Ged Carroll

Category: luxury | 奢華 | 사치 | 贅沢

Over the space of 20 years, luxury changed enormously. The Japanese had been a set of new consumers for luxury, but in terms of numbers they hadn’t eclipsed the US as the biggest market for luxury.

China’s ascent into the WTO (World Trade Organisation) made a lot of business people and politicians a lot richer. China challenged the US in terms of luxury market size. On their rise, Chinese consumers changed a lot in their sophistication as they educated themselves on luxury consumption.

These new consumers picked up new traits such as wine drinking. This also meant that luxury goods became new asset classes as Chinese money looked to acquire only the best. Chinese culture in turn impacted luxury design. Chinese new year became more important than Christmas.

Then there was the second generation money. Young rather than old consumers. Consumers who were looking for something less formal, either because they didn’t wear anything but streetwear or they worked in the creative classes rather than the traditional professions and high finance.

The industry had traditionally avoided rap artists and R&B singers, now Jay Z and Beyonce are the face of Tiffanys and Fendi had collaborated with Rihanna.

They no longer wanted to have to wear a jacket and tie to have afternoon tea at the Mandarin. They took an eclectic look more attuned to the Buffalo Collective than Vogue Italia.

You had hybridisation with the street to create a new category of luxe streetwear in a way that also owes a debt to football casual terrace wear and the pain.

Now you have Zegna badge engineering approach shoes from alpine brand La Sportiva and Prada has done a similar thing with adidas’ iconic Stan Smith tennis shoes. Balenciaga with their Speed Sock looks like a mix between Nike’s flyknit football boots and the Nike Footscape sole.

As I have written elsewhere on this blog:

Luxury has traditionally reflected status. Goods of a superior nature that the ‘wrong sort’ of people would never be able to afford. Luxury then became a symbol that you’d made it. In Asian markets, particularly China, luxury became a tool. People gifted luxury products to make relationships work better. It also signified that you are the kind of successful business person that partners could trust. You started to see factory managers with Gucci man bags and premium golfwear to signal their success. Then when the scions of these business people and figures in authority were adults, luxury has become about premium self expression.

  • 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

  • Sean Coombes reinventing his label

    The New York Times has an interesting article about how Sean Coombes is trying quite successfully to walk his urban fashion label out of the cliche it had become. Though his business is worth some 400 million USD annually, Coombs has seen the writing on the wall of the scene and rather than cater for the limited market of Ali G impressionists is trying to move more upmarket. The urban fashion scene has become as tired as the sound of R&B and rap music, in the way that 80’s rock got into treading the same groove over and over again to make money.

    In the US, labels like Ecko, Sean John and Phat Farm have been co-opted by preppie clientele. There is a certain irony in this as Phat Farm often aped preppie and collegiate looks for the hip-hop community. Now Phat Farm has been co-opted by desperate brands such as Motorola looking for a hook-up, Russell Simmons sold out leaving the company to an international conglomerate. Brands like Gap and Abercrombie and Finch have stolen much of the look. While in Europe, genuine workwear brands like Carhartt and Dickies that were part of the real prison yard baggy look have combated the new pretenders by acknowledging their fashion customer base and participating in associated activities like music and extreme sports.

    Coombs is using his womenswear range as a Trojan horse to get into the department stores that otherwise would not have carried his usual clothing range. More on fashion here
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  • 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. 

  • Marketing crisis

    Marketing crisis in competence and capability: Creative Business has a great leading article based on research conducted by The Marketing Society and McKinsey called Marketing in Crisis.

    When you think about the marketing crisis, you also need to think about the people providing the feedback. Other board colleagues might have a stilted or inaccurate view of what marketing does. But at the very least there seems to be a marketing crisis in miscommunication.

    A second aspect of this marketing crisis report is to ask what’s in it for The Marketing Society and McKinsey. The Marketing Society would be looking to professionalise marketing and differentiate from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. McKinsey would look to deposition marketing teams so that it can sell additional services.

    Key takeaways from the report include:

    • Marketers are seen as creative but undisciplined
    • Marketers don’t understand their own businesses
    • In marketing led businesses such as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), marketing is too important to be left to the marketers
    • Marketing attracts the wrong kind of people
    • Marketers are undisciplined
    • Marketers are not interested in the P&L

    So this also might explain many of the client horror stories that I hear from agency veterans in PR, advertising, design and branding.

    The Buy Buy Generation

    Young Japanese women are consumers with a high disposable income, publishers target them with ‘product porn’ style magazines focusing on luxury handbags, shoes and clothing. UK publishers are now looking to copy this format. What surprised me about this article is that it did not draw comparisions with the product porn gadget magazines targeted at young men in the UK like Stuff and T3.

    Anybody walking the streets of London will have realised young Japanese are the most stylish people on the planet and avid collectors of the latest thing. On a related note the British boutique with a Japanese name Oki Ni have teamed up with the Adidas vintage connection to do two cool exclusive versions of Adidas’ ‘Torsion Special lo’ trainers here and here. These were the ultimate ravers trainer when they originally came out in the early 1990’s, they fit like a glove, are light, good cushioning, came in a multitude of colours (my originals were predominantly purple) and have a sole that will grip to any warehouse floor.

  • Five star living

    Trendwatching is back with a pattern that they call five star living, where property developers and high-end resort or hotels sell a home away from home to the super dumb but loaded.

    They put a whole pile of luxury living brand experience about it, but what they are seeing is the window dressing not the trends in five star living. Five star hotels are capital intensive and unless you have high occupancy all the time, expensive.

    Apartment complexes can draw on the service aspects of five star hotels; but farm off a lot of the capital risk to apartment purchasers and still charge them for premium rate services. Five star living is about hotels hedging their bets in a post-September 11 world. I realise that this is a less romantic and stylish explanation of this trend, but its all about the money.

    Mandarin Oriental have built suites in their Hyde Park hotel which would be a great example of five star living. Luxury brands like Giorgio Armani have extended into interior design to try and capitalise on this trend in combination with luxury property developers. 

    You also have people like the Trump Organisation extending themselves from real estate into hotel services and tourism in the opposite direction with its golfing themed resorts. More five star living related content here.

    Apple spoof product lifecycle article which can be found here. Its funny because there are a lot of underlying themes which are close to the truth as consumers see it.

    Finally, the New York Times have got a great interactive presidential election guide that they are going to keep updated. So go to this link, have a play and bookmark it until November. Interactive data like live dashboards in business allow you better understand the data. It makes for shareable content and is sticky in nature.