Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.
Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.
Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation
Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.
It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.
The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.
Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. Zhang is a senior legal academic who works at the University of Hong Kong, which until recently got a front row seat to China disputes with both the European Union and the United States. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter if it was viewed to fall under the purview of ‘state secrets’. With the new security law that has come in, definitions have been left deliberately vague and wide-reaching.
So why is Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism of interest?
If like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Around the time I worked on one client, they were shamed on the evening TV news and some of their staff disappeared for questioning by the authorities. They then reappeared months later looking haggard and worn out. It is new important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines.
Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. The rise of antitrust was as much down to bureaucratic politics of the Chinese government.
What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit.
Zhang talks about how regulatory hostage taking and public shaming was a tool of the regulatory authorities from early on.
The book then looks at foreign reactions to Chinese government from EU investigations to current US-China trade restrictions and discusses how China weaponised its regulatory frameworks making ‘hostage taking’ trans-national in nature.
Last of it’s type?
Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. More on Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism here. More book reviews here.
Why trends and fads came about as a post, was that I was scrolling on my LinkedIn notifications on a Saturday (I know, I know I should keep my life free of this crap on the weekends.) Creative Review were talking about how trend forecasting had become rusty, but that got me thinking about did they understand the difference between trends and fads?
A good deal of what I see described as trends are fads, which then got me wondering about how do I help people differentiate between trends and fads.
Why has it become harder to differentiate likely trends and fads?
I would argue that the difficulty in differentiating likely trends and fads is down to a few reasons.
The nature of culture has changed. It has become massively parallel in nature. This has in turn impacted trends
Culture has become elongated in nature.
The changing nature of culture means trends surface and submarine again over time.
Mass to massively parallel.
Culture has become massively parallel. Culture and its nature has been transformed over the last century. There were a few sub-cultures at best that mattered at a given given moment in time.
The idea of the ‘teenager’ which was the first attempt to carve out a new generation was done in the post-war affluence of America and latterly European countries, Japan and Korea as economic development took hold. We might use different language now, but teenagers were the engines for the sale of goods and services:
New music
New spaces (gaming arcades, fast food restaurants, coffee shops, instant messaging platforms, social platforms)
New fashion looks (mods, rockers, greasers, ravers, emo, gorpcore etc.)
At the time, the mass media helped facilitated the propagation of a mass culture. A few music publications, radio stations, newspapers and TV stations could make a break an artist. We can see this over time with the power of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin or Ed Sullivan in the US, Gay Byrne and Gerry Ryan in Ireland or Top of the Pops and Pete Tong in the UK.
https://youtu.be/Ep3t451Iv5Q?si=NRAzgP5SP_DJpBkq
Ed Sullivan introduces The Beatles.
Paul McCartney remembering the 1964 show.
However a combination of economic improvement and technology saw the mass media broaden with countless publications, TV channels, radio stations, websites and social channels until it is no longer ‘mass’ in nature.
Add to this, the world got smaller. Travel while still expensive became cheaper from the 1970s and 1980s onwards allowing more people to discover culture from elsewhere. And this was despite a massive surge in the price of oil due to troubles in the Middle East. So trends and fads moved around the world. Liverpool lads brought the ideas of sports casual dress from Spanish and French department stores, Japan borrowed various parts of Americana and streetwear, hip hop went around the world.
The connectivity from the worldwide web put this in overdrive. A world of culture opened up making things massively parallel, which allowed people to pick and choose their own cues. These choices gave us massively parallel culture and resulting trends.
Culture has become elongated in nature.
I have friends (and associates) in their late 50 and early 60s who DJ, surf, skateboard and do martial arts. These were people who remember club nights before house music let alone EDM, who can remember the first skate parks being built in the UK and knew of Stüssy because they were part of the original Stüssy tribe of interesting folks formed by Shawn himself.
People who might listen to Radio 4 on occasion, but are still cooler and more culturally relevant than many teenagers. Probably more culturally relevant than their college age kids.
This cultural elongation is something that we’re starting to see gen-z obsessed agencies. A good example of this is ZAK Agency’s Learn To Time Travelwhite paper. Part of it has been down to life stages happening later for each generation; or not at all.
Moving out on your own.
Settling down.
Having children.
Buying their own home.
Being able to afford to retire.
Part of it is down to the world norms changing. I seldom have had to wear a shirt and tie, or suit to work. My Dad wore a tie right up until the mid-1980s to work, because that was expected of him. He wasn’t a banker, but a shipyard worker. Athletes can potentially stay in peak condition for longer, all made possible by the modern world.
Despite what we believe about technology usage, for those who are 70 or younger, income influences tech adoption as much as age related knowledge. Giving all of us access to as much culture as we can mainline.
Fads
If you hear the phrase ‘TikTok trends’ that are fast-changing, it’s a clue that it’s likely to be a fad unless by some blessed miracle it sticks. In the 20th century, fads were often easier to spot and the 1970s in particular were a gold mine for the fad spotter.
Fads appear, go large and then disappear. They are ethereal in nature, rather like most TikTok trends. The Pet Rock is a prime example with its swift rise and demise.
Pet Rock
Northern California-based copywriter Gary Dahl came up with the idea of a pet rock. Essentially adhesive googly eyes attached to a rounded pebble that might feel pleasing in your hand for skimming across a body of still water like a lake. Dahl’s insight came from sitting with friends in a bar and listening to complain about the challenges of pet care.
Dahl started off his project by writing a satirical pet care manual for a rock, based on the kind of care guide a veterinarian might have for a new dog owner. This included on tips for when your rock was feeling anxious.
The rock came with the instruction book for care, it sat in a nest of long wood shavings inside a card carrying crate with a handle on top and seven vent holes on each side.
Dahl put his product into the market in August 1975. Dahl was apparently selling 10,000 rocks a day and it became a gag gift over the Christmas period with estimates on sales as between 1 million to 1.5 million genuine rocks. By February 1976, they started to need discounting. Dahl ploughed his profits into opening the Carry Nation’s bar in Los Gatos, which is still there.
The Pet Rock was clearly a fad, yet it did inspire my junior school art teacher to get us to collect stones from a visit to the beach, stick googly eyes on them and varnish the whole lot. Some were brought home and the rest sold at the school fair. Dahl wasn’t able to patent his idea. As far as I know around 2010, someone started an abortive business replicating Dahl’s packaging design and rocks.
Dahl built his freelance copywriting business up into an agency that produced radio and television ads for local businesses including wireless providers, technology firms and dot coms. The reason for this was that Campbell had been living in the Silicon Valley area as it grew up into what we know today. Dahl even wrote the For Dummies guide on advertising in 2001, which is still available today and is a good primer on the process. Dahl passed away in 2015.
Trends are resurgent, surfacing and submarining over time.
Take the idea of cocooning in our own soundscape as an example of a resurgent trend. If you go on the public transport headphones or AirPod type earphones are ubiquitous. If you go and work in an office, you will see a similar set up. Prior to the rise of the AirPods it would have more likely been Sony or Bose over-ear headphones rather than wireless AirPods.
Back in the early 1970s, my Dad took the train down to London while listening to a collection of cassettes he’d made of his record collection. The trip was one he occasionally made for the shipyard where he worked at the time. It was a long slow train journey. We had a bulky luggable cassette player similar to the one below and he wore a pair of headphones bought in Liverpool that looked like sturdy ear protectors. The tape machine was more designed for basic portable recording such as a manager recording a memo to be typed up. They were occasionally pressed into service in a similar way to my Dad’s usage.
Around about the same time, luggable stereos were being made by European manufacturers including Philips and Grundig. Soon after that Japanese manufacturers like Sharp, Sony and Panasonic released their own versions which were very successful. These were cemented into culture by young Americans who valued their portability and bass response.
https://flic.kr/p/oCT3F
Beck at Yahoo! Hack Day with a boom box
Boomboxes weighed a lot, Sony provided an alternative with the Walkman and eventually the Discman. These were portable cassette and CD players respectively which offered personal listening with headphones. These were briefly joined by MiniDisc players.
Around about the time when the web started to take off, you had early MP3 players such as the Rio series of machines and the CreativeLabs Nomad. But things took off with the Apple iPod, offering a new level of personal audio freedom.
Eventually a confluence of the smartphone as digital Swiss Army knife and BlueTooth wireless standards provided us with our current personal audio freedom.
Cocooning is just one example. As far back as the post-war era we have seen military surplus clothing go in and out of style. Thrifting has taken a similar route with it driving the iconic grunge look of the early 1990s and the Dpop shopping of today’s young people.
We could quite easily come up with a list of trends that never die. The annual trend reports tweaking the relative volumes on these trends over time to match economic and socio-cultural changes.
Six hundred pairs of Nikes in a custom-built house
The six hundred pairs of Nikes are owned by a Japanese lady who now is head of marketing for Ugg in Japan. Previously she’d spent over 20 years in sales and marketing for Nike. Her house was designed around her shoe collection and the double height ceiling in the room to host the six hundred pairs is worth watching for alone. There are more than six hundred pairs. Some of the stories about the six hundred pairs of shoes are fascinating such as how Nike Air Max 95s were responsible for thefts and muggings in Japan.
Tom Ford
Everyone needs a Tom Ford in their life. From personal life hacks to interior design and grooming all in the space of a few minutes. This sounds as if the interview as done around about the time that Ford was bowing out of his fashion and beauty businesses.
Gibbs SR toothpaste
Along with Close Up and Aquafresh; Gibbs SR toothpaste was one of the toothpastes I remember most from childhood. Unilever bundled it eventually into Mentadent and it was quietly taken off the UK market in 2018.
I didn’t realise that Gibbs SR toothpaste was the first advertisement shown on British television. UK law had changed the previous year allowing for commercial television. The creative behind the ad was Brian Palmer of Young & Rubican (now VML).
So, I was listening to the Uncensored CEO podcast Jon Evans when he had Les Binet and Sarah Carter on. One of them mentioned that the above ad was tested recently and scored top scores. It might be novelty, but is unlikely to be nostalgia that drove this test score. What’s more interesting it that Y&R managed to get the creative so high performing decades before the kind of tools that we have now.
Hyper-reality
Keiichi Matsuda took what Apple would call spatial computing to its logical conclusion in this 7 year old film HYPER-REALITY. There are a number of clever aspects to it. Watch when the device reboots in the supermarket and the glyph wearing criminal who escapes identification by the system.
In reality, hardware will restrict how useable that these products will be. Which is the reason why the Apple Vision Pro looks so cumbersome. More related content here.
John Glenn
Great interview with Mercury and Apollo programme astronaut John Glenn covering different aspects of his experience as an astronaut. We hear how astronauts became so involved in the engineering and safety aspects of the Mercury and Apollo programmes.
My mind cast back to one of the first modules I studied at college. There was a lecture on the role of complaint resolution as part of customer services. The idea was that effective complaint resolution engendered trust in a customer service function and was more likely to increase brand loyalty and recommendation to other people. In reality Ehrensberg-Bass Institute have explored this area in more depth and found that customer penetration is more important than customer loyalty.
US National Archives: Approaching Logan Airport. 05/1973 by Michael Manheim
I suspect that the benefit in complaint resolution is more around a premium brand positioning rather than the business benefits of loyalty. This is an interesting frame to consider AirHelp’s global airline ranking. Unlike SkyTrax that focuses on experience, AirHelp weighs its ranking heavily on complaint resolution.
British Airways came 82nd out of 83 airlines assessed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has flown with them over the past four years.
Many airlines that would have a high SkyTrax service ranking, didn’t perform as well on complaint resolution.
So there wasn’t a clear correlation between experience resolving lots of customer complaints or a highly evolved service offering.
Emerging car brands scrutinised by Bloomberg and Grant Thornton | Manufacturer – “Chinese brands are dominating the scene with good products, big screens, and impressive interfaces.” However, the challenge arises when considering pricing, as Chinese EVs like the XPeng’s G9 SUV was 72,000 euros competing against the likes of BMW and Mercedes. So they’re going to find it very, difficult and it’s going to come down to price.” Dean pointed out MG’s success in the UK market was achieved by hitting exactly the right sweet spot in terms of pricing. The MG ZS, the second-best-selling battery electric vehicle in the UK, is priced at an average of £31,000, making it compelling in terms of competitive pricing especially in a country where consumers are not fiercely loyal to specific brands. – interesting reading. The way for Chinese vendors to win would be to have Chinese incentivised lease financing, particularly in a time of higher interest rates a la Huawei in the telecoms markets.
American men are dying younger. – by Richard V Reeves – I just don’t think this can be addressed in the current climate of othering and privilege. It would be like trying to hold a meaningful discussion on immigration a few decades ago.
Xi in Nanning; Shanghai and Beijing real estate tweaks; More Hong Kong bounties; Sim Love | Sinocism – the Hong Kong puts bounty on the head of US citizen who has criticised the Hong Kong government in the US. They are all ethic Chinese. So China and the Hong Kong government think that ethnic Chinese wherever they are should be loyal to their respective administrations – in essence their face is their passport. Not even Israel does something similar with the the world’s Jewish community, or Ireland with our diaspora.
Innovation
Quantum Breakthrough: Caltech Scientists Unveil New Way To Erase Quantum Computer Errors – Researchers from Caltech have developed a quantum eraser to correct “erasure” errors in quantum computing systems. This technique, which involves manipulating alkaline-earth neutral atoms in laser light “tweezers,” allows for the detection and correction of errors through fluorescence. The innovation leads to a tenfold improvement in entanglement rates in Rydberg neutral atom systems, representing a crucial step forward in making quantum computers more reliable and scalable.
Innovation signalling has some similarities with its counterpart virtue signalling in terms of authenticity in terms of behaviour and the projected image. An organisation looks to demonstrate its ‘high degree’ of innovation with actions and projects with the external image firmly in mind. There may be an internal learning, or business benefit to this as well, but the image projected is the main objective.
https://flic.kr/p/2iRfgVg
As I wrote this post a collaboration between Moncler and Adidas dropped putting innovation signalling at its core involving both involving NFTs and AI generated designs and models.
Open Sea has an NFT where the owner gets a Rolex watch on submission of the NFT. This has since been extended into the US market by CRM Jewellers in Miami.
AI has its place for instance, simulating and optimising product design based on physical properties. NASA has used AI for just this purpose in conjunction with additive manufacturing techniques for small production runs of parts needed for the space programme.
It’s not just the luxury sector
This might read like I have been picking excessively on the luxury sector. I use them as exemplars mainly because their examples are so high profile. But there are examples in other sectors. For instance, Walmart partnering with IBM to use block chain to track individual lettuce heads from farm to customer trolley.
There were similar partnerships that IBM hatched with Unilever, Nestlé and Dole Foods as well, but the fruits of these projects were not publicised to the same degree.
You can find similar posts here and this metaverse discussion paper that helps to cut through the blockchain and metaverse hype.
An Outfit to Match Your Chain – Google Drive – Highsnobriety has interviews where these intersect with luxury and fashion. It will be probably handy for a couple of client presentations
