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

  • Dopplr death & more news

    Dopplr

    The slow death of Dopplr | guardian.co.uk – on its own the death of Dopplr is not really news, the interesting timing  of this article by The Guardian put out this evisceration of Nokia’s web service ambitions. I’m not saying that Jemima Kiss got it wrong, but the timing was interesting: published last Friday – right on the eve of Nokia World. Dopplr is similar to other startups that have gotten lost after having been acquired. Dopplr allowed users to create itineraries of their travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts’ travel plans in order to arrange meetings at any point on their journey. It was known for the quality of its user experience design in comparison to other apps.

    China

    String of Holidays in China Bring Time Off, With Complications – NYTimes.com – complex yes, but I can’t help feeling for the bureaucrats who came up with this who thought that they were doing the best they could for the people and now must be as popular as tax collectors

    Economics

    Inflation in China Is Rising at a Fast Pace – NYTimes.com – the downside of continual double digit growth

    Environment

    MIT: We’ve Got Plenty of Uranium | Fast Company – nuclear power not the washout environment naysayers think

    FMCG

    Deal Profile: Unilever to Buy Alberto-Culver for $3.7 Billion – WSJ – interesting move that strengthens Unilever by taking out a competitor. It does make me wonder about all the brands that Unilever sold a few years ago though

    Japan

    Japan Surrenders – The Atlantic – interesting though very American focused article on changes in Japanese society over the past three decades

    Marketing

    Some of Sharecare.com’s Health Advice Will Be From Advertisers – NYTimes.com – this was where I thought Hunch and Yahoo! Answers could have done more. Ideal opportunity for branded content as trusted brands are experts in some areas and expertise could help imbue trust in a new brand

    Media

    Jason Calacanis: Revenge is a new editorial project to rival TechCrunch | guardian.co.uk – interesting that he is going down an email newsletter route. It potentially cuts social sharing a la Twitter and Facebook as well as social bookmarking off at the knees

    The real cost of free | guardian.co.uk – Cory Doctorow in praise of free and dealing with ill-informed critics

    Online

    Yahoo: Is Carol Bartz in the process of being replaced? – Quora – insightful answer. Possibly yes as part of a process to take Yahoo! private. The critique of Bartz is telling:

    • She has not articulated a coherent product or vision for the company
    • She wasted over $120M on an ad campaign (no material impact on any user engagement metric)
    • She promoted executives like Hillary Schneider after failing miserably with APT (Yahoo ad exchange system).
    • Yahoo left between $500M to $1B of value on the table as part of the search agreement with Microsoft (Carol made Hillary the POC for the Yahoo deal team – lets just say that Microsoft had their way with the Yahoo deal team)
    • She used odd (my gentle way of saying they didn’t work) PR tactics to recast Yahoo in the tech and business community

    Alibaba and Yahoo quagmire: a battle of the wills | FT.com – the FT is very slow to this story. I suspect that this isn’t only about corporate wills, but also about Ma pleasing the Chinese government as well and if he manages to get even richer by doing so: win-win

    Combing Your Friends’ Tastes, Not the Whole Web’s – NYTimes.com – social search market analysis

    Software

    N900 plug-in for OSX iSync – makes Nokia N900 into a a viable option

    Technology

    China Catching India As Asia’s Service Provider? – WSJ – China’s technology service industry catching up with India

    Web of no web

    DOCOMO and University of Tokyo to Conduct Joint Research for Urban Planning Based on Mobile Spatial Statistics | Press Center | NTT DOCOMO Global – really interesting work here, kind of reminds me of The Dark Knight were Batman maps out the building in Hong Kong using mobile phone signals and captures mafia money man Lau

    Wireless

    Nokia’s problem – QuirksBlog – interesting thoughts on Nokia from a software developer

  • Corvette ‘roar’ campaign

    The new Chevrolet Corvette marketing campaign has had a lot of positive vibes out in adland so I thought I would share it with you along with some thoughts.

    The video

    The idea

    The two-and-a-half minute video is designed to promote a Corvette experience: for an extra 5,800 USD you can help build the power-plant which is fitted into your new Corvette.

    Here is in Europe a number of sports car companies used to allow to to visit the factory (it was part of the experience of buying a TVR for instance) and in the case of continental companies drive it back home. This way you could see the craftsmanship that went into your vehicle and meet some of the people responsible for it. In the same way that the lord of the manor may meet some of the landscape gardeners who were remodeling the maze or the alpine rockery.

    Being able to participate in building the engine, struck me as something different. If you think about the ‘golden days of the 1960s and 70s’ real men were renaissance creatures regardless of their profession they could also throw themselves into DIY and major mechanical work on the car. It was supposed to be a major bonding opportunity between father and son, working on the car together like Yoda and Luke Skywalker.

    My Dad has a garage full of tools that he accumulated over time, some of them handed on to him by friends or given to keep at the end of a job. I used to help him working on our car, though not much of it made sense to me. I haven’t inherited his practical gene, but it did give me a good worth ethic.

    It was also a time of family breakdown as divorce and womens long-deserved independence finally came into its own.

    It used to be that clocks and sewing machines were the only non-user serviceable items on a household; but as time moved on globalisation and technology meant  that cars like most household appliances and consumer electronics needed an expert. Not just the handyman with a garage and a service pit around the corner, but the correct software to understand the different diagnostic outputs on the car.

    Manufacturers have taken advantage of this development to shore up their total lifetime revenue funneling these customers into dealer service centres, requiring special fitting tools and clamping down on third-party parts in a similar way to HP’s chipped toner and inkjet cartridges.

    Instead real men are now likely to be slightly buffoon-ish a la Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May in Top Gear.

    So is the building the engine experience less about demonstrating the handmade craftsmanship of your sports car and more about selling you the mythical father-son bonding experience that the car’s owner may not have had as a child?

    The soundtrack

    So I was thinking about this Corvette ‘auto-worker as father-figure’ concept when I thought about the soundtrack to the video. According the video titling the Corvette is all about the roar, yet there is no engine noises in the soundtrack at all. Don’t get me wrong I quite like the soundtrack, it’s the kind of sound you’d expect if the Chemical Brothers drafted in Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald and Doug Wimbish from Tack>>Head as collaborators to come up with an appropriate soundtrack. It would fit right in with the first Matrix film soundtrack – again planting this very firmly in generation-x territory.

    But there is no engine noise, making the statement that its the roar seem dubious. Have a look at the Audi R8 microsite whilst it has brooding electronica pretending to be a Wagnerian mood music, the engine noise does feature in the video clips as you explore the site. The new Lexus LFA website makes no bones about the cars sound even allowing you to download it as a ring-tone (though I imagine that it would grate on the nerves after a bit).

    So I don’t think that its about the Corvette ‘roar’ at all, instead I think its about a mythical father-figure | son experience – a blue-collar bromance: it is the Brokeback Mountain of car adverts.

    It’s a smart offering and campaign which I imagine was probably based on some sort of clever consumer insights programme. And it breaks away from the usual ‘our car is an incrementally better phallic compensator than X, Y or Z’ personified by recent Nissan Z-series marketing efforts. More marketing related content can be found here.

  • Influence singularity

    This post on what I am calling influence singularity (and some other trends) came from discussions whilst travelling. I have been on the road a fair bit and have speaking to a number of people coming from all aspects of communications and marketing. Speaking to these different people has covered a lot of areas but three trends stood out:

    • Influence singularity
    • Welcome to your new press spokesperson, your customer care rep
    • Inhouse vs. agency

    I have explored these trends in a bit more depth below.

    Influence singularity

    Increasingly we are seeing agencies of all ilks: PR, advertising, marketing, digital and everything in between are descending on the area of influence – creating an influence singularity. This influence manifests itself primarily through social media and digital; though it can manifest itself in experiential events like un-conferences and meet-ups. One of the best campaigns I have come across was the RNLI’s efforts to engage with young people.

    RNLI

    A social media campaign thought through and brought to life by a direct marketing agency: they saw the interaction in a similar way to the relationship between an organisation and the recipient of a direct mail piece. Instead of a purchase call to action, they provided a task to be completed. It is not only at agencies where this conflict is happening, I hear anecdotally that marketers are having PR discussions both online and offline actvities and carving it up with no PR people involved.

    The communications heads that were left out instead retreated to focus purely on corporate communications: outflanked, outgunned and out of their depth in a digital world. PR agencies where they have been involved, are often working with marketing managers as the inhouse PR people are not clued in.

    A secondary aspect of this, is that where the role is reversed and the PR department has led on social media, they are now having their efforts hijacked by marketers playing catch-up – because the marketers feel that they should be the owner, have better budgets and often have the ear of the board.

    This then begs the question: does PR the profession, its practitioners and the business need to have a rapid rebrand as a profession before it becomes roadkill?

    Welcome to the new press spokesperson: your customer care rep

    Back in 2004, I wrote a blog post about some comments that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had made about iPod owners having devices full of stolen music. I dashed off a missive to Microsoft.com’s customer service form and got a response.

    At the time John Lettice, when writing about the affair in The Register said:

    We’re sure iPod owners will regard being called law-abiding by an exec from a company with Microsoft’s legal experience as a high point to end the week on. But, you ask, how the blazes did we get to this one? We have Ged Carrol’s blog to thank. Mightily offended by Ballmer’s original comments, Ged used the feedback system at microsoft.com to demand an apology, and he got one. The possibility of feedback systems of this ilk actually working had never occurred to The Register, so we’ve never bothered trying, but if you want your very own grovel, insert your outraged howls here.

    At that time, journalists didn’t think of customer care representatives as a source of comment. Six years later and with social media on tear, the customer care representative is increasingly on the frontline of reputation management.

    Some of the discussions I have been involved with has been about the interface between PR and customer services. Where is the overlap? How do you ensure efficient and effective task management between the two? The last question is being addressed with solutions from the likes of Brandwatch and Salesforce.com.

    Inhouse vs. agency

    I was discussing in-house versus agency with some people recently and one of the key points they made was that whilst agencies provide flexibility in terms of manpower and access to tools that an in-house team couldn’t justify because of cost, social media’s need for immediate and decisive responsiveness required organisations to re-address their in-house requirements and expand their current capability.  This is a great opportunity for measurement companies, other organisations that provide ‘horizontal’ services and e-lance digital communications people to interject as these considerations are being made. It may also cause some agencies to start thinking about what an agency means and how they can change the structure of their offering to ensure that they remain relevant.

  • Classy Kiss yoghurt drink

    While staying in Shenzhen, I came across Classy Kiss yoghurt drink. At first I was a bit thrown, the European Dickensian vintage illustration was at odds with the product name.

    The name was the only English apart from <- Open on the package.

    Classy Kiss yoghurt drink, originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

    So why have the name in English and why European people on the packaging? Here are a few likely factors:

    • Chinese people up until recently generally didn’t consume dairy products, so a ‘foreign looking’ brand might make more sense. It came into vogue when they wanted taller stronger kids and had the economic purchasing power to buy a higher protein diet. The old illustration likely conveys heritage (and so trust) of some sort
    • Most Chinese people wouldn’t know what the packaging was saying in English. They also wouldn’t appreciate the odd typography. It would probably feel balanced to a Chinese eye and not too out of step with the feel of the Chinese ideograms
    • It will contrast on the shelf against the clean modernist packaging of western brands like Danone, or General Mills’ Yoplait

    As for the ‘Open’; that was likely on the InDesign file template for the TetraPak packaging. I wouldn’t say that the product is like a classy kiss, but it is a perfectly passable yoghurt drink. More FMCG related posts here.

  • Black precious resin & Montblanc

    I had a short haul flight and went over the duty free catalogue on Swiss Airlines. This section on Montblanc pens stuck out at me because of its wording. Each pen was described as being made of ‘black precious resin’. Click on the image if you want to see a larger version.

    Precious Resin Montblanc spiel

    So what does black precious resin actually mean? One would presume some form of black shiny plastic, which doesn’t seem quite so precious. Now the use of plastic isn’t a bad thing in pen manufacture. For instance fellow German writing instrument manufacturers Pelikan and Kaweco both make writing instruments out of plastic, but they also don’t charge over 300 pounds for a ballpoint pen.

    Plastic feels thoroughly modern. It defined the post-war world and accelerated further with globalisation. Black precious resin isn’t particularly rare in itself like ebony wood or precious metals. 

    What the black precious resin explanation misses is the real elements at the heart of Montblanc’s authenticity:

    • History: Montblanc is actually over a century old as a firm
    • Country brand: It’s pens are still made in Germany, so it can take advantage of the German country brand: precision manufacturing excellence and craftsmanship
    • Craftsmanship: making a pen write smoothly is an art, too much ink and you will get splodges. A badly designed nib or ballpoint mechanism will scratch the paper, deliver the ink unevenly and even stain the writer
    • Design: One of the reasons why Montblanc managed to upset A.T. Cross in the market for luxury pens because their pen design feels much better in the hand because of its fuller barrel size

    But none of these factors are reflected in the description of the Montblanc pens featured in the duty-free catalogue, instead we get smoke-and-mirrors which engenders distrust and makes for an authenticity FAIL.