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
Ian Hislop is well known in the UK as being the editor of Private Eye and managing to bring the snark of the paper into real life. In this interview with the politics channel of Joe, he seems flummoxed by the state of politics in the UK over the past year or so.
In this video, Ian Hislop talks about the year with clear sense of exasperation. The laughs are for relief rather than humour. The commentary by Ian Hislop on collective short term memory is very interesting.
Tiananmen Square killings
CNN put together an interesting collection of footage around the Tianamen Square protests and put some context around what was happening in China when the protests happened. CNN seemed to have done a better job than most western media at the time in its coverage of the protests. If anything the footage seems even more harrowing now than the bit I remember from the time.
CNN
Darlie Malaysia travel promotion
Back when I worked on Colgate brands in Asia, Darlie was the ‘entry level’ brand. As such its one of the best selling toothpaste brands in Asia and you can see it in any pharmacy or supermarket you walk into in China, Hong Kong and across Southeast Asia. It’s actually an old brand founded in the 1930s in Shanghai that latched on to the popularity of Al Johnson to promote the teeth whitening effect of their toothpaste.
The brand seems to have changed to Darlie around about 1990.
Colgate Palmolive
Moving forward three decades Darlie is still wrestling with its heritage in the eyes of western stakeholders important to Colgate Palmolive. Darlie is a best selling brand.
In Malaysia it seems to have got involved in a package promotion with local travel brand Klook to provide travel vouchers and hotel discounts as Malaysia kick started its domestic tourism and hospitality industries. Much of the promotion revolves around the use of influencers (to appeal to the three main ethnic groups in Malaysia – Chinese, South Asians and Malays).
I am not a huge fan of their books generally, but if the Darlie adverts spark your interest, then the Lonely Planet travel guide is your best option for the two main areas to see: Kuala Lumpur (KL) and Georgetown on Penang island.
The Reflex
I have been listening to this mix a few times this week.
Zone Energy
Zone Energy drinks targeted students sitting exams with adverts on the Tokyo subway that only. they could see using the red plastic sheet lens that is used to decode answers in their work books.
While everyone from from organised criminals to Chinese government hackers were robbing governments blind during the COVID crisis, in the UK the scandal surrounding PPE Medpro seems particularly egregious. The tale of PPE Medpro goes back to the VIP programme that the UK government used to secure PPE through politically connected companies. PPE Medpro was one of the companies who benefited from £10 billion squandered on these PPE purchases.
https://flic.kr/p/4TtSuS
Michelle Mone with former Spice Girls singer Mel B
PPE Medpro got contracts through the VIP programme after a Michelle Mone, a member of the House of Lords lobbied on their behalf. Mone had previously set up a successful clothing brand with her first husband, then moved into diet pills, fake tanning products and even an aborted cryptocurrency launch.
In return PPE Medpro is alleged to have paid Mone £29 million, the subsequent investigation led HSBC to freeze her bank accounts.
China
China risks 1mn Covid deaths in ‘winter wave’, modelling shows | Financial Times – China is easing restrictions after the Chinese COVID protests. 1 million is on the low end of numbers I have heard quoted. However, it is also politically evocative. The Chinese people have been constantly reminded that 1 million people lost their lives to COVID in the United States and the communist party ensured that just 5,000 people have died in their country.
Germany confronts a broken business model | Financial Times – Chief executive Martin Brudermüller announced that BASF would downsize in Europe “as quickly as possible, and also permanently”. Most of the cuts are expected to be made at the Ludwigshafen site. BASF is not alone. Since the summer, companies across Germany have been scrambling to adjust to the near disappearance of Russian gas. They have dimmed the lights, switched to oil — and, as a last resort cut production. Some are even thinking about moving operations to countries where energy is cheaper. That is triggering deep concern about the future of German industry and the sustainability of the country’s business model, which has long been predicated on the cheap energy guaranteed by a plentiful supply of Russian gas. Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution, has said Germany is a case study of a western state that made a “strategic bet” on globalisation and interdependence – based on this experience why would you want to ‘bet’ on China or any other authoritarian country? Once the basic industries like BASF go, the higher end industries will follow
Auction sales slide in Hong Kong | Financial Times – Six-monthly auction sales in Hong Kong have had their worst results since 2018, with this season marking the third consecutive drop, according to ArtTactic. Its analysis finds that the October-to-December evening sales made a total of HK$1.7bn ($220mn, before fees), a fall of 34 per cent since the equivalent sales last year and more than 50 per cent down from their peak in spring 2021 – this is interesting given how much has been invested in the past couple of years by the major auction houses into Hong Kong
How Do Korea’s 1% Get Rich? – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition) – The wealthy prefer deposit and savings accounts as the best short-term investments over the next year now that interest rates are high. But they pointed to real estate, both to let and for use as their own homes, as the best investment over the longer term. Their hopes for gold and jewelry or bonds also increased.
Being a creator and relying on YouTube ad revenue sounds like rather like being a musician and relying on Spotify. For reference £1 is worth about ₩1611 at the time of writing, which means they make less than £50/month. This anecdotal evidence fits right in with an analysis piece in the FT – The Lex Newsletter: the cratering creator economy | Financial Times
Hackers breach energy orgs via bugs in discontinued web server – state-backed Chinese hacking groups (including one traced as RedEcho) targeted multiple Indian electrical grid operators, compromising an Indian national emergency response system and the subsidiary of a multinational logistics company. The attackers gained access to the internal networks of the hacked entities via Internet-exposed cameras on their networks as command-and-control servers. – The software being hacked is the Boa web server. Boa was originally written by university student Paul Phillips. Phillips became CTO of Go2Net.
Go2Net ran several websites including 100Hot – a website ranking service; payment processing service Authorize.Net, metasearch engine Dogpile, Haggle Online who provided online auction and PlaySite who ran multiplayer games.Prior to being acquired by InfoSpace Go2Net touted their technology behind these sites and selling services to customers.
Boa’s afterlife on IoT systems
So having a CTO who had written a small footprint web server like Boa made a lot of sense. At some point, Phillips stopped working on Boa. Instead maintenance was handed over Larry Doolittle and Jon Nelson who maintained the code for three years or so. Since then, Boa has not been maintained. Its small size made it very popular with Internet of Things products including CCTV systems. Which is the reason why Boa server software has been repeatedly hacked.
How you treat the ‘non-elite’ is key to beating populism | Financial Times – Middle-status people, social scientists have shown, are more conservative and cautious than the poor (who can afford to take risks because they have so little to lose) and elites (whose privilege allows them to bounce back from failures). They show more respect for authority for a simple reason: being “disruptive” may be highly valued among Silicon Valley elites but, in blue- or pink-collar jobs, it merely gets you fired
Ethics
Kanye West Used Porn, Bullying, ‘Mind Games’ to Control Staff – Rolling Stone – West looked down at his foot, stared up at the woman, and told her, “I want you to make me a shoe I can fuck.” Adidas representatives — including a vice president involved in the apparel giant’s billion-dollar licensing partnership with West’s influential brand — did not confront West about his alleged remark, the two attendees claim. The woman took a leave of absence before moving to a job elsewhere at Adidas (in an email, she declined to comment and requested that her name be withheld from this article.) Former Yeezy and Adidas employees, however, point to the alleged incident as one of many experiences — over the course of a decade — in which, they say, West used intimidation tactics with the staff of his fashion empire that were provocative, frequently sexualized, and often directed toward women. – what were Adidas doing and why the sudden change of conscience now, when all this was going on for the best part of a decade?
Metabolism and the capsule building were a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Its a much more expansive vision of manufactured housing than post war pre-fab housing in the west.
Rolex Is Reportedly Building a New $1 Billion Factory – Robb Report – it sounds like a large amount of money. However tooling on a car production line would be 150+ million pounds alone. Rolex makes everything on site, rather than relying on a range of supplier partners. 1 Billion dollars almost sounds cheap.
‘We’re mandating its use’: Estée Lauder turns to TikTok marketing after reach on Instagram stalls – Digiday – When Estée Lauder’s reach on Instagram started to slow across EMEA, its marketers turned to TikTok. Obviously, there’s more to it. The early success of the brand’s global TikTok account, for one. But the crux of the brand’s decision to be on TikTok came down to Instagram. Estée Lauder’s marketers realized that no matter how big they tried to go in terms of reaching more people on the Meta-owned social network, they were stuck talking to a limited part of its desired audience, said Lubna Mohsin, the social media and content manager for Estée Lauder. Moreover, it was the same core people in the same cohort who were being reached over and again
The tragic romance of China and Hollywood – The China Project – “Beijing offered up access to its market in exchange for a decade-long tutorial from Hollywood on how to replicate its filmmaking process.” Now that China has caught up (somewhat), there’s less incentive to collaborate. Beijing-based director Daniel Zhao agrees, with a caveat. “The overarching policy of the central government now is to build a self-reliant ecosystem (自循环 zìxúnhuán), but I do see gaps where China still needs to import international technology and personnel,” Zhao told The China Project. He has worked in China’s film industry for over a decade, including a stint with Fenton’s company DMG. China’s film industry has made great strides, thanks in part to its Hollywood’s partnerships. It is now home to some of the largest production sites in the world. China is rapidly developing new virtual production capabilities and improving its 3-D animation quality. In recent years, China has demonstrated that it can pioneer fresh aesthetics and produce domestic successes without Hollywood’s guidance.
How retailers are reshaping the advertising industry | Financial Times – shopper marketing for e-tailing. Interesting how this budget would likely have been previously spent on paid placement in Google Shopping etc. and yet now in the shift to mobile Google (and other search engines) are now losing out on the opportunity for product search. Part of this is them re-optimising around local search like where’s the nearest coffee shop with free wifi and CBD infused kombucha? Meanwhile online retail destinations like eBay and Amazon became product search engines
What about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF??? | I, Cringely – I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. This, too, shall pass – vintage Bob Cringely
China’s Diaspora Policy under Xi Jinping – Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik – China estimates the number of people of Chinese origin outside the People’s Republic to be 60 million. Beijing considers them all to be nationals of China, regardless of their citizenship. Xi Jinping views overseas Chinese as playing an “irreplaceable role” in China’s rise as a world power. Beijing is working hard to harness overseas Chinese resources for its own goals in the fields of economics, science and technology, as well as diplomacy and soft power. Beijing also expects people of Chinese origin in Germany to deepen relations between China and Germany. But not only that: As “unofficial ambassadors”, they are also expected to spread China’s narratives to the German public, defend China’s “core interests”, and help with the transfer of knowledge and technology to China. – This explains foreign police stations to ‘help the Chinese diaspora and considers Singapore to be a ‘Chinese state’. To realise how ridiculous this sounds, imagine Ireland berating the United States for not towing the line because it is an Irish state. I was surprised at the relatively small size of the Chinese diaspora at only 60 million, Ireland claims 70 million people of Irish descent. And that’s even allowing for the fact that the Irish minority in mainland Britain is declining in number due to an ageing community. If you want to know more about the government of China and its efforts to influence the Chinese diaspora, I can recommend reading Hamilton & Ohlberg’s – The Hidden Hand.
It’s hard to believe that fast food restaurants were innovative 40 years ago. McDonald’s haven’t changed their tray designs at all. The idea of it being fast and clean doesn’t feel so fast or clean now given the small of the restaurant and greasy stainless steel counter sides.
Magic: The Slathering | Financial Times“We are downgrading Hasbro to Underperform after conducting a deep dive on the company’s Magic: The Gathering business. Hasbro is overproducing Magic cards which has propped up recent results but is destroying the long-term value of the brand. Card prices are falling, game stores are losing money, collectors are liquidating and large retailers are cutting orders.”
In 2020 Forbes magazine described Yeezy’s rise as “one of the great retail stories of the century”. Yeezy influenced and inspired a multitude of other fashion brands. Kanye West and the Yeezy brand has been a phenomenal power in street wear. West collaborated with BAPE early on his career and Yeezy took off with the famous Nike collaboration output: Air Yeezy sneakers. Adidas reached out to West, after
Adidas has a plan to sell Yeezy sneakers without Ye – Because the company owns the designs it made with Ye, it can—and it probably will—sell the shoes, chief financial officer (and interim CEO until Dec. 31) Harm Ohlmeyer said on the company’s Nov. 9 earnings call. – They can’t use the Yeezy name though. Given that Yeezy is responsible for up to 40 percent of adidas properties according to some sources, this could end up being the best of both worlds for adidas. Kanye West was unhappy for a long time with the adidas deal, so unlikely to complain, and he may yet be able to use the Yeezy brand with another sneaker maker, for instance in China.
Opinion | How China Lost America – The New York Times – interesting piece by Thomas Friedman – the big take out for me is that China thinkers don’t realise that Xi Jinping doesn’t care due to his Marxist dialectic world view. Read also: The Return of Red China: Xi Jinping Brings Back Marxism – China is now breaking from decades of political, economic, and foreign-policy pragmatism and accommodationism. Xi’s China is assertive. He is less subtle than his predecessors, and his ideological blueprint for the future is now hiding in plain sight. The question for all is whether his plans will prevail or generate their own political antibodies, both at home and abroad, that begin to actively resist Xi’s vision for China and the world. But then again, as a practicing Marxist dialectician, Xi Jinping is probably already anticipating that response—and preparing whatever countermeasures may then be warranted – Kevin Rudd on China
Consumer behaviour
PR emails: I said yes to every single one for a day. Oof. | Slate – Could it be possible that the publicists are on to something? Is the daily flood of hopeless pitches actually a secret window into American ingenuity, optimism, and desperation—not to mention a very interesting line of scientifically tested sex toys?
Really interesting commentary on how Adidas designed the mesh used in the 4DFWD running shoe that provides a similar energy transfer to the carbon fibre shank in Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT% shoes that completely changed long distance running
Great video on how additive manufacturing’s unique properties can result in innovation. This heat exchange was printed from laser sintered aluminium alloy powder. The weight savings and increased thermal efficiency figures claimed are very impressive. The problem is using this technology at scale, or will it be niche like carbon fibre fabrication is now?
Some machines combine CNC milling machines with additive manufacturing capability, this hybrid expertise makes a lot of sense.
The US used shell companies during the Cold War to secure titanium from Russia. Now it seems that Russia has done similar things with electronics components for its smart weapons obtained from US manufacturers.
