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

  • US political reporting

    Like most people at the moment I have been following the US presidential election. What struck me was the state of US political reporting I was watching on US network ABC and foreign media coverage.

    Polling station
    Polling station sign

    Polls

    Something seems to have gone wrong with polling methodologies. There are a variety of explanations for this but the impact is felt on US political reporting.

    • There is a lack of polling coverage in areas that are more likely to vote Republican: white working class, working people in rural areas
    • Conversely the models tend to skew more towards urban and suburban based voters
    • The very nature of polling questions is usually done out of context

    Qualitative data

    What becomes apparent is the there are huge swathes of the country that there is no longer qualitative research from. There are no longer local newspapers in a number of areas and ‘local’ TV networks are often an agglomeration of several former stations. This impacts on the granularity of the US political reporting. The greatest impact of this is felt in areas that are also ‘under-polled’.

    Disintermediation of the media

    The campaign for incumbent president Donald Trump seems to have been organising under the radar on social media and seems to have focused on getting more people who share their world view to get out and vote rather than reach ‘new constituencies’. This aspect of the campaign seems to have been missed by media pundits.

    In many respects it resembles the UK leave referendum grassroots campaigners and supporters of Nigel Farage’s various reactionary political efforts. What they lack in absolute numbers, they try and make up for in commitment to getting out their base.

    This resulted in Republican supporters creating convoys of cars and pickup trucks in their neighbourhoods to show their visibility, creating a form of social proof.

    Opinions

    Instead of data, the US political reporting seems to be based on the opinions of pundits affiliated to both major parties. This allowed networks and audiences to ‘drink their own kool-aid’.

    While the Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign strategy was to try and build interest across the spectrum – there wasn’t a manifesto the way we’d understand it in Europe.

    Instead there was an exchange of negative character messages about each candidate bolstering this wider battle of opinions over substance. This hasn’t been questioned in the US political reporting that I’ve seen, which surprised me.

    More media related content here.

  • T Factory + more stuff

    Korea’s Largest Telecom has Partnered with Apple, Microsoft & Samsung in new kind of High-End Retail store called T Factory – Patently Apple – interesting tech department story T Factory by SK Telecom. T Factory seems to be much more ambitious than Hong Kong’s 1010 mobile carrier shops

    Ex-Morgan Stanley bankers make a splash in Hong Kong as new boutique firm adds Ant Group, Xpeng to list of clients | South China Morning Post – launched last year by two former senior Morgan Stanley bankers, Crawford Jamieson and Daniel Wetstein, and has since added top-notch companies including Alibaba Group Holding, Ant Group, and Xpeng among its clients. The firm offers corporate finance advice to companies and financial sponsors in the technology, health care and financial services sectors, backed by experience in completing US$500 billion worth of deals between them since late 1990s.

    Who will win the battle to replace Huawei in Europe? — Quartz
    https://qz.c – “Open-RAN is something in the future,” says Strand. “It is not an alternative to the equipment Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, and ZTE are delivering today.”

    Comparison Shopping in the Age of Information Overload | INSEAD Knowledge – interesting research that is important for online shopping

    An XR partnership between Orange and Deutsche Telekom – Hello Future Orange – a bit happy clappy but shows some interesting ambition around the web of no web

    Google is bringing its own VPN to desktops and phones with $9.99 Google One subscription – The Verge – hmmm poacher turned gamekeeper?

    PlayStation CEO says VR won’t be a ‘meaningful’ part of gaming for years – The Verge – Sony PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan says virtual reality won’t be a meaningful part of interactive entertainment in the near future. Ryan indicated to The Washington Post that VR still has a long way to go, although he emphasized that Sony isn’t giving up on the medium. The statement suggests that an update to Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is years away.  “I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan told the Post. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that.” – Interesting take. On one hand the hardware in Sony’s VR sets for the PlayStation doesn’t need to change due to displays, on the other hand the pause in take up seems to be software related. Does gaming have the kind of storytelling issues that VR cinema has?

    Facebook Is Up To 10 Million Active Advertisers, But Zuck Says He Fears For The Future Of Personalized Advertising | AdExchanger – headwinds coming in the form of an evolving regulatory landscape, continued uncertainty to do with transatlantic data transfers and coming platform changes, particularly on Apple’s iOS.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Positive Brand Friction is a report that looks at the impact of customer experience on brand and how to get the best benefit out of it in the long term. The report was launched by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) at the Effworks Global Conference.

    Positive Brand Friction identifies a number of factors that increase the complexity in customer experience:

    • CX is usually designed around business functions rather than the customer
    • Ownership (but not necessarily responsiblity) falls under different business functions. Collaboration and swift decision making become even more important
    • The conflict between identifiable efficiency gains through cost reductions versus more variable returns through effectiveness and value-growth focus
    • Investment differences between operating expenditure (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX). This can make it harder for marketing to deliver long term value where OPEX is reduced

    Positive Brand Friction identifies four areas of focus for organisations and their agencies:

    • Experience intelligence / measurement. Measurement, insights and reporting system to discovers places where the experience can be improved
    • Collaboration rather than individual ownership of the experience. This also results in a customer focused culture
    • Evolving to get the right balance of positive brand friction without impacting on customer effort
    • Marketing growing into its role as the experience leader and influencer balancing customer and business value

    More here.

    Kazakhstan gets their reputation work in to balance the new Borat film on Amazon Prime Video. Rather than righteous indignation, they’ve respun Borat’s catch phrase and put together a number of short spots that challenge viewers expectations of Kazakhstan.

    Big Daddy Kane is one of the unsung heroes of hip-hop, Micro-Chip put together this great essay on him. Take out 15 minutes and give it a read: Big Daddy Kane’s Voice is an Instrument – Micro-Chop. 

    I happened to come across this Doug DeMuro video reviewing the BMW X5 M Competition. I haven’t suddenly turned into a car nut, but I found DeMuro’s dive into the unusual aspects of the driver experience was fascinating. What becomes apparent is how much digital has become part of the car. Look at the remote finger-twirling gesture control to alter audio volume at 7:00 in. It all feels very laboured compared to other digital products and too feature heavy.

    More on design related content here.

  • Consumerology by Philip Graves

    Consumerology taps into Phil Graves experience as a consultant on consumer behaviour.

    In the book, he draws on experience in retail marketing and classic marketing case studies such as New Coke. These examples show the numerous ways in which marketing fails to understand consumers.

    Consumer.ology
    Consumerology by Philip Graves

    Much of the tried and true testing methods used make consumer marketing decisions have their own built in biases and affect the results that marketers use to base major decisions on.

    AFECT criteria

    In Consumerology, Graves recommends a set of criteria to assess any research project against. The more that the research project aligns with these principles, the less likely it is to be adversely affected by consumer or marketer bias.

    A – Analysis of behavioural data. Does the research look at consumer behaviour or not? If it doesn’t look at some aspect of consumer behaviour, it isn’t valuable.

    F – Where the consumers in the right frame of mind? Where they observed whilst in a retail experience, making a purchase?

    E – Environment. What is the context of the content. Research that isn’t observational / behavioural in nature should at least be done where retail decisions happen. Environment is bound together with frame of mind.

    C – Covert study. Being aware of being observed affects behaviour. Think about the use of close circuit TV and fisheye mirrors to try and prevent casual shoplifting.

    T – Timeframe. Did the timeframe of the study match the timeframe that consumers would typically use themselves?

    Other book reviews here.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Share of search

    Les Binet talks about how share of search (organic search queries) volumes is a good indicator of likely interest in a brand. Somewhere between salience and brand consideration. As an idea it isn’t necessarily new, but Binet has put validated it through research. Its a new spin on the idea of people telling what they’d like to be true on social and what’s actually true on search. You can watch Les tell you more over at Vimeo. Given the popularity of Binet and Fields The Long and the Short of it, I expect to hear share of search cited much more in client – agency discussions.

    Pepsi & Notorious B.I.G.

    Notorious B.I.G. has had one of his in-studio freestyles (think the equivalent of a doodle) that was never released, converted into a Pepsi ad. He probably didn’t release it for a reason, it didn’t really go anywhere apart from him flexing is quick thinking. It didn’t add to his image. But that didn’t stop Pepsi from swooping in. I like it, it has brand salience.

    Hip hop seems to be a bit of blind spot for progressive voices at the moment. Wallace was a self-proclaimed former drug pusher, was arrested for selling crack cocaine and weapons charges. Apparently is was Sean Combs who eventually stopped him selling drugs. Whilst Wallace had collaborated with Pepsi-sponsored Michael Jackson; he’d also wrote about violence towards women on his album Ready to Die.

    I get that it would be cool for gen-X marketers; who also listen to the Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul, Common, Mos Def, Gangstarr and the Beastie Boys.

    But what happens if the tide suddenly changes as it has with other artists? Pepsi could be left high-and-dry. My attitude might be seen as overly cautious; but I am sure that Kendall Jenner ad seemed like an ‘now’ version of Coca-Cola’s ‘hilltop’ advert to the clients at the time.

    DataPlay

    Even though I am interested in gadgets and technology, I had never come across DataPlay. Mat Taylor goes through the history of the DataPlay format. The format looks like something straight from the pages of Akira or Ghost in the Shell.

    I had a number of takeaways from the video:

    • DataPlay lacked what Robert Cringely called the ’10x’ factor in his book Accidental Empires.
    • DataPlay ignored the progress promised by Moore’s Law, which at the time was still going strong through the early mainstream web era
    • DataPlay ignored the lesson that Sony learned the hard way with the Betamax format. If you don’t have content for your format; it will fail. Other Sony formats like MemoryStick, SACD, DAT to name but a few have shown that formats can fail even if you have content. But not having content leaves you with little chance for success.
    • Finally, DataPlay was relying purely on third parties to make the format successful. It had relatively little skin in the game.

    More here.