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
My listening has alternated between the comfort food for the ears of early 1990s dance on the Deconstruction label to streams from the Awesome Tapes From Africa blog. The Awesome Tapes From Africa blog collects African music that has been
It was interesting to watch Aldi and Kellogg’s duke it out on YouTube over copy cat brands.
In stark contrast, at the tail-end of the early 1990s recession; United Biscuits successfully took ASDA to court in 1997 for passing off over the supermarkets Puffin biscuits which were considered a copycat brand of UB’s own McVitie’s Penguins.
Web 2.0 is dead long live Fluent. O’Reilly Conferences finally left behind the web2.0 conference as the web as a platform became ubiquitous. It’s successor Fluent which is about extending out in different ways to create what I call the web-of-no-web.
The most interesting interview done at that where things move beyond the browser was Brady Forrest of PCH International (an Irish company based in Shenzhen).
The programmable world is interesting because of its potential, but it poses two problems that aren’t addressed:
Privacy
Information security
Also how will this programmable world / internet-of-things affect energy consumption, given that the internet and associated data centres created a spike in energy consumption? We can see how the blockchain and cryptocurrency consumes more power What will be the net net? Any energy gain is likely to be diffused and harder to address. More here.
This week I am reading Millward-Brown’s iPad magazine Perspectives on the iPad.
UK inflation: five graphs that show why prices are rising – Telegraph – quite a BusinessInsider-esque article. In short wages outpaced by Consumer Price Index, rising food price inflation, rising clothing costs attributed to the cold May, jump in energy prices with the exception of the filling station which was moderated by vehicle fuel duty freeze
mobygratis – great for not-for-profit and independent film makers and some interesting benefits for Moby in terms of distribution and incremental YouTube ad revenue / iTunes click to buy options
Huawei talks up Nokia deal in smartphone market consolidation – FT.com – Mr Yu predicted that the smartphone market would consolidate to about three or four companies – and warned that Microsoft’s Windows phone platform used by Nokia as well as Huawei was “weak” (paywall) – I guess that’s one of the reasons why Microsoft is reputedly paying developers $100,000 to port their application to Windows Phone 8
Two things got me thinking about Facebook and advertising this week. Since I have changed my location on my Facebook profile to Hong Kong the bulk of the adverts I have seen have been in Chinese. Now you could argue that the model should also look at the langauge I use for Facebook; but many people in Hong Kong are bilingual so there is a limited gain. Chinese language is fine, because they seem to be the same irrelevant stuff I got when my profile location was in the UK:
Credit cards
Mobile phones
Variants on the usual e-commerce model
However the irrelevance of Facebook and advertising confronted me with this suggested post.
The additional problem that I have with this is that the big spenders of the advertising world like consumer packaged goods brands I’ve worked with would probably be leery about putting their advertisements next to one with a URL indicating likely adult content. It wouldn’t happen on Google because of the context dependent nature of the search page.
The second thing was when I took time to reflect on the the BBC’s study into socio-economic classes in the UK. Here is some of the data:
‘Class’
Tend to socialize exclusively with people like themselves
Percentage of UK population
Average age
Elites
Yes
6
57
Established middle class
No
25
46
Technical middle class
Yes
6
52
New affluent workers
Yes
15
44
Traditional working class
Yes
14
66
Emergent service workers
No
19
34
Precariat
Yes
15
50
This data was interesting to me, because it said that for a significant minority of the UK population (those with a wide range of friends), the Facebook model may be a logical fallacy.
The precariat are the least economically active if we take them out of the equation the numbers change again:
‘Class’
Tend to socialize exclusively with people like themselves
Percentage of UK population advertisers are likely to care about
Average age
Elite
Yes
7.06
57
Established middle class
No
29.41
46
Technical middle-class
Yes
7.06
52
New affluent workers
Yes
17.65
44
Traditional working class
Yes
16.47
66
Emergent service workers
No
22.35
34
When we look at two other factors the numbers become even more stark:
Attribute
Yes
No
Average age
54.75
40
Percentage of the UK population
48.24
51.76
So from a marketing point-of-view the friends model poses two problems: it appeals to consumers with a lower lifetime spend in them (this depends what you are selling) and you are addressing less than half the population you care about (and that includes bottom-feeding brands like pay-day loan companies).
On the bright side as a marketer using Facebook in the UK you may be that bit closer to the old marketing conundrum attributed to William Lever, Viscount Leverhulme of Lever Brothers fame:
I know which half of my advertising is working, I just don’t know which half.
Startup Sherpa Bets Its Predictive Smartphone Assistant Can Best Google Now | MIT Technology Review – Sherpa is mobile assistant that performs searches on the web, takes notes, posts content to Facebook and stream music on command. The app had a big impact in Spanish speaking markets. It uses Android’s speech recognition API. Sherpa competes against Google voice search and provides an equivalent service to Siri on the iPhone.
Facebook moves to defuse algorithm row – Brand Republic News – One industry source claimed the natural reach of posts it made on behalf of a brand with one of the biggest Facebook followings in the UK has dropped from 15% to 5% after the change to the EdgeRank algorithm
Mercedes Benz G63 AMG 6×6 « Gear Patrol – I can’t work out if the Mercedes Benz G63 AMG 6×6 is amazing or stupid. It is based on the G Wagen which is a proper off-road vehicle. The 6×6 platform used was developed for the military like Germany’s KSK special forces unit. The Mercedes Benz G63 AMG adds a ridiculously overturned engine. AMG then has to go over every inch of the Mercedes Benz G63 and change chassis and components to adequately handle the power.
BMW announced it’s i3 Coupe concept this week. It was buzzword compliant with plug-in technology; but the most interesting thing for me about it was the way in which the car shows the current range that could be travelled as part of its in-car instrumentation.
It was a duh moment of genius simplicity in terms of user experience design for vehicles.
