In on the sofa on
17 July 2010 with 1 comment
For those people that believe in karma and reincarnation I must have been very bad in a former life because I sat through Sex In The City 2. I delayed posting this as I wanted develop my thoughts on the film, rather than tearing off into a rant.
In advance of the film, I got a quick brain dump on the main protagonists so had a moderately good idea of what to expect from the characters.
The film started well with an MGM-esque gay wedding with Liza Minelli belting out Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies‘ but then went downhill. At first it was just minor actors had cod Oirrish accents and then production item things started to bug me like the fact Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie had an apartment that felt as personal as a hotel room. This all meant that the suspension of disbelief necessary to follow the plot was shattered.
The Middle Eastern plot line played to many American stereotypes of the region that felt more Carry On Up The Khyber than a modern drama should. This film does for Abu Dhabi what Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat did for Kazakhstan. Arab societal conservatism is mocked and violated by Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall).
I was really surprised that for a show which had a decade or so to develop the characters, everything felt so two-dimensional. The whole film felt like the cynical abuse of presumably had been a powerful franchise.
In links on
16 July 2010 with no comments
Comparing urbanization in China and India – McKinsey Quarterly – China has been very smart in its approach, India looks like a train wreck waiting to happen, but they still have the time to turn it around
Bongal: The Interests Network – but will its specialism be able to eat into Facebook
Twitter to work with Groupon, Gilt deal sites on ‘earlybird’ offers – SiliconValley.com
China’s Internet Gets Around to Security – WSJ – government looking at convergence of TV with the internet and concerned at the amount of malware | spamming happening on Chinese computers
Google Keyword Targeting Tool Launches Globally | WebProNews – will broad targeting squeeze inventory further?
Explore Hong Kong with CNNGo TV | CNNGo.com
How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made – crackunit’s Iain Tait gives the skinny on the campaign
Adobe Announces Open-Source Collaboration with Sourceforge
OgilvyOne Connected – online consumer behaviours in Asia
What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall? – interesting reaction from PRs who are snubbing Times for publications that provide better visibility
Linda McMahon, CT Senate Candidate, Slammed By Mothers Group Over WWE Past (VIDEO) – powerful campaign ads
MediaPost Publications Starbucks Tops 10 Million Facebook Fans 07/15/2010
Omnicom Will Funnel Hundreds Of Millions Of Display Dollars Through Google | paidContent – intelligence for guaranteed cashflow, where does this leave the likes of Nielsen?Apple to hold special iPhone 4 press conference on Friday | The Loop
Google Begins Phasing Out YouTube Accounts – seems to be following the flickr playbook in the way that they’ve handled this
Survey: RIM’s BlackBerry Losing Favor Among Consumers | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD – a bit weird this one, as BBM has taken off amongst young people
Historious: The bookmarking tool I’ve been waiting for has finally been built. What took so long? – replacement for delicious?
ACTA so transparent, the text still has to be leaked – EU has little to gain, all of the complaints from the public and experts still remain
Under Surveillance: comic on digital civil rights in Europe – Boing Boing
Why the RIAA Doesn’t Mind Losing Money on Lawsuits | TorrentFreak
Teen Retailer American Eagle Outfitters Embraces Small Fries – WSJ.com – couldn’t extend their brand into adult ranges
Old Spice Voicemail Generator | By Chriswastaken, Area, and Nelson Abalos Jr | Thanks to Reddit – you know your ad campaign is smart, when other people start doing your advertising for you
Happy Customers Tell 3 Friends, Unhappy Customers Tell Google
Why Facebook friends are worth keeping – tech – 15 July 2010 – New Scientist – loose network ties have value
Communities Dominate Brands: An 8 Segment Model to Analyze Smartphone Market, Consumers and Handsets
GE plans to leverage sponsorship in UK – Warc News – Warc
Tell-All Author Riffs on Music Industry in Crisis; Part 1 | Epicenter | Wired.com
40 Hong Kong foods we can’t live without | CNNGo.com
Apple’s iPad Is Going To Destroy The Netbook Market, Says Goldman (Sorry, Microsoft) – A survey of 90 hedge fund CTOs isn’t exactly a comprehensive study, but it’s worth making one additional observation: Hedge funds are freakish about security. So if this many of them are planning to swap netbooks for iPads, it seems Apple has overcome the security concerns that initially hindered corporate iPhone adoption.
You Can’t Appreciate How Completely Apple Has Humiliated The Cellphone Industry Until You See These Charts
Uh Oh: Microsoft Office 2010 Sales “Disappointing” – Don Dodge predicted that this would happen in interviews after joining Google
Microsoft Is Trashing Us For Not Eating Enough Crow About Bing’s Market Share Gains – but Bing is hemorrhaging cash
ISP Music Levy, Legal P2P Back On Royalty Agenda | paidContent
Hewlett-Packard Partners With China’s Communist Youth League to Reach Rural Consumers – AdAgeChina – university students working as tech and internet evangelists. And the headline is fantastic as well ^_^
L’Oreal Freshens Up Yue Sai’s Image With Edgy Web Series – AdAgeChina – using web TV to reposition and reinvigorate a brand
P&G Turns Virtual Makeover App Into Max Factor Contest – AdAgeChina
New Rules To Reach China’s Social Media Users – AdAgeChina – adoption curve considered to be much flatter by Ogilvy
AppleInsider | Apple acquires online mapping company Poly9 – report
TelecomTV | Nokia Siemens set to snap-up Motorola’s comms equipment business – further wireless industry consolidation
New breed of consumers emerges in China – Warc – Li Ning tries to rebrand its sportswear business to embrace them
THE 99 – interesting project about engaging young people in the Middle East and beyond
Old Spice | Facebook – facebook app of the US campaign
How your cell phone’s autocorrect software works, and why it’s getting better. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine
5 Ways Social Media Helps Promote Good Health
YouTube – oldspice’s Channel – I love way they’ve extended it into personalised responses for Twitter users
The Halifax Holiday Matchmaker tool is at your disposal | Mobile Industry Review – nice facebook app implementation
Marketing, Online shopping on the rise in APAC | Market-interactive.com – I have noticed how travel has taken off in Hong Kong
Communities Dominate Brands: AT&T CTO claims US leads in mobile. Paging Truth Police? – basically AT&T are deluded
Omnicom deconstructs Agency.com | Market-interactive.com – interesting how few of the pioneer digital shop brands remain
MediaPost Publications Pampers Partners With Abbott For Web Series 07/14/2010 – interesting brand collaboration rather than worrying about brand dilution
The profession that dare not speak its name | The Australian – interesting perspective on the state of PR as an academic subject and a profession.
MediaPost Publications Top Execs Dish About Social Media Strategies 07/14/2010 – some good advice
Conspiracy For Good – Majestic meets social conscience
In branding on
15 July 2010 with 1 comment
This post sprang out of a Twitter conversation that was started by Graham Brown. Graham felt that the term brand manager no longer had meaning in the modern marketing world. But what to replace it with?
This threw up a number of related questions that I decided to attempt and start to answer here.
So what is a brand? Even answering this simple question incorporated a number of different facets. It is not only about physical items and customer experience, but also about the perceived origins of the brand from Häagen-Dazs faux European name, to the precision engineering of German car-makers, Swiss watch manufacturers and the fine tailoring of Italian men’s suits.
The brand is also affected by context. Audi is a luxury car brand, but for many years in China it has been associated instead as the vehicle of choice for government officials rather than dynamic entrepreneurs or the rich and famous.
I remember going to a mobile phone exhibition a number of years ago and was shocked to see a Japanese lady decked out in a well-tailored suit of Burberry check. In Japan, Burberry was seen as a sophisticated luxury brand, however my perception from experience in the UK was the Burberry is passé through its association with football casuals and copycat ‘townies’.
It could even be the absence of something. A good example of this is the absence of modern farming chemicals in organic food has created an artificial perception of improved health benefits for these products.
So what parts of a brand does a brand manager manage? The design and delivery of their product or service and elements of the marketing mix, such as promotion, distribution and reputation management. But many of those items are in some ways out of the brand manager’s control. You can distribute a product but the way it is presented and sold is often outside your control, you can create advertising but the way stakeholders interact and interpret it is out of your control.
The are things that a brand can do:
- Coach – providing help and advice to get the most out of a service and celebrate success
- Pathfinder: a great example of pathfinding is Innocent Drinks and the way that they handled their involvement with McDonalds
- Curator – highlighting community knowledge and ensuring that it is organised and accessible to all. I was involved in working with colleagues in a former role doing this for HTC through a wiki for their smartphones
- Community leader – creating partner alliances (for instance Apple’s app store for the iPhone), investor in products to meet the community’s need, facilitate co-creation with consumers (MyStarbucksIdea) and crowdsourcing tasks with the community (TfL flickr pool)
This has an effect on strategy moving it from a traditional western command and control style business strategy to an emergent strategy based on company thinking, consumer dialogue and behaviour combined with the dynamics of the market.
So a brand manager no longer manages but influences ‘a brand wrangler’ who tries to steer the direction of the consumers, but can’t necessarily stop stampedes in different directions. It is often easier to steer the company than steer the brand.
In business, internet on
13 July 2010 with 1 comment
I wrote a quick analysis of non-monetary options that Jeremy Hunt can use to improve the quality and coverage of broadband in the UK for Left Foot Forward: Hunt for super-fast broadband covers some of the concepts that I had been thinking about for a while:
- Addressing the disparity between business rates charged for optical fibre versus copper cables
- Revisiting the approach to the forthcoming 4G spectrum auction
- Addressing planning issues for mobile telecommunications base stations
More over at Left Foot Forward
In event, london on
13 July 2010 with no comments
If you were a junior PR person in central London who had ever mounted clippings on a coverage board or made props for a pitch you will have come across the London Graphics Centre behind Longacre in Covent Garden.
The shop is also a key resource for the students of architecture and the arts, at the moment the London Graphics Centre is displaying a selection of large format artworks. I loved the giant till receipts they had in their reception to promote the exhibition.
In media on
12 July 2010 with no comments
I was enjoying my morning coffee during a day off and using the free wi-fi at Starbucks when I came across this piece ‘Apple needs an attitude adjustment‘ (July 8, 2010) over at MarketWatch. The sentiment of the headline wasn’t the issue, what I was more concerned about was the lack of analysis and coherent facts to support the piece.
The author Therese Poletti cites Apple’s market capitalisation and the iPhone 4 issue as her rationale for why Apple should become in her words ‘its corporate culture of arrogance‘.
So let’s look at these items:
- The market capitalisation is based on the whims of stock traders, and is often based on irrational sentiment. The consensus numbers that Apple has to beat quarter after quarter as its part in this process is set largely on Excel-based crystal ball gazing by equity analysts detached from Apple’s business. There is a strong incentive based on social norms for these analysts to cluster their guesses together. Apple has consistently low-balled them – not exactly the arrogance one would have expected from Poletti’s hypothesis
- Apple’s handling of the iPhone 4 antenna is the kind of response I would expect from a confused technology company caught with its pants around its ankles. I am not saying that its right, but having seen these kind of things (and worse) from the inside, that it usually doesn’t come from arrogance, but fear and more than a hint of panic
What surprised me about this article is that there is plenty of evidence to support Polletti’s hypothesis of arrogance that either she, or her editors at MarketWatch had chosen to ignore, for instance:
- Apple’s sometimes tense relationship with iPhone developers
- The fact that Apple had turned its back on the community of Mac developers at the recent Worldwide Developers Conference which for the first time featured no Mac-orientated tracks
- Apple’s relationship with Adobe
- Apple’s relationship with Google and the rivalry between Android and iOS
Given Therese Poletti’s background in technology, the article begged two questions:
- Is MarketWatch moving away from providing indepth analysis and insight to Gawker-style link-and-comment bait?
- Or was it just poor journalism and or editorial judgement?
The move to a Gawker-style link-and-comment bait hypothesis is given additional weight by the ten-fold increase in comments that her post attracted compared to previous articles filed on July 1 and July 6.
You can read Apple needs an attitude adjustment by Therese Poletti here, I have been careful not to give the article the oxygen of a Google search friendly link that it craves by putting it at the end of the article.
In links on
12 July 2010 with no comments
DARPA BAA on homomorphic encryption – PDF document with major implications, it would allow privacy and protection of information in cloud services – a computation could be performed over data that remains in encrypted form throughout the entire computation
MeeGo – will keep checking in here to see how Intel and Nokia’s mobile Linux continues to develop
Monocolumn – Expenses scandal, Kiwi-style [Monocle] – interesting how the UK MPs expenses scandal influenced story initiation and coverage of New Zealand parliament expenses coverage
Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games - it makes sense given the changing patterns in online consumer behaviour
Capturing the world’s emerging middle class – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis
In jargon watch on
11 July 2010 with no comments
When a consumer goes in and picks up a Linux smartbook; assumes that the notebook format means that it is a Windows laptop, finds out that it won’t run their Windows software programme and returns it to the retailer. There isn’t anything wrong with the device, but with the consumer expectations, this is the type of scenario that Jerone Young, Partner Engineer at Canonical described as the ‘soccer-mom syndrome‘.
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