Ged Carroll

Category: fmcg | 雜貨業務 | 소비재 | 食料品事業

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.

  • Kraft mothers day marketing + more

    Kraft Mothers Day marketing

    Kraft’s marketing has left a lot to be desired in the past couple of years partly due to the way the brand has implemented ZBB, but the Kraft Mothers day campaign running in the US is genius. It is a brave campaign that could fail due to wokeness or social conservatism. And they still went ahead and did it anyway. More FMCG related content here.

    Feedi RSS search engine

    Feedi Search Engine – part of the importance of media literacy is finding quality sources and anything that encourages adoption of RSS readers has the potential to be a good thing. If you need a good RSS reader, I can recommend Newblur which I have been using for a number of years. The reason why I like it is that you can train it to surface content of interest over time. It doesn’t machine learning to guesstimate it, but you have to make active decisions, which I think is a healthier balance.

    Game of Thrones collaboration

    MGM Resorts International – Winter Is Coming – MGM and HBO did a great tie-in to celebrate the start of the final Game of Thrones season. It is well worthwhile clicking on the link and going through their case study to see what MGM Resorts did.

    ZTE’s cyberpunk Nubia Alpha smart watch

    ZTE’s Nubia Alpha smart watch looks like something out of a cyber-punk novel. I love what ZTE have tried to do with the aesthetic. The key challenge is what looks like a shockingly bad user experience based on this video unboxing and preview. Wearables are a relatively new space and fair play to ZTE for attempting something this ambitious.

    WePresent

    WePresent – lovely creative brand building work by wetransfer. It is great the way WeTransfer consistently support fantastic creative. It is also a really amazing 404 error message page.

  • UN Huawei + more things

    UN Huawei must be given equal opportunity to bid for 5G business | total telecom – Houlin Zhao, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, told reporters from Reuters that 5G security remained of paramount importance but that there was no evidence to suggest that the use of Huawei’s network equipment should be restricted – the hasn’t read the UK government report on Huawei security flaws – the coincidence that Mr Zhao is Chinese is overlooked in the article. This also ignores issues around Huawei software engineering across its product range of network equipment with extensive backdoors built in that Huawei refuses to remove. The UN Huawei statement highlights the declining trust in UN bodies that have undergone state capture by China. More related content here.

    Apple’s Computer Vision Team is working on using Depth-based Touch Detection for Games & Virtual Keyboards – Patently Apple – depth based touch detection is important beyond the Minority Report style virtual keyboard interface. It could allow Apple engineers to design completely new ways of processing locative and contextual information mapped on the real world. It also means that we’re likely to be doing embarrassing gestures in the future. We will be closer to the idea of a web-of-no-web where the boundaries between the real world and the digital world are blurred and in some cases merged.

    Burger King under fire for ‘racist’ Vietnamese chopsticks ad | The Drum – really surprised Burger King made this mistake so close after the Dolce & Gabbana China debacle. One key consideration is that Yum Brands China that owns Burger King and KFC in China is a completely separate business. So Burger King might not be a truly global learning organisation. This happened in one of Burger King’s smallest markets – New Zealand is which is probably why it managed to sail under the radar of global brand vetting until it was too late.

  • China is the big winner + more things

    China is the big winner from Europe’s Brexit chaos – which is probably why the UK will get a shitty deal in phase II. China is the big winner because:

    • It ensures its inbound investment into the UK becomes more important. China can have more influence and spend less money proportionally than they had to do before
    • It weakens the EU a bit, in particular amplifying the power of just two partners in the bloc: France and Germany. It means that the northern bloc including the Netherlands has less of a voice in the union creating opportunity for division
    • European power projection is reduced. As is European soft power
    • China is the big winner, but Russia also has similar benefits on a smaller scale

    More on Brexit here.

    McDonalds acquires Israeli company Dynamic Yield | Silicon Angle – really interesting purchase by McDonalds

    Naspers to Separate Tencent Stake, Web Assets in Dutch Listing – Bloomberg – this is just the kind of listing one would have expected in London

    Michael Avenatti charged for attempted extortion of Nike – Business Insider – interesting how a celebrity level lawyer is on the end of this case

    The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2019 | Fast Company – interesting how APAC companies are at the very top

    LOEWE on Instagram: “When @danielnorris18 is not playing baseball, he loves to climb into his van and hit the open road. Wearing the new #EYELOEWENATURE…” – interesting where Loewe is going with this campaign, crossing the lines between sports marketing, streetwear and luxury

    Materials science is helping to transform China into a high-tech economy – technique-wise very similar to the west. Back over 20 years ago we weren’t using brute force in the labs I worked in but computer-assisted formulations. You did some trials, put the results in. Put in the desired results and then the computer worked to bring you towards an optional formulation using fourier analysis

    Pinterest’s IPO filing, annotated – Digiday – nicely put together if no suprises, worthwhile as a reference / 101

  • Hasan Minhaj and other things that caught my attention this week

    Supreme by Hasan Minhaj. I hadn’t watched much of Patriot Act mainly because there is more content that grabs my attention on Netflix. This clip is a great dive into hype culture by Hasan Minhaj – often the best humour is that with uncomfortable truths in it.

    Amazon playbook on Amazon Vine. Gartner L2 made this useful clip on the effective use of Amazon’s Vine programme.

    Key take-outs (my observations in italics):

    • Amazon don’t allow vendors any editorial controls over reviews and look to keep them honest and authentic
    • Vine seems to be really good in the process of accelerating product launches for vendors
    • Use Vine BEFORE Amazon’s sponsored products and sponsored brands advertising function; by the sounds of it pretty similar to the way you’d have previously used PR in a product launch marketing campaign
    • L2 recommends ensuring the efficacy of the product; but Vine COULD be used as the last gate in the innovation process before you go gangbusters. Lots of negative reviews could still save you on a massive production run and huge advertising spend

    Sophie Cope (Electronic Frontier Foundation) on digital privacy and the surveillance state. Great video on the World Affairs channel – interesting how this has become such a big issue amongst ‘wonkish’ audiences. More privacy related content here.

    Lynx (Axe for non UK audiences) have latched on to the ASMR meme that has been popular for a couple of years. It feels weird to watch, I am not sure what the strategic insight(s) were for this work beyond the fact that beards are sticking around for a good while yet.

    https://youtu.be/x9T7BJ-jf6o

    The last thing is the positive experience I had with American Express this week when I lost my card. I spoke to a real person on a decent phone line who quickly canceled my old card sent me out a new one that arrived in 48 hours.

  • Brexit approaches + more things

    Sky, Unilever and McDonald’s slash UK ad spend as Brexit approaches | The Drum – not terribly surprising. I would expect other changes as Brexit approaches. Changes in warehousing or even moving teams offshore. From a marketing perspective there is a compelling argument for a counter-cyclical strategy, which is how Proctor and Gamble built their brand in the US during the great depression via sponsored radio plays and serials which gave us the ‘soap opera’. The theory would go something like this. As Brexit approaches, media spend declines. Which means for flat or increasing spend your share of voice increases. Market share growth is directly related to share of voice.

    China’s lunar new year spending growth slowest since 2005 | Financial Times – That was an increase of 8.5 per cent from last year, a sharp drop from 2018’s year-on-year growth of 10.2 per cent and the slowest rate of growth since such data were first tracked, in 2005. – interesting numbers. China is seeing weakening capital investment due to recent interest rises, paired with declining consumer sentiment and consumer spending growth. It impacts global economic indicators and also the Communist Party of China plan for a ‘dual circulation’ economy. (paywall) More related posts here.

    Opinion | China’s Online Censorship Stifles Trade, Too – The New York Times – I only agree to a point on this, China’s services, in particular Baidu who went to head-to-head with Google won out in China. This was as much down to Google’s lack of preparedness to invest in search indexing that would grow at the same rate as the Chinese net. Censorship then provided them an excuse to get out of China. Amazon China is still way behind JD.com and Alibaba and its market share has been going down for years. That doesn’t mean that these services shouldn’t be blocked in international expansion as part of the trade dispute, but also don’t discount US hubris so lightly