Ged Carroll

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  • 3iYing & teen marketing

    3iYing

    A design and marketing company called 3iYing has enlisted the help of 15 – 25 year old girls to help develop more effective marketing strategies.Earlier this year a group of 8 young women enlisted by 3iYing walked into the Virgin Mobile office and told them their teen marketing strategy was all wrong. The girls pointed out that pay-as-you-go tariffs cost too much for teen girls who usually resort to using ‘guilt-tactics’ on their parents to get them to pay.

    3iYing spurs guilt marketing

    Virgin listened and subsequently ran a campaign in CosmoGIRL that included tear out phones that allowed teens to make fake calls in front of their parents, thereby pushing their ‘guilt button’. 3iYing’s Chief Executive Heidi Dangelmaier came up with this approach having been a leading voice in girl market trends. The teen demographic has increased by 17 per cent over the last 10 years, Moreover the financial muscle of these teens in terms of home spending is growing even faster.

    Companies like Virgin, realising they cannot properly relate to this market are turning to alternative approaches like that offered by 3iYing. User-centred design and marketing has always proved a successful approach, by designing relevant services and consumer experiences. By listening to what teens really want will make for more compelling, teen-centric brands and products.

    Teens also provide insights into their parents, who were the best people to advise on how to manipulate the parents. Parents still hold the purse strings, but teens are the key to accessing their spend. Kudos to Steve. More related content here.

    Update: USA Today has an article about Gen Y in the workplace, basically they want a dot.com style work environment with a decent pension plan. Sounds similar to Gen X really, apart from the fact they are more mouthy and high maintenance. Kudos to Blake Barbera.

  • IT First Look + more things

    IT First Look by Forrester Research

    Forrester Research has some interesting video and audio sessions attached to its IT First Look (November 9, 2005) – subscription required. Forrester’s work on IT First Look is interesting because it touches on how technology and web companies are failing in their marketing communications with consumers.

    IT First Look touches on how these companies understand how build the stuff, but do not understand how the consumers really use and adopt it.

    AT Kearney on mobile media

    Thanks to Ian Wood who pointed out an interesting thought piece and associated research by management consultants AT Kearney. Some interesting data in there which I haven’t had a full chance to check out but two points immediately leapt out:

    • Western European survey respondents were less interested in downloading music on to their mobile phones than their counterparts in Asia, The US and Russia. This and a flatlining of online music sales in the US since May this year indicates that the post-iPod age may be upon us
    • Interactive entertainment like games was less popular and did not have as much repeat demand as other mobile services. Interactivity is something that tech advocates bleat on about since before the arrival of the CD-ROM, but it fails to take account of the different types of people and the various ways that they like get and work with information.

    Mobile society

    The FT devoted much of its magazine over the weekend to mobility and its impact on society. The main article by Richard Waters, their US technology correspondent can be read here. What is really interesting is the way people have absorbed mobility into their cultures, rather a brave new world occurring like all the tech-mavens like to crow about.

    37 Signals

    Salon.com has an interesting article about 37 Signals a Chicago based software company that is making waves. The company has developed lean, responsive web-service based software applications for project management and personal productivity.

    Odeo

    Odeo is a way of making podcast publication and consumption much easier, it has the ease-of-use that one would expect from one of the founders of Blogger.

    Firedrop and Basecamp

    When I worked during the dot.com boom I briefly used a great free document management service called FireDrop to manage approvals from press releases to appraisal forms for my team. There has seldom been a web service that has impressed me since, however BaseCamp looks like it might do that.

    Unlike many web services offerings it is truly platform-agnostic.

  • Ireland by Frank Delaney

    Frank Delaney’s Ireland was one of the most enjoyable books that I have read in a long time. The book has been compared to James Michener‘s books and Alex Haley’s Roots – fiction based on history with more elemental truths in it than most non-fiction.

    The book is complex and multi-layered, but easy-to-read. The story focuses on a young boy in a middle class household in rural Ireland during the 1950s and how his imagination and interest in the country’s myth and history is fired by a traditional storyteller. His search for the storyteller unravels some of the elements of his own family story which people have sheltered from him.

    The book accurately reflects the social environment of my parents Ireland. A rural-based community bound by morality, coming to terms with its fractured identity post-independence and oppressed by its own family secrets. It highlights the reasons why I used to get chastised as a child when I was willful or bold (and I wasn’t actually that bad) with ‘you’ll disgrace us’ or ‘you’ll disgrace the family name’.

    The clash with modernity lived on in the small farms that I grew up on for much of my childhood. Electricity made it to my uncle’s farm when I was a toddler and I can remember helping to foot the turf, drinking stewed tea and red lemonade along with a packed lunch as we worked in the bog, filling the high sided cart with sods of turf to be dragged home by a donkey and stored in a shed down the yard.

    I was in primary school before they moved away the traditional cocks of hay to bales and sudden bounty of shiny nylon twine that tied the bales was a wonder material that held fittings, extended electric fences and acted as a temporary way of securing a gate to a post. The excitement of making silage with all the heavy machinery running around the place compensated for the eventual reduction in the nylon twine supply.

    My only criticism is that the book portrays this rural life in a rosy way like the Famous Five books of Enid Blyton and her ‘scones and lashings and lashings of ginger beer’. Whilst the upside of a closely knit community would have been more a sociable people that cars, a faster pace of life and commuting no longer facilitate. Life is hard and it requires commitment to get up and ‘fodder’ animals in the early hours of a winters morning, clear out stables, dig out potatoes out of a storage heap that’s frozen over, pull in hay in the baking sun, dig a turf bank or repair ditches.<

    The Raleigh bicycle with one gear and a heavy frame that you could get in any colour so long as it was black was the standard mode of transport. They lasted forever, it would be common to see these rust covered scrap heaps parked up and then the owners come along jump and go. This was also the only way to get your shopping (or messages as it would be called). It had levers rather than brake cables with thick chromed steel rods and linkages running to both the front and the rear brake pads. That may mean a round trip of 14 – 20 miles with your shopping on a bike.

    The only concession to modernity would be a seat protector – there would be a plastic fitted shower cap put on over the leather coil sprung seat so that when the owner came out to ride the bicycle away he would not have the discomfort of a wet bum. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Loose connected networks

    In order to tell you about loose connected networks, I wanted to tell you about my friend Heather. During the dot com era when I started my agency career, Heather and I were pod (as in cubicle) neighbours at the same agency for 2 1/2 years.

    The last time we worked together was almost five years ago. However we have managed to keep in touch over the past five years via email on an irregular basis, the occasional phone call and kept up to speed with the happenings in each others lives.

    Heather is a classic example of a loose connected networks within my professional life.One which would not have been realistically possible without the benefit of email. This network maintenance with people who I have known through different phases of my life is a key example of how the Internet has altered our social fabric and social networks such as LinkedIn, SoFlow and Orkut have tried to codify this process.

    The value of loose connected networks to me is very tangible. I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley whilst at Yahoo!. Heather met me at San Francisco airport, gave me a tour of Silicon Valley and on my one night off, took me to the Sunnyvale town market and custom car show.

    Being in a strange place and being able to kick back with a friend who is a local, but at the same time gets where you are coming from was priceless. Being able to find a bar with a proper Irish fry up with black and white pudding makes her even more valuable!.

    I got to see a more human personal Silicon Valley than some of my peers who dismiss the place as being dull.

    Certainly Sunnyvale felt small, but then why wouldn’t it when most of the major employers provide most of lifes requirements on giant campuses and you can buy everything else at the out-of-town Walmart or Target store. Being a European I was reminded of the small town mythology perpertrated in US films like American Grafitti, Back the Future and ET. Having been to Sunnyvale it all made sense. More ideas related content here.

  • Sean Coombes reinventing his label

    The New York Times has an interesting article about how Sean Coombes is trying quite successfully to walk his urban fashion label out of the cliche it had become. Though his business is worth some 400 million USD annually, Coombs has seen the writing on the wall of the scene and rather than cater for the limited market of Ali G impressionists is trying to move more upmarket. The urban fashion scene has become as tired as the sound of R&B and rap music, in the way that 80’s rock got into treading the same groove over and over again to make money.

    In the US, labels like Ecko, Sean John and Phat Farm have been co-opted by preppie clientele. There is a certain irony in this as Phat Farm often aped preppie and collegiate looks for the hip-hop community. Now Phat Farm has been co-opted by desperate brands such as Motorola looking for a hook-up, Russell Simmons sold out leaving the company to an international conglomerate. Brands like Gap and Abercrombie and Finch have stolen much of the look. While in Europe, genuine workwear brands like Carhartt and Dickies that were part of the real prison yard baggy look have combated the new pretenders by acknowledging their fashion customer base and participating in associated activities like music and extreme sports.

    Coombs is using his womenswear range as a Trojan horse to get into the department stores that otherwise would not have carried his usual clothing range. More on fashion here
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