Ged Carroll

Category: taiwan | 中華民國 | 중화민국 | 民国

Ni hao – welcome to the Taiwan category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the island of Taiwan, business issues relating to Taiwan, people from the island of Taiwan, or Taiwanese-specific culture. I don’t post that often about Taiwan but given its strategic location, vibrant culture and importance in global manufacturing I’d like to remedy that.

Taiwan has a range of cultural exports including music, but most of that is focused addressing a Chinese speaking audience. Many of China’s stars actually come from across the strait. Many Chinese factories are actually owned and run by Taiwanese companies with many managers and engineers crossing the straits to work. They were as responsible for the success and opening up as their Hong Kong brethren who moved their factories upstream along the Pearl river delta.

The Republic of China to give it its formal name has had a complex history, acting as a cradle of traditional Chinese culture that was destroyed and remade on the mainland under Mao Zetong. He was looking to build a new country, while Chiang Kai-shek was looking to preserve as much of an old country as he could. The island across the strait was like a seed bank ready to regenerate the mainland at some point in the future.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if the Palace museum launched a collaboration with a brand that had great design chops and that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in design as well as Taiwan. Or if there was a new white paper from the government of Taiwan, that might appear in ideas and Taiwan. If there are Taiwanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • MWC 2016 as a case study on talkability, brand mentions and brand performance

    Mobile World Congress (or in industry parlance MWC 2016) is where the telecoms industry goes to set out its stand. It has gradually changed from being a conference where the big issues of the day are hashed out, to more of a trade show a la CES or CeBIT.

    From a brand point of view, it was of interest to me for two reasons:

    • It offers largely culture neutral brand discussions, many of which occur online
    • I have an interest, having worked on a few mobile brands during my agency career (Palm, Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Samsung, Qualcomm, Telenor Myanmar and Huawei)

    I pulled this slide ware together for a talk I am giving at an internal event at an agency.

    The first data that I have put together is looking at the amount of mentions that occurred regardless of the channel. It is a relatively easy data point to pull out of monitoring systems very quickly.

    Obviously the value of mentions will depend on how many people view them, what is the context that the mention appears in. What was the content around it? Who said it, are they expert or trustworthy? So looking purely at the number of mentions would be crude, offering little value apart from nice PowerPoint slides.

    Breaking the mentions down by platform gives an idea of relative marketing communications competencies of brands. So looking at Huawei and Xiaomi shows contrasting approach to building talkability and conversations. Huawei focuses on traditional media channels where as Xiaomi focuses on social.

    By comparison LG and Samsung seem to have a more holistic approach.

    I then moved on beyond the mention data to try and look at relative authority of whoever mentioned the brand and looking at the relative distribution by brand and channel.

    I had done some initial analysis on the event in general here. These numbers showed how well brands had built high authority communities and the discussions around them.

    What was quite surprising was the polarised authority of mainstream media sources. Newswire syndication had destroyed authority of many online traditional media channels. A second cross brand observation was the relatively low authority of the blogosphere.

    These slides only start to delve into understanding talkability and are time consuming to create in comparison to looking at raw mention numbers, but offer superior strategic insight for both earned and paid media approaches for future launches.

    I did some broad profiling of online conversations around MWC here.

  • Chinas Coming War With Asia

    Chinas coming war with Asia – provocative title

    Chinas Coming War With Asia: where do I start with a book title this inflammatory? I went to the trouble of reading the book twice before starting this review. In the end, the only conclusion I can come to is ‘Policy Faultlines in East Asia’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

    Chinas coming war with Asia is one of those books that you shouldn’t judge too harshly by its cover, but by Jonathan Holsag’s writings.
    Untitled

    About the book

    Holsag marshals a huge range of facts and opinions within the book. If you want to have a basic understanding of the modern Chinese state, then this book is a good primer.

    He provides insight into the Chinese Communist’s Party’s policy cornerstone of territory maximisation. They were happy to put off their agenda for tactical advantage, but never gave up on their goals. China’s neighbours have similar inflexible policy goals. There is is no win-win solution. This is very interesting given the treaty

    Time has brought increased pressures. A fight for resources to fuel further growth and water rights conflicts. Relative declines in economic growth also fuels nationalistic politics. In China, nationalistic sentiments in citizens grew with prosperity. It has become convenient for politicians to tap into nationalistic sentiments.

    Holsag doesn’t attempt to provide a solution for de-escalation of these edges. His book only provides a macro-level understanding of the countries involved. For the reader who wants to understand Asia, Holsag’s book is an excellent primer.  More on Chinas Coming War With Asia by Jonathan Holsag. More book reviews here.

  • Hardkiss reissues + more things

    Hardkiss Music – love to see this stuff get reissued. Gavin and Scott Hardkiss brought something new to the table with their recordings. Scott Hardkiss’ use of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s  Fire on High for the track The Pheonix blows me away every time that I listen to it.

    5ninthavenueproject – YouTube – set of VHS amateur documentaries that capture New York in the late 1980s

    The decline and fall of HTC | Digital Evangelist – a bit of the PC commodisation industry model and the mistake of following the Apple model without the full stack and marketing spend

    Korea’s Daum Kakao Brings In 34-Year-Old CEO To Grow Its Messaging Business Overseas | TechCrunch – can KakaoTalk deal with LINE, WhatsApp, KIK and WeChat overseas? WeChat has already failed to expand significantly beyond the Chinese diaspora

    Has America Completely Forgotten Its Roots In Dance Music? Magnetic magazine – I understand it but many people think that the blues started with Eric Clapton, culture is becoming like vapour

    Google new operating structure – Business Insider – interesting moves which formalises where Google has been. It also means that the Google brand isn’t likely to be over extended or risked on edge ventures. Innovation is likely to be stifled

    Pinterest’s Difference From Other Social Media Lures Quaker | Advertising Age – more like search. Longer content shelf life, minimal snark, searchability. I would be surprised if more family brands don’t go there as well. Facebook and Twitter have become cesspits

    759 Store dips toe in e-Commerce waters | Marketing Interactive – pet products, snacks and other in store products to follow. More retailing related content here.

    Traditional ad spending drops for first time | Kantar China – presumably because the Chinese economic growth is slowing down. Changes in media regulations is making it harder for TV stations to show the kind of content that consumers like

    Here’s how a Finnish startup landed $10M from Baidu. In a McDonald’s – interesting use of magnetic fields

  • Shenzhen ecosystem

    It is hard to believe that the Shenzhen ecosystem was built over just a few decades. Just over 30 years ago China moved from a period of cultural isolation to gradually opening up to the commercial world beyond its borders. The place to naturally start this was in Guangdong province close to the then British colony of Hong Kong. A small fishing village grew to become the workshop of the world. The growth of Shenzhen was driven by investment from multi-nationals and overseas Chinese. One of the earliest industrial areas was called Overseas Chinese Town or OCT. OCT has changed from manufacturing to retail and offices for the creative industries in the former factory buildings.

    Hong Kong had built up capability and expertise in light manufacturing and clothing from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is still important for supply chain intermediaries. This was the ‘golden age’ of Hong Kong. This is how many of the Hong Kong oligarchs made their first fortunes; which they then invested overseas, in China and into the Hong Kong real estate market.

    Globalisation had started after the second world war. But the opening up of China threw it into overdrive. Hong Kong industrials moved manufacturing plants for clothing, shoes, toys, plastic goods and electrical appliances to China.

    They were joined by Taiwanese electronics manufacturers and then multinationals from Europe, America and Japan. Hong Kong clothing manufacturers provided China supply chain expertise to western retailers like Walmart.

    The Shenzhen ecosystem was built on manual production. The deft fingers of Chinese women workers allowed a lot more precision than Japanese pick-and-place machines. Which meant a lot more flexibility in manufacturing using the Shenzhen factories. You wouldn’t have an iPhone if you used pick-and-place robots on the production line.

    Electronics manufacturing

    At first, these companies were used to fatten the wallets of customers who took on the marketing and distribution of electronics in the West. The dirty secret about many PC and laptop designs was they were standard underneath. Then this cost saving was passed on to the customer as people like Dell went for close to lowest price operator based on a direct mail / online direct ordering and cut out the channel.

    Finally that wasn’t enough, and most of the laptop and PC resellers make no money. Instead the main people to profit from these sales were Microsoft which licensed it’s Windows operating system and Intel which provided the majority of compatible micro-processors capable of running Windows-compatiable applications. In the PC industry there is usually just two or three profitable manufacturers and one of them is Apple. Historically it was Dell, then Hewlett-Packard and now it is likely to have be Lenovo.

    Shrinking PC-esque computing power into the palm of one’s hand was inevitable with the rise of flash storage and Moore’s Law facilitating power-efficient processors. The challenge is battery technology, packaging and industrial design.  Apple pushed the envelope with suppliers. Hon Hai and other manufacturers installed hundreds of CNC machines to fabricate thousands of metal phone chassis. These radical changes in manufacturing capability were opened up to lower tier manufacturers raising the standard of fit and finish immeasurably over a few years.

    Now Xiaomi and Lenovo product handsets that have better build quality than many Samsung and HTC handsets. The performance is good enough (again thanks to Moore’s Law) and the handsets run the same applications. Sony, HTC and Samsung handsets look as marooned as Sony’s Vaio PC range in the Windows eco-system.

    Shenzhen’s ecosystem has been a great leveller of manufacturing and industrial design capabilities with Apple at the leading edge of what’s possible from an industrial design and materials technology.

    More information
    Shenzhen Government Online – this loads slow like they are phoning the pages in from 2002, but is informative
    The smartphone value system – An earlier piece I wrote about the challenges of the Android eco-system

  • Duracell, Buffett & more things

    Duracell

    Warren Buffett buys P&G’s Duracell business | Marketing Interactive – I think that this is smart, Duracell is a powerful brand. It has been extended from beyond its traditional high quality alkaline batteries to include rechargeable batteries, chargers and related products. Beyond distribution, the fit for Procter & Gamble is less obvious. Having Duracell under more focused management should bear dividends

    Branding

    Nokia would like you to know that it’s “up to something” — Tech News and Analysis – Nokia is more focused on the business to business space now, I wonder if its more than a licenced brand deal? Nokia says vanishing consumer brand may return | Reuters – as a licenced brand, think Bush, RCA or Philips

    Consumer behaviour

    Instagram is killing teen girls’ self-esteem – Quartz – an exaggeration, am sure you could have put in magazines, models or TV role models in this title just as well

    Finance

    China bad loans rise as growth slows | SCMP – medium businesses suffering

    Kuwaitis to get Dow’s divested shares | Shanghai Daily – interesting move

    Morgan Stanley pushed murky China stock to market | AP – Tianhe story probes and is a warning for due diligence`

    Marketing

    Is Adblock Plus Killing Your Conversions? | Kissmetrics – it is more the issue that they are counted as false impressions

    Hong Kong Tramways: West Island MTR Line opportunity to grow ad revenue | Marketing Interactive – Hong Kong’s trams are a great outdoor advertising option which I’ve used to Tommy Bahama in the past

    Security

    The Nor » All Cameras Are Police Cameras – interesting article on the paranoia imbued by surveillance technology. It opens serious questions about devices like Ring security cameras

    McChrystal warns against ‘police state’ | Politico – sweet spot between police state and anarchy

    Technology

    TSMC Predicts Next Big Thing | EE Times – MEMs and CMOS together on the one chip

    Tencent’s Quarterly Earnings Disappoint As WeChat And Mobile Gaming Growth Slows | TechCrunch – games growth wouldn’t run at the same rate in the west anyway?

    Build Your Own Tiny Titan Supercomputer for Less than a Grand | Motherboard – gives you an idea of how technology has changed

    Tools

    YouGov Profiler – so handy for throwing together personas