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

  • Magic Leap + more things

    Magic Leap has shared an interesting concept video. Magic Leap that has technology which provides a more immersive experience, layered on top of the real world. It would be impressive if Magic Leap manages to pull it off. A demo are notorious for being the technology equivalent of snake oil salesmen who sell but can’t deliver. There’s even a name for it: vapour ware. I have no idea yet if Magic Leap is vapour ware. But the engineering challenges in terms of optics, software, power management and hardware are immense. More on web-of-no-web type experiences here.

    Once they have nailed the device, there is a requirement for content development. Lots of it. This also has implications for story telling.

    The Rise and Fall of China’s economy is a provocative title. The title was designed to be really good link bait rather than accurately reflecting the content of the video. The video actually does give a good background on how the Chinese economy has developed on a macro-level in a way that the interested non-economist would understand.

    I like the way Nestle has brought on board a gingerbread man character to advertise Coffee Mate in the US. There has been a move away from mascot-type figures in marketing in general. This is a really nice counterpoint to that trend.

    Nikon seem to be reaching out to millennials with this profile of a skateboard photographer, it is likely to appeal to a contingent of generation X too.

    It targets a very different type of photographer who would wouldn’t be impressed by the traditional photography ‘personalities’ from Rankin to Dave Lee Travis (Leica paid him good money back in the day, apparently he was interested in bird-watching).

    This is a world away from the first skating video shot by Stacy Paralta back in the mid 1980s, with grainy low-fi VHS cameras.

    Really nice mobile experience: Sync! Illumination lets you watch Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade from home on multiple phones

  • WeChat Life Report

    Chinese consumers literally live a WeChat life as shown by this great  collection of consumer behaviour data on WeChat. Over the past year WeChat has expanded the services that it provides to include Skype like conference calls, which changes and expands the behaviour in this report. (Presentation on Slideshare)

     

    Key takeouts

    • The ubiquity of WeChat can’t be over stated with over 93% usage in tier one cities. It will grow over time in lower tier cities for a couple of reasons. There will be a network effect that will reach out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers and countryside. Secondly, WeChat services will start to permeate out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers. You will then have a virtual cycle due to network effects and ever-increasing ubiquity
    • Call and message data shows how it binds the diaspora back to friends and loved ones in China. The Chinese talk about ‘near and far networks’. But WeChat closes the gap, meals can be shared with photos and videos. Voice messages popular with older users also helps with asynchronous communications over difficult time zones
    • Chinese people tend to exercise during the week, rather than at the weekend according to WeChat fitness data. The idea being for rest is an insight and an opportunity for fitness and sports apparel companies
    • Male shoppers spending 30% more than female shoppers  was an interesting statistic emblematic of WeChat life. Generally men are not as enthusiastic a shopper as women are. They have to save for a home, a car and marriage. My take was that women offer WeChat a growth opportunity in payments; if it can address the underlying cause of this disparity
    • The average social circle on WeChat at 128 is very close to the Dunbar number

    More on WeChat here.

  • Nudges + more things

    The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad – NYTimes.com – how loss aversion and other behavioural traits  (or nudges) can be used as methods for social change and political change. These elements have already been used in UK government projects and the advertising world. They are the reason why games are addictive and so is swiping on Tinder. (paywall) – more on consumer behaviour including the impact of nudges here.

    Chat App Firm Line Focuses On Services After Adding Just 1M MAUs In 3 Months | TechCrunch – I don’t think that this is as bad as the TechCrunch seems to think. US focused services and China focused services are about the advertising eco-system and scale.  LINE hasn’t really tried to blow out the market penetration beyond Asian markets yet. It does really well in places like Thailand, Taiwan and Japan. It is also a media franchise rather like Sanrio, given the licenceable nature of its sticker characters like Brown. Also ARPU (average revenue per user) is as important as numbers – profit share vs. market share. This has been demonstrated in other sectors such as the smartphone market, where Apple has historically earned 70 to 90 percent of smartphone profits from just 15 percent market share.

    U.S. Technology Device Ownership 2015 | Pew Research Center – good data points on device usage by US consumers.

    Hong Kong pupils at risk of ‘becoming like Foxconn workers’ in education system, says former principal – it is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, that kids will be put in such a high stress position by the Hong Kong education system. The second reason is that Foxconn as become a verb for stressful conditions. That is damaging for both Hon Hai Electronics and their customer base. The idea of damaging stressful conditions being so tightly linked with the company name is damaging. It’s like a really bad version of ‘Hoover’ and vacuum cleaner linkage.  (paywall)

  • Social relationship platforms + more

    Most Marketers Don’t Use Social Relationship Platforms | Forrester  – I am not that surprised, social relationship platforms such as Hootsuite’s user experience isn’t exactly intuitive. They’re hard to use for the teams that I have worked with on campaigns and their pricing policy isn’t transparent. Instead it’s more like feeding your wallet through a salami slicer. Also with the changes in social platforms, social relationship platforms make less sense

    End of the Line? Messaging app in big trouble as active user growth stalls | Techinasia – really?

    Flipboard’s Fanfare Fades as Executives Exit, Sale Talks Stall – Bloomberg Business – the writing was on the wall with Flipboard back when I ran into some of their people in Seoul a few years ago

    Inside Innoway, China’s $36 million government-backed startup village – in just two years, Beijing city planners transformed a no-frills walkway in the city’s northwest into a symbol of China’s internet ambitions

    Mossberg: The Apple TV gets smart | The Verge – wait for the next version basically

    Hong Kong is the happiest place in China, according to WeChat posts – Hong Kong is home to the happiest people in Greater China, closely followed by Taiwan

    The Architecture of Communication: The Visual Language of Hong Kong’s Neon Signs | NEONSIGNS.HK 探索霓虹 – great article on decoding Hong Kong signage design

    (in)visible (de)signs | Designs that often go unnoticed – architecture of communication: the visual language of Hong Kong’s neon signs

    A movement in the making – Dupress – some nice slide ware on maker economy

    IBM to Buy Weather.com, But Not the Weather Channel – NBC News – surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Great case study for IBM, surprised if AccuWeather doesn’t receive offers after this

    The Cheapest and Most Expensive Places to Live in Luxury in Asia – WSJ – the cost of living in luxury has come down in Mumbai making the Indian financial capital the cheapest place in Asia to live it up, according to a new report that examines the price of top-end goods and services

    BMW Icons Guide. – I like the thought put into the icon design

    Taxi groups unite to fight Uber with $250m start-up – FT.com – interesting meta taxi app (paywall)

  • On innovation

    Before I start to reflect on innovation, let me tell you story from my my old agency days. Back in the day I used to work agency side on the Microsoft account. Unlike a lot of my colleagues who worked on it full time, my workload was usually tangental to everything else that I had going on. My senior colleagues had worked on the business for a long time and became what you might term institutionalised. They had a definite dogmatic world view, which I was wasn’t comfortable with as I felt it lacked the objectivity required to give good client counsel.

    That world view was baked into the descriptor of the agency, that we provided ‘innovation communications’, that is focused on communications programmes for innovative organisations. For certain people innovation became defined purely in terms of what Microsoft was doing at that time. For instance, winning a client that had a new business model would challenge mainstream ‘gourmet’ food brands like Kettle brand crisps (chips in US parlance) – saw colleagues berated over e-mail by senior leadership for bringing the wrong kind of innovation into their consumer brands part of the business.

    Businesses change, no more so than the technology sector and agencies with anchored positions are left behind in spite of their loyalty as clients need fresh ideas.

    Steve Jobs (WIRED Japan - August,1995).

    I was thinking about at their dogmatic view of innovation when I read this quote from Steve Ballmer talking about Microsoft’s landmark investment in Apple back in 1997.

    They’ve done a great job. They’re a company that’s done a great job. If you go back to 1997, when Steve came back, when they were almost bankrupt, we made an investment in Apple as part of settling a lawsuit. We, Microsoft made an investment. In a way, you could say it might have been the craziest thing we ever did. But, you know, they’ve taken the foundation of great innovation, some cash, and they’ve turned it into the most valuable company in the world.

    It probably would have been enough to make a couple of my former colleagues extremely uneasy to say the least, especially given Steve Ballmer’s hard charging reputation. One thing that Ballmer misses is that even though Microsoft couldn’t vote with those shares, it was potentially as well-made a deal as Jerry Yang buying into Alibaba – if Microsoft had held those shares for long enough. Regardless of this, the Office unit of Microsoft more than made up for this investment with the amount of profit they made over the next few years on versions of Mac Office.

    More information
    Steve Ballmer: Microsoft investing in Apple ‘might have been the craziest thing we ever did’ | BGR