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

  • Creativity in data

    I had the honour of being part of a panel for the PRCA on the creativity in data run in association with The Work Crowd.

    Creativity and data

    Here was the synopsis of the panel discussion that the PRCA put out.

    Communications is frequently seen as all about ‘big ideas’. But increasingly, it’s being recognised that to develop a big idea that’s really going to have an impact, it’s not just about creativity. Now, the winning formula is creativity + data.


    Of course, data has always played a role in the creative process, but historically through a more ‘rear view’ measurement of past behaviours. However, with technology advancing and predictive analytics utilising newly available data, the data we have access to is more forward-looking than ever.


    The ability to synthesise these insights is super-powering strategic planning for businesses, but it’s definitely not just the boardroom who should be interested in ‘running the numbers’. Maths and data may not be seen as natural bedfellows of storytelling and creation, but have we been underestimating the power of creativity in data? Ultimately, is data a friend or foe to the creative process?

    I kicked this around with Camilla and Richard. Here are my thoughts that came from this process in no particular order below:

    I wondered what the forefathers of the communications industry would have thought about the question? Leaving ethical considerations aside for a moment about the legitimacy of their techniques, what would they have thought?

    Edward Bernays was famous for using consumer insight, research and psychology in his work. It would likely have felt very alien to Bernays that we were even asking such a question. He would have felt that the answer is self-evident a 100 years later.

    Data isn’t a friend or foe to the creative process. It is part of the creative process. The sieving of data to get down to the grain of truth – the insight that you can hang your creative idea off.

    Thinking about the nature of data itself is muddled. Over the past couple of decades the communications industry has struggled with measurement. This then shaped its perception of data.

    • Data is quantitative
    • Data is tech dependent
    • Data is precise

    All of which is wrong:

    • Data can be quantitative, but qualitative data is also important, particularly to the creative process. Qualitative data is the stuff of stories and storytelling
    • A lot of data is technology dependent, but a lot of good stuff from a creative perspective isn’t. Marketing communications as an industry, has increased its use and importance of cultural insights in planning
    • Quantitative data isn’t always precise. Correlation and causality aren’t the same things. In addition, if online ad fraud has taught us anything, it is to be skeptical of data quality

    I am not saying that communications should move away from obtaining and using quantitive data. But this should be balanced by a focus on qualitative data as well.

    Data is seen paradoxically as ‘all around us, pervasive’ and expensive to obtain.

    So what data should the creative planners of the communications industry care about? Some of the sources listed below are free, some are books that are worthwhile investing in and others are expensive services that even the largest agencies struggle to afford in many markets.

    The data that the client has already

    Clients are already sitting on a wealth of information inside their organisation:

    • Past marketing campaigns. What has worked, what hasn’t.
    • Web analytics – what content is doing well. What do we know abut site visitors?
    • Key words that they use for SEO. What language should we be using for coming with messaging?
    • Sales data. Not just qualitative data, but what is coming out of sales calls and customer services enquiries? What concerns prospective and current customers? Why do they buy? Do they stay loyal? Do they have great stories? Who buys and who is likely to influence a buying decision?
    • Competitor research including brand tracking data if available
    • Planning work and creative briefs done by the clients other agencies. Chances are that a comms agency will have been brought in after other agencies. What channels are those agencies looking to leverage. Where can you complement their work? What is the human truth that they are hanging their creative from? Are there any design cues in their artwork?

    Work smarter, rather than harder. It is foolish to try and do the same information gathering twice. A client’s willingness to dig and get this for you gives you a rough read on how important your work is for the organisation.

    Best practice data on efficiency and effectiveness

    The marketing industry as a whole has put a lot of money into the Ehrensberg Bass Institute and they have compiled decades of marketing science research to some accessible books. How Brands Grow parts 1 and 2 are constant references for me.

    The IPA’s publication The Long and The Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Fields is another reference for me. Binet has updated this research to cover B2B recently.

    They help me answer questions such as:

    • Is PR the right tool to solve the client’s current problem?
    • Is our creative likely to be effective?
    • How much should be focusing on brand building versus activation?

    To make your life easier, here’s a slide where I distilled optimal channel choice versus marketing strategy.

    Zero-Based Budgeting

    Where you see ticks, that’s when the marketing tool (PR, advertising etc) will do the most good.

    The Holmes Report and WARC have collaborated so that if you have a WARC subscription you can access award winning case studies and learn from campaigns that have solved similar problems to the ones that you face. None of the industry organisations or communications have distilled this kind of data down into a comms agency equivalent and Binet and Fields.

    Desk research

    • Videos – its amazing the insights you can pick up from observing YouTube videos
    • White papers – I have become a pack rat for these, I download everything and keep them on my machine because you never know when you might need it
    • Your own data bank. I have over 40,000 site links to content that I’ve found of use in the past. It’s where I go to before DuckDuckGo since I already know its of a certain quality. I use a social bookmarking tool called Pinboard

    Academia

    Both Scopus and Google Scholar have got great resources on social science based research. In addition, Wolfram Alpha is a really good sources of validated data points. The British Library can also be a treasure trove of content.

    Articles

    • Blog posts (like this one)
    • Free and paid resources for example: Apollo Research, Business Insider Research / Contagious / Datamonitor / D&B Hoovers / Ebiquity / Emarketer / Economist / EIU / Financial Times / Forrester Research / Gartner L2 / Global Web Index / IPA databank / Kantar / Lexis Nexis / Little Black Book / Mintel / Nielsen / Pew Research / Statista / WARC / YouGov
    • Management consultancies in particular McKinsey do a wide variety of research
    • Other planners (for instance here’s an article that I wrote about trends in the beauty sector)
    • Trade bodies (particularly good examples are the GSMA Intelligence and CES)

    Government statistics bodies

    • CIA World Handbook
    • EuroStat
    • Government national statistics offices (Wikipedia has a great category page that points you to the right countries and regions for these sources)
    • IMF
    • UN Statistics Division
    • World Bank
    • World Economic Forum

    Social listening data

    Social listening data needs to be used with a certain amount of caution. It is a measure of the level of discussions around a given subject but not the sum of them. Some of them are likely to happening in real world settings, many in ‘dark social’ – social interactions that tools can’t see.

    As a rule of thumb in European countries there tends to be less B2B social discussions going on than the US. For consumer brands there has been some good work done to show how social media listening attributions (volume, share of voice, sentiment etc) can approximate to brand tracking.

    Primary research

    This could be everything from:

    • Quantitative focused research: running a quick and dirty survey on Survey Monkey, a reputable omnibus survey provider like Dalia Research, Kelton Global or YouGov through to commissioning a piece of bespoke research
    • Qualitative research: eye tracking, focus groups, interviews, neurological scans to analysis response to stimulation, observational research, video diaries
    • Field trip: go out with sales people, meet clients, walk around stores and notice what people do, strike up conversations in stores or trade shows. The art of the flâneur is made for the planner

    More information

    Academia

    British Library – getting a reader pass

    Google Scholar

    Scopus (paywall)

    Wolfram Alpha

    Best Practice

    How Brands Grow What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp

    How Brands Grow: Part 2: Emerging Markets, Services, Durables, New and Luxury Brands by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp

    The Long & The Short of It: Balancing Short Term and Long Term Marketing Strategies by Les Binet and Peter Fields

    Other

    FT Graphics

    World Economic Forum reports

    Governmental organisations data

    CIA World Factbook

    Eurostat

    IMF Data

    UN Statistics Division

    Wikipedia category page on national statistical services

  • Bullet time + more things

    Bullet Time – Logic Magazine – Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. Started in Japan, but popularised massively in China. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan — washes over whatever happens next. The bullet time interface reminded me of the realtime information one would see in things like trading desks. Its an emotional barometer amongst your people for real time content.

    Mark Ritson: Binet and Field aren’t perfect but it doesn’t make them wrong | Marketing Week – well deserved defence of Les Binet and Peter Field by Mark Ritson. Models are never perfect

    Why Strangers Are AirDropping You Memes and Photos – The Atlantic – everything old is new again as Bluetooth sharing ‘Bluetoothing’ gets a refresh. Taylor Herring used this to share a job advert at the recent PR Week Awards

    Does the UK Benefit From Chinese Investment? – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – short answer no – it’s actually harmed by it as investment is power projection and compromises the UK’s strategic capability

    Mark Read: CMOs have become too much like chief communications officers | PR Week – A lot of CMOs have become too much chief communications officers, not chief marketing officers,” Read said. “Our job is to help to put the ‘market’ back into the word ‘marketing’. “Communications has an important role, but it needs to be “the right element” within the wider marketing mix, according to Read: “Marketing means: what markets are we in? What products do we offer? What prices do we do? How do we understand and anticipate consumers?”

    Despite Fears, Aviation’s Future Will Be More Automated | Time – so why the move towards more automation in cars such a good idea based on what we know about airliners from this article?

    The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs – The Atlantic – context specific

    WalktheChat | WeChat Live Streaming Case Study: 48% Sales Conversion Rate! – really interesting read. China’s mix of live-streaming and e-tailing is shopping TV for the 21st century

  • Qualcomm licensing + more

    Judge Koh: Qualcomms Licensing Practices Destroyed Competition, Harmed Consumers – Disruptive Competition Project – as best as I can understand this, the analogy of Intel and AMD comes to mind in terms of the kind of case Judge Koh has described her thoughts. But the case is different which is what makes this a bit odd. Especially odd given that there is so much more to criticise on Qualcomms licensing practices. In particular the coercive cross licensing conditions that are part of Qualcomms licensing practices. More on Qualcomm here.

    Blockchain officially confirmed as slower and more expensive | FT Alphaville – Oracle et al should be showing this to clients

    Field Notes: Highlights from Huawei – Andreessen Horowitz – My family uses Apple’s phones; Apple’s ecology is very good. When family members travel abroad, I would gift them an Apple computer. One can’t narrow-mindedly believe that if you love Huawei then you must only use Huawei mobile phones. – Chairman Ren says that when he and his family are looking for premium smartphones they use an Apple

    TV makers to reduce display panel stocks, says IHS Markit | EE Times – expectation of economic contraction

    China’s robot censors crank up as Tiananmen anniversary nears – Reuters – there’s a definite tension between western media fake news and Chinese censorship coverage. Not that there’s moral equivalence, but a lack of awareness about the thread connecting the subject areas

    Dunkin Donuts Refuses to Get Woke: ‘We Are Not Starbucks’ – Sometimes the brand purpose is what it says on the tin

    Uber introduces quiet mode for premium customers | Canvas8 – you need an app to mediate a simple request FFS

    Global Competition and Brexit | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core – highlights the importance of globalisation in driving populism in post-industrial economies. This is probably why Trump and American politicians are in the trade cold war for the long haul and likely to see similar in the EU – its only a matter of time

    Nigel Farage seeks to establish a viable far right UK party — Quartz – If you don’t read anything else about Brexit and think that the current populism will peak and subside with Brexit ponder “Anyone who is not the governing party is going to benefit from the governing party inflicting food shortages. Medicine shortages will be very immediate. All of which he will be able to blame on Brexit not being done properly, and at least some people will be receptive to that message.”

    China showing signs similar to Japanese housing bubble that led to its ‘lost decades’, expert warns | South China Morning Post – I’ve heard this more than once, though there are two things to consider: 1/ the Bank of Japan was much more hands off than Chinese monetary policy 2/ China has opacity of data and more levers to pull in its favour in property market. Bigger issue is corporate and government debt

    Exclusive: Behind Grindr’s doomed hookup in China, a data misstep and scramble to make up – Reuters – While it is known that data privacy concerns prompted the crackdown on Kunlun, interviews with over a dozen sources with knowledge of Grindr’s operations, including the former employees, for the first time shed light on what the company actually did to draw U.S. ire and how it then tried to save its deal. Reuters found no evidence that the app’s database was misused. Nevertheless, the decision to give its engineers in Beijing access to Grindr’s database proved to be a misstep for Kunlun, one of the largest Chinese mobile gaming companies

    Mediatel: Newsline: Sex sells, right? – So, with that in mind, can sex still have the selling power for advertisers that it once did? 
    “Ultimately? Yes and no,” Jem Fawcus, CEO of brand strategy partner and insight agency Firefish, tells Mediatel. 
    “Every well observed element of human life can sell if used in the right way. But if used just for titillation and as an attention grabber, absolutely not.”

  • Beauty trends

    Beauty trends is a bit tricky – there are generational and cultural aspects to beauty and standards. I’ve tried to tease out elements that will ripple around the world.

    Digital Beauty

    Chinese women use Meitu and other beauty apps to present the best versions of themselves with a virtual makeover. This goes from skin quality, skin tone and make-up to a full virtual plastic surgery style makeover.

    Meitu has 63 apps and 2 mobile websites as it expands internationally.

    Meitu beauty cam

    Meitu has collaborated with over 100 make-up brands including L’Oreal, Guerlain, Lancôme, Estée Lauder, and Shiseido.

    Meitu is only the tip of the spear. Smartphone manufacturer Huawei has provided a simple beauty mode in its default camera app. Chinese video streaming software provides a similar functionality for performers. Even Skype had trialed a digital make-up service in association with Shiseido.

    Authenticity

    There is a tension between the trends in authenticity and some of the developments that we’ve seen in beauty.

    On the one hand there are the clean and effortless beauty movements that taped into a wider consumer trend around natural.

    On the other hand you have the Korean ten-step beauty process popularised over the last decade and digital beauty apps – particularly from China and Korea.

    In the case of digital beauty and instagram filters critics claim that a new form of dysmorphia seems to be emerging. Its the difference between what they see in the mirror and on their smartphones.

    That dysmorphia is one of the things that has driven a move towards authenticity. In the West, wider moves around everything from trans rights to the body positive movement has redefined what make-up does.

    Punk

    Whilst most people think of punk and associate it with tourists taking pictures in Camden, the Sex Pistols and Vivienne Westwood. But the biggest impact of punk was the rise of independent media from fanzines to record labels. We’re seeing a similar DIY approach in the beauty industry. Big beauty companies are being challenged by independent companies with a narrow or even singular product focus. There are a number of perceived advantages to these independent brands:

    • Perception that niche brands spend less on advertising and more on research and development; these products can be considered more specialised and effective
    • Niche beauty brands can have greater social currency in terms of being an element of self expression and part of friend-to-friend recommendations

    In China, you see a greater interest in these independent niche brands from men than female consumers.

    Diversity

    Traditionally make-up has been an additive process to conceal and cover up blemishes, flaws and signs of ageing. Modern make up is about celebrating quirks and even flaws. This goes beyond beauty spots to female baldness and skin conditions. Effortless make-up is often an artfully constructed look where the person rolled straight out of bed.

    Beauty from the inside

    Beauty from the inside has a mix of socio-cultural aspects to it. In China it includes focusing on quality sleep to reflect in beauty regimes. The key thing for most brands is the ingestion of ingredients. Where are the lines drawn between make-up and the health-like claims of functional foods? Could we see licensed pharmaceutical products as cosmetic aids like currently happens in China? Here’s that the Hong Kong Trade and Development had to say about ‘cosmeceuticals’ in their report on China’s Cosmetics Market:

    Cosmeceuticals, especially Chinese herbal cosmetics, are opening up a new territory in the cosmetics market. It is understood that more than 170 enterprises have tapped into China’s cosmeceuticals market to date, many of them renowned pharmaceutical companies in China, such as Tongrentang and Yunnan Baiyao. Cosmeceuticals only have a market share of about 20% in the mainland at present. In Europe, the US and Japan, cosmeceuticals have a 50-60% share. It is believed that China’s cosmeceuticals market has much room for development. As young consumers begin to concern themselves with the ingredients and quality of products, consumption of cosmeceuticals tends to start at increasingly early ages. While cosmeceuticals have medical properties, they are classified as cosmetics since there is still no official definition for the term ‘cosmeceuticals’ on the mainland.

    China’s Cosmetics Market – HKTDC Research

    Natural

    Natural has affected the food industry and this has extended to beauty trends Younger consumers are interested in products that don’t contain ingredients that sound synthetic. The lack of artificial ingredients a key selling point. Instead they expect natural and botanical ingredients.

    A natural output of this trend has been a rise in home manufactured cosmetics supported by an eco-system of how-to videos on YouTube.

    Ageing

    The population of the developed world in both the west and east is aging. This means that gen-y and gen-z obsessed beauty marketers are having to adapt to an ageing audience. They have the disposable income and the demand for beauty products.

    Brands are adapting their

    • Products and formulations
    • Packaging
    • Language – you know longer see ‘anti-aging’ used on many product descriptors, despite that being essentially what the products ‘do’

    More information

    Digital Watch: How Chinese Millennials & Gen Zers are Re-connecting with Their Elders | Jing Daily

    App Annie data on Meitu

    Shiseido’s New “TeleBeauty” App , A Virtual Makeup Solution for Online Meetings | Shiseido News Releases

    China’s selfie obsession | The New Yorker

    China’s Cosmetics Market – HKTDC Research

    92% of Chinese males prefer niche beauty brands: report | Campaign Asia

    The future of skincare – Spencer Schrage, Ogilvy Consulting

  • Swatch and Brexit + more

    Swatch and Brexit

    Swatch have been doing some interesting things around personalisation of watch design, but Swatch and Brexit feels like a leap too far. They’ve got a really nice user experience in the web interface, which makes this a disappointing post to make. I do wonder about who they think Swatch and Brexit is actually aimed at? What other fashion or luxury brand has looked to exploit Brexit like a tawdry souvenir seller?

    swatch brexit

    More Beyond campaign

    Cathay Pacific – Move Beyond campaign might have passed by without a mention for me for a number of reasons.

    • It doesn’t say anything new, but reaffirms the Cathay Pacific that I’ve known and loved to fly with
    • It’s very much a campaign designed to top up brand awareness and consideration for the airline which has taken some brand knocks at home and declining awareness abroad
    • It’s about brand purpose, which seems to be a hygiene factor at the moment. More on that from Mark Ritson. I am not sure that Cathay Pacific’s brand purpose passes Ritson’s test of being prepared to stick with the brand purpose, even when it costs money – like when they moved away from having the Mandarin Oriental handling lounge catering…

    Creatively its nice. A generic, safe looking brand film with catalogue corporate video backing track. I know Jack Scott shot it and some of the cinematography is nice (that word again), the colouring of the film is on point for money well spent. As an audience member it is pleasant enough to watch drift by, but not necessarily enough to spike a change

    In fact, if it wasn’t for the MTR (Hong Kong’s equivalent of London Underground and Overground) and Hong Kong International Airport outdoor advertising it would be utterly forgettable. One of the print posters has a couple of clothed men holding hands running on a beach. An ideal compromise between a socially conservative society and western virtue signalling.

    Cathay Pacific LGBT

    The poster wasn’t initially allowed to run on the MTR or in Hong Kong International. I heard some murmurings of China’s dark shadow casting a censoring hand on the posters – by westerners on social media. To be honest, they’d be more concerned about dealing with free speech, Falun Gong supporters, the Hong Kong independence movement rather than homosexuals being encouraged to walk on a beach in business smart suits.

    Instead the reality is more mundane. A minority of Hong Kongers: Taoists, Buddhists, the non-religious and Christians alike are a bit ‘mid western American’ about the gay community. There is an obvious tension between deeply-held beliefs, the longevity of the family through children and grandchildren. Thankfully, the LGBT community and straight supporters managed to have the ban reconsidered.

    William Chan Chinglish

    I am guessing that Chanel has insights to show that women buy its J12 watches, whether as a gift for someone else or themselves. William Chan is an interesting brand ambassador choice in this video. There is criticism in the YouTube comments on his pronunciation and ‘Chinglish’. It also feels a bit too ‘sweet’ to me. At least he’s a good boy who loves his Mum.

    Royyal Dog

    Asian Boss put together this great documentary on Royyal Dog – Korea’s top graffiti artist.

    Sony

    Lastly I found this amazing corporate film by Sony of their corporate history that I guess was shot in the early-to-mid-1970s. The manufacturing process, in particular test and measurement being so labour intensive is fascinating. The 5 inch micro-TV set is a beautiful piece of product design, as is the early Trinitron TV set. The hi-fi equipment is achingly beautiful. Well worth watching it from start-to-finish. More Sony content here.