FMCG or fast moving consumer goods sprang out of the mass industrialisation. Brands sprang up originally as a guarantee of quality. Later on as these brands needed to be promoted, we saw the foundation of the what we think of as modern marketing and advertising.
Today media and entertainment takes up an increasing amount of the household spend, as does housing, but FMCGs are a crucial part of their essential and disposable income spend.
They have nostalgia wrapped up in them, distinctive aromas, taste and packaging designs. From the smell of my Granny using so much Pledge on the TV that I was surprised it didn’t burst into flame to the taste of Cidona and texture of Boland’s Fig Roll biscuits in my mouth.
The sound of their advertising jingles was the soundtrack of my childhood. Digital advertising is largely rationale, it lacks the fluent devices that provide the centre to advertising and made FMCG advertising iconic. Fluent devices like the Peperami ‘Animal’, the M&M characters or the Cadbury Smash robots were embedded in deep marketing research. FMCG brands still sponsor the best research in marketing science.
I had the good fortune to work inhouse at Unilever and agency-side for their brands. I also managed to work on Coca-Cola and Colgate during my time in Hong Kong.
2008 was the best and worst of times for Chinese brands. The Beijing olympics was supposed to spur national pride. Included in this national pride was pride for Chinese brands – guo chao. Chinese athletics brand Li Ning took centre stage in the opening ceremony, screwing over Olympic official partner Adidas. For other olympics ambush marketing is severely restricted, but this was a national champion in China. Chinese pride usually means someone else’s humiliation, in this case Adidas.
Right after the Olympics in September that year, a major food adulteration scandal became public. Over 300,000 babies were harmed when melamine was added by baby formula. The reason why this was done was to boost its ‘protein content’ in tests. The main brand in focus was Sanlu – a local milk powder brand. Subsequent tests found that adulterated powder had been sold around the world, by multiple Chinese brands.
Chinese consumers hoovered up milk powder all over the world. Several countries and Hong Kong had to limit milk powder purchases, due to Chinese tourists and intermediaries cashing in on the demand for safe milk powder. During 2013, I was working behind the scenes at an agency for FrieslandCampina to try and combat the shortages in Hong Kong. The ban has been put in place indefinitely.
Move forward a decade and guo chao is mainstream
Everything is political, this is even more so in China. With the rise of Xi Jingping he sought to stop Chinese ‘irrational worship of the West‘. There are well loved domestic legacy brands in China, a prime example would be White Rabbit candy.
Guo chao brand ‘White Rabbit’ candy
Along with this inflated Han nationalism has gone a pride in domestic brands. Huawei handsets are as expensive, if not more so than Samsung and Apple – which equated to a perception of similar quality. The fact that Chinese live most of their online lives inside WeChat dulls the difference in software. The operating system is no longer important. This is similar to the vision that Jim Clark had for the Netscape browser. If apps were on the web and ran through the browser, that would negate the stranglehold Microsoft Windows had on corporate and personal computing.
Young adults in China now favour products with Chinese cultural designs and products made in China – guo chao. In one survey 75% of Chinese consumers surveyed state they like products that incorporate Guochao design elements. Design and colour choice is particularly important: doesn’t just mean “made in China” but embracing traditional Chinese elements and inciting national pride. Foreign brands have struggled to maintain market share. Guochao brands have built a good consumer reputation and market share by relying on the advantages of lower price, practical and competitive levels of quality. They have also suffered from the perception of being a copy or imitation of more expensive brands. Domestic brands have managed to use e-tailing to get over established foreign brand advantages in market penetration. More consumer behaviour related content here.
How Should the U.S. Respond to China’s Military Civil Fusion Strategy? | ChinaFile – Over the past four years, the U.S. government has invoked military civil fusion (MCF) to justify a range of policies. For instance, MCF was among the rationales for the reform and expansion of export controls to include certain “emerging” and “foundational” technologies, as well as for the addition of companies and universities to the “Entity List” and “Unverified List” that the Department of Commerce maintains. The Trump administration partially justified attempts to ban WeChat and TikTok from the United States through initial claims about the companies’ alleged linkage to MCF. Moreover, a presidential proclamation on Chinese students and researchers studying in the United States cited students’ proximity to entities engaged in MCF as grounds for denying or revoking visas – military civil fusion is probably one of the biggest things that will affect innovation over the next couple of decades. It will shape the prioritisation of innovation topics in the west as a reaction to what happens in China.
Bitcoin declined substantially in value this week. The inciting incident seems to be Elon Musk waking up to the environmental impact of cryptomining. Papa Johns Pizza put out an offer in the UK which seems to bet a rise in the value of bitcoin.
This offer could democratise ownership of bitcoin, but it’s unlikely. Instead it feels like a PR driven story that could turn into the Hoover’s free flight debacle of 1992. It is apparently to celebrate Bitcoin pizza day.
Media
What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks – Columbia Journalism Review – really interesting findings, though I am surprised that the percentage link rot is only 25% – I was expecting it to be much higher given the range of years covered. When you have 72% link rot from 1998, it gives a counterpoint to ‘on the web is forever’. My friend Ian often talks about how he can’t find a video demonstration of Orange’ home of the future from the dot com era. This data supports his empirical experience. The work that the Internet Archive do is immensely important. But it misses the interconnectivity between content; which is an important part of the medium and the context of online.
New 2021 Ford Focus RS hot hatch axed | CAR Magazine – interesting story. It implies that motor companies won’t be able to do niches and halo cars. This will have a knock on for suppliers, forcing consolidation. It also has implications in terms of the need for design houses and design teams, motorsport participation and brand differentiation. And the software aspects of car experience looks even worse for the consumer – ‘The uncomfortable future of in-car upgrades has begun’ | CAR Magazine
Ford’s Ever-Smarter Robots Are Speeding Up the Assembly Line | WIRED – up to now manufacturing robots have been programmed to do a series of movements, not that dissimilar to a CNC machine. This means that they are intolerant of inconsistency. Ford, Nissan and Toyota are looking to use machine learning to handle inconsistency. The man on the line is fine if his screwdriver, is placed in roughly the same place as it was when he put it down. He or she doesn’t mind what part of a bolt they pick up in the parts bin. Yet that kind of thing requires a lot of machine learning work for robots. It will be incremental gains on tasks like this that moves automation forwards
Revealed: residency loophole in Malta’s cash-for-passports scheme | Malta | The Guardian – Henley’s files reveal that in the early years of the scheme, many applicants told the government upfront that they planned to develop only the most superficial links to the country, with most disclosing that they planned to spend just a few weeks in Malta during the supposed 12-month residency period
US Sanctions Help Crack Malaysian Crime Ring — Radio Free Asia – “This continues a pattern of overseas Chinese actors trying to paper over illegal criminal activities by framing their actions in terms of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the China Dream, or other major initiatives of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” the government agency said, referring to China’s ambitious program of building a modern-day Silk Road through a network of infrastructure projects stretching through Southeast Asia, South Asia and elsewhere.
Hong Kong
Wells Fargo plans to shift Asian hub from Hong Kong to Singapore | Financial Times – The plan would involve slowly building up Singapore as Wells Fargo’s Asian hub through a mixture of new hires and redundancies in Hong Kong, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. It would still maintain a presence in the territory. One former employee said the plan was dubbed internally “project sun”.
The mystery mansion near Calgary that has everyone talking – Macleans.ca – Class is something polite Canadians avoid discussing. We think of our country as comparatively classless, and we manage the cognitive dissonance presented by the haves and have-nots of housing by requiring our rich people to keep quiet. They should wear clothes that are well-cut and well-designed, but not flash. Buy the multi-millionaire’s car, but paint it in a sedate hue. Wealthy neighbourhoods should feature winding streets with mature trees and large lots, the better to conceal the true size of the homes built upon them
Inside the ‘digital cleanse’ companies taking on cancel culture | Financial Times – Former Sainsbury’s boss Justin King, one of The Marque’s clients, tells me that part of the appeal of having an SEO-optimised profile was that he was sick of people looking him up on Wikipedia and emailing him to ask if he was the guy who took away the Christmas bonus. “Forever, my Wikipedia profile will tell you that I’m Scrooge,” he says. “The idea that you could keep a single source of truth in one place – my truth about me and what I do – was very appealing.” – the idea of SEO as a ‘luxury’ good is interesting. More related content here.
Marketing
Facebook advertising chief worried about whether it overstated reach | Financial Times – “We are going to get really criticized for that (and justifiably so),” she said. “If we overstated how many actual real people we have in certain demos, there is no question that impacted budget allocations. We have to prepare for the worst here.” Two months ago, other documents in the case revealed that the Facebook product manager in charge of the reach metric said in an internal email that the company had made “revenue we should have never made given the fact [the metric is] based on wrong data”
Adult male virginity soars | Boing Boing – There are far more merciless forces in play, not least dating and hookup success being forced onto the same algorithmic curve as everything else on social media; the increasingly hypnotic impulse to live lives online; and the generally hopeless economic circumstances of young people who are getting very little out of life, but haven’t yet decided to burn it all down – interesting disparity between men and women in the data. I think the reasons behind adult male virginity soaring are multi-causal. I can see how adult male virginity trends will be be endlessly kicked around by a football to suit one viewpoint or another
China
How much will China grow as an export market? | Hinrich Foundation – Policy makers are currently in a conundrum over how best to engage economically with China. Underlying much of the debate is the assumption that China is a huge and rapidly growing market. While that has historically been true, the falling import intensity of China’s economic growth suggests a more limited market than foreign exporters assume
A number of Hong Kong oligarchs brought up in mainland China, initially made their money on smuggling materials into China. This was back when the country was closed off. This included luxury goods, oil, truck tyres, machine parts or antibiotics. For instance, casino magnate Stanley Ho made his first fortune during world war II and the aftermath smuggling luxury goods from Macau into China. So it didn’t surprise me to see Fujianese Chinese connections involved in smuggling crude oil into North Korea.
New York Times YouTube channel
The New York Times Visual Investigations team used a mixture of old school investigative journalism and open source intelligence techniques championed by Bellingcat to blow open the story.
A Brief History of Semiconductors: How The US Cut Costs and Lost the Leading Edge | by Employ America | Mar, 2021 | Medium – As the industry matured and the competitive environment changed, the policy framework shifted as well. Since the 1970s, industrial policy has been incrementally replaced by a capital-light “science policy” strategy, while mammoth “champion firms” and asset-light innovators have replaced a robust ecosystem of small and large production-focused firms. While this strategy was initially successful, it has created a fragile system. Today, the industry is constrained on one side by fragile supply chains narrowly tailored to the needs of a few firms with enormous investment moats, and on the other side by the many asset-light design firms who are unable to generate or capture process improvements – this going into reversal is going to offer a bonanza for semiconductor manufacturing equipment vendors
Hong Kong Cantopop singer Eason Chan cuts ties with Adidas after brands reject forced labour – probably one of the odder celebrity backlashes against western companies not wanting to use forced labour in its supply chains. Chan is a Cantopop singer, he has low to no exposure to the mainland. His fan base is in Hong Kong and amongst the Hong Kong diaspora. On balance, give the age profile most of his fans will be ‘yellow’ in terms of their viewpoint. He is doing himself no favours by putting his head over the parapet. His fan base will shrink because of his hyper ‘blue’ alignment. I wonder what brought about his performative outrage. It carried more weight than Hong Kong politician promising not to wear another Burberry scarf until the brand backtracked on using Uighur picked cotton.
Luxury Brands Are Moving Into Online Stealth Mode. But How Can They Measure Success? – At the beginning of this year, Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta signed off its social media accounts not with a bang, but with silence. The move, which was followed by the removal of its content on its Weibo account, was praised by many and marked a decided shift in the wider luxury market between brands that choose to be more inclusive in mindset, and those that are taking a more exclusive approach with their customers – I was surprised when many luxury brands went on to social media in the first place. On the flipside it makes complete sense for premium streetwear brands like Moncler.
H&M boycott in China intensifies over Xinjiang supply issue | Marketing | Campaign Asia – The statement surfaced on social media yesterday and sparked an online storm of opinions. Comments on Weibo included “get out of Chinese market”, “the company’s clothes sucks, and I will no longer buy”, and “I heard that you are boycotting Chinese cotton, then I will boycott your products”. Chinese actor Huang Xuan has also terminated his relationship with the brand, according to reports. On his Weibo account, he posted a statement that said he was “firmly opposed to any attempt to discredit the country”. Those calling for a boycott claim that international sanctions against China are unjustified and based on “biased reports in foreign media and from international human rights campaigners”. – its a day with a ‘y’ in it, which means that China will be waging war by other means. The most recent high profile example would be the way Lotte was run out of China. The sooner the west start boycotting the Chinese market and supply chain the better. More at the FT – H&M and Nike face China backlash over Xinjiang stance | Financial Times
Technology
Molson-Coors Discloses Cybersecurity Incident that Affected Production in 8-K Filing | Data Privacy + Cybersecurity Insider – Molson Coors Beverage Company (the “Company”) announced that it experienced a systems outage that was caused by a cybersecurity incident. The Company has engaged leading forensic information technology firms and legal counsel to assist the Company’s investigation into the incident and the Company is working around the clock to get its systems back up as quickly as possible.
China and the UK test HSBC Bank divided loyalties in Hong Kong — Quartz – If HSBC Bank were to spin off its China operations, it wouldn’t be the first bank to reconfigure its ties due to a changed political situation. In the 1980s, the British banks Barclays and Standard Chartered pulled out of direct operations in South Africa amid global pressure against the apartheid regime. The bank’s actions “highlighted…the fact that financial institutions were not unassailable when faced with public pressure on ethical issues. HSBC Bank is betting that the screwing China will give it is still better than the west, more from the FT here: HSBC Bank shifts ‘heart of business’ to Asia in latest strategy revamp | Financial Times
Book Review: Rural Youth Key to China’s Human Capital Crisis – Caixin Global – Rural China is so systematically neglected that it has become nearly invisible not only to most outside observers but even to urban elites within China. But this “invisible” part of China will determine its economic future. Instead of sitting in an ivory tower advising Chinese officials what to do, the authors and their team at Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program (REAP) have been helping China’s rural youth on the ground in practical and realistic ways
Exclusive: Scientists at top British universities worked with Chinese nuclear weapons researchers – Scientists at Britain’s leading universities – including Cambridge, Edinburgh and Manchester – have worked on a string of projects with researchers at China’s nuclear weapons research institution – it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were helping the Chinese build a new generation of warheads but its not a good look
Consumer behaviour
Cultural Differences May Affect The Outcome Of A Pandemic: New Research : Goats and Soda : NPR – Tight cultures tend to have had a lot of threat in their histories from Mother Nature, like disasters, famine and pathogen outbreaks, and non-natural threats such as invasions on their territory. And the idea is when you have a lot of collective threat you need strict rules. They help people coordinate and predict each other’s behavior. So, in a sense, you can think about it from an evolutionary perspective that following rules helps us to survive chaos and crisis
Notice, Shift, and Rewire: Starting the Journey to Dismantle White Supremacy | by Anna Madill | Feb, 2021 | B The Change – interesting read. What struck me is how much this goes against efficiency and effectiveness in terms of everything one would have been taught in business management, to focus on what I’d call internal quality. It is predicated on a sufficiently slow rate of environmental change / client demands in order to allow this to happen. It is an ideal work environment (and I don’t mean that in the terms that they define it) but in a more general sense. It goes against the grain of the observations of James Gleick in his work Faster
