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

  • Facebook eroding & other news

    Facebook eroding

    The tweet about Facebook eroding is part of a greater issue of what Facebook is calling internally ‘context collapse‘. Facebook recognised the issue back in 2015. There are several likely reasons for Facebook eroding:

    • Negative network effects
    • Societal norming on social media content
    • Lack of trust in the facebook brand
    • People just don’t like Facebook as a platform that much

    Business

    After Anbang Takeover, China’s Deal Money, Already Ebbing, Could Slow Further – The New York Times

    Hello, mobile operators? This is your age of disruption calling | McKinsey & Company – lots of buzz words, diagnosis but not a glimpse of a way forward

    Edelman Revenue Up 2.1% In 2018 To $894m | Holmes Report – given that all the global PR groups have had exceptionally low growth or even declines

    How Douyin became China’s top short-video App in 500 days – WalktheChat

    Wireless

    Nokia on 5G at MWC, what struck me is the sales pitch was more like an enterprise software company like IBM or Oracle than a telecoms vendor. There is lots of tech in the networks but there isn’t a recognisable killer app. His warnings about 5G upgradeable products ring true though.

    Consumer behaviour

    Asian Boss do some really nice street interviews in different Asian cities and this one about Apple iPhones in Korea is particularly instructive. Samsung is seen as the default phone as they assemble phones (mostly for Asian markets) in Korea. Whereas in Europe all of the are made in China. When I lived in Hong Kong, both Samsung and LG emphasised that they made their phones in Korea with an implicit quality guarantee. 

    The iPhone seems to have won out on product design amongst younger people. but one shouldn’t ignore the desire to support the national brand. 

  • Operaatio Elop

    Nokia

    Operaatio Elop covers one of the most dramatic events in Finland since the Winter War. At the time of Nokia’s high point it accounted for over 25% of the Finnish economy. There has seldom been a fall so drastic as Nokia’s fall in the mobile phone market from leading player to disaster. With that fall came the humbling of an entire country.

    Given the scale of the fall and the size of Nokia as a brand around the world, I was surprised the the Operaatio Elop hadn’t been translated and published in different language editions. Instead it was up to numerous Finns to crowdsource a translation into English for free and provide it on an as is basis.

    Has Nokia’s fall had been so complete that it literally fell out of interest for non-Finns?

    What becomes apparent is that a story more nuanced than the press coverage would allow. Elop comes out of it a flawed tragic figure – a one-trick pony; rather than a skilful trojan horse.

    Nokia’s feature phone line up where surprisingly a hero of the piece contributing positively to the business for longer than I would have expected and slowing down the business collapse precipitated in the smartphone business.

    Nokia’s board of directors and former management come out of it much worse.

    Fatal flaws

    Nokia’s strengths had become its weakness.

    • Smartphone manufacturing processes weren’t ready for mass adoption
    • MeeGo had been unfairly assessed
    • It blew its marketing budget on a bet on the North American market, ignoring other countries
    • The marketing budget was spent too early and all at once. What resulted was an ineffective and inefficient marketing campaign. By my reckoning it was roughly $100 per phone sold during the launch of the Lumia range in the US
    • Poor quality Windows Phone software, small Windows Phone application ecosystem and cheap Android phones were key issues
    • Chip technology partner issues from its relationship with Qualcomm to Intel’s failure in 4G as it focused on WiMax rather than LTE

    The more pertinent question would be is there any circumstances where Nokia stood a chance of staying on top in the mobile phone marketplace? Operaatio Elop is a compelling but balanced read and I can’t recommend it highly enough. More book reviews here.

  • Blazed & other things

    Blazed

    I was having an online conversation with friends in the game about our favourite advertising, and this one came up. I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a public service announcement from New Zealand: Blazed – Drug Driving in Aotearoa.

    Guinness Rutger Hauer ads

    I also managed to find all the Rutger Hauer ‘Pure Genius’ ads done for Guinness. A lot of it looks like fresh thinking but mainstream production now due to CGI and After Effects, but at the time it was like nothing else that you would have seen

    Nazira

    I have been listening to this mix by Nazira. Nazira is from Almaty, Kazakhstan and plays at Berlin’s Room 4 Resistance parties. There’s also a great interview with her on the Discwoman site

    Fieldnotes Newsletter

    First issue of Fieldnotes newsletter is out! | Chad Dickerson’s blog – I used to work at Yahoo! when Chad was there, so can vouch for the newsletter being all killer, no filler. Chad headed up Yahoo!’s incubator Brickhouse. I can also recommend a second newsletter Brain Reel by Gemma Milne.

    For A Few Dollars More

    Revisiting For A Few Dollars More – I love the pace, the way it was shot and the storytelling. It also has Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood teaming up – EPIC. When I was a child I was confused the Lee Van Cleef playing two different characters in the ‘Dollars Trilogy’. In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly he plays a psychopathic gun for hire. In For A Few Dollars More he plays the honourable Colonel Mortimer looking for justice against a bandit.

    Gian Maria Volontè played both protagonists in A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More – and died both times. Leone didn’t intend for the films to be a trilogy, but they work quite well together. More related content here.

  • CNY 2018 ads that have made my day this week

    CNY 2018 – Chinese new year of the dog.

    CNY

    Whilst Christmas is the big ad time in the UK market and the Super Bowl dominates American advertising – the Sinosphere is dominated by lunar new year. You see Chinese new year adverts (in the Motherland obviously), Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. They are generally exceptionally sentimental and mawkish, but beautifully shot. It is a time for for family get togethers and when childhood memories are made. Things that symbolise Chinese new year include special food, getting given money in red envelopes and wearing new outfits for the first day of the new year.

    Here are some examples I have found of this years ads.

    KFC

    A film director goes back in time to see his younger self and tries to give him advice. I found this interesting given the Chinese government’s ban on time travel in dramas.

    Apple

    This was done for Apple China by Peter Chan and reposted on Apple Singapore’s social channels. They’ve done a really good job of capturing the gruelling journey home that many Chinese make every year.  Shenzhen’s main railway station is anarchy at this time of year.If this one doesn’t wring your tear ducts out you’re one heartless bastard.

    Digi Telecommunications

    A mobile carrier in Malaysia. the largest shareholder is Telenor. This one has a slight twist in the tail. I was expecting it to be a family matriarch – but it touches on wider connections and childhood memories. Education is much more highly prized in Chinese culture than British or Irish culture.

    Maybank – Malaysia’s largest bank

    Nothing quite like a bit of TVB style family melodrama to be squeezed into this four and a half minute film. A family in financial hardship gets pulled apart as the daughter grow up and ambition put a rift in the tight family unit.

    AirAsia

    My favourite one is this ad by AirAsia, who managed to weave in a deft bit of storytelling through the camera PoV and reference the symbolism of the Chinese horoscope for this year through the main character Ah Boy.

    More CNY related posts here.

  • The forces of 5G + more things

    The next generation of wireless technology is ready for take-off – The forces of 5G – the forces of 5G will be felt more in the industrial space than cellular networks (paywall) More related content here.

    The top trends to watch in OOH | Marketing Interactive – digitalisation – dynamic contextual content, programmatic like placement

    Inside North Korea’s Hacker Army – Businessweek – Bloomberg – really interesting insights. It makes you wonder about freelancing sites

    Silicon Valley Has Developed a $300 Million Foot Fetish – Bloomberg – Bloomberg’s take on how startups are tapping into the streetwear luxury nexus. Jordans are starting to look pretty played out

    Books with Full-Text Online | MetPublications | The Metropolitan Museum of Art – amazing resource via our Matt

    Episode 337: The Secret Document that Transformed China : Planet Money : NPR – a great lunch time listen. The farmers who came up with the first commercial contract during the communist era of China that led the way for the Deng era of opening up

    Trivago Surpasses Billion-Euro Mark as Tech Investment and Advertising Pay Off – Finance.co.uk  – The company also stated that increased expenditures in advertising had helped to improve revenues. Schroemgens informed reported that advertising has been a help for the company learn more about their customers. “We do a lot of quite extreme tests because the more extreme we do it, the more information we get,” said Schroemgens, in reference to the near wall-to-wall advertising campaign of Trivago on the London underground that features “the Trivago girl”, actress Gabrielle Miller. – In a digital world mass media still works. Trivago is particularly interesting when you think about the amount of established online travel players

    Tom Scott talks about the ethics and perils of doctored videos due to face swapping. Porntube and Twitter have already outlawed it, but I think that we’re only at the beginning of the ethical morass that’s about to unfold

    Bloomberg: China May Legalize Gambling on Hainan Island | Jing Daily – problematic for Macau and more likely to attract luxury retail to Hainan island alongside the high rollers

    Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disrupted – basically a summary by Scott Galloway of the argument in his book The Four

    Scandal-hit casino mogul Steve Wynn’s luck may be running out in Macau as well | South China Morning Post – according to a gaming industry source, that Wynn may have failed to meet expectations the Macau government had that he could be a key driver of a culture shift which would see the city “transformed” from a purely gaming destination into a family oriented centre for mass market tourists

    Why mobile operators want your second SIM card slot | HKEJ Insight – Hong Kong is hyper-saturated. Apple missed out by not having a dual-SIM offering. The problem with a lot of non-Hong Kong carriers is they would be struggling to innovate on the service that they offer due to generous data packages

    Toyota’s China Crisis Is Misfire in Biggest Auto Market – Bloomberg – interesting debate around Toyota’s product range