Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • November 2024 newsletter

    November 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my November 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 16th issue. 16 is a low power of two which saw it used in weighing light objects in several cultures. For instance in the British Imperial system of weights 16 ounces were in one pound. This lived on far longer with British drug dealers who looked to sell cannabis in ‘teenths’ (16ths) or eighths of an ounce. Prior to decimal being implemented in China 16 taels or liǎng equalled one catty or jin. Chinese Taoists counted on their finger times and joints of the fingers with a the tip of the thumb, so 16 can be counted on each hand.

    The highlight of November was meeting up for brunch with Calvin who I used to work with in Hong Kong and collaborate with on occasion for projects going in-or-out of China. He was passing through London on his way to Web Congress in Lisbon, supporting one of the burgeoning number of start-ups coming out of Shanghai.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Ghost Signs – how legacy signage allows us to peer back into history, camcorders having their ‘lomography’ moment and much more.
    • Layers of the future – or how innovation doesn’t exist in a fully-formed world, but instead exists within layers of progress over time.
    • Presidential election beliefs – amongst the autopsies of the campaign that have been discussed, one of the things that struck me was the role of presidential election beliefs that have wrong-footed analysis
    • Klad & more stuff – a Russian pioneered integration of dark web markets and concealed ‘Amazon locker’ type infrastructure to deliver a new approach to drug dealing. Other items include bottlenecks in gadget manufacturing, internet maturity and more.

    Books that I have read.

    • Dead Calm by Charles Williams – the early 1960s crime novel packs a lot into the story. Trauma, mental illness, murder and intrigue on the high seas. Dead Calm was later made into a film and relocated from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.
    • Jipi and the paranoid chip by Neal Stephenson. A short story that fits into the Cryptonomicon universe of Stephenson’s books – shares the story of Jipi a former flight attendant who works for Mindshare Management Associates Inc. – an agency that distracts tourists to Manila from the rapid construction work taking place during a China-like economic miracle. Because of her personality, Jipi has to track down errant AI powered car alarms fitted with plastic explosives that were designed to deter thieves, but AI happened. If you’ve ever had to write prompts, you’ll likely appreciate it.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    The fame game

    Rosemary_Smith
    Irish rally driver Rosemary Smith, had the skills but never did get the fame. Smith even got behind the wheel of a Renault formula 1 car to get a test drive at 79 years of age.

    I am by no means a sports addict but even in my psyche I know the names and reputations of several famous sports stars across hurling, gaelic football, motorsports rugby league and even soccer. Sid Lee and Appino have raised the issue of how this fame gap is bridged in women’s sports drive into long term mainstream success. Where is the women’s sport equivalent of Stig Blomqvist, Arnold Palmer or Michael Jordan who are hailed in a similar way? Want to know more, reach out to Rory Natkiel.

    Yes, Christmas really is getting earlier

    He's back from vacation, there are already Christmas decorations and Christmas cookies everywhere

    My local supermarket started to sell mince pies right after the August bank holiday this year. It had Christmas decorations for sale before the Halloween ones. Christmas seems to be coming earlier this year. The Guardian researched how Christmas was arriving earlier each year, from charting music to mince pies and Christmas puddings going on sale. This year lo-fi girl had their first Christmas soundtrack up on November 4th. If you want a change from the Spotify Christmas list, try this old mix from former streetwear boutique The Hideout.

    WARC noted how companies like John Lewis with dedicated Christmas campaigns look to gain a first-mover advantage to aid the talkability around their campaign and gain the full benefit from their emotion driven campaign bedding in and building new memory structures.

    WARC predicted that Christmas advertising spend would rise 7.8% to over £10.5 billion. Big growth for search, online display and out of home compared to last year. The biggest losers including TV, direct mail, magazine and print news media.

    Things I have watched. 

    Famous Hong Kong cinema film director Johnnie To criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview for the BBC’s Chinese language service. With that in mind, I thought it prudent to buy up as much of his back catalogue as possible because the classics amongst them may be harder to get hold of in the future.

    PTUPTU starts in a similar way to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog with a policeman losing their duty weapon. However that’s where the parallels finish. In Stray Dog the young detective looking for his gun feel empathy at the end with the criminal who used his weapon. The moral being two-fold – crime starts with a few wrong choices, but are still human. In order to deliver law, over time the policeman needs to become less empathetic, losing a bit of their humanity. PTU on the other hand shows how police blurred the line between the law and crime with extra-legal methods to solve crime. It also highlights the complex relationships between criminal gangs and the police. To keeps the tension going with PTU throughout the film. The ambiguity between police and criminals would not be allowed in future Hong Kong films thanks to the National Security laws that have come into force.

    Election – The literal Cantonese title for this film is ‘Black Society’ – which as a term covers all kinds of organised crime groups. Two members of the Wo Lin Shing are up for election become leader (aka chairman or dragonhead) of the organised crime group. It’s a common trope in Hong Kong cinema that these elections happen on a regular basis. Wo Lin Shing is a stand-in name of the very real Wo Shing Wo – a group that have a side hustle doing wet work for the Beijing forces at work in the city.

    The film focuses on the election and immediate fallout. Lok runs a more rational campaign, whereas Big-D runs a showy campaign offering money for votes. The elders appoint Lok and Big-D tries to steal the symbol of power. To moves the tension and action on at a rate of knots. It features many of the heavyweights of Hong Kong cinema including Simon Lam, Louis Koo, ‘Big’ Tony Leung, former policeman Nick Cheung and Lam Suet.

    Not a Johnnie To production, but I have been enjoying Detective Chinatown on Amazon Prime. The show is similar to the BBC show Sherlock and CSI in the way its plot devices and how its story arcs work. It has been interesting to watch for a number of reasons. The series was produced for Chinese streaming platform iQiyi – think Chinese Netflix. The series is based in Bangkok, Thailand. The senior Thai police representative is portrayed as dramatic, volatile and religious in nature – interesting stereotyping by the Chinese production team. The plot line has a very supernatural aspect to it, which is generally considered to be a no-no with Chinese censors. I am curious to see where they take the show.

    Useful tools.

    Mac keyboard shortcuts

    Alongside David Pogue’s Missing Manual series of reference books for each version of macOS, MacMost’s videos are a great resource for the Mac user. MacMost now have a free downloadable table of Mac keyboard shortcuts.

    AI-powered diagram creation

    Ever sat in front of a blank Keynote or PowerPoint slide and wondered how to represent something? I am across the Napkin AI which takes your written text describing something and renders it into a diagram. I don’t use these diagrams as the finished product, but as an inspiration for me then to artwork together in Keynote, OmniGraffle or PowerPoint. You can output from Napkin AI as a PNG file. At the moment it’s free to use as a beta product.

    Woznim

    Woznim allows you to record the names of people and where you met them to try and aid in recall of of them if you run into them again. It reminds me of Foursquare and social bookmarking. Foursquare because of its where 2.0 location based data and social bookmarking because if you develop the Woznim habit it could be life-changing, but if it doesn’t gel with you it’ll be dropped as a service in no time. At the moment it’s an iPhone-only app.

    Bluesky

    Bluesky has been having a moment as another tranche of social media users follow The Guardian’s lead to leave Twitter and need a micro-blogging service. Bluesky has got a good deal of attention because of its starter packs and list features. Whether Bluesky will continue to grow into a vibrant post-Twitter place isn’t certain yet. But if you are going to use Bluesky then these two tools might help:

    • Bluesky tools directory. There is a surprisingly rich set of tools available rather like ‘golden age’ era Twitter.
    • Starter packs. Starter packs are a set of curated recommended accounts to follow based around interests. This site has a large directory of them covering everything from professional interests to sports passions.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my November 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the Christmas season and the rush to complete projects before clients disappear on holiday.

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.

  • Ghost signs + more stuff

    Ghost signs

    I took this picture almost two decades ago on a visit to Hong Kong of ghost signs.

    Former industrial units in Fotan

    I was reminded of this picture when I watched the below documentary on ghost signs. Specifically it reminded me of the former industrial units I saw in Fotan, which is in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Their structure used as a giant billboard advertising their former uses making fur coats or plastic flowers. The ghost signs of Hong Kong were fast-fading evidence of an industrial golden age in Hong Kong extinguished by China’s entrance into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at the end of 2001.

    The UK ghost signs highlighted in the documentary benefit from a slower rate of building replacement and a more temperate climate that helped preserve lead paint over a century old.

    Ghost signs show that history is all around us, if we care to look around us.

    Beauty

    Avon mulls franchise stores and widens tie-up with Superdrug | Retail Gazette

    China

    Volkswagen China CMO deported from China for drug use | News | Campaign AsiaVolkswagen Group China’s chief marketing officer, Jochen Sengpiehl, has been expelled from China following a positive drug test upon his return from a holiday in Thailand. This development has caught significant attention on Chinese social media, as reported by the German tabloid Bild-Zeitung. AFP reported that German officials confirmed the news on Tuesday. Sengpiehl was detained for over 10 days and instructed to leave the country immediately after Chinese officials detected traces of cannabis and cocaine in his blood, according to AFP’s coverage. He was held in custody before Volkswagen and officials from the German embassy managed to secure his release. However, he was required to leave the country instantly, as reported by Bild. Campaign Asia-Pacific reached out to Volkswagen Group for comment. A global spokesperson offered a terse response: “We ask for your understanding that we will not comment further on the content of your questions in light of our contractual and data protection confidentiality obligations.” The incident throws a harsh spotlight on the differing legal landscapes around drug use. While Germany legalised cannabis use earlier this year, and Thailand became the first Asian country to decriminalise it for medical purposes in 2022 (though recreational use is slated for prohibition by the end of the year), China maintains extremely strict anti-narcotics laws, with severe penalties for violations. – This also says a lot about how little China needs Volkswagen in the country now.

    Why Are Airlines Quiet Quitting China? | Skift

    Consumer behaviour

    Gen Z’s joy in chaos: Why maximalism is back | Jing Daily – at odds with the sleek pared down looks currently driving Chinese fashion. Not really that much of a surprise given how young people over the years have rated thrift shops, army surplus stores and shopped while travelling in search of authenticity and a story behind their eclecticism.

    54: Double 11 (Is Ralph Lauren a victim?), The fall of Will’s and ClassPass | Following the Yuan – Chinese consumers using returns policies to hit ‘boycotted’ western companies in the pocket by exploiting the elevated business costs of returns in e-commerce. Double 11 or singles day is one of the premier shopping days in China. If this movement is real, the results for targeted brands like Ralph Lauren would be exceptionally brutal.

    Culture

    Camcorders are now going through a ‘lomography‘ phase now – where creators love their limitations and flaws.

    Finance

    Hong Kong exchange launches crypto index for Asia | Tech In Asia

    Luxury

    Why do people queue up outside luxury stores? | FT

    Kering and Hermès tell tale of luxury inequality | FT

    Marketing

    Why global brands are failing in Africa | WARC

    Beyond the horizon: The holistic path to measuring media investments | WARC

    Online

    Preparing for Apple & Google’s certificate lifespan changes | The Stack – interesting that this transition is being compared to Y2K in terms of technology experience disruption

    Security

    TSMC cuts off Chinese chip designer linked to Huawei • The Register

    Software

    OpenAI and Anthropic present two possible futures for AI – The Verge

  • October 2024 newsletter

    October 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my October 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 15th issue. This is the second year that I have written about Hallowe’en sharing my Mam’s recipe for barmbrack – an Irish household standard. When I lived in Hong Kong, the locals enthusiastically adopted western Hallowe’en culture with local amusement parks Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland competing to create the scariest experience for young people and dating couples. They mixed western and local horror motifs. It’s amazing how thanks to the mass media Hallowe’en has become a global cultural event. More on that later.

    As for the significance of the number 15? It seems to have deep significance in modern culture with a wide range of artists including Taylor Swift and Marilyn Manson using it as the title of songs, albums or mixtapes. Additionally, the number has some significance in Judaism. The number 10 represents the hand of God and the number 5 represents to save or rescue. If we add 10 plus five, we get 15. The symbolic meaning of 15 translates to “mercy,” which means compassion and forgiveness.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • An honest review of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 – which is as much a critique of wearables as a category, as the device itself.
    • Cocaine Cowboys is a book on Irish crime, but the title is as interesting as the book in terms of its particular cultural resonance in Ireland and a reflection of the Irish experience.
    • Nike changes CEO John Donahue, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to unforced self-inflicted strategic errors.
    • Pagers and more things can be found here.

    Books that I have read.

    • Taylor Lorenz’ Extremely Online is a history of the social web from bloggers to the present day. Lorenz’ telling is very US-orientated but an interesting account of how influencers and brands evolved their social presence adapting to platform changes such as the disappearance of Vine. Aspects that I found fascinating included how influencers accelerated their following through offline events rather similar to Japan’s idol industry and the career resilience of the Paul brothers
    • The Murderers by Frederic Brown provides a criminal side view to a story in a world that one would recognise from James Ellroy‘s neo-noir crime world of Los Angeles.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Tourism Ireland: Halloween.

    halloween
    Tourism Ireland

    Hallowe’en was a huge part of my childhood in an Irish household, bairn brack and tea, going around and collecting apples, dried fruit and hazelnuts from neighbouring houses, carving out a turnip lantern, making a papier-mâché mask, enjoying ghost stories on RTÉ radio and strange noises that came from the worsening weather and wildlife. However, America seems to have defined a lot of the narrative and globalised behaviours around the festival.

    Living in Asia, I saw revellers in Hong Kong and Japan enjoy the festival and borrow heavily from Hollywood from ET to the Halloween franchise. Like Irish-American cuisine, American Halloween is based on the European traditions brought to the new world and then reinterpreted.

    So I was fascinated to see Tourism Ireland’s campaign to reclaim Halloween from internally pervasive American soft power and Hollywood; going back to the festival’s pagan origins.

    Meaningful patient engagement

    Measuring and Demonstrating the Value of Patient Engagement Across the Medicines Lifecycle is a call to action to assess and measure patient engagement for the pharmaceuticals industry. It redefines the concept of patient-centricity – a popular concept that has become increasingly prominent and popular in the industry. (Disclosure, the paper involved a couple of former Concentric HX Wegovy launch colleagues: Fay Weston and Zoe Healey).

    The Change Makers

    Brand purpose has lost a good deal of unalloyed credibility in marketing circles (for some very good reasons). But that doesn’t mean that consumers got the memo. Havas’ The Rise of the Change Makers report looks at change through this lens. Like the Edelman Trust report, it has tracked the change in consumer zeitgeist over the past few years.

    Social effectiveness

    There was a couple of interesting research papers in the International Journal of Advertising. Firstly, digital detoxing by consumers seems to have a temporary inoculation against social media advertising when they return to using a social platform. Secondly, romance sells, or the psycho-romantic aspect of parasocial relationships sells – which should be taken into account when weighing up influencers that brands might want to partner with.

    Things I have watched. 

    Series three of ITV’s Van Der Valk’s reboot is a sleeper series that I have enjoyed watching with my Dad. Season 4 has debuted in the US on PBS, but there is no sign of it being picked up in the UK yet.

    Barry Foster
    Barry Foster

    The series is based on a series of thrillers written in the 1960s by Nicolas Freeling; the first one was Love in Amsterdam. The original TV adaptation featured Barry Foster as Van Der Valk whose performance gave the original show a unique look-and-feel.

    I watched some vintage Jack Ryan with a young Ben Affleck playing the CIA analyst in an adaption of The Sum of All Fears. This version is usually overlooked in favour of the modern TV series and the Harrison Ford films. Alan Bates played a delicious villain; an Austrian politician with far right tendencies. Bates’ character felt the most prescient of all the characters, while the thawing relationship with Russia feels further away with each passing week. Unfortunately, the franchise was left on the shelf for a while after this film was made; Ben Affleck made a good Dr Ryan and Liev Schreiber was a good foil as character John Clark – the real muscle in Tom Clancy’s books.

    Amazon Prime Video has some sleeper films if you dig around. Deliver Us From Evil is a respectable Korean action film with the classic ‘tragic hero’ plot line popularised in Hong Kong and Japanese cinema. While it has been compared to The Raid, there is an Old Boy feel to the violence. Much has been made of it starring Lee Jung-jae – known to global audiences for his role in Netflix’ Squid Game. It’s just under two hours of enjoyable escapism.

    I rewatched Inception for the first time since I saw it in the cinema. Since then we’ve had COVID and a generative AI-filled media sphere and the film hit different. It no longer felt exceptional in the way that films like Blade Runner and the Studio Ghibli back catalogue still do.

    Il Divo was one of a couple of DVDs that I bought instead of paying the Netflix tax. Il Divo appealed to me because of my love of real-life Italian intrigue, sparked by watching The Mattei Affair for the first time several years ago. I became reacquainted with it more recently again when I rewatched it. Il Divo covers the political intrigue of the 1970s and 1980s, in particular Giulio Andreotti, an Italian prime minister and failed presidential candidate. At the time Italy suffered from far left terrorist attacks and a reactionary right-wing movement that revolved a freemason lodge known as P2. Andreotti’s leadership is directly linked to a succession of deaths of enemies and associates during his career – which the film displays in an artful tableau at the beginning.

    It is a very complex time in modern Italian history and the story tries to pull different strands of the story in through different vignettes. Like The Mattei Affair before it, a certain amount is left up to the audience’s interpretation.

    Central Intelligence

    Not television, but my current favourite show on BBC Radio 4 is Central Intelligence, which is part of their Limelight drama content. I love it for a few reasons:

    • I grew up with cold war-era espionage books and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, so the security services stories owned a bit of real estate in my head. Given the way things have been going over the past decade, this kind of world has been raising its head again.
    • It’s a really well researched show with high production values on the history of the CIA told from the prospective of Eloise Page who joined the agency at its start and had a 40-year career.
    • Fantastic voice talent. Accomplished high profile film actress Kim Cattrall who has appeared in iconic film and television roles playing both comedic and meaty characters. Ed Harris is a fantastic, but less well known actor who appeared in classic movies from The Right Stuff and Walker to portraying The Man in Black in the Westworld TV series.

    Useful tools.

    Downloading images on a web page

    Imageye is a browser extension that helps you download all pages on a given web page. It can be handy for mood boards and social research.

    Getting to Heathrow

    I have had to do a bit of travel. Thankfully it has been well planned. One of the things that helped my planning and saved money is the Heathrow Express’ £10 Advanced Discounted Tickets. More details on the caveats surrounding the discount here.

    Buying cheaper

    MoneySavingSupermarket has a search engine of products available via Amazon Warehouse. If you’re a jobbing freelancer or just looking for something for your home – it allows you to buy that item a bit cheaper.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my October 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into November, but not before you’ve charged your energy levels up on Hallowe’en treats!

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

  • Pagers + more things

    Pagers

    Pagers went back into the news recently with Hizbollah’s exploding pagers. YouTuber Perun has done a really good run down of what happened.

    Based on Google Analytics information about my readership the idea of pagers might need an explanation. You’ve probably used a pager already, but not realised it yet.

    A Twosome Place wifi puck
    A restaurant pager from Korean coffee shop / dessert café A Twosome Place.

    For instance if you’ve been at a restaurant and given puck that brings when your table is ready, that’s a pager. The reason why its big it to prevent customers stealing them rather than the technology being bulky.

    On a telecoms level, it’s a similar principle but on a bigger scale. A transmitter sends out a signal to a particular device. In early commercial pagers launched in the 1960s such as the ‘Bellboy’ service, the device made a noise and you then got to a telephone, phoned up a service centre to receive a message left for you. Over time, the devices shrunk from something the size of a television remote control to even smaller than a box of matches. The limit to how small the devices got depended on display size and battery size. You also got displays that showed a phone number to call back.

    By the time I had a pager, they started to get a little bigger again because they had displays that could send both words and numbers. These tended to be shorter than an SMS message and operators used shortcuts for many words in a similar way to instant messaging and text messaging. The key difference was that most messages weren’t frivolous emotional ‘touchbases’ and didnt use emojis.

    Beepers
    A Motorola that was of a similar vintage to the one I owned.

    When I was in college, cellphones were expensive, but just starting to get cheaper. The electronic pager was a good half-way house. When I was doing course work, I could be reached via my pager number. Recruiters found it easier to get hold of me, which meant I got better jobs during holiday time as a student.

    I moved to cellphone after college when I got a deal at Carphone Warehouse. One Motorola Graphite GSM phone which allowed two lines of SMS text to be displayed. I had an plan that included the handset that cost £130 and got 12 months usage. For which I got a monthly allowance of 15 minutes local talk time a month.

    I remember getting a call about winning my first agency job, driving down a country road with the phone tucked under my chin as I pulled over to take the call. By this time mobile phones were revolutionising small businesses with tradesmen being able to take their office with them.

    The internet and greater data speeds further enhanced that effect.

    Pagers still found their place as communications back-up channel in hospitals and some industrial sites. Satellite communications allowed pagers to be reached in places mobile networks haven’t gone, without the high cost of satellite phones.

    That being said, the NHS are in the process of getting rid of their pagers after COVID and prior to COVID many treatment teams had already moved to WhatsApp groups on smartphones. Japan had already closed down their last telecoms pager network by the mid-2010s. Satellite two-way pagers are still a niche application for hikers and other outward bound activities.

    Perun goes into the reasons why pagers were attractive to Hesbollah:

    • They receive and don’t transmit back. (Although there were 2-way pager networks that begat the likes of the BlackBerry device based on the likes of Ericsson’s Mobitex service.)
    • The pager doesn’t know your location. It doesn’t have access to GNSS systems like GPS, Beidou, Gallileo or GLONASS. It doesn’t have access to cellular network triangulation. Messages can’t transmit long messages, but you have to assume that messages are sent ‘in the clear’ that is can be read widely.

    Consumer behaviour

    Yes, CEOs are moving left, but ‘woke capitalism’ is not the whole story | FT

    Culture

    ‘We were cheeky outlaws getting away with it’: the total euphoria of Liverpool’s 90s club scene | The Guardian – maybe one day I will tell my side of this tale. It’s all a bit more nuanced and I was stone cold sober throughout it all, which is a rare perspective.

    Economics

    Invest 2035: the UK’s modern industrial strategy – GOV.UK

    Corporate Germany is on sale | FT

    Health

    Ukraine’s pioneering virtual reality PTSD therapy | The Counteroffensive

    Korea

    The sabukaru Guide to Seoul’s PC Room Culture | Sabukaru

    Luxury

    How luxury priced itself out of the market | FT – brands have tested the elasticity of pricing and pushed beyond the limits for their middle class customer base

    Watch-maker Jaeger-LeCoultre expands into fragrances inspired by its Reverso dress watches: Jaeger-LeCoultre fragrances take form | Luxury Daily

    Ozempic is transforming your gym | FT, The Vogue Business Spring/Summer 2025 size inclusivity report | Vogue Business – GLP-1s blamed for stalled progress.

    Ferrari, Hermès lead global luxury brand growth in 2024: Interbrand | Luxury Daily

    What is Chinese style today? | Vogue Businessstreet style at Shanghai Fashion Week has been low-key. The bold looks of the past have given way to a softer aesthetic that’s more layered and feminine, with nods to Chinese culture and history. This pared-back vibe was also found on the runways. Part of this might be down to a policy led movement against conspicuous consumption typified by Xi Jinping’s ‘common prosperity‘.

    Marketing

    Adland’s talent spill: Seniors double blocked as ageism, cost-cutting compounded by ‘threatened’ younger managers | Mi3

    Where to start with multisensory marketing | WARC – 61% of consumers looking for brands that can “ignite intense emotions”. Immersive experiences that are holistic tap into people’s emotions and linger in the memory. It’s also an opportunity for using powerful storytelling to communicate a brand story.

    Media

    Tesco to launch location-based self-scanner adverts in stores – Retail Gazette

    Everyone is burning out on the news, including journalists – Baekdal

    Online

    Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research

    How Google Influences Public Opinion | HackerNoon

    Software

    Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX • The Register

    Web-of-no-web

    Airbus to cut 2500 staff in Space Systems | EE News Europe“In recent years, the defence and space sector and, thus, our Division have been impacted by a fast changing and very challenging business context with disrupted supply chains, rapid changes in warfare and increasing cost pressure due to budgetary constraints,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO of the Airbus Defence and Space business.

    Wireless

    Boeing plans quantum satellite | EE News Europe

    Elon Musk battles Indian billionaires over satellite internet spectrum | FT

  • The John Donahue post

    Who is John Donahue?

    John Donahue is the outgoing CEO at Nike. Full disclosure, I have Nike in my wardrobe and I own a share in the company at the time of writing. Anyway back to Donahue, according to his biography on the Nike website:

    John Donahoe is President & CEO of NIKE, Inc. He is responsible for the continued growth of NIKE’s global business portfolio, which includes the Nike, Jordan and Converse brands. John became president and CEO of NIKE in January 2020 and has served on the Board of Directors since 2014. Previously, he was the president and CEO of ServiceNow and of eBay Inc., and he continues to serve as chairman of the board at PayPal. Earlier in his career, he worked for Bain & Company for nearly two decades, becoming the firm’s president and CEO in 1999. A former basketball player and lifelong sports fan, John received an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dartmouth College.

    john-donahoe
    John Donahue via the Nike website.

    He is a business strategy wonk and has extensive experience in online businesses and online commerce. When Apple had the vision thing, they hired Tim Cook – a famed operations and logistics executive in the technology industry to deliver. John Donahue had been hired to do great operational execution, by a company that was running low on the vision thing.

    Donahue may not have had permission to deal with some of the systemic issues in Nike and some of them issues might be due to the board itself.

    Penetration

    Nike’s collective strategy to move to D2C via its own retail stores and e-tailing platform was ostensively a way to increase profitability and presumably focus on heavier, brand loyal users. I can understand why they might have felt that due to the ubiquity of their products on the backs and feet of customers around the world.

    Secondly, prior to 2010 (and in most business schools still) the perceived wisdom was that modern marketing is supposedly about focusing on loyal, heavier buyers; focusing on retention (not acquisition) and return on investment.

    However, things changed in 2010; Ehrensberg Bass researchers Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk summarise the marketing science research that their institution had been doing in their books How Brands Grow part one and part two. A key part of their findings was that brand loyalty is positively correlated with brand penetration – if you have higher levels of penetration then your customers will tend to be more loyal. However, if you have lower levels of penetration then your customers will tend to be less loyal. Smaller brands suffer from a double jeopardy of sorts: their sales are lower because they have fewer buyers, who buy the brand less often. 

    Which kind of makes sense. When you go to a supermarket, you can only buy what’s on the shelf when you’re in the supermarket. It would take a lot to go and try another supermarket to just buy one product. Most people will just buy what they can on their list and maybe look at substitute products.

    Nike is a huge brand, but it wilfully reduced its marketing penetration, by reducing the amount of places it appeared. It withdrew or reduced engagement with a range of partners:

    • Amazon
    • DSW
    • Footlocker
    • JD Sports
    • Macys
    • Olympia Sports
    • Urban Outfitters
    • Zappos

    When Nike goes back to those partners, there will be a shift in the power dynamic away from Nike. These retailers have options because Nike let other brands in to fill the void it chose to leave behind.

    On LinkedIn, people have talked about this as Nike has a brand problem. This is far beyond a brand problem; but brand has suffered.

    Where’s the community?

    Nike’s Londoner celebrated community back in 2018. Nike has continued to win in culture with collaborations including Nigo and Yoon Ahn of Ambush. But the culture didn’t translate into the degree of sales that Nike wanted so far.

    Part of the reason for this is Nike’s focus on sub-cultures rather than broader transformational trends in middle class and working class consumers.

    On Running have built their brand around running groups. Nike used to have running clubs ran by staff at their retail outlets. They were also were supporting Charlie Dark’s Run Dem Crew in the early 2010s.

    When did Nike give competitors space in communities? Was it down to a pivot win focus from retail to online? Given that part of the rationale for Nike’s move to selling direct to customers was to be closer to them, this all seems really odd.

    Charlie Dark has since become a global running ambassador for Lululemon.

    Core competences

    In the late 1990s and early 2000s Nike sold watches. The most famous of which was the Triax range that angled the display to make it glanceable for runners. There were also Nike MP3 players made with Philips. There was also the Nike fuelband, an in-house attempt at a wearable.

    The company decided to focus on what it did well and has since made products that are complementary to Apple’s product line like watch straps and apps. Under Donahue’s watch Nike extended itself into the technology space with NFT offerings and metaverse experiences. Both of which seem to have been expensive follies.

    Fading stars

    Nike was formed at a unique point in time and over the decades has worked with a range of game-changing athletes who were known globally thanks to mass media and the internet.

    Nike’s biggest brand and star is still Michael Jordan. The Air Jordan 1 was launched in 1984. That means that the shoe design and when he played in it is older than the young people it is sold to. The linkage between the iconic jumpman performance and his signature shoe is becoming elongated by time.

    Granted Adidas sells the Superstar, the Stan Smith, the Samba and Gazelle shoes which are older than the Jordan 1. But Adidas doesn’t lean as heavily on any one design. Instead they rotate in and out of style. Even then Adidas has suffered from problems executing consistently such as the Yeezy scandal.

    Nike’s Dunk design comes from 1985, the Air Force 1 came out in 1982. They are not bad shoes, but they will fade in and out of style.

    Nike had also been relatively slow to take advantage of the surge of interest in women’s basketball with Caitlin Clark only getting a signature shoe deal this year.

    Nike also managed to grossly underestimate the demand for replica jerseys of its England and Australia women’s football teams.

    Jordan has since expanded into a brand that Nike has used to sponsor the likes of French football team Paris St Germain.

    In golf, Nike parted ways with Tiger Woods this year. Woods is launching his own line instead. While Nike has other golfers on its roster, they don’t have the cultural impact that Woods had on the game.

    The brand has better news in football where it has a deep bench of both teams and player sponsorships to draw on. Nike still has a great bench of athletes comparable to rivals like Adidas, and that’s the problem. They glitter like the Milky Way rather than radiate like the sun.

    The secondary market

    Hypebeasts

    The rise of streetwear as an industry took off in the late 1980s. Its origins go further back. You had Dapper Dan in Harlem in the 1980s, football casual culture, Japanese fashions and the California surf culture influence. Soon after it took off you had unobtainable items:

    • Major Force t-shirts – (Major Force was a Japanese hip hop and house label featuring artists like Hiroshi Fujiwara)
    • The Tommy Boy Carhartt Detroit jacket
    • Numerous Stüssy Tribe letterman jackets
    • Supreme drops from 1994 onwards

    Trying to scratch that itch made you a hype beast. I know hypebeasts who are 60 years old and have college age children. The signs of this secondary market being bubbly could be seen back before COVID.

    The end of easy money

    Nike like other premium brands benefited during COVID-19, when interest rates were low and consumers had money in their pockets. Interest rate rises, inflation and an economic dip took away the easy money. Nike doesn’t seem to have factored this into its expectations. The decline in Chinese economic growth, seems to have hit Nike particularly hard.

    The polyurethane problem

    Nike shoes took off on them being tradable alternative assets like sports cards, or vintage bottles of wine. Nike trainers have a shelf life due to the materials that they are made from. Adhesive bonds can be reapplied, stitching can be repaired, but polyurethane midsoles crumble over time and can’t be replaced.

    The plastic breaks down and and the soles disintegrate. I have had pairs go at the four year mark. Chemistry undermines the collector segment that supports much of the secondary market for Nike products.

    A long train running

    Passengers relax and view the scenery from the lounge car of the Empire Builder enroute from Chicago to East Glacier Park Montana, and Seattle, Washington, June 1974

    John Donahue was in charge when Nike had unprecedented decline in sales. But there have been issues for a long time. Donahue was executing on a strategy for direct-to-consumer sales via its own retail stores and online, that Nike had committed to prior to his arrival as CEO.

    This is obvious from John Donahue’s recruitment process.

    • Donahue’s reputation was helped by his roles at ServiceNow and eBay
    • Donahue was a former partner at Bain and a friend to many in Silicon Valley
    • He received his MBA from Stanford School of Business – which is a great institution and happens to be the one that Phil Knight went to.

    What Nike didn’t do was commission a headhunter, hold a beauty parade or anything akin to a rigorous recruitment process in hiring their CEO.

    All of which points a board-wide issue rather than just a CEO issue. Which begs the question, will Nike become the sports apparel version of Yahoo!? A rotation of CEOs, intractable board level issues and an inevitable slide out of the limelight? Nike has been wrong-footed before, it was clobbered by the rise of Timberland in the early 1990s driven by the brown boots usefulness for standing on cold wet street corners in the criminal underworld adjacent to hip hop culture. But Nike came back. That was a different Nike with a more energetic Phil Knight and Tinker Hatfield.

    The scale of this stumble seems bigger and faster than before. Nike might not be resilient enough to withstand it.

    The innovation problem

    Former Nike designer Steve McDonald has painted a very different picture on Nike innovation internally within the company than has been seen on the outside. Outdoor sub-brand ACG was ‘never supported‘ when it was launched back in 1989. It was an immensely political environment with star-designer Tinker Hatfield warring with rival designers. Instead Nike used golden birdcage contracts to lock up and stifle talent. Hatfield is in charge of Nike’s Innovation Kitchen, but there seems to be a lack of commercially beneficial output.

    Hatfield’s days as a star designer are numbered following several decades at the top and there doesn’t seem to be a star-status worthy successor coming though.

    Nike seemed to abandon mainstream sustainable innovation some time after 2012, with its ISPA range as a sporadic tokenism to green issues.

    NikeLab – a premium line that fits in with On Running’s apparel seems to receive only sporadic support. All of which implies that product innovation had problems way before Hoka and On Running turned up.

    Nike’s Vaporfly running shoes were originally released back in 2018 and by 2020, World Athletics rule changes meant that Nike has a range of competitors providing similar shoes.

    The next battle ground has been fought over consumers focusing on wellness and fitness. When Hoka and On Running did turn up, Nike didn’t have much in the tank to respond.

    It was really brought home to me in sportswear-loving Merseyside where On Running shoes are the universal choice of everyone from office workers to scallies. Before COVID they’d all be in Nikes with the Air Max 95s being particularly popular.

    More information

    Nike withdraws full-year guidance ahead of CEO transition | FT

    Nike tries to get back in the race as sneaker sales gather pace | FT

    As Nike cuts ties with retailers, competitors try to take its wholesale place | Modern Retail

    Steve McDonald on Instagram