Ged Carroll

Category: jargon watch | 術語定義 | 용어의 정의 | 用語の定義

Jargon watch as an idea was something that came from my time reading Wired magazine. I found that in my work terms would quickly spring up and just as quickly disappear. So it made sense to capture them in the moment.

The best way of illustrating jargon watch is by example. I came across the term black technology through mainland Chinese friends. One of the key things that Chinese consumers think about technology products is the idea of ‘black technology’. This makes no sense to your average western reader. It equates to cool and innovative.

The term itself comes from a superior technology featured in a Japanese manga series plot. As an aside the relationship between Chinese and popular Japanese culture is becoming increasingly attenuated due to Chinese nationalism.

What might be black technology this year might be humdrum in six months as the companies quickly catch up. Black technology is a constant moving target, but generally its sophisticated and likely has a cyberpunk feeling to it.

I keep an eye out for jargon like this all the time, hence jargon watch. I find this content in my professional reading and in the sources that I follow online. What makes something worthwhile to appear here is purely subjective based about how I feel about it and how much I think it resonates with my ideas or grabs my attention. A lot of British youth culture doesn’t make it because it doesn’t have that much of an impact any more beyond the UK.

  • Black business

    The term black business is an Asian term in terms of origin and use. In the west, corporate and social responsibility has been on the minds of management teams for a while. It is also starting to get traction in Asian companies that are exposed to international markets. It doesn’t seem to trouble some Japanese companies however.

    Black business as a term, isn’t about environmental issues, though I imagine that they probably won’t rate great on that either compared t their peers. 

    Instead black business focuses purely on how they manage and treat their employees. A black business is a dismal place to work. 

    A black business is described as a company that overworks its employees, harasses them, and/or pays significantly low wages for the work provided.

    Charges against black businesses include death by overwork. While this is a Japanese buzzword, it doesn’t apply strictly to Japanese companies or their workers. Death by overwork happens in multinational companies. International advertising agencies have a reputation for it. 

    Work cultures in Chinese companies would be typical of black business attributes. These would generally fall into the kind of wolf culture seen at firms like Huawei. The 996 working style prevalent in Chinese tech firms, would be considered overworking members of staff. Chinese fashion online retail company Pin Duo Duo has seen a number of employee deaths through overwork. 

    Foxconn saw worker suicides soar due to pressure on employees and their difficulties adjusting to life on huge campuses. 

    Many Chinese construction firms working abroad routinely pay their Chinese employees six months late. This is due to the hamfisted mess that payments are made from the main contractor to sub-contractors.

    Workers rights in China are routinely suppressed by unions in concert with the employer and the local government.  

    More information

    Could Japan’s Latest Buzz Word Get You Sued? Lawyer Weighs In | Rocket News 24

  • Clone

    I wrote a bit about my experience speaking with a consumer electronics salesperson on a post I wrote for PR Week. It was this conversation where I heard the phrase clone used.

    When I heard clone, I thought of Dolly the sheep, or the lumberjack ‘castro clone’ subculture in the gay community that borrowed from 1960s rockabilly and drove the Levi’s 501s as fashion movement. It also had a clear influence on grunge fashion of the early 1990s

    However n this context it meant a piece of consumer electronics badged with the brand name of, and sold by a famous Japanese brand that has been made in China by an ODM (original device manufacturer), and where many of the critical  components were not sourced from within the industrial group of the Japanese brand. It was a negative term implying that the product was in many respects counterfeit or unauthentic.

    The concept in itself isn’t a new idea. During the golden age of Japanese hi-fi you saw similar ODM relationships. The most egregious example is from some 30 years ago it was well-know that  Ferguson’s Videostar machines were re-badged JVC models. Show a picture of a JVC HR-3300 to your average British person of a certain age and they might tell it was a Ferguson Videostar or a Baird. Grundig and Philips shared a similar relationship back in the 1980s.

    What is interesting is the corrosive effect that the clone accusation must have on a brand, particularly when it comes from a figure like the sales person I spoke to who would be considered by the consumer to be a domain expert.  I gnaws away at reputations based on quality and design over decades and explains how globalisation and digital convergence has destroyed giants like Panasonic, Sony, Pioneer and Sharp.

    This contrasts sharply with the perception of Apple, which uses a similar ODM-based supply chain yet has managed to grow from strength-to-strength. More gadget related content can be found here.

  • Expandables

    BBC documentary series The Men Who Made Us Fat is a fascinating mix of health, marketing history and the law of unintended consequences that has affected the modern diet. One phrase struck me as being a quite interesting. Expandables was a term to use a category of food products that would be part of multi-pack or buy-one, get-one-free deals. The products couldn’t be economic substitutes for instance discounting one type of meat would have it substituted over another meat-type.

    In the case of food products it is usually items that people graze on, so this usually ends up not being the healthiest foods. The idea of grazeable supersized foods came from the middle of the last century in Chicago. There David Wallerstein came up with the idea of supersizing popcorn servings. Wallerstein came up with a behavioural change experiment as business idea based on the insight of that people might want to buy and eat more popcorn, but were simply ashamed of buying two bags.

    Wallerstein was successful in his experiment. Wallerstein was appointed by Ray Kroc to the board of McDonalds in 1968 and then rolled out larger servings in McDonalds restaurants. So in that respect one could consider Wallerstein the inventor of expandables.

    Another McDonalds business person Max Cooper, who was franchisee is credited with inventing bundling – packaging a high margin drink and french fries with a low margin burger. What McDonald’s now call their ‘combo meals’ or ‘extra value meals’. This cemented the role of expandables in food sales.

    Unfortunately, this fits in with an unfortunate evolutionary trait, that humans are hardwired to consume high energy foods. And if the consumer has paid for it, they will eat it. Expandables are considered to have driven obesity, (there is some statistical correlation in obesity levels that suggest correlation).

    More information

    Zoe Harcombe’s blog has a complete summary of the TV episode to put expandables in context.

    More related posts can be found here.

  • Green fatigue

    Green washing to green fatigue

    The idea of green fatigue encouraged me to reflect on FMCG marketing in the 1980s. In the late 1980s we’d started to see mainstream brands selling ‘green’ products: washing-up liquid and clothes detergents that were more friendly to the environment. Concerns about phosphate-based detergents in water supplies, organo-lead compounds in petrol and the effect of chloro-fluoro carbons on the ozone layer drove a wider consumer awareness of the environment setting a zeitgeist that was ripe to sell more environmentally conscious fast-moving consumer products.

    Sales of these products dropped as the recession changed consumers focus from being environmentally responsible to paying down personal debt and worrying whether they would have a job next year.

    Ipsos research

    According to Ipsos as reported by Le Monde; an increasing number of consumers feel ‘too much is being done about climate change‘. A combination of ‘green wash’ products.

    Green conspiracy

    It was interesting to see that environmental groups seen to be part of a green conspiracy (just look at your typical Greenpeace campaign and it kind of makes sense). Greenpeace themselves have admitted that they won’t let the truth get in the way of their campaigns. They have also ran some questionable lobbying campaigns in Africa as documented by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Manifesto.

    They also have a feeling that consumers greening efforts don’t move the needle in the first place. Le Monde describes this as green fatigue. Again a good deal of this is down to the nature of the way green campaigning is delivered. What is less apparent is whether there is a wider political aspect to this. Is there a fundamental divergence in values from the progressive consensus around globalist responsibility for climate change?

    More related content can be found here.

    More information

    It Ain’t Easy Being Green: First Signs Of Eco-Fatigue – WorldCrunch in partnership with Le Monde

  • Innovation starvation + more news

    Innovation starvation

    Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute – in his article Innovation Starvation author Neal Stephenson talks about the decay of innovation in the west. Innovation starvation is about an inability to get big things done – I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy. Innovation starvation has multiple causes from a research mythical man month type problem due to increasing specialisation, lawyers, search engines, pressure groups and activists have a lot to answer for

    Economics

    More Conflict Seen Between Rich and Poor, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com

    Hong Kong

    China denounces ‘Hong Konger’ trend – The Washington Post

    How to

    Use the Ten Second Rule to Cut Impulse Purchases

    Innovation

    New details surface on the UPU: A next-generation CPU architecture | ExtremeTech

    [CES] Sony Develops Self-luminous ‘Crystal LED Display’ — Tech-On!

    Japan

    What’s happening in Japan right now?: Social Games in Japan – interesting that this is part of mobile gaming

    The Myth of Japan’s Failure – NYTimes.com

    Korea

    Samsung Merging Its Bada OS With Intel-Backed Tizen Project – Forbes

    Luxury

    What Luxury Brands Should Learn From Dolce & Gabbana’s Hong Kong PR Disaster – Forbes

    Media

    Microsoft hits pause on web TV service because shows cost too much – SplatF

    TVShack Admin Fights Extradition To U.S. On Movie Piracy Charges | TorrentFreak

    CES: Survey Finds Traditional TV Viewing Is Collapsing – Forbes – this is more about more personal, less social (within the family) media consumption and also consumers are exhausted by TV innovations that don’t matter. I still rock a Sony Trinitron from the late 1990s

    Online

    Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998 – Paul Graham on what the web used to look like when I first started off in agency life. The site looks curiously mobile friendly!

    Security

    Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA

    Cars: The Next Victims of Cyberattacks – IEEE Spectrum – if this doesn’t scare the bejeezus out of you, it should

    Wireless

    Apple Suspends iPhone 4S Sales in Mainland China Stores – NYTimes.com

    CES 2012: Mr. Elop makes bold statements about Nokia in the Windows Phone space | ZDNet – ok what is important here is what Elop isn’t saying. No real reasons around Android and they seem to be having a problem building an on ramp that gets their ecosystem to support them

    Groklaw – Nokia Moves To Quash Barnes & Noble’s Letter of Request the ITC Sent to Finland Re Discovery ~pj – oh dear, sounds like Nokia and Microsoft have been caught looking a bit shady. Even if there is nothing here, it feels like there is which isn’t good from a reputational point-of-view

    Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone – NYTimes.com – this looks like a classic bit of PR-led storytelling – where you give the journalist the bread crumbs that lead him to the story you want to write. The most interesting bit of this is Microsoft  (whom I presume was the client) was willing to throw its other partners such as HTC and Samsung under the reputational bus to big up Nokia. Yet a lot of the hardware issues are due to Microsoft dictating specs to the hardware manufacturers.