Category: retailing | 零售 | 소매업 | 小売業

Looking back to when I started this blog, it would have been reasonable to expect an inevitable march of retailing from offline to online. Amazon was on a tear and search advertising volumes were increasing year on year. By the time I was at Yahoo! search advertising (focused on online retailing) counted for about half of all revenue for the company.

At that time Yahoo! had a Spotify-like subscription streaming music service that was viewed as a threat to Apple’s iTunes download only offering. When I worked there Yahoo Music was the number one online music site in terms of audience reach and total time spent by consumers on the site. Also display advertising was much bigger for brands than it is today and Yahoo! was guaranteed a good share of the online marketing spend from any movie launch at the time.

The reality of online retailing, was slower than our expectations. While COVID drove an increase in online retailing there has also been corresponding innovations in retailing as well.

Amongst the pioneers in this change have been luxury brands like Burberry and Nike, who brought digital into their stores to provide a superior customer experience.

Adidas brought manufacturing into its stores with its speedfactory experiment, allowing for fast time to market and customisation.

Supreme changed the cadence of retailing with the Thursday morning ‘drop’ which saw queues outside stores. Every Thursday became a launch day as far as their customers where concerned. The queue has moved from Apple’s annual cadence, to every week.

US military right to repair + more

Here’s One Reason the US Military Can’t Fix Its Own Equipment – The New York Times – the irony of the US military being restricted by US legislation and lack of ‘right to repair’. US military withdrawal from R&D hasn’t help things either. DARPA does pure research, but the focus on COTS (commercial off the shelf) solutions by the US military has seen a withdrawal from more practical applications. Where is the modern US military equivalent of things like the Piccatinny rail standard? More security related content here.

Facebook’s fake numbers problem — Lex in depth | Financial Times – Facebook’s own estimates suggest duplicate accounts represent approximately 11 per cent of monthly active users while fake versions make up another 5 per cent. Others claim the total is higher. Yet Facebook continues to promote its user base as an incredible 2.45bn per month — close to one-third of the global population.” – ok so some of the logic is wonky, but the underlying point is very interesting

Adidas is shutting down its Speedfactories in Germany and the US — Quartz – Adidas is apparently moving this to APAC which negates the agile advantage. Is this more about Capex and recent poor financial results instead?

Sidewalk Labs document reveals company’s early vision for data collection, tax powers, criminal justice – The Globe and Mail – The community Alphabet sought to build when it launched Sidewalk Labs, she said, was like a “for-profit China” that would “use digital infrastructure to modify and direct social and political behaviour.” While Sidewalk has since moved away from many of the details in its book, Prof. Zuboff contends that Alphabet tends to “say what needs be said to achieve commercial objectives, while specifically camouflaging their actual corporate strategy.” – some of the most sinister stuff I’ve heard of, that hasn’t been originated by Chinese Communist Party cadre

E-Commerce Content Marketing: A 2020 China Trend | PARKLU – basically OTT shopping TV

Luxury Daily | Breitling in step with resale mood launches online trade in programme – or a way of stimulating sales. Rolex seems to have sucked a lot of the momentum out of the luxury watch market. Breitling and and other brands like IWC have suffered

Chaebols and firm dynamics in the Republic of Korea | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal – Moving from low- to high-income status implies that countries escape the middle-income trap. This implies institutional reform to create innovation-based growth. The column uses firm-level data to show how the Korean government’s chaebol reforms in the late 1990s transformed the economy from an investment-based to an innovation-based model. There are lessons here for China.

USAF officer says China brags about stealing US military tech, they call it “picking flowers in the US to make honey in China” | War Is Boring – ”China devotes significant resources at a national level to infiltrate our universities and our labs,” Murphy stated. “They are doing it for a reason. They’ve even coined the phrase, ‘Picking flowers in the US to make honey in China,’ which I would say perfectly illustrates their deliberate plan to steal R&D, knowhow, and technology

Why are so many countries witnessing mass protests? | The Economist – interesting on how there isn’t necessarily a clear correlation of reasons, despite efforts to find a pattern – (paywall)

Apple, TikTok draw congressional rebuke for skipping hearing on China – The Washington Post – I hope that they get penalised

Dialog 50 cent SoC Targets Disposable Bluetooth Market | EE Times – environmental disaster in waiting

Smartphones Rule. But Should They Control Cars? | EE Times – no they shouldn’t

Something in the air – Why are so many countries witnessing mass protests? | International | The Economist – As Red Flag, an Australian socialist journal, sees it: “For more than four decades, country after country has been ravaged by neoliberal policies designed to make the mass of workers and the poor pay for what is a growing crisis in the system.”

Opinion | Why Google’s Quantum Supremacy Milestone Matters – The New York Times – In everyday life, the probability of an event can range only from 0 percent to 100 percent (there’s a reason you never hear about a negative 30 percent chance of rain). But the building blocks of the world, like electrons and photons, obey different, alien rules of probability, involving numbers — the amplitudes — that can be positive, negative, or even complex (involving the square root of -1). Furthermore, if an event — say, a photon hitting a certain spot on a screen — could happen one way with positive amplitude and another way with negative amplitude, the two possibilities can cancel, so that the total amplitude is zero and the event never happens at all. This is “quantum interference,” and is behind everything else you’ve ever heard about the weirdness of the quantum world.

5G will only be as revolutionary as the devices we design for it — Quartz – “When we’ve spoken with consumers who carry the latest smartphones today, and you talk with them about 5G, what these users are saying is that the current form factor and feature sets cannot take advantage of the promise of 5G,” Sethi told Quartz. While smartphones are great for reading the web, watching videos, and checking emails, there’s not much that a considerably faster connection speed will do for them that they can’t already do.

Unreal life: just 21% of Brits believe internet personalities portray life honestly | YouGov – about authenticity as a concept….

Letter of the US attorney general – very thoughtful defence of end-to-end cryptography in the face of sensationalist ‘protecting children’ claims

How China’s mystery author called its economic slowdown | Financial Times – interesting read about the end of China’s growth

I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb – VICE – the interesting bit is that AirBnB don’t care if people get grifted

China effectively bans online sales of e-cigarettes | Revue – given that: China invented the e-cigarette and the government has a monopoly on smoking sale. This isn’t the market opportunity loss Juul et al might think that it is

IPA | IPA reacts to Twitter’s political ad ban – If online platforms won’t commit to a publicly available, platform-neutral, machine-readable register of all political ads and ad data online, then they should consider following Twitter’s lead in banning political advertising – and even then what would the first solution solve, given the failure of legislative regulation – what’s the point of a register when you have both major parties more crooked than a yakuza convention, but without the style?

IPA | IPA Insight Infographic: Smartphones – interesting point for me is that the phone alarm didn’t appear on this

IPA | Legal Update 31 October 2019 – Google announced that they are making changes to YouTube to address the substance of the FTC’s concerns and will apply these changes globally. The changes, which will be rolled out from January, include:• moving families over to YouTube Kids through notifications and educating parents about its benefits;• identifying Made for Kids content on YouTube via a combination of input from creators and machine learning; and • no longer serving personalised ads on Made for Kids, for all users regardless of age, and serving only contextual ads on this content

November 21, 2019
Electric car issues + more stuff

Tesla Model 3 Survey: What Owners Think About the Electric Car – interesting read, Toyota and VW Group will eat them alive as their electric car programme take off. I am not going into the dumb nature of Li-ion versus hydrogen powered vehicles…

‘Caveat Emptor:’ State Dept. Mocks Russian, PRC Weapon Sales In ‘Buy American’ Pitch « Breaking Defense – four Chinese-made Harbin Z-9 helicopters purchased by Cameroon in 2015, one of which crashed soon after purchase. Similarly, Kenya bought a handful of Chinese-made Norinco VN4 armored personnel carriers, “vehicles that China’s own sales representative declined to sit inside during a test firing,” he claimed. “Since going ahead with the purchase regardless, sadly dozens of Kenyan personnel have been reportedly killed in those vehicles,” Cooper said, adding “caveat emptor!” He also slammed Chinese CH-4 armed drones, which various countries in the Middle East have found “to be inoperable within months, and are now turning around to get rid of them… We have seen countries around the world leap at the chance to obtain high-tech, low-cost defensive capabilities only to see their significant investments crumble and rust in their hands” – buy China and pay twice, interesting to see this in the defence sector. Is the export quality worse than the products for the PLA? Or is China falling down on maintenance and services packages (customer service)? I think the Russian argument is harder to make given their decades of experience building simple, but effective defence products

Ireland Inc.: The corporatization of affective life in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland – Diane Negra, Anthony P McIntyre, – how a post-Celtic Tiger Irish government aligned with elite interests has doubled down on its commitment to corporate citizenship. Despite the depredations of this era being directly attributable to the irrational exuberance of the Celtic Tiger period and lapses in financial regulation, Ireland post-2008 is marked by a radical forgetfulness and defined by ‘Shock Doctrine’ regulatory policies that have installed corporatism at the heart of everyday life. Key features of this landscape include ongoing governmental facilitation of tax avoidance by multinational corporations, the hollowing out of public services, the normalization of under-employment and a burgeoning housing crisis. We show here how the popular images and narratives of the period index a shift toward corporate impregnability and a public culture in which individuals absorb greater risk and take up positions of heightened precarity

One firm, two countries, one workplace model? The case of Foxconn’s internationalisation – Rutvica Andrijasevic, Devi Sacchetto, Ngai Pun, – insight into the employment relations in China-based multinational companies internationalising to Europe, a still relatively unexplored topic. We investigate the transfer of work and employment practices from Foxconn’s manufacturing headquarters in mainland China to its subsidiaries in Czechia and the factors that influence the firm’s internationalisation of production – (PDF)

M&S launches ‘buy now, pay later’ service | Business | The Guardian – sub prime retailing in the making

Glossy 101: How fashion brands are rethinking influencer marketing – Glossy – when brands work with micro-influencers, they’re paying less to work with people who tend to have a more engaged audience. A report from The Wall Street Journal estimated the micro tier charges between $400 and $2,000 per post, while higher tiers will charge anywhere between $10,000 and $150,000. It should be a win-win. However, by adding more people to the mix, brands are setting themselves up for a lot more work

The Boss on Board: Mafia Infiltrations, Firm Performance, and Local Economic Growth | naked capitalism – explains a lot

Sprout Social its at IPO | Pitchbook – it will be interesting to see how they get on given the negative investor sentiment around the likes of Hootsuite

China’s e-commerce giants are looking for gold in rural areas as growth in big cities slows down | South China Morning Post – over 26% of China’s online population are from rural areas

BT unveils biggest brand campaign in 20 years – created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the ad begins with a schoolgirl reciting Charles Dickens’ classic opening from A Tale of Two Cities as she walks through the dreary British streets. Set to Blinded by Your Grace, Pt 2 by Stormzy, it goes on to showcase Britain’s technological advances over the past few decades, from CCTV and Tube advancements to the emergence of broadband – is it just me or this or is this exceptionally dark. CCTV!

Cathay Pacific Calls On PR Firm Edelman To Help Plot Revival | Holmes Repor t – thankless task for Edelman, short of a takeover by Air China nothing is going to stop the China government pressure. It might slow it down but it won’t stop it. Swire needs to extract itself from China

Measuring the effectiveness of creativity in marketing | Marketing Week – the ad industry will be forced to refocus on creativity. Yet marketers (and their counterparts in finance) have become used to the measurability of performance marketing. If the industry can’t prove the effectiveness of creativity, brands will continue to up spend on short-term sales activations rather than brand building. The majority of markets are trying to add some science to the art. An exclusive survey of more than 400 brand marketers conducted by Marketing Week finds 61.8% measure the effectiveness of their creative (compared to 76.5% who measure the effectiveness of media)

Don’t Let Metrics Critics Undermine Your Business | MIT Sloan Review – those lucky employees who haven’t been automated into professional obsolescence instead find themselves enduring what economic historian Jerry Z. Muller calls the “tyranny of metrics.” Numbers rule their workplace lives, and there’s no escape. “The problem is not measurement,” Muller declares, “but excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement — not metrics, but metric fixation.” “Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business,” warns Harvard Business Review’s September-October 2019 cover story: “Strategy is abstract by definition, but metrics give strategy form, allowing our minds to grasp it more readily. … The mental tendency to replace strategy with metrics can destroy company value.”

Reliance on Louis Koo’s Box Office Power Highlights Challenges in Hong Kong Industry | JayneStars.com – to be honest this has been coming for years. There are few Hong Kong male stars below the age of 50. It saddens me having grown up on Hong Kong cinema and knowing the richness of creativity in the city

Hey – it could’ve been Regina Ip! | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – it seems Hong Kong officials use Reuters as their preferred conduit for leaks (or ‘scoops’ as media folk call them), while their Mainland counterparts prefer the Financial Times. The latter today reveals (paywall, etc, possibly) that Beijing will eject Chief Executive Carrie Lam, maybe in March, after things have ‘stabilized’ ha ha

New WeChat regulation on incentivized sharing and external links – new WeChat regulation on incentivized sharing and external links

Six Chinese men jailed for a hit job that was subcontracted five times – Inkstone – Pi Yijun, a criminal justice professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said the case reflected strong distaste towards litigation in Chinese culture. “People are not willing to go through the legal channel,” Pi told Inkstone. “Whenever they encounter disputes, they try to solve it privately, mediating through personal connections or taking the law into their own hands.” – Caveat Emptor

Steve Jobs’ speech that made Silicon Valley obsessed with pirates — Quartz – ‘machine for thinking’

AI Weekly: In China, you can no longer buy a smartphone without a face scan | VentureBeat – there’ll be a good market in stolen phones then

SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites – SpaceNews.com – Iridium 2?

Ren Zhengfei: HongMeng is capable but will not replace Android | Gizchina – translation – we aspire to displace Android and become more profitable but our OS isn’t up to snuff for westerners

Andy Kessler: WSJ: Tech Treadmill Wears Firms Out – Max Hopper’s “Rattling SABRE—New Ways to Compete on Information,” and finally in 2013 we got Rita Gunther McGrath’s “The End of Competitive Advantage.” Each of these takes describes a different stage in the life cycle of corporate tech. Hopper was, as Harvard professor James Cash noted, “the first person who really defined the marketing leverage that could come from using technology.” In the late 1950s Hopper helped build Sabre, an automated flight-reservation system, and in 1981 he helped design the first major frequent-flier program to give American Airlines a competitive “AAdvantage.” Yet by 1990 he worried that the game was over, suggesting that technology was “table stakes for competition.” Hopper noted that “SABRE’s real importance to American Airlines was that it prevented an erosion of market share.” That insight comes to mind watching the Streaming War of 2019. Netflix and Amazon have a huge lead in streaming video. But eventually everyone uses the same technology. Tim Cook wants in, so Apple TV+ launches Nov. 1 with (probably overpaid) Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. Robert Iger wants in, and Disney paid (probably too much) for control of BAMTech, the streaming-video technology developed by Major League Baseball, which it is deploying for streaming services Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu + Live TV. AT&T wants in and paid (again likely too much) for Time Warner to create HBO Max. NBCUniversal wants in too. See the trend? Google ought to rename its streaming service YouTube TV Max+

Are Publicis’ problems reflective of a wider market malaise? | Advertising | Campaign Asia – By placing Publicis on top of Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and Bartle Bogle Hegarty, they have destroyed those storied brands. By putting Publicis Sapient on top of LBi, Digitas, Rosetta and Razorfish, they have killed their digital brands too. As a result, now they are saying they have to transform the transformers – I agree that brands have been affected, but I’d also argue that the flight away from craft to disruption has also been probelmatic

Martin Sorrell: Group M alone is worth as much as WPP’s stock market value | Campaign Asia – in the face of Facebook, Google and Amazon advertising in the west and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent advertising in China is Group M really worth the whole of WPP alone? There is also the aspect that Group M has been crying disruption, disruption and screwing its own business

Qatar, facing unbearable heat, has begun to air-condition the outdoors – Washington Post – this sounds mad

Google discontinues Daydream View VR headset and drops Daydream support from Pixel 4 – The Verge – people don’t like wearing their phone

Facebook opens search ads to all advertisers – Search Engine Land – this is going to make things interesting

U.S. lawmakers urge Apple to restore HKMap app used in Hong Kong – Reuters – Apple and quisling Tim Cook getting squeezed by US politicians

Louis Vuitton Has a Factory in Texas Now, Marking its Third in the U.S. — The Fashion Law – LVMH – which is trudging ahead and abroad and “increasingly letting industrial logic and geopolitics govern supply-chain decisions,” per Dalton, while competitors, “such as Gucci, Hermès and Chanel have kept most [of their] production in Italy and France” – this is just business. And considering that LVMH’s Fashion & Leather Goods division, alone, brought in $15.8 billion in sales in the first 9 months of the year– with the group as a whole reporting revenues of $42.14 billion for the same period

Teaching Democrats to Speak Evangelical | The New Yorker – interesting how the Democratic Party are having to go back to basics on learning community relations in US politics

November 4, 2019
Choi Hyun woo & things that made last week

Choi Hyun woo

TV shopping channels are huge in Korea. Asian Boss did this great interview with Choi Hyun woo, one of the most successful shopping TV pitchmen (pitchwoman) in Korea.

Looking at data from home shopping company CJ ENM Commerce division, sales are starting to focus more on premium and luxury products from international brands like Karl Lagerfeld and Vera Wang. Overall TV viewship has been declining; but TV home shopping has been steadily growing.

Good document on how consumer behaviour and technology will affect the future of retailing and e-commerce by Sparks & Honey. Its a book rather than a presentation.

Amazing bit of creative work by Alzheimer’s Research UK.

We’re in a golden age of TV drama and it looks like thins are only going to get more interesting with this trailer from HBO’s adaptation of The Watchmen universe. This seems to go in a very different direction to the original Watchman series. It is picks up from the end of the original book when a ‘trans-dimensional’ invasion fails. It doesn’t have the cold war orientation of the original series and is instead a show for our times. The HBO series focuses on issues of race and class. It looks as if it could be more entertaining than the original film adaptation that felt a bit flat.

https://youtu.be/-33JCGEGzwU

McDonalds have pushed these ads about trust and they play on human truths like the discomfort of formal restaurants or the tyranny of choice in grocery stores. A classic example of this tension is that many people I know refuse to eat on their own in a restaurant. I don’t have that hang up at all. McDonalds deserves credit for really listening to consumer insights and playing them back tot the audience for added brand resonance.

October 11, 2019
Illegal spy camera + more things

Illegal spy cameras are still easy to find in Shenzhen’s gadget paradise | Abacus – this will make you very paranoid. The size of the devices now mean that you can have illegal spy cameras everywhere. Smartphone adoption has driven the quality of small cameras up and their size down.

Jollibee acquires US-based Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf | Marketing | Campaign Asia – this is huge. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is a credible Starbucks competitor with a substantial footprint and great tasting coffee. It has a substantial presence in the US and Asia, with a particularly big footprint in Korea. Korea is one of the major coffee consuming nations in Asia.

Inside Amazon’s pitch for new audio ads in music on Alexa devices | AdAge – Amazon sells 15 and 30 second radio type adverts. It looks like a modern version of Rediffusion style radio that piped content directly into consumer homes in the post war period. Cable radio used to be a thing in the United Kingdom Barbados, Malaysia, Malta, Singapore and Hong Kong….

Forever 21 Sent Some Customers Atkins Diet Bars And People Are Very Angry | Buzzfeed News – I wonder what persuaded Atkins to come to Forever 21 with this tie-up. Is there something in their customer base demographic profile that isn’t obvious to me? I could see why at first glance Forever 21 could have seen the product drop as a ‘delight’ for customers. But in retrospect the sensitivity is understandable. It is also interesting how Forever 21 took the brunt of consumer displeasure on what was a co-promotion with Atkins.

Extinction Rebellion breaks into fashion in Stella McCartney sustainability campaign | The Drum – Extinction Rebellion gets co-opted by fashion brands. The FT have an interesting interview with Greta Thunberg about how XR and he wider climate change protest movement spiralled out of control

July 27, 2019
A fierce head cold & other aspects of my week

My week had been truncated somewhat by a fierce head cold and am cranking this post out with less deliberation than normal due to a backlog of household chores that aren’t going to take care of themselves. Add to that a Lemsip induced haze to try and combat the fierce head cold and you see how the rest of this post will go

Paul Armstrong shared this AR/VR example with me: Swedish creative agency Warpin posted a video of a H&M-commissioned experience for Magic Leap glasses. The concept looks like everything my cyberpunk fan brain would want; like being inside Max Headroom’s mind. I’d also imagine that it would be hellish for any length of time. More related content here.

Warpin Media for H&M

BBH came up with this campaign for Carabao energy drink. The ad is aimed at the Chinese market and asks the question ‘What fuels your fighting spirit?’. In western English – this would be closer to ‘what makes you resilient, or what gets you through?’. It’s pretty much the same question that any ad planner or creative in an agency has asked as they chug their energy drink of choice whilst working on a client pitch, or particularly tough creative brief.

BBH Shanghai for Carabao

‘Dear young people don’t vote’ by Shokasonjuku is a great video highlighting the need for younger Japanese to get involved in the electoral process, if they want issues that they care about to be heard. Shokasonjuku is a production company set up by Nana Takamatsu – a Japanese comedian. Young people in Japan aren’t educated or engaged by the political process, something that Takamatsu wants to change.

Shokasonjuku

Martin Lindstrom on how data separates businesses from consumers and how ethnography can bridge the gap. It’s also interesting how he talks about small data; or what you and I would call qualitative data that leads to insight based on a human truth.

Smart cart guides the visually-impaired around grocery stores | Trendwatching – so a beer brand comes up with a smart shopping cart, but is the marketing benefit to the beer brand anything other than ambient marketing? There’s nothing wrong in that of course, but the linkage that will be made with social purpose looks spurious at best. If you want to help people and you sell alcohol. Stop. Don’t enable drunk drivers, wife beaters and alcoholics.

July 22, 2019