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.

  • Glade e-tailing + more stuff

    Glade fills packaging pillows with its scent in creative product sampling campaign with Walmart | Contagious – Glade fills packing pillows in Walmart e-commerce orders to provide scent samples and drives a double digit uptake in online sales (which is huge in CPG). It also provides Walmart with a uniquely pleasant e-commerce experience. More retail related content here.

    Canadian charity SickKids put together this amazing ad. The production is beautiful. The ad plays with idea of super powers. It focuses on the self esteem and resilience of the children.

    Guinness and Japanese women’s rugby. Not a combination that I would have normally thought of. But this ia lovely advert that pays tribute to Japan’s first women’s rugby team. Again its another ad that focuses on resilience and dignity. Guinness has had a long history with promotion round rugby as sport.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE_mVvJyWQY
    AMV BBDO & Grey London

    Luxury brands have done a good job of tapping into modern culture from streetwear to gaming and everything in between. Frieze and Gucci partner on a mini-documentary looking at the history and origins of techno. Part of Kim Jones’ success at Dior has been his ability to draw on culture like this. This is the reason why he draws from 90s street wear and even got Shawn Stüssy to collaborate with Dior.

    This history of techno is an attempt by Gucci to do a similar meld with culture. It pulls on Detroit’s manufacturing history, pre-dominantly based around the US automotive industry. Detroit always had a distinct culture. Black people in Detroit were known to spend more money on their outfits in the 1960s and 70s. It was a birthplace for the Motown sound.

    A six year old Korean YouTuber buys a house. Korean public reactions are interesting. The Korean influence sector is large. What is particularly interesting is how profitable mainstream content is. The UK influencer scene is much more skewed towards beauty, fashion and hospitality.

    Child influencers will hopefully have a happier ending than many child actors.

  • Illegal spy camera + more things

    Illegal spy cameras are still easy to find in Shenzhen’s gadget paradise | Abacus – this will make you very paranoid. The size of the devices now mean that you can have illegal spy cameras everywhere. Smartphone adoption has driven the quality of small cameras up and their size down.

    Jollibee acquires US-based Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf | Marketing | Campaign Asia – this is huge. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is a credible Starbucks competitor with a substantial footprint and great tasting coffee. It has a substantial presence in the US and Asia, with a particularly big footprint in Korea. Korea is one of the major coffee consuming nations in Asia.

    Inside Amazon’s pitch for new audio ads in music on Alexa devices | AdAge – Amazon sells 15 and 30 second radio type adverts. It looks like a modern version of Rediffusion style radio that piped content directly into consumer homes in the post war period. Cable radio used to be a thing in the United Kingdom Barbados, Malaysia, Malta, Singapore and Hong Kong….

    Forever 21 Sent Some Customers Atkins Diet Bars And People Are Very Angry | Buzzfeed News – I wonder what persuaded Atkins to come to Forever 21 with this tie-up. Is there something in their customer base demographic profile that isn’t obvious to me? I could see why at first glance Forever 21 could have seen the product drop as a ‘delight’ for customers. But in retrospect the sensitivity is understandable. It is also interesting how Forever 21 took the brunt of consumer displeasure on what was a co-promotion with Atkins.

    Extinction Rebellion breaks into fashion in Stella McCartney sustainability campaign | The Drum – Extinction Rebellion gets co-opted by fashion brands. The FT have an interesting interview with Greta Thunberg about how XR and he wider climate change protest movement spiralled out of control

  • Celine + more things

    Work & Co.’s clean looking website for Celine. Its a beautiful piece of luxury orientated user experience for Celine. It was founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana. Celine was originally a made-to-measure children’s shoe business. In 1960, the brand decided to pivot, focusing its business on a ready-to-wear fashion brand for women with a sportswear approach. The brand offered a range of leather goods such as bags, loafers, gloves and clothes. By the 1970s Celine had boutiques in Switzerland, Monte Carlo, the US, Canada and Hong Kong. They were bought by Bernard Arnault in 1987 or 1988 around about the time that he took over at LVMH to build it into the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. More luxury related content here.

    I have deliberately ignored a lot of the brands trying to cling on to the proverbial vapour trail of the Apollo space programme; but this video caught my eye because it showed the amazing engineering chops of Sony. Just look at the detail-orientated design. You can understand why Sony was held in such high esteem as a brand when you watch this video.

    Dentsu (the agency network formerly known as the Dentsu Aegis Network) released its CMO survey (registration wall). From the almost 40 pages of content, one paragraph struck me as being the single most important take out:

    CMOs are often simply not incentivised to deliver long-term change. In terms of performance metrics, they’re primarily accountable for growing the customer base (see Figure 3), while medium/ long-term brand health and digital transformation are way down the pecking order. Coupled with the fact that, in many markets, CMOs often ‘enjoy’ the shortest average tenure of anyone in the C-suite (around three and a half years in the United States, for example) there is little reason for many CMOs to look beyond the near-term.

    2019 Dentsu Aegis Network CMO survey (sample size 1,000 CMOs)

    If you take into account the relatively short tenure of CMOs, it looks like a toxic brew for businesses in the medium to long term.

    It’s like as if this opinion piece was written with marketing in mind…. Watermelons vs. Sesame Seeds | World Bank.

    Interesting academic research paper that reflected on the triad actions against Hong Kong’s civil society and democracy movement in 2014, which seems sensible to revisit. Resurgent Triads? Democratic mobilization and organized crime in Hong Kong – Federico Varese, Rebecca WY Wong, 2018  

  • Ultra deep watch + more things

    OMEGA SEAMASTER PLANET OCEAN ULTRA DEEP | Watches News – I love some of the design details in this Planet Ocean Ultra Deep such as the lugs. I was less convinced by the aesthetics of the dial, the hands and the lack of protection given to the crown on the Planet Ocean Ultra Deep. More on design here.

    So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press | Literary Hub – way before Samsung Korea was innovating the shit out of the world, here’s the story

    The Redirect Method – its rare to get this much of an inside view inside a campaign, well worth reading

    NHS teams up with Amazon to bring Alexa to patients | Society | The Guardian – the push here seems to be accessibility; but a call centre is even more responsive than Alexa is

    Shiseido’s Beauty App Promises Perfect Skin — at $92 a Month – Bloomberg – Shiseido is targeting women facing “the dilemma of valuing skincare but struggling to find the time to find the perfect formula,” Shigekazu Sugiyama, president of Shiseido Japan, said at a news conference in Tokyo. Research by the company shows that the more hectic the lifestyle, the greater the fluctuation seen in complexion, he said. 

    Optune’s cylindrical device mixes and dispenses a personalized formula twice a day, with as many as 80,000 different combinations. The product’s software, available as an iPhone app, takes photos of the user’s face in order to detect skin conditions. The data is analyzed together with sleep rhythms and menstrual cycles, as well as external factors such as weather and air pollution, in order to deliver the right mix of serums.

    Unilever tackles marketing bias with DNA tests | WARC – The exposed group who perused their personal DNA results and participated in the immersive training recorded a 35% decrease in unconscious stereotyping when measured against the control group. 

    Similarly, Santos revealed, the exposed group also logged a 27% increase in original thinking measured against their peers in the control group. 

    Such an insight builds on a growing slate of evidence that the part of the brain associated with stereotyping influences the cognitive activities that are needed for creativity, too.

    Podcast: WARC’s David Tiltman On Marketing Effectiveness – great listening for the lunch hour on advertising effectiveness

    Nomads travel to America’s Walmarts to stock Amazon’s shelves – The Verge – “If somebody likes a certain scent or how something works, they become loyal to that item, even if just the packaging has changed. They can no longer find that item in a store, and Amazon is one place they’ll look for it. It’s people like us who travel around that can find it.”

    Mediatel: Newsline: The scourge of short-termism comes from the top – “The Media sector has several examples of companies that placed short-term earnings growth over long-term investment and saw their earnings and, ironically, share price suffer. RELX (the old Reed Elsevier) suffered a collapse in its share price, which took several years to reverse, after the market realised previous management had underinvested to boost earnings growth to meet LTIP plans. On the other hand, companies that invest see returns to shareholders. Sky, which famously prioritised organic investment over shareholder returns and meeting earnings targets, eventually was bought out at a big premium to its historic share price”.

    How 5G will affect marketing communications | Advertising | Campaign Asia – so adtech will slow up the theoretical speed of 5G, this is all very depressing

  • Chinas booming streetwear scene + more

    Inside Chinas booming streetwear scene – Inkstone – great video on Chinas booming streetwear scene that’s morphing into someithing very different

    Tesco Is Said to Work With Israel’s Trigo on Cashierless Stores – Bloomberg – if Chinese cashier less stores experience is anything to go by, this might not be a good idea

    ‘Adapt or die’ – Martin Sorrell’s message to ‘Pavlovian’ ad industry holding companies – Mumbrella Asia – S4 Capital’s low overheads and a cheaper wage bill due to the average employee age being 25 at Mightyhive – the programmatic firm – and 33 at MediaMonks, the production house, meant it could deliver greater bang for the buck than the networks – so its not a smart marketing play but a manpower cost play? We’re better run because we employ cheaper staff? Sorrell gets made to look like a chump in this article; I’d also suggest that he does his homework looking at effectiveness and creativity more closely

    Opinion | A Major Police Body Cam Company Just Banned Facial Recognition – The New York Times – interesting move by Axon. The US seems to be doing to facial recognition what the EU did to online data with GDPR

    FCB parts with Nivea amid rising tensions, including allegations of homophobic remark | AdAge – client reported said ‘we don’t do gay’ on agency call. That’s being leaked from FCB staff or freelancers

    Crazy/Genius: Are Influencers Frauds or the Future? – The Atlantic – the dystopian age of whuffie capitalism

    Nike Withdraws Products After Brand Partner Vexed China for Supporting HK | Jing Daily – Nike and the bullshit of brand purpose, especially when you contrast this to the Colin Kapernick campaign. When sales are lacklustre principles go to shit

    Huawei Personnel Worked With China Military on Research Projects – Bloomberg – looks like a mix of internal security work (analysing emotions in online video content, and external security on collecting and analysing satellite images and where 2.0 data. One also has to remember that Qualcomm has got a heavy national security background in the US. Given the current situation this news couldn’t have landed at a worse time for Huawei.

    Naomi Wu has an interesting discussion on professionalism versus engagement to maximise pay off on video. You need to have 2 million+ viewers to make the transition from 1080P to 4K worthwhile

    Carrefour sells 80% of China grocery business — Quartz – surprised they didn’t use China to jump start experience on e-commerce so they could take Amazon on in the home market. Talk about a missed opportunity

    China’s millennials are mourning the end of an era in online hook-up culture | Quartz – really interesting, given how early marketers like China Merchants Bank used drift bottle for its CSR programme. Its also unsurprising given China’s tightening grip on media distribution