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.

  • Semantic web + more news

    Semantic web

    Tim Berners-Lee Says the Time for the Semantic Web is Now – The semantic web is designed to be machine readable. The underlying technologies supporting the semantic web are used to formally represent metadata. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between entities, and categories of things. The most interesting thing about Berners-Lee’s interview is that he thinks that the semantic web will be closer to Google’s vision through database manipulation rather than folksonomy. I think you will need a combination of both for a semantic web that works

    China

    Masters of Media, New Media MA Amsterdam » Chinese low-wage workers disloyal for a reason  – Chinese workers sticking it to the man and wanting an independent China to kick multi-national mega corp. bootie

    Consumer behaviour

    Technology Can Be a Blessing for Bored Workers – New York Times

    Americans Trust Online News More Than TV | WebProNews – online trusted more than TV. Does this say more about the rise of online or the pitiful state of TV news journalism? I don’t know

    White working class ‘voiceless’ – A majority of white working class Britons feel nobody speaks for people like them, a BBC survey has suggested. Some 58% said they felt unrepresented compared to 46% of white middle class respondents to a Newsnight poll.

    Design

    Normal Room – home for global homes, wonderful lifestyles and fabulous interior design – Home – for interior design junkies

    Olympus Announces ‘World’s Smallest and Lightest’ DSLR – Consumer-SLR – but you dont want a camera thats too light because then you get issues wtih camera shake

    Ethics

    YouTube – Edison Chen Sex Scandal Apology – Hopefully this will finish once and for all the scandal and allow all the starlets to keep their jobs in the Asian entertainment industry. It would be a shame if Maggie Q had to retire :)

    I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Leadfoot | PBS – interesting post on the false green measure of lead-free solder

    FMCG

    Kit Kat Lucky Little – interesting japanese offline / online integrated marketing idea

    BBC NEWS | UK | Tate & Lyle sugar to be Fairtrade – In terms of size and scale, this is the biggest ever Fairtrade switch by a UK company, will the company get held to a holier than thou status and get beaten up on big food issues the way the post-Prius Toyota got beaten up by environmentalists about the conventionally powered cars that it still sells?

    How to

    7 Food Hacks to Stay Alert Without Caffeine | Zen Habits

    Ideas

    apophenia: Where HCI comes from (and where it might go)

    BIL Conference – Minds Set Free. – TED meets barcamp

    The New Economics of Brands – Harvard Business Online’s Umair Haque – Umair has an interesting article on how Google built their brand

    Innovation

    The World’s Most Innovative Companies | Fast Company – I am surprised that Facebook has scored so highly in this article and we don’t have any of the results of IDEOs commissions described

    Japan

    SMS Text News » Archives » Japan gets new MVNO and starts price war

    Michelin Gives Stars, but Tokyo Turns Up Nose – New York Times – if I go restaurant hunting in Japan, I want to be told by by the Japanese not some French interlopers the best places to go. Also Japan is more wired than most other nations on earth, why the dead tree edition instead of using viaMichelin’s much vaunted mapping on a mobile service?

    Tokyo Taxi Drivers get Ranked | Japan: Stippy – not all taxi drivers who pass The Knowledge are equal now Tokyo is recognising their most highly qualified drivers wtih a star system. Cool idea

    PingMag – Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex And Marriage In Japan – interesting author interview about changing society roles in Japan

    Luxury

    Digital World Tokyo | World’s first holographic RFID tag to stop Vuitton knock-offs

    Hoods Hong Kong Previously Opening Exhibition | Hypebeast  – Japanese label Neighbourhood opening their first store in HKG

    Marketing

    Brand persuasion wheel – Ulli Appelbaum – Six most common principles of human persuasion that can be used by marketers reward, threat, expertise, liking, scarcity and social proof

    Media

    Boom times for Chinese film, but what comes next?

    Two takes on essentially the same data set about Google’s clicks Google’s Paid Click Business Slipping – ComScore – Seeking Alpha

    British ISPs to Delve into Behavioral Ads, Too – deal by Phorm, these guys seem to have stepped up a gear. Prospective acquisition material by AOLGoogleIACMicrosoftNewsCorpYahoo?

    Telegraph Opens Tech R&D Lab | paidContent:UK

    Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution – O’Reilly Conferences

    Online

    SyncWizard – SyncWizard takes your contacts, appointments, music and documents and zaps them onto the Net. You get a MyStuff page. Using this web site all your personal information is in one password protected place available from any net aware device.

    Digg, Stumbled Upon Is there Room for Yahoo! Buzz

    Delver – Home – Interesting new social search project

    » Social Media in Russia sixtysecondview – David Brain on Russian netizens

    Welcome to Hello Kitty Online! – World of Warcraft puh, this is where online gaming is at. I can see a can of feline whoopass being unleashed on Disney’s Club Penguin

    Yahoo Attracts Younger Users, Google Has Bigger Spenders | WebProNews – interesting data on the demographics of different search engines user base

    New Yahoo tool gathers favorite Web places on mobiles – By Georgina Prodhan, European Technology Correspondent HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) – Yahoo, still fending off a $42 billion takeover bid by Microsoft, unveiled a bookmarking tool on Tuesday that lets users keep track of favorite Web topics on their…

    MediaPost Publications – Yahoo In Control Of Open Search – 03/04/2008 – Trusted web concept gets a bit of a bashing, but the truth is that user intent and context is hard to compute

    Shopnik – experiment in data organisation (thanks to my colleague Nathan for flagging this one)

    Local search in the UK

    Software

    Judge on privacy: Computer code trumps the law | CNET News.com

    Style

    Nike “St. Patrick’s Day” Wildwood 90 Free | Hypebeast – I love these St Pats inspired Nike trainers which are a hybrid of an old school top and the Nike free sole. Top of the morning to ya!

    Technology

    Stegen Electronics – Scandinavian hardware hackers are selling the first multi-region Blu-Ray players from Sony and Pioneer.

    OLPC Review – ICONEYE

    The Technology Chronicles : Apple shareholder meeting Tuesday – hippies try to hijack Apple AGM with green agenda

    The trouble with Steve – Mar. 4, 2008 – Fortune gets tall poppy syndrome and let’s a journalist loose with a scythe on America’s most admired company and its CEO

    Wireless

    400,000 unlocked Apple iPhones turn up on China Mobile – and more are in HKG, Singapore etc

    Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip – New York Times – cell phone design and consumer behaviour

    Ian Wood’s reports from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: Digital Evangelist: Ist day at MWC, Digital Evangelist: Day Two @ MWC and Digital Evangelist: Final Thoughts on Barcelona

    Europeans may be forced to pay for incoming cell calls – email your MP, email your MEP, email Gordon Brown: nip this in the bud

  • Pop Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company by Constance Hays

    The journey back north gave me time to read Constance Hays expose of the accidental success that is the Coca-Cola company Pop Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company.

    The book was a bit repetitive in parts and could have been reined in with some proper direction and editing, but that’s a problem of the editor rather than the author per se. Despite these flaws it provided an interesting insight into how a company had become such a colossal success in spite of itself and a parable on what happens when you try and shaft distribution channel partners.

    The Coca-Cola Company used interesting accounting arrangements and stuffed its distribution channel in order to deliver results. But this just moved revenue allowed them to book revenue early rather than creating business growth. In this respect is similar to the way IBM started selling rather than leasing mainframes to book sales early whilst personal computing ate into its business market. It used an off-balance sheet transaction to set up a separate distribution company and then buy up its partners bottling operations. Eventually this arrangement together with product disasters like New Coke and Dasani caught up with them

    Unlike Enron these weren’t bad people, they were just trying to keep Coke enjoying the kind of success it had always been in a changing world. The changing world increasing dominated by savvy consumers and operators like Wal Mart that have a touch of the night about them. Where it gets interesting is how someone like Warren Buffett could get taken for the ride by the Coca-Cola Company.

    It is full of high-drama like directors being called to meetings in distant aircraft hangars, being fired by key shareholders and then all of them going home in their own Gulfstream jets – quality, you couldn’t make Pop Truth and Power up, even if you wanted to.

  • Hallyu, Mociology & Microchunk

    Hallyu – The rise of Korea as a cultural hotbed (what’s called the Korean wave in some quarters) in Asia: from the sexiest mobile phones, or well written and produced cinema to K-pop (the Korean equivalent of J-pop: sugar-coated Japanese pop music that carries well in other Asian markets and performed by young performers so physically perfect, you wonder if Sony hasn’t a secret laboratory protected by ninjas inside of Mount Fuji to manufacture J-pop artists).
    Interestingly the Korean wave has not yet impacted on Japan in the same way as its neighbours, which was an interesting aside that came out of Richard Edelman’s keynote at the London presentation of his agency’s global trust barometer survey. Kudos to the New York Times Online (registration required).
    Expect to see more of hallyu: the mix of professional product perfection and the conservative nature of Korean culture produces a product that travels better around the world than much US culture.

    Mociology – The study of how mobile technology impacts with sociology from purchasing concert tickets to organising political rallies, raves and flash mobs. (Derived from mobile and sociology).

    Microchunk – A product or service sold traditionally as a package broken down into its constituent parts so buyers can purchase a la carte for consumer electronics to news feeds. Think sachet marketing for the digital world. People like 37signals have successfully built ‘microchunk’ applications and services (like Backpack) that do one thing extremely well and compete against other much larger software companies that take a bundled approach leveraging an effective desktop monopoly (mentioning no names). Kudos for mociology and microchunk to Wired Magazine. More related content here. 

  • G Collection

    Godiva have come out with some bling-bling chocolates designed by a pastry chef appropriately named the G collection. The G collection moves Godiva deeper into luxury territory than it already is. It also marks a change in luxury that started with premium fragrances. Luxury is now about (relatively) accessible experiences, rather than its traditional space of luxury goods. 

    This kind of chocolate is designed to evoke the bespoke chocolates that would be available at the best restaurants and hotels. Obviously Godiva might be making this at a slightly more industrial scale.

    Godiva is thinking about the G collection as a halo brand. Think about the relationship between a Mercedes-AMG GT and the Mercedes A-Class saloon. Both have prestige positioning, but there is a world of difference in price and what the car says about you.

    They were ostentatious in nature. They are statement chocolates. It is an ostentatious enough for a statement gift and highly Instagrammable. The G collection are impressive, well crafted but not necessarily any better than other premium chocolates. It is much more about appearance, or more precisely about being seen. That being seen is important. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had many people gift the chocolates to themselves so that they can show on their social channels that they are living their best life. 

    The real question is who is the customer base who would pay for these chocolates. If you are really that well off, you would be able to get access to an artisan chocolatier and that does make you wonder about the seriousness of the product launch. The prices are that eye wateringly expensive. Godiva are looking to have the chocolate equivalent of Cristal or a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, so expect to see them in a Snoop Dogg video soon. Kudos to Trendwatching for the heads up. More luxury related posts here. 

  • Swiffer

    Swiffer is a US homeware brand owned by Proctoer & Gamble. Proctor & Gamble had to do a product recall last week on a battery operated vacuum cleaner that they sold in the US market under the Swiffer name. The product could overheat in certain circumstances and they had received 14 complaints. I was impressed by the recall notice on the front of the website, it showed real class. Rather than hiding behind legalese, they put personality to it and even had it signed by ‘Kris from the Swiffer team’. This conduct is likely to help them protect their Swiffer brand and reduce panic amongst consumers whilst still ensuring an orderly recall of the product.

    I have pasted the copy below because I have no idea how long P&G will keep it on their website.

    Swiffer Sweep+VacImportant product news

    As you know, we are very sorry to announce that Swiffer will be voluntarily recalling our new product, Sweep+Vac. The Sweep+Vac is our new battery-operated vacuum cleaner brought to you in September 2004.

    We are pleased to reassure you that this product recall does not involve any of our other great Swiffer products.

    We have identified an isolated Sweep+Vac product quality issue. Click here for complete details.

    If you have this product at home, we are asking that you stop using the Sweep+Vac immediately and disconnect the Sweep+Vac by removing the top section of the handle. Click here for instructions on how to disassemble your Sweep+Vac.

    Even though this issue has been observed in just a few Sweep+Vac units, we have taken this voluntary measure to ensure the highest standards of quality, safety, and satisfaction by recalling Sweep+Vac as quickly as possible. If you have purchased a Sweep+Vac, we would like to provide you with a refund. Click here for refund instructions.

    We’d like to thank the initial consumers who alerted us to this problem. We are very committed to delivering the highest standard of product quality and take these types of issues very seriously.

    We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your continued support of Swiffer,

    Kris from the Swiffer team

    More related content here.