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
I started thinking about climate despair last month as I was researching my post on psychotherapy + culture.
Depth of climate despair
The driver was a research report that appeared in The Lancet in December 2021. Researchers surveyed 10,000 respondents aged between 16 – 25, in ten countries across the Asia Pacific region, North and South America, Europe and Africa. The respondents were drawn from Kantar’s LifePoints online research panel. Of those who started the survey less than 70 percent completed it. The gender split was slightly overweight towards males: 51·4% male, 48·6% female.
The survey was developed by 11 international consultants with expertise in climate change emotions, clinical and environmental psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, human rights law, child and adolescent mental health, and young people with lived experience of climate anxiety. Which means that there was an incentive to come out with the findings they received and that may have biased the results. But the indications are clear in terms of direction around climate despair.
Key datapoints supporting the sense of climate despair amongst respondents:
Survey respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried)
Over half of those surveyed reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless or guilty
75% of those surveyed said that they think the future is frightening
Derek Read – “C̶l̶i̶m̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶C̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ We Change”
The report says:
Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed, and that governments are failing to respond adequately, and with feelings of betrayal and abandonment by governments and adults. Climate change and government inaction are chronic stressors that could have considerable, long-lasting, and incremental negative implications for the mental health of children and young people.
Hickman, C.,Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R.E. & Mayall, E.E. (December 2021) Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. (UK) The Lancet Planetary Health
The article then goes on to hold governments accountable for a moral harm on the young people. However, a good deal of the moral harm is also due to the way companies and NGOs actually talk about climate change.
Anecdotal evidence from therapists interviewed by the New York Times suggests that climate despair tends to be more prevalent in young female patients that they see. However, this might be down to a young men being less likely to see a therapist than a young woman.
Positive reinforcement
This video from WARC features research why it is ineffective to play into the constant environment doom loop if we want action. A change in approach should start to combat the deeply entrenched feeling of climate despair.
When the environmental issue is considered a sudden disaster, negative anthropomorphism is more persuasive.
By contrast, when the environmental issue is viewed as an ongoing tragedy, positive anthropomorphism results in a more favourable attitude, higher willingness to pay, and more money being donated.
Consumers’ connectedness to nature serves as the underlying mechanism in this messaging. If this level of connectedness to nature is low, nonprofit organizations and companies must alter these perceptions by choosing a more appropriate anthropomorphic valence and cause acuteness in their green advertising.
All of which seems to point to a possible challenge amongst both NGOs and companies over their inability to discern the difference between important and the most urgent elements. If collectively they can’t understand the categorisation, it’s no wonder that a significant minority of their audience slips into climate despair and is discouraged from taking a more active role.
Secondly, working on consumer’s connectedness to nature is a major communications JTBD (job to be done).
If you’re of a certain age, you might think that Suncity is related to Sun City in South Africa. Both are in the gambling resort businesses but I don’t think that either are connected. Sun City is part of a pan-African hotel and resort group headquartered in South Africa.
You might even remember remember the Artists against Apartheid song.
Suncity was associated with gambling junkets to Macau. The company is associated with Alvin Chau. Prior being sentenced to prison for 18 years, Chau was known as a philandering casino tycoon with a Malaysian-American mistress Mandy Lieu (劉碧麗).
Suncity Holdings was a Hong Kong listed investment company with:
Resort business in the Philippines
Hotels and gaming businesses in Russia
Consultancy for running hotels and resorts
Travel Agency and air chartering services
Property development
Shopping mall management
After Chau’s arrest, Suncity cut ties and shut down gambling rooms associated with Chau. Suncity then changed its name to LET.
The FT alleges that Suncity is also connected with online sports gambling, with services aimed at mainland Chinese. This is illegal in China.
The most shocking part of the FT’s video is The Gaming Commission (TGC) admitting that they didn’t want to disclose information as it would undermine trust in the ability of TGC to do its due diligence properly.
Australia’s daigou days done? | WARC – tightening regulatory standards and alternative employment are cited as two key factors by Asia News Network. I would also add increased national pride gau chao has changed the game for Chinese domestic brands
How Coach is using “expressive” luxury to connect with Gen Z | WARC – Heritage brands find themselves at a crossroads between preserving their historical roots and resonating with younger demographics. Tapping into influencer partnerships and cause-related initiatives are two ways to strengthen consumer engagement while simultaneously retaining a brand’s established culture.
Can Tokyo Fashion Week get back on track? | Vogue Business – The Japanese event is rebuilding momentum and simmering with fresh and unique talent, but hopes for international success are hobbled by insularity and pandemic lockdown aftereffects
Great manufacturing video showing 100% sports sunglasses being made. Interesting that they choose not to manufacture in China. 100% came out of the motocross scene in the US, back in the 1980s.
How dollar stores (especially Dollar General) have quietly conquered America. The documentary talks about how they’ve reduced their base costs and can work in sparse or very low income communities. If nothing else, this reminds of you of the scale in America’s mid-West.
Enquire Within tends to appear in book collections for people of a certain age, or, where the book collector has inherited part of their collection. Spending time on the family farm in Ireland during my childhood, I used to see a copy of an early 20th century vintage sit next to a dog-eared copy of Old Moore’s Almanac (not to be mistaken for a separate UK publication: Old Moore’s Almanack), Old Moore’s was used for deciding what to plant in the garden besides potatoes.
During the bank holiday weekend, staying with my parents, emergency works on a water main managed to take out the broadband and electricity along their road. I went back though my Dad’s boxes of books and leafed through my parents copy of Enquire Within. My Dad thinks he had received the copy as a gift from a the owner of a second hand book store in Birkenhead market right after he had moved into the first house that my parents had bought. But he can’t be certain. Given that the outer gloss paper wrap around the hardback inner cover uses a font that looks similar to Eurostile and the price is in decimal – I guess it’s from the early to mid-1970s.
Enquire Within could be thought of as a primer for everyday life. Topics included how to play a variety of card games, basic first aid, the basics on taxation and education with the addresses of the UK government departments responsible. There was a travel section with a few paragraphs on every western European country, which had been written by the Financial Times travel correspondent. The gardening section went into much more depth explaining what a hardy annual and hardy perennial were, alongside the correct way to build a compost heap, how to dig drills and prune roses.
At the back there is an exhaustive list of children’s names together with their meanings.
Enquire Within and the origins of the web
What I didn’t find out until later on was that Tim Berners-Lee was partly inspired to create a predecessor to what would become the world wide web by a Victorian vintage copy of Enquire Within that was in his parents house when he was growing up. The system was called ENQUIRE and seemed to be similar conceptually to HyperCard or a Wiki. The World Wide Web came out of Berners-Lee’s efforts to integrate disparate systems including ENQUIRE together to facilitate better collaboration between CERN research projects.
This video on money laundering is as much of interest for the phenomenon of quality documentaries on YouTube as it is for recycling known truths about HSBC.
The Forrester Wave™: Commerce Search And Product Discovery, Q3 2023, Surfaces The Challenges Of AI Unchecked – Don’t let buzzwords distract you from what your customers — and your business — need. Vendors often use their own terminology, especially in a market that hasn’t had a Forrester Wave evaluation in place already. One will talk about how extremely relevant their results are, while another will scoff at “relevancy” as outdated methodology. You’ll hear semantic, vector, hybrid, ML, AI, and all sorts of branded names for products and functions
Security
The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland’s Railway System | WIRED – the ability to send the command has been described in Polish radio and train forums and on YouTube for years. “Everybody could do this. Even teenagers trolling. The frequencies are known. The tones are known. The equipment is cheap. – This reminds me of the blue boxes used for phone phreaking decades ago.
Adobe’s AI diversity auditor | Patent Drop – is seeking to patent a system for “diversity auditing” using computer vision. Essentially, this system uses facial detection and image classification to break down photos of employees and slot them into categories based on certain physical traits and characteristics. Adobe’s system looks through several images and detects faces in each one, then classifies each face based on a predicted “sensitive attribute” relating to “protected classes of individuals,” such as race, age or gender. For example, Adobe noted, this system may classify images from a company’s website, then compare its predictions to a “comparison population.”
Technology
Mexico’s Microchip Advantage | Foreign Affairs – there are significant hurdles to making Mexico a bigger player in supply chains for chips and advanced technologies. The country lacks its Asian rivals’ existing networks of high-technology firms. Until now, investments in the sphere have been sparse. To change this situation, Mexican political and business leaders need a clearer strategy for attracting semiconductor investment. The dividends, both for Mexican industry and for U.S. supply chain security, could be significant. Today’s large-scale shift away from China-focused assembly operations offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a more fully integrated North American semiconductor and electronics supply chain. Despite the United States’ major involvement in many segments of the chip industry, there is at present hardly any semiconductor packaging or assembly in the country and very little anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. The United States maintains a leading role in R&D-intensive segments of the semiconductor industry, including chip design and manufacturing equipment. The CHIPS Act is intended to increase the amount of chip fabrication in the United States. Yet neither the United States nor any country in the Western Hemisphere plays a major role in the final stages of the chip manufacturing process—assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP)—in which semiconductors are tested and assembled into sophisticated packages. The Western Hemisphere also does relatively little assembly of advanced electronic systems that require a lot of chips, such as consumer electronics.
TikTok quacks is a bit of a harsh label for TikTok content. The reality is that similar content to that turned out by various TikTok quacks appear on YouTube, Instagram and other social media channels. Quack and quackery are synonyms for medical false claims or a ‘snake oil salesperson’.
Social media not only spreads misinformation and false hope across a range of medical conditions, it allows the perpetrators to profit directly from their work. The rise of dodgy health businesses with commerce integrated into their social posts by the likes of TikTok (and Instagram) facilitates TikTok quacks.
Below are just some of the content currently exposing this intersection between health, wellness, beauty and dishonestly obtained profits.
Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades – not entirely unexpected and a great opportunity for Singapore
Digital materials look to use different geometry of materials to replace other materials with special properties like foams. It does this through 3d printed lattices.
Sweden Is Not Staying Neutral in Russia’s Information War | New York Times – The Psychological Defense Agency also raised political concerns when it was proposed, but its leaders have emphasized that mandate allows it to address only foreign sources of disinformation, not content generated in Sweden. The challenge is one facing all democracies that, as a matter of principle, decline to enforce official ideologies, allowing divergent points of view of what is true or false. “The government can’t control the truth if it’s going to be a democracy,” said Hanna Linderstål, the founder of Earhart Business Protection Agency, a cybersecurity firm in Stockholm, and an adviser to the International Telecommunication Union, part of the United Nations. “The government can’t control the truth if it’s going to be a democracy,” said Hanna Linderstål, the senior cybersecurity adviser of Earhart Business Protection Agency.
ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day – not terribly surprising, it’s computationally intensive and hard to monetise. Look at how Google and Facebook have looked to squeeze computing power per watt out of their data centres, along with squeezing cost per server right down as well – they did this to reduce operating costs versus income. ChatGPT hadn’t gone there on design and instead uses 10,000 plus servers based around power-hungry top-of-the-range Nvidia graphics processors
What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.
Geico advertising – a primer
Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.
Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.
The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising
Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.
Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).
Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset
As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.
There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.
The reasons are cultural in nature:
Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere
Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.
Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.
By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).
The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.
This achieves a few things:
You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand
Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:
Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients
So why was Geico advertising spend cut?
This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.
There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:
There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities
There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.
Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.
Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.
‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories
Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.
