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

ICYMI | 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우

Ogilvy consulting – the digital transformation arm of ad agency Ogilvy put together their annual trends presentation, which is worth going through. Ogilvy Consulting came out of Social@Ogilvy, Ogilvy Red and OgilvyOneMore related content here.

http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/qKBcnrebDLtUu9

About Placement asset customization on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network | Facebook Ads Help Center – via James Whatley

Evaluating the GCHQ Exceptional Access Proposal – Lawfare
– great piece by Bruce Schneier and dangerous ideas. Once it can be done, it won’t be just the good guys that will be demanding it

Jury awards T-Mobile $4.8M in trade-secrets case against Huawei | The Seattle Times – this has been going for years

Navigating luxury in China: advice from the front line | Campaign Asia – 2018 was an interesting year for brands in China. It was the year of the WeChat pop-up mini program, and also the co-branded limited edition KOL collection. Standouts included collaborations between Mr Bags (the pseudonym of fashion blogger Tao Liang) with Tod’s—a collection that sold out in seven minutes—and Longchamp, for whom Liang made RMB 5 million [US$738,000] in two hours; and top KOL Fiona Xu’s collaboration with Roger & Gallet, which saw 500 limited edition pieces sell out online in minutes.

Transformation | PMI – Philip Morris International – interesting regulatory push Philip Morris is making around smoke-free cigarettes

Swiss Watchmakers Brace for Slowing Chinese Demand | BoF – they are are remarkably more resilient than I was expecting

WSJ City | Poland tries to balance reliance on Huawei with spy fallout – just wait until they get into the water, electricity and railways….

CES 2019: A Show Report – Learning By Shipping – Sit back and think for a minute that it actually got easier to turn off your lights in New York by tapping a button on smartphone and sending the off command into outer-fricking-space and back through a datacenter in Idaho than to simply send 4 bytes worth of infrared 12 feet across the room.

January 19, 2019
K pop bandwagon & things that made last week

Puma have got on the K pop bandwagon to sell sneakers to Indonesians. Historically Korean brands have been most adept at getting on the K pop bandwagon. It is as common as chips in Korea. They have started to extend these K pop bandwagon campaigns abroad. Foreign brands have started to get in on the act. For instance, Girls Generation partnered with Casio’s Baby G range of watches. More Indonesia related content here

A vintage advert from Apple that was all about storytelling through its customers. What’s On Your PowerBook. What’s interesting is the storytelling and the ‘lone computer user’ narrative of the Apple PowerBook. It leaned into the otherness of Apple products in the Windows world and equated that otherness to being fashion forward. During the dark days Apple was a hold out in the creative industries from graphic design to fashion and novelists.

Nike have launched a more polished looking self lacing trainer fulfilling the promise of the future from the film Back To The Future 2. They also did a good video that discusses the design of the Nike BB Adapt sneaker. The interview gives you a good insight into the Nike innovation and design process.

Pretty much everyone has shared their opinion on Gillette’s virtue signalling dog whistle advert on toxic masculinity – so I feel no reason why I should anything to the discussion. Instead, check out this Bosch ad that I got through my friend Ian. Where do you start with it? Its not nerd core as its trying to hard. I could think of a few reasons why the main protagonist lives alone with this smart home and smart car. I am sure that there would be a lot of raised eyebrows in Germany over it. Its very far away from where I would have thought that the Bosch brand would be.

January 18, 2019
Cathay ticketing error + more things

Cathay ticketing error … again: first-class fares at tenth of original price – Is there problems in Cathay’s Pacific backend algorithm that is causing the Cathay ticketing error? This is the second time that a Cathay ticketing error has happened recently. More related posts here.

NGT48 pop idol Maho Yamaguchi’s apology for home assault sparks outrage at Japanese victim-blaming | South China Morning Post – A Japanese girl group pop star gets assaulted in her own home by a crazed fan. She is then made to apologise by her management company for the whole incident. So reading between the lines management are likely to be scum bags, possibility connected to the criminal underworld, if not a yakuza family. The yakuza historically have had strong links to the entertainment industry. Periodically there is a scandal where photos of entertainers mingling with Yakuza appear in the media

2019 Predictions | The Daily | Gartner L2 – no surprise on the Amazon predictions. Amazon has little incentive to buy legacy retailers as its advantages comes from the lack of legacy infrastructure and people. Amazon’s increase in value makes sense due to its cloud computing market share, and increase in share of basket and performance advertising.

Qualcomm CEO defends chip licensing business in FTC trial – CNET – Qualcomm’s “no license, no chips” policy is at the heart of the FTC’s case against Qualcomm, which lawyers are arguing before Judge Lucy Koh in US District Court in San Jose this month. Mollenkopf was among the witnesses who testified on Friday. Under the policy, companies must license Qualcomm’s patents before it will sell them chips. Qualcomm customers, such as Apple, don’t like that one bit.

Hong Kong-based online travel agent Zuji, now without a licence, unable to operate | South China Morning Post – just wow, I remember when Zuji was a hot start-up. Like European countries Hong Kong startups have challenges when they are up against competitors with scale.

January 15, 2019
Zodiac signs perils

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.

January 6, 2019
Vein verification + more things
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.

9 Chinese Fashion Labels to Watch in 2019 | RADII Media – there are also legion of domestic streetwear brands to keep an eye on due to the popularity of hip-hop culture in China

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…

Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality | VentureBeat – general AI is nowhere near reality, but the amount of people who talk as if it is are legion

Chinese regime ‘intimidates critics in intellectual war against Britain’ | News | The Times – you can feel a Cold War brewing – the key difference in Chinese and western influence operations is that they lack subtlety and go harder. Which makes sense when they are used to getting their way at home

China restarts video game approvals after months-long freeze | Reuters – what’s more interesting is the degree of flexing going on by the Chinese government against Tencent. No Tencent games were in the batch of 80 approved titles

Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women – Bloomberg – prisons are taking up the slack of community care

QR Codes are dead — long live Bluetooth beacons! – YNAP Tech – Medium – not convinced:
- QRcodes are now supposed in the core OS of iOS
- Support and familiarity in Asian apps (WeChat, LINE etc) and even the hand off between WhatsApp mobile and desktop clients
- Bluetooth beacons size and broadcasting nature vs print materials and European privacy regulations
January 2, 2019