Ged Carroll

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  • Yellow economic cycle

    The yellow economic cycle has manifested itself as a positive boycott.

    The anti ELAB protest movement in Hong Kong exposed the fracture lines between pro-Beijing (blue) and pro-Hong Kong sides (yellow). Some of Hong Kong business community came out and criticised the protestors. This resulted in consumers boycotting their business.

    Maxim’s

    The classic example of this was when Annie Wu criticised Hong Kong protestors. Wu’s father James co-founded Maxim’s Caterers Limited. Maxim’s is has a wide range of restaurants for all budgets. It also owns bakeries, provides catering for universities and businesses. Maxim’s even has a joint venture with Starbucks. Starbucks coffee shops in Hong Kong and southern China are run by this joint venture called Coffee Concepts.

    Mainland businesses, especially Chinese state-owned enterprises like China Mobile and Bank of China were defaced by protestors. McDonalds restaurants in Hong Kong and China are majority owned by CITIC – a Chinese state-owned investment company.

    Garden Bakery

    Garden Bakery’s Life bread ended up becoming a yellow brand by default when it was criticised by members of the Hong Kong Police. Hong Kong protestors rallied around and even brought along loaves to demonstrations.

    #AnywhereButChina Challenge

    Consumers bought everyday products that weren’t made in China and shared the product and its country of origin online. This becomes quite tricky as products from western brands like Wrigley chewing gum or pair of Nike sneakers could be made in China.

    It’s particularly interesting as it raises questions about long term perception of quality. Back before the protests when I was living in Hong Kong LG and Samsung smartphones being sold advertised with pride that they were made in Korea. It was a similar story with high-end Sony TV sets. #AnywhereButChina channels China’s political and quality related issues in one meme.

    Solidarity with their customers

    Many small businesses in Hong Kong started to do what they could for their young customers. And the customers paid them back with loyalty. By trying spend their money only in yellow businesses and avoid blue ones by creating a yellow economic cycle.

    Yellow economic circle

    Online assets were created to point customers in the right direction. Here is one of the posters that have been circulating on Twitter. The use of QRcodes is much more common in east Asia than Europe. The code takes you through to a Google Maps overlay of Hong Kong featuring Yellow businesses which would be preferable to shop and eat at. Green businesses which are preferable to blue businesses. Blue businesses will be avoided wherever possible.

    Reviews of yellow shops and restaurants on review sites like Open Rice have been poisoned by pro-government supporters placing bad reviews and protestors piling in to defend their yellow economic circle members. At its worst, even the most hardened Wikipedia editor would be daunted by the pitched battles going on.

  • Sonos problems + more things

    IoT Trouble: The Sonos Example — And More – Monday Note – the recent Sonos issue is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the basic IoT issue that older equipment on a network can block security updates to newer Sonos gear. The second aspect of this relates to consumer attitudes. Early Sonos sales positioned the equipment against traditional consumer electronics brown goods like Sony, Denon, Yamaha etc. As we can see from recent products, Sonos has moved away from hi-fi to convenience. This is probably why Sonos legal action against Alphabet’s Google Chromecast and Google Home became more important.

    Sonos
    Early model Sonos hub and amplifier

    Angelo Baque, Zainab Jama and Acyde on counterculture – The Face – interesting thoughts on immediate access and value versus gradual access and appreciation

    Here are some terms to mute on Twitter to clean your timeline up a bit. · GitHub – really handy to clean up your Twitter feed

    Jobs, Cook, Ive—Blevins? The Rise of Apple’s Cost Cutter – WSJ – sounds like a sociopathic knob who’d be better off working at Huawei

    Facebook Says Bezos Hack May Highlight Phone Vulnerabilities – Bloomberg – Nicola Mendelsohn over at Facebook is like one of them monkeys that throws its own faeces at bystanders walking past their cage

    Nutella/Ferrero: nut fluster | Financial Times – In 2012 Ferrero agreed to set aside $3m to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by a California mother. She had been surprised and upset to learn Nutella was not a “healthy, nutritious” food. She was widely mocked – you could not make this up (paywall). More on FMCG as a topic here

    MBS Taunted Jeff Bezos Over Secret Affair Before National Enquirer Expose | Daily Beast – surprised that Bezos didn’t have multiple numbers and and handsets – private and business. Also that the handsets weren’t scrubbed regularly. Some of the infosec experts commenting on the report itself are very interesting and raise more questions than answers

    Mediatel: Newsline: Tess Alps: We can’t confront climate change without advertising – despite the headline this is about advertising requiring an emotional pay off

    Sonos will stop issuing software updates for ‘legacy’ speakers and devices in May | TechHive – another reason why hi-fi makes more sense

    LOEWE Runway Men’s Fall Winter 2020 | Fashion Show – feels curiously low res

  • CNY 2020

    Today is the start of CNY 2020 (Chinese New Year 2020). January 24 is ‘New Years Eve’. It is the year of the rat, which symbolises another start in the Chinese horoscope cycle. Here are some of the best examples of adverts celebrating Chinese New Year (CNY 2020).

    China

    Nike China benefited enormously from this advert done by Wieden & Kennedy Shanghai. Which is a take on the politeness of ‘oh no, you shouldn’t have but on a very amped up level’. Reminded me of my interactions as a small child with my Granny in Ireland ‘Ah go on, go on, you will, you will’ aspect a la Ms Doyle in Father Ted. Nike ZoomX Vaporfly NEXT% which provide runners with an unfair advantage play a starring role in the film.

    The Great Chase by Wieden & Kennedy Shanghai for Nike China

    By comparison, Adidas’ effort is beautifully made; with really high production values and a riot of colour like you’d expect for Chinese New Year. But in my opinion, it lacked that killer idea and talkability compared to Nike.

    Adidas 新年造萬象 – Adidas CNY 2020 by Haomai Advertisement Co., Ltd

    As with other countries Apple China’s shot on… series of adverts merges film directors, storytelling and ‘eats its own dog food’ by shooting using the Apple iPhone 11 Pro. As in previous years Apple stays away from the usual cliches. For CNY 2020, Apple tells the story of a single mother and her child. Single parents are seldom visible in Chinese advertising as so much emphasis in society is put on marriage. It’s well worth a watch.

    https://youtu.be/bvtwWhKdxhM

    Last year’s advert focused on the ‘taste of home‘.

    Malaysia

    Malaysia’s Chinese community may only make up 30 per cent of the population; but its Chinese New Year adverts punch above their weight in comparison to other countries and CNY 2020 was no exception.

    Telenor-owned Digi Telecommunications film Home is about the family visiting an aspirational daughter in her new home for lunar new year. It cuts through some of the chintz of the celebrations with a working class family grafting away, but ultimately family bonds conquer all.

    Panasonic Malaysia’s video takes a little while to get in the swing but when it does I could imagine it being a right ear worm. You put this on TV and radio to get a really efficient campaign. It also stays away from being overly sentimental.

    https://youtu.be/Vlvz68wWtVw
    Panasonic Malaysia – Sek Bao Mei

    It wouldn’t be a round up of Chinese New Year adverts if there wasn’t at least one that tugs at the heart strings. Malaysian RHB Group who provide banking services came up with this tear-jerker. If you don’t well up just a little you’re a sociopath.

    Singapore

    One of the weakest efforts that I have seen this year was this effort by Dyson to promote the air purifying qualities of their fans. The sole nod to CNY 2020 is the brief red envelope with an engineering drawing on it at the start of the video. I don’t know who commissioned this for Dyson; but they should be hanging their head in shame.

    https://youtu.be/ugWpkTsS4NM

    SingTel’s recent festival related advertising have pulled on the heart strings, and been ‘anti-millennial’ – like The Gift shown for last Christmas. By comparison this one is a classic situation comedy highlighting all the benefits of connectivity. The humour reminded me of the Hong Kong film series All’s Well That Ends Well – which are usually in cinemas over Chinese New Year.

    Prudential Singapore have a wider campaign going called #MindTheGenerationGap over CNY 2020 and have put together some nice branded content like this cooking programme with lovely interstitial animations

  • Convenience store + more things

    CivicScience | Convenience Store Food Taking Aim at Fast Food – god this brings back memories of fishballs and curry sauce in the 7-Eleven convenience store common in Hong Kong. More stories on retailing here

    7-Eleven at Tung Chung (Lantau Island) MTR station
    7-Eleven convenience store in Tung Chung (Lantau Island) MTR station circa 2006

    TBWA HK offers service pack to help brands through “financial winter” | Advertising | Campaign Asia – sales over brand building. More on this later

    What the Heck Does Luxury Mean Now? | GQ – a new and enticing definition of the word emerged with flawless-diamond clarity: big European houses hired a swath of truly cool designers who rewrote the rules of exclusivity and quality, breaking brands free from its tiresome cliches about who and what was indulgent, beautiful, and elegant. Figures like A$AP Rocky and Frank Ocean became the new doyennes of style and taste; Alessandro Michele, Virgil Abloh, and Kim Jones became worldwide superstars; and Supreme convinced a new generation that you could make inexpensive stuff with the rigorous sensibility of a fashion house. Things that were once secret became matters of global pop-cultural importance—a lot of people now follow the haute couture and menswear shows like others follow football

    PopSockets, Sonos, and Tile Ask Congress to Rein in Big Tech | WIRED – it wasn’t until PopSockets agreed to spend $2 million on retail marketing that Amazon finally clamped down on the fakes and knockoffs. Amazon denies this, and says that worked “with PopSockets to address our shared concerns about counterfeit.”But there were still other problems: Barnett says Amazon frequently lowered the price of PopSockets products, and then expected his company to make up the difference—even though that was never part of their contract. Amazon would “dress up requests as demands, using language that a parent uses with a child, or more generally, that someone in a position of power uses with someone of inferior power,” Barnett wrote in testimony sent to Congress. Am I shocked that Amazon is playing hard ball in the way that everyone from Tesco to Wal-Mart have done? No. But the problem isn’t the tactics per se, but the scale at which Amazon operates. Also Tesco and Wal-Mart might try and tear your face off with look-a-like private label products, but they won’t intentionally cross the line into selling counterfeit products

    Twitter picks 2019’s most creative brand campaigns – Some interesting tactics, all of which look like PR and are run of the mill in nature

    How China’s state-owned enterprises milk listed subsidiaries – Nikkei Asian Review – no surprise in this report but nice to see it explicitly stated

    Facebook apologises after Xi Jinping name translated as an obscenity – While China does not allow its citizens to access Facebook freely, the country is the company’s largest source of revenue after the US. Facebook is setting up an engineering team at its Asia-Pacific office in Singapore to focus on the lucrative Chinese advertising market, Reuters reported this month.

    How Britain’s big retailers missed their online moment – most traditional retailers still operated separate pools of stock, often in different warehouses, for stores and online. This really surprised me

    Old Masters, New Clothes: Highsnobiety’s Latest Streetwear Collab | Sotheby’s – STFU – this is just taking the michael. Years from now, I might look back on this as the peak of the current premium streetwear bubble

  • Plastic flowers + more things

    Hong Kong’s Industrial History : How Plastic Flowers Built A Global Metropolis – In the years after World War II, buying a bunch of plastic flowers was trendy, not tacky, and Li Ka-shing built their novelty into a business empire that now spans the globe – the Hong Kong manufacturing boom went on until the opening up of China. At this time Hong Kong was a more equitable society. The business entrepreneurs either pushed into China or deindustrialised and became Hong Kong property developers. As for plastic flowers, you often see them around you and don’t realise what they are. More on Hong Kong here

    Pinwheels for sale Hong Kong.

    Airline vlogger faces backlash, including a death threat, for his negative review of Singapore Airlines – TODAYonline – Singapore gets its unofficial 50 cent army

    The durable history of Casio’s durable G-Shock watch – the company gets asked all the time about how it might create a smartwatch that lives up to users’ rugged expectations for its storied brand, but that any such product would have to be a G-Shock first. “I believe you can rest assured that it will be uniquely G-Shock in its form factor, unlike anything we have seen before.” If Casio carries its tradition forward, you’ll be able to read all about it—right on the face of the watch itself

    Inside the Feds’ Battle Against Huawei | WIRED – interesting that it misses out on past behaviours of concern such as the T-Mobile robot arm technology theft and the African Union system infiltration (paywall)

    No Free Lunch, but almost: what DoorDash actually pays, after expense — #PayUp – uberization of workers in action

    EU’s former ambassador to South Korea suspect in China spy probe | South China Morning Post – shit meet fan

    Facebook does not understand the marketplace of ideas | Financial Times – The first critical flaw in Mr Zuckerberg’s thinking is the idea that the marketplace for goods is efficient without regulation. Much of the thrust of economics over the past half century has been to understand what regulations are needed to ensure that markets work. We have tort laws that ensure accountability if someone is injured and we don’t allow companies to pollute willy-nilly. We have fraud and advertising laws to protect consumers against deceptions — recognising that such laws circumscribe what individuals may say and publish – well worth reading the rest of the article (paywall)

    Fun With Charts: A decade of Apple growth – Six Colors – I wonder if these values were normalised to compare like with like?

    Marine Commandant: ‘The Farther You Back Away From China, They Will Move Toward You’ « Breaking Defense – take the fight to them rather than the other way around

    How Loro Piana serves ‘nomadic elite’ with €7,000 cashmere coats | Financial Times – A recent report from consultants Bain & Co argued that new growth in the luxury goods industry was going to be driven by brands that go beyond just offering shoppers a product and were able to also provide a mixture of new experiences and ideas, and even provoke emotions

    LinkedIn – Louis Vuitton menswear fall/winter 2020 lifestream – its odd to see a YouTube style lifestream on LinkedIn. Engagement seems to be relatively low given Louis Vuitton’s million-plus followers

    A new way to find clothes, shoes and more on Search – bringing back Froogle, I suspect this is to counteract Amazon in product search and advertising

    Betfred owners make millions from company treating gambling addicts | The Guardian – now that’s vertical integration

    New Tesla registrations in California nearly halve in fourth quarter: data – Reuters – which tells you something about the value proposition of Tesla

    Jeff Staple On How Streetwear Set The Tone For Today’s Mainstream—And What To Expect Next – now, a single post can disrupt everything. A single verse from the right musician can kill off an entire brand. So the velocity at which retailers must adapt had to catch up. They could no longer wait for the Vogue “September Issue” or New York Fashion Week to see what was hot. It was blatantly obvious down to the exact number of “likes.”

    Chow Tai Fook, Sa Sa closures deepen Hong Kong retail crisis | Campaign Asia – this is about deflating an overinflated retail and real estate economy. Its popularity was from the prevalence of adulterated products in China and the lack of sales tax in Hong Kong. Chow Tai Fook failed to look at international expansion and has no one to blame but its board of directors