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
Bob Barker is a client that I worked with on nascent digital work for RFI Studios. Bob worked as the CMO of Alterian. Alterian started off in customer experience management, they did a series of acquisitions when I worked with them including Mediasurface the CMS company. The company was acquired by SDL and some part of it was sold on to private investors.
Flip video camera
Bob decided to delve into social media and understand it as a marketer. The Flip Video camera which includes basic software inspired him to do video content. Bob had a ‘Gorilla tripod‘ for the Flip and the lighting was just done with daylight. I did an interview with Bob Barker for his blog last week, you can read his take on things on his blog.
I realise that we talk through a number of social platforms, so here is a list of what I use:
iMessage – though I have found it to be flaky
Skype
Fastladder.com for RSS feeds. I am currently experimenting with FavShare as a Fastladder client on my iPad and iPhone which started after my interview with Bob
Pinboard.in for social bookmarking
IFTTT to syndicate content
Microblogging: I use the Twitter client on my Macs at home, and m.twitter.com on my iPhone. I use Weibo’s iPhone client and WeiLark for the Mac to post on my Sina.com Weibo account, rather than Sina’s sluggish web interface
I use Kakao Talk and Tencent Weixin (WeChat) social messaging clients on my iPhone. The international versions of these tools don’t have all the features the local ones.
I use a mix of technology:
MacBook Pro
Dell 22 inch widescreen display
MacBook Air
iPhone
iPad
Samsung feature phone with dual SIMs
The video is on YouTube so may not be available to all readers. You can find Bob’s video channel here.
Ferdinand A. Porsche, 76, Dies – Designed Celebrated 911 – NYTimes.com – Butzi Porsche dead. Butzi Porsche came from a family of engineers. His grandfather led the original team behind the Volkswagen Beetle. His father had been part of that engineering team and went on to found what we now know as Porsche. However, Butzi Porsche wasn’t engineer but a designer with technical chops. After an infamous meeting of the Porsche family, no members were allowed to work at Porsche. Butzi Porsche didn’t get to do more after he designed the 911. Instead Butzi Porsche started Porsche Design. Butzi Porsche did product design for other companies. Porsche Design also came out with its own products with Butzi Porsche designing watches, glasses and more. Butzi Porsche resigned from Porsche Design in 2005 due to ill health.
Why Are So Many Americans Single? : The New Yorker – single living was not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Supported by modern communications platforms and urban living infrastructure: coffee shops, laundrettes
Kraft break-up yields marketing shift: Warc.com – the break-up is ironic when you look at the trouble they went to, in order to buy Cadburys and then break their business down broadly into Cadburys + Jacobs Suchard vs Kraft US.
HK’s rich hesitate to have babies | SCMP.com – interesting takeaways: didn’t want the emotional commitment, time poverty, financial stability / too small a living space and concerned about the local environment not being suitable for children. It was interesting that the education system was given such a hard time, given that it’s better than the UK system (paywall)
agnès b. | VICE – great interview with French fashion designer agnés b
Marketing
Fueling the hunger for The Hunger Games – The New York Times – really interesting comment: …during the 1980s you bought the poster and once a year went to a convention and met your people for something like Star Trek (and Star Wars). It misses out the fact that you are likely to have had real-world friends that you would have talked about it with as well – marketers now seem blindsided to the real-world
Gore-Tex Under Siege from Waterproof Fabric Newcomers | OutsideOnline.com – interesting how Goretex waterproof fabric stranglehold mirrors Microsoft’s position in the technology sector. Goretex was historically under threat from a number of systems that had varying degrees of impact. Hipora is a silicon coating structure invented by Korean firm Kolon, Schoeller’s C change which has temperature dependent venting, SympaTex commonly used when you see ‘no brand’ 3-layer laminate, usually lower price products that would lose margin paying for Goretex licensing. Lowe Alpine’s ceramic coated triple point fabric, but managed Goretex to survive and Lowe Alpine didn’t. There are other competitor products including I suspect that the other fabrics will become niche pieces unless they sort their marketing out. Goretex is primarily a branding exercise, that sets minimum standards such as taped seals. Much of Goretex intellectual property has been voided or circumvented.
Marketing is where the Goretex difference lies now, but it is known for a confrontational relationship with partners.
Kwok brothers arrested by HK watchdog – FT.com – Sun Hung Kai is Hong Kong’s largest property company. Surprising that they are involved as the big firms there generally keep their noses clean (paywall)
Turbo Shandy from the Turbo Drinks Company – I find it fascinating that someone would use ‘turbo’ as a brand. Its so 1980s: Saab Turbo, Turbo aftershave (like Brut, but nastier), Turbo sunglasses, Turbo razors
Shenzhen drivers face new toll | SCMP.com – it would collect the congestion fee when the city’s public transport network improved with the opening of phase three of the Shenzhen Metro, adding five new lines and more than 100 stations. <– This says a lot about the can-do attitude of China
Cathay seeking 400 in its largest ever recruitment | SCMP.com – Hong Kong is a real mobile device society so it was interesting to read that since Cathay Pacific introduced mobile app boarding passes only 60-100 out of an daily 50,000 passenger check-ins used the mobile QR code based boarding pass (paywall)
Confidence shaken by hub revelations | SCMP.com – interesting that Norman Foster’s design was originally disqualified for technical reasons, yet was reinstated by some jurors and then won. Sounds a bit dodgy (paywall)
OpenText Tempo – OpenText Corporation – interesting product: Dropbox | Box.net type metaphor to a product which does the same role that Microsoft Sharepoint previously did within the enterprise
A while ago I built a framework from a hodge lodge of ideas to think about social marketing with being useful as a foundational element. I was thinking about this as I read a number of Chinese news sources, the name Lei Feng had started coming up a lot recently. The reason why it was coming up was that it marked the 50th anniversary of Mr Lei’s death. The Chinese government was trying to use this date to encourage a greater sense of community and altruism in modern Chinese society including a Weibo hashtag with Monday having been ‘Learn from Lei Feng’ day.
Being useful exemplar – Lei Feng
Mr Lei was a 22-year old soldier who drove military trucks for a living. He was killed when a telegraph pole was felled by another truck and landed on his cab. This would have been just another sad but unnoteworthy accident, had not Mr Lei left behind a 200,000 word diary which was naturally full of content about how great the party was and documented an otherwise selfless life where he continually focused on being useful to those in his community.
Mr Lei was an orphan which meant that it was easier to use him posthumously as an example to others. March in Chinese schools is learn from Lei Feng month. Today Mr Lei is considered with mixed feelings by Chinese people; his selflessness is at odds with a laissez-faire market economy and the use of his life is viewed with some cynicism by many.
Regardless of the realpolitik surrounding the legacy of Lei Feng his focus on being useful could teach brands a lot about social media.
A lot of the time colleagues and clients come up to me and say we want something that’s ‘viral’ and I die a little inside. Its all about the brand rather than the brand interaction with the consumer.
I wish there were more brands that aspired to being useful. It’s simple to do, it opens a natural point for engagement because it fits nicely into the intent and context of the audience: – it builds long-term relationships rather than campaign statistics.
Being useful in action
A couple of great examples of being useful include the University of Westminster who provide tips on the shops and restaurants who offer students discounts.
Or the way Vodafone in the UK uses social media as the tip of the spear to address customer care issues.
I contacted Vodafone so that I could merge my identities into one, with one place to manage my devices on the Vodafone network. I got in touch by Twitter; they responded below:
I then completed a web-based form and was contacted by phone by one of the web team called Cate. She explained to me how they were going to address what I needed and resolved the problem without my having to hang on listening to hold music a la my previous experiences with 3UK or T-Mobile.
Now I am not suggesting that we all dress in olive fatigues; but it would be a good idea to lift ourselves out of what do we want – profits, fame, fortune, a Cannes Lion award and instead start thinking a bit more about the person on the other end of the communication. Being useful like Lei Feng and being open to the insights that this provides is also more likely to provide the inspiration over time for a really great word-of-mouth idea upon which you can start to built your path to fame and glory as a marketer.
