Ged Carroll

Category: marketing | 營銷 | 마케팅 | マーケティング

According to the AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. This has contained a wide range of content as a section over the years including

  • Super Bowl advertising
  • Spanx
  • Content marketing
  • Fake product reviews on Amazon
  • Fear of finding out
  • Genesis the Korean luxury car brand
  • Guo chao – Chinese national pride
  • Harmony Korine’s creative work for 7-Eleven
  • Advertising legend Bill Bernbach
  • Japanese consumer insights
  • Chinese New Year adverts from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
  • Doughnutism
  • Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
  • Influencer promotions
  • A media diary
  • Luxe streetwear
  • Consumerology by marketing behaviour expert Phil Graves
  • Payola
  • Dettol’s back to work advertising campaign
  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders
  • Dove #washtocare advertising campaign
  • The fallacy of generations such as gen-z
  • Cultural marketing with Stüssy
  • How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp
  • Facebook’s misleading ad metrics
  • The role of salience in advertising
  • SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? advertising campaign
  • Brand winter
  • Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting
  • Lovemarks
  • How Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer’s needs and tastes
  • Korean TV shopping celebrity Choi Hyun woo
  • qCPM
  • Planning and communications
  • The Jeremy Renner store
  • Cashierless stores
  • BMW NEXTGen
  • Creativity in data event that I spoke at
  • Beauty marketing trends
  • Kraft Mothers Day marketing
  • RESIST – counter disinformation tool
  • Facebook pivots to WeChat’s business model
  • Smartphone launches

  • Chip implanted everywhere + more

    Marc Andreessen: ‘In 20 years, every physical item will have a chip implanted in it’ – Telegraph – but is it needed? I could see this idea of a chip implanted as being touted as a sign of biblical end times. Also how cheap can chips go and solutions like QRcodes and barcodes work fine to do the same job in many applications already. The gains of a chip implanted are often marginal at best

    Browsers Are Starting to Block Ads by Default | Motherboard – interesting move, especially when one thinks about the trend of manufacturers like Sony (and others) to load their machines with crapware for money. Privacy is increasingly looking like a luxury good, which should be of concern to everybody.

    Three Chinese state-owned banks using lie detectors and customers don’t know it | SCMP – to improve marketing, efficiency and security. I had heard of this also being experimented with in western financial institutions. As if banking interactions weren’t stressful enough as it is, now there is this? I find the marketing aspects of this darker and even more scary (paywall)

    WhatsApp Video Calling Coming In Update, Leak Reveals | BGR – Skype compete. Given Skype seems to be lost in the wilderness as a product and WhatsApp has focus this could get interesting. For me only Skype’s low international calling rates for when I have to dial into conference calls or phone relatives keep it on my device

    Aethra Botnet Attacks WordPress Sites – Wordfence – back doors don’t work

    Samsung launches 6-inch, all-metal, super-thin Galaxy A9, in China | VentureBeat | Mobile | by Evan Blass – this is from the usual Samsung playbook of having large amount of variants to go after all aspects of a given market. In this case the Galaxy A9 seems to be going after the Huawei P-series devices. More about Samsung here.

  • Things that made my day this week

    Dragon Ball characters appear in Ford anime ad specifically made for English-speakers 【Video】 – unfortunately it is unavailable in the UK, there must be some kind of geography-related images rights licensing issue with Dragon Ball. That’s a shame as it looks like a beautiful bit of work for Ford

    Great idiosyncratic video that talks about the kind of product design considerations customers need to think about in buying a quality bag. The less seams that you have, the less points of failure that you have in the bab. More design content here.

    Pressure Scale – great iPhone hack as a HTML 5 web app. It uses the iPhone’s own sensors to provide a pressure gauge. This goes to show the Swiss Army knife nature of smartphones.

    Quentin Tarantino has a reputation for interpolating other film makers work, that he picked up from his time working behind the counter of a great video rental store called Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. When it closed down he bought their complete catalogue of content. Some of this won’t have made it to digital formats such as Blu Ray or streaming. I presume that he’ll never be bored, with that comprehensive a film library.

    Hungry for more clicks, Zomato is running a killer marketing campaign on porn sites – PornHub has also done similar campaigns with the likes of Diesel jeans. There is a wider ethical discussion to have around this.

    Where the line falls will depend on the customer base and the corporate brand.

    Whilst it might be right for Axe or Lynx male grooming products, that doesn’t mean that Unilever should do it because of its corporate stance and the knock on effects to the likes of Dove.

    On the other hand, a brand that thrives on controversy like Dolce & Gabbana might be a much better fit.

  • My 10 most popular (trafficked) blog posts of 2015

    These are the ten most trafficked posts of 2015, in reverse order:

    Throwback gadget: Nokia N900 – I tried Nokia’s first Maemo-based phone. It was amazing how useless it was as one forgets how linked the modern smartphone is to web services. Despite these problems one could see the now lost potential of the phone. More on the Nokia N900 at GSMarena.

    Generational user experience effects – a meditation on user experience from the analogue era to the present

    2015: just where is it all going? – I had a think about where digital and technology would go over the next 12 months or so. You can see how I did here.

    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation – by June this year, the product rationalisation that Yahoo! underwent provided ample opportunity to show that it’s core offering was collapsing in many international markets. Rather than it being a market wide condition, the data pointed to Yahoo! specific issues.

    Traackr – beyond the buzzword event – a post about how a diverse range of organisations from Coca-Cola to a luxury jeweller were thinking about influencer marketing.

    Throwback gadget: Made 2 Fade (by KAM) GM-25 Mk II phono pre-amp and mixer – a review of a mixer that has been lost in dance music culture history, yet was responsible for much of its popularity outside the super clubs.

    That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis) – or why everyone from the mainstream media to PR Week got the story so wrong about Jeremy Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear.

    An experiment on fake Twitter followers – I spent some of my hard-earned cash to see what difference if any buying fake followers had. I chose Twitter as a channel mainly because it would be easier to measure any impact, otherwise it could have just as easily been Facebook followers, Pinterest subscribers or Instagram followers. My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system.

    O2O (online to offline) or what we can learn from the Chinese – East Asia is way ahead of marketers in the west in terms of multi-channel marketing particularly the integration of of online with offline aspects.

    48 hours with the Apple Watch – hands down the most popular post of this year on my blog was my short experience living with the Apple Watch. I felt that it was a nicely designed, but un-Apple experience. It also convinced me that the use case for wearables wasn’t here yet.

    That’s the end of my posts of 2015.

  • Zoetrope + other things

    Zoetrope based on a number sequence

    Amazing zoetrope based on Fibonacci sequence made using 3d-printing – just mesmerising. The strobing effect reminded me of the strobe edge on the Technics SL-1200 turntable. The zoetrope were moving images before film or television existed. This embedded the zoetrope in a wider steam punk aesthetic that harked back to the Victorian and Edwardian age. John Baird used some of the visual effects that a zoetrope has in the electro-mechanical mechanism of his original television system.

    Road readers programme

    Honda Turns Car Time Into Story Time With ‘Road Readers’ Program – Print (video) – Creativity Online – smart work by Honda. It deals with the ‘are we there yet’ yet problem that emanates from the back seat during medium to long journeys. It is a world away from the focus on driving experience that car marketing usually does.

    Zegna

    Zegna celebrates family togetherness with multi-generation gift guide – Luxury Daily – really nice idea that ensures your family gets presents that you’d actually like. It deals with the awkwardness of intergenerational gift giving exemplified by Bart Simpson socks and Old Spice gift guides. For Zegna’s perspective it also allows the brand to build a relationship with the children and grandchildren of current customers. Its an interesting approach to building those mental models for the brand. More luxury-related content here.

    Bizarre Tinder ads

    Amazon Looks To Recruit Engineers With Bizarre Tinder Ad | Motherboard – this looks at first glance an attempt to target brogrammers. I wonder what was the insight that drove this whole campaign? The whole thing feels so odd and out of context. Alongside the nazi branded tube train to promote Man In The High Castle this feels one of Amazon’s odder marketing decisions.

    Vogue China

    It is interesting hearing about the role that Vogue China played in ‘building’ the fashion industry in China including getting Chinese models on the world stage. Why had they been ignored previously?

  • Cullinan SUV + more things

    Sneak Peek at Rolls-Royce Project Cullinan “SUV” – Luxury Insider – the approach to teasing the Cullinan is more like the way (Android) smartphones are marketed. It is interesting that car makers now leak this photography. As a teenager I remember that there was quite an industry in photographers taking pictures of engineering mules and models being tested in disguise. Hans G. Lehmann’s photography in Car magazine of the late 1980s were legendary. More on luxury here.

    Discogs Relaunch Record Store Database ‘VinylHub’ – hyponik – good to see that Discogs is not sitting on their laurels. Independent record stores are using Discogs to reach customers around the world. It makes sense for Discogs to build a database about real world record stores that make up its seller backbone.

    New proposal for Yahoo’s turnaround: get rid of Marissa Mayer, 75% of staff, and lavish perks – Quartz – they would struggle to keep the other 25% of the staff left. It is the antithesis of the Silicon Valley culture. You couldn’t run a business like Yahoo! in the same way as you can run tired enterprise technology companies using the private equity or Computer Associates formula. Despite what you might think Yahoo! relies on innovation. PHP and Hadoop are just two of the technologies that have come out of Yahoo!. If you don’t have talent, you go from having a profitable business with an older client base; to a loss making business with even less of a client base. Websites go downhill a lot faster than milking enterprise software users for maintenance contracts.

    Michael Tsai – Blog – Apple Pushes iPhone 6s Pop-up Ads to App Store – which indicates that Apple’s customer upgrade cycle might be too long for Apple’s finance department. It also suggests that Apple might be moving away from the pre-owned market being an on-ramp to iPhone usage.