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
We’re less than a month away from the year of the pig on February 5, 2018. Marketers need to be cautious using Chinese zodiac signs.
Chinese new year is a time of gifting. It may be red envelopes with cash, Christmas style gifts (like a new iPhone), or zodiac animal themed gifts. Shops often gift if you buy above a certain amount. I bought a sweatshirt in Decathalon and was given a Mickey Mouse towel free to celebrate the year of the rat.
If you have a premium bank account you might be given a zodiac ornament of some type. Coffee shops like Pacific Coffee and Starbucks get in on the act with zodiac animal themed merchandise and gift cards. Zodiac signs are big business.
Of all the zodiac signs, the pig presents some unique challenges for marketers.
On one hand it can be seen as a kawaii or cute looking creature, like the Hong Kong cartoon character McDull. A pig is also seen as gluttonous and fat. Chinese and other east Asian cultures are not shy about saying if someone is fat. This means that consumers can more be sensitive about their body image.
Starbucks Hong Kong seems to have upset a small but significant number people who have shared their dislike on Facebook.
They didn’t want a pig faced coffee tumbler because of what it implied about them whilst they used it.
Hong Kong clothing brand Giordano have played with the concept of the pig in their promotions. Again the association between this design on clothing and the wearer could be an interesting one. The idea of a fat year, meaning a prosperous year maybe lost in translation for some Hong Kongers.
The key takeout for brands should be to practice critical thinking. They need to go beyond the cute design and repetition of last years gift with a different animal design. Think about the context and interaction of the end user with the product. What does the symbolism say about them? More related content here.
Hackers Make a Fake Hand to Beat Vein Verification | Motherboard – another biometric standard weakens. The big question is the cost of the hand versus the benefit gained fooling vein verification. I am quite impressed by the vein verification hack. More on biometric authentication here.
Apple’s “Color Flood”: like Picasso said | Ken Segall – interesting analysis on the influences on Apple’s iPhone X/XR/XS advertising. All I can say is thank goodness Qualcomm aren’t in the ad business or Apple would be screwed
Can Luxury Brands Tap Into China’s ‘Virtual Avatar’ Fever? | Jing Daily – reminds me of the Adidas promotion Yahoo! did as a tie into to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Yahoo! was a FIFA sponsor (for online sports content, part of the bigger Terry Semel – ‘lets build a media company’ ethos along with ‘Kevin Sites in The Hot Zone’ – a proto-Vice TV documentary series. Often ideas have to come around a number of times before they have their day…
At a macro level, the world is in a pretty strange place at the moment. Populism is at the centre of uncertainty across many countries in terms of political direction, macro economics, technology and consumer uncertainty.
Populism and nationalism is on the march: Duterte in the Philippines. Trump in the US. The German right wing populism leaning political party AfD is shifting the Overton window in Germany. The yellow vests in France and the UK is channeling anger into political activism along fringe party lines providing an opportunity for populism. The UK has seen a rise in far right grassroots media mirroring the rise of The Canary and similar publications on the left both of which fuel different forms of populism. The Russians don’t need to do it as the populism and divisive politics is homegrown. The Queen’s speech called for unity in the country and the UK government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme has more far right cases than Islamic extremists. Even China has been gradually moving to a Han nationalism as part of its more forceful foreign policy. India and Pakistan have both seen a rise in sectarian politics. This has impacts in terms of foreign trade and economic growth. We are already seeing domestic brands rising in China and India; we may see a decline in brands and product SKUs in the likes of the UK – all of which will impact advertising budgets. At an agency office level; the chilling effect of nationalism is going to affect the movement of talent on both client and agency side. It’s hard to articulate the atmosphere of an agency that I was working in the day after the Brexit vote without using the word bereavement. I know people in my family and peers who are moving away. Over time this will impact culture and creativity. It is hard to remember but back in the 1970s the UK was much more parochial and less multi-cultural than it is now. Everyday things we take for granted like good food were much poorer experiences.
There are so many variables in play we don’t know where populism and divisive politics is going, but there are dark possibilities to the government ‘by the seat of their pants’ which seems to be prevalent.
Cryptocurrency and block chain: We’ve seen a wide range of crypto currencies decline in values this year. What are the factors might drive a recovery? Why would there be a spike in demand? I don’t know what that ‘X factor’ would be. I suspect that experiments in block chain such as verifying online media spend to prevent online fraud will start bumping up against the limitations of the technology. Blockchain has a relatively low transaction rate compared to legacy payment systems. Decentralisation still isn’t as good as an Oracle database or a mainframe a la the traditional banking system. Some applications just make no sense.
From Farm to Blockchain: Walmart Tracks Its Lettuce – The New York Times – is a classic example of technology for technology’s sake. How much lettuce would Walmart be selling day in, day out? That data has to be collected across a complex supply chain. Secondly, its a privatised centralised blockchain which negates the technical benefits of Blockchain and makes me wonder why IBM weren’t selling in Db2 or Oracle high transaction speed relational database on a z-series mainframe. It’s announcements like this that makes one wonder if blockchain has jumped the shark.
Virtual reality hasn’t seen the level of adoption that was predicted. The problem is no longer one of technology hardware (lets ignore battery life for a little while) but content. VR changes the way stories are told and experienced, it makes it hard to build brand experiences and compelling content. Microsoft has managed to build a community of early adopters in Altspace – a Second Life type environment. Augmented reality (AR) has been sporadically adopted and Apple has been putting a lot of work into building creator tools, but the decline of Blippar. Magic Leap’s demo film for its partnership with Cheddar doesn’t currently look like a compelling AR application to me. It does mirror, anecdotal evidence that suggests the most common use of VR is to replicate a big TV experience in a small space through the Netflix application.
https://youtu.be/xjYE-joYjQs
If 2017 and 2018 were the years when ad fraud became the bête noire of marketers, 2019 might see harder questions asked of influencer marketing practices. The move from influencers to micro-influencers was down to cost per reach and engagement. The move to nano-influencers implies a similar kind of shift again. Yet it seems to be largely taken on blind faith by marketers at the moment that influencers are good thing. I think many of the challenges that influence marketing faces when I wrote about them earlier are still valid. One question that I haven’t seen seriously considered by marketers is when you’re in a culture where ‘selling out’ has moved from being shameful to gen-x; to a badge of validation in the space of a decade that has to change the value proposition that influence brings? As a marketer the possible answer to that question worries me.
The focus on ad fraud might be partly responsible for a slight resurgence in the realisation brand advertising is valuable. Performance advertising is about the now, brand advertising is all about sowing acorns that are reaped for decades to come. As a concept it’s easy to grasp at an empirical and research driven level. But when marketers typically stay in a role for a short time, the now becomes of outsized importance. They have to make an impact and then plan their exit strategy in what’s typically a three year cycle. Brand is hard for FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) brands to take on board as they see channel and shelf disruption from the likes of Amazon and Ocado. They have experimented with the direct sales model a la Birch Box and Dollar Shave Club, but that will only work with certain products. Consultants selling disruption are selling chaos; clients hedging against black swans often miss where change isn’t happening – consumer behaviour doesn’t change at the speed of PowerPoint. I’ll leave the last word on digital disruption to Mark Ritson.
It’s hard to get emotional or feel any of the romance of news media from a home page, but the paper edition carries with it the great cultural power of journalism. Print editions will become the ‘couture’ offering of the news brands – loss-making but important assets for building and retaining authority and influence over the market
Validation of traditional media can be seen all around us. Amazon printing catalogues, online brands having flagship stores. Underground and out of home adverts for e-commerce businesses surround me as I go about my daily life in London.
Stories with everything – I don’t know whether the recent trend of every social platform having a short form video function that disappears a la ‘stories’ is a wider socio-cultural trend or the constant carousel of changing formats as part of a ploy to keep users engagement rate up. For established platforms there is little to be lost by throwing new features agains the wall and seeing what sticks.
I’ve omitted talking about 5G as it will take more than a year to get up and running. It won’t be clear what its application is until we start to see how effective the network is in practice. Gadgets like fold out phones won’t fundamentally change the pictures under glass interface used in smartphones for the past decade or so. Their impact may be exaggerated due to their high cost that consumers will bear one way or another.
I realise that these are a series of random thoughts but would be interested to know what you think. Feel free to comment below.
I tried to keep the crazy in the week under control listening to smooth jazz. However the week has been just as insane as last week. Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou is out on bail, but Donald Trump cast a shadow on the whole process by a saying that he was quite prepared to use her freedom as a pawn in his trade dispute with China. Telling China that the rule of law is malleable isn’t a good move from a strategic point-of-view. Suddenly everything is negotiable, which incentivises bad actor behaviour.
As for Brexit, the words of Danny Dyer still ring true:
Who knows about Brexit? No one has got a fucking clue what Brexit is… You watch Question Time, it’s comedy. No one knows what it is. It’s like this mad riddle…
Danny Dyer, Good Morning Britain – ITV (June 28, 2018)
How smooth jazz originated and took off
How habit-forming products are made by Nir Eyal. This is all pretty dark and illustrates how modern apps are and web services are made habit forming.
There are a series of Christmas themed adverts at the moment that riff on Christmas animation The Snowman by Barbour and Irn Bru’s original and belated sequel ad.
Uber has got into the Christmas spirit by putting a limited amount of toy themed cars out on to the streets of Paris.
Matt Farah’s Watch and Listen podcasts is one of the better YouTube channels out there. Their interview with Jean-Marc Pontrué, the CEO of Panerai is a level of insight that you wouldn’t normally have. One key observation is that Richemont has turned SIHH into a fan event for their brands as other houses have withdrawn. It is part of a wider more engaged attitude that Panerai takes with its fans compared to the likes of Rolex. I think that its a smart move as luxury is still about experiences.
New Yorks information for Amazon – crazy number of data points and a must see for any planner looking at campaigns targeting New Yorkers (PDF). From a more sinister point of view about New Yorks information for Amazon – it shows a corporate culture that’s out of control.
Just who is Huawei listening to? | Business | The Sunday Times – “In the event of an international crisis — say, if the Chinese were to invade Taiwan — if you own a fleet of thousands and thousands of routers, you can launch service-denial attacks on a massive scale,” said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. “You can potentially make the internet unavailable for days or weeks.”
