tells Mediatel. 
    “Every well observed element of human life can sell if used in the right way. But if used just for titillation and as an attention grabber, absolutely not.”

  • Toxic masculinity with P&G + more

    Toxic masculinity P&G exec behind viral Gillette ad interview — Quartzy – I’d argue that some of this work shows poor judgement in the way its executed that damaged rather than helped toxic masculinity

    Reputation Inflation | National Bureau of Economic Research – A solution to marketplace information asymmetries is to have trading partners publicly rate each other post-transaction. Many have shown that these ratings are effective; we show that their effectiveness deteriorates over time. The problem is that ratings are prone to inflation, with raters feeling pressure to leave “above average” ratings, which in turn pushes the average higher. This pressure stems from raters’ desire to not harm the rated seller. As the potential to harm is what makes ratings effective, reputation systems, as currently designed, sow the seeds of their own irrelevance. Or in plain language how ratings programmes fail over time as they get bigger.

    Toyota Already Has Upgrades for the New Supra • Gear Patrol – really interesting tension in the Supra – leave space for tuning – which is where the passion for the car grew out of whilst not gouging customers with a shonky value proposition versus rivals

    Streetwear Global Market Research | Hypebeast – this was done in association with PWC’s consulting arm

    How Streetwear Brands and Consumers are Toppling Previously Understood Notions of Luxury and Exclusivity — The Fashion Law – great 101 guide to streetwear from the perspective of people working in luxury brands. I’d also recommend this piece I wrote that would provide a lot of context around the two

    My Way or the Huawei – Peter Zeihan – I’m not a blinkered fan of Huawei, but even I’ll admit that there’s not a great deal of balance in this article

    To Many Chinese, America Was Like ‘Heaven.’ Now They’re Not So Sure. – The New York Times – “…the perspective of young Chinese is different. They don’t respect you. Nor are they afraid of you.”

  • Swatch and Brexit + more

    Swatch and Brexit

    Swatch have been doing some interesting things around personalisation of watch design, but Swatch and Brexit feels like a leap too far. They’ve got a really nice user experience in the web interface, which makes this a disappointing post to make. I do wonder about who they think Swatch and Brexit is actually aimed at? What other fashion or luxury brand has looked to exploit Brexit like a tawdry souvenir seller?

    swatch brexit

    More Beyond campaign

    Cathay Pacific – Move Beyond campaign might have passed by without a mention for me for a number of reasons.

    • It doesn’t say anything new, but reaffirms the Cathay Pacific that I’ve known and loved to fly with
    • It’s very much a campaign designed to top up brand awareness and consideration for the airline which has taken some brand knocks at home and declining awareness abroad
    • It’s about brand purpose, which seems to be a hygiene factor at the moment. More on that from Mark Ritson. I am not sure that Cathay Pacific’s brand purpose passes Ritson’s test of being prepared to stick with the brand purpose, even when it costs money – like when they moved away from having the Mandarin Oriental handling lounge catering…

    Creatively its nice. A generic, safe looking brand film with catalogue corporate video backing track. I know Jack Scott shot it and some of the cinematography is nice (that word again), the colouring of the film is on point for money well spent. As an audience member it is pleasant enough to watch drift by, but not necessarily enough to spike a change

    In fact, if it wasn’t for the MTR (Hong Kong’s equivalent of London Underground and Overground) and Hong Kong International Airport outdoor advertising it would be utterly forgettable. One of the print posters has a couple of clothed men holding hands running on a beach. An ideal compromise between a socially conservative society and western virtue signalling.

    Cathay Pacific LGBT

    The poster wasn’t initially allowed to run on the MTR or in Hong Kong International. I heard some murmurings of China’s dark shadow casting a censoring hand on the posters – by westerners on social media. To be honest, they’d be more concerned about dealing with free speech, Falun Gong supporters, the Hong Kong independence movement rather than homosexuals being encouraged to walk on a beach in business smart suits.

    Instead the reality is more mundane. A minority of Hong Kongers: Taoists, Buddhists, the non-religious and Christians alike are a bit ‘mid western American’ about the gay community. There is an obvious tension between deeply-held beliefs, the longevity of the family through children and grandchildren. Thankfully, the LGBT community and straight supporters managed to have the ban reconsidered.

    William Chan Chinglish

    I am guessing that Chanel has insights to show that women buy its J12 watches, whether as a gift for someone else or themselves. William Chan is an interesting brand ambassador choice in this video. There is criticism in the YouTube comments on his pronunciation and ‘Chinglish’. It also feels a bit too ‘sweet’ to me. At least he’s a good boy who loves his Mum.

    Royyal Dog

    Asian Boss put together this great documentary on Royyal Dog – Korea’s top graffiti artist.

    Sony

    Lastly I found this amazing corporate film by Sony of their corporate history that I guess was shot in the early-to-mid-1970s. The manufacturing process, in particular test and measurement being so labour intensive is fascinating. The 5 inch micro-TV set is a beautiful piece of product design, as is the early Trinitron TV set. The hi-fi equipment is achingly beautiful. Well worth watching it from start-to-finish. More Sony content here.