Ged Carroll

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  • Swiffer

    Swiffer is a US homeware brand owned by Proctoer & Gamble. Proctor & Gamble had to do a product recall last week on a battery operated vacuum cleaner that they sold in the US market under the Swiffer name. The product could overheat in certain circumstances and they had received 14 complaints. I was impressed by the recall notice on the front of the website, it showed real class. Rather than hiding behind legalese, they put personality to it and even had it signed by ‘Kris from the Swiffer team’. This conduct is likely to help them protect their Swiffer brand and reduce panic amongst consumers whilst still ensuring an orderly recall of the product.

    I have pasted the copy below because I have no idea how long P&G will keep it on their website.

    Swiffer Sweep+VacImportant product news

    As you know, we are very sorry to announce that Swiffer will be voluntarily recalling our new product, Sweep+Vac. The Sweep+Vac is our new battery-operated vacuum cleaner brought to you in September 2004.

    We are pleased to reassure you that this product recall does not involve any of our other great Swiffer products.

    We have identified an isolated Sweep+Vac product quality issue. Click here for complete details.

    If you have this product at home, we are asking that you stop using the Sweep+Vac immediately and disconnect the Sweep+Vac by removing the top section of the handle. Click here for instructions on how to disassemble your Sweep+Vac.

    Even though this issue has been observed in just a few Sweep+Vac units, we have taken this voluntary measure to ensure the highest standards of quality, safety, and satisfaction by recalling Sweep+Vac as quickly as possible. If you have purchased a Sweep+Vac, we would like to provide you with a refund. Click here for refund instructions.

    We’d like to thank the initial consumers who alerted us to this problem. We are very committed to delivering the highest standard of product quality and take these types of issues very seriously.

    We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your continued support of Swiffer,

    Kris from the Swiffer team

    More related content here.

  • Digital Natives

    Digital natives is a generational term rather like generation x which is starting to hit the mainstream. A digital native is someone who has growth up in close contact with computers Mark Prensky hypothesised and found some proof to indicate that these people absorb and process information in a different manner to those of us old enough to remember the analogue world. The term digital native comes from Prensky’s view that these people are native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. This has implications for teaching, advertising and the media.

    Just because someone has grown up with computer technology does not mean that they particularly want and like immersive experiences like video games. I am sure that there will be personality and learning types within the digital natives group as there are within the immigrants: some are better at learning by rote, others by doing.

    Those of us that have adapted to this world are considered to be digital immigrants rather than digital natives. Prensky then goes on to forecast the demise of printed materials amongst other items, but if thats the case why is Amazon so successful? Why are young people buying increasing amounts of vinyl?

    To find out how good a digital immigrant you really are, try this quiz courtesy of AlwaysOn.

    Wired has an article yet again on the death of print media because of technologically savvy young people based on the findings of these surveys here and here. News print has declined for years before the rise of the public internet and web browsers.

    Finally Piper Jaffray have been hyping up the Apple share price with a target to hit 100 USD from 61 and change. This based on the results of a survey that they think indicates that the iPod will turn a significant number of iPod owning PC users into Mac users. More gadget related posts can be found here.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Marketing crisis

    Marketing crisis in competence and capability: Creative Business has a great leading article based on research conducted by The Marketing Society and McKinsey called Marketing in Crisis.

    When you think about the marketing crisis, you also need to think about the people providing the feedback. Other board colleagues might have a stilted or inaccurate view of what marketing does. But at the very least there seems to be a marketing crisis in miscommunication.

    A second aspect of this marketing crisis report is to ask what’s in it for The Marketing Society and McKinsey. The Marketing Society would be looking to professionalise marketing and differentiate from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. McKinsey would look to deposition marketing teams so that it can sell additional services.

    Key takeaways from the report include:

    • Marketers are seen as creative but undisciplined
    • Marketers don’t understand their own businesses
    • In marketing led businesses such as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), marketing is too important to be left to the marketers
    • Marketing attracts the wrong kind of people
    • Marketers are undisciplined
    • Marketers are not interested in the P&L

    So this also might explain many of the client horror stories that I hear from agency veterans in PR, advertising, design and branding.

    The Buy Buy Generation

    Young Japanese women are consumers with a high disposable income, publishers target them with ‘product porn’ style magazines focusing on luxury handbags, shoes and clothing. UK publishers are now looking to copy this format. What surprised me about this article is that it did not draw comparisions with the product porn gadget magazines targeted at young men in the UK like Stuff and T3.

    Anybody walking the streets of London will have realised young Japanese are the most stylish people on the planet and avid collectors of the latest thing. On a related note the British boutique with a Japanese name Oki Ni have teamed up with the Adidas vintage connection to do two cool exclusive versions of Adidas’ ‘Torsion Special lo’ trainers here and here. These were the ultimate ravers trainer when they originally came out in the early 1990’s, they fit like a glove, are light, good cushioning, came in a multitude of colours (my originals were predominantly purple) and have a sole that will grip to any warehouse floor.

  • Nokia 8850

    I am reasonably tech savvy, but I am using a Nokia 8850; let me explain. I have been on email for ten years and used a mobile phone number for a decade and a half. However I have found myself sliding my mobile technology back in time. Last year I had a 3 mobile phone, on the UK’s first 3G network. It was shocking. I then had a traumatic move to Orange and got given a Nokia 6600.

    The Nokia 6600 is not a bad phone, but I don’t need a colour screen or camera, I occasionally read my home emails on the phone and get texts. However, the phone is bulky and the battery runs out after just two days. That’s better than the NEC e606 3 mobile phone I had, but way behind other phones that I’ve owned in the past.

    Finally I decided enough was enough for now, and have gone back in time from a technology perspective. I took the technology time machine back to 2000 and am using a vintage design Nokia 8850. Its small, it texts, you can speak to people, its intuitive to use and the battery lasts a week, oh yeah it has a need aluminium shell and a sliding key cover.

    The 8850 is an elegant solution to my communications needs, the point is that I have gone back in tech time because the present offerings fail to meet my needs of:

    • being intuitive to use
    • easy to call and text
    • good battery life
    • good product design
    • small / discreet
    • no unnecessary features

    3G at the present time isn’t ready for modern usage. The NEC e 606 phone used to get hot to touch in my hand during use. The reception was awful and the device was cumbersome. At the moment there is no killer app to using 3G. More related content here.

  • Running Money by Andy Kessler

    Andy Kessler’s Running Money, Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets And My Hunt For The Big Score is a well written set of memoirs from a technology fund manager. Together with his partner-in-crime Fred Kittler, Kessler managed to survive the highs and lows of the technology industry in the late 1990’s, he tells the story in a very articulate way that is as powerful as Robert X Cringely’s book Accidential Empires. The expansion of the tech sector is told using the industrial revolution as an analogy.

    One of the first things portrayed in Running Money (and other books) is that the tech sector actually revolves around a relatively small group of people. In addition to writing his memoirs Kessler tries to make sense of it all and proves very illuminating to readers. In this respect it is far better than The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.

    Post-industrial, IP-driven economy

    The book looks beyond the technology sector to put a positive spin on the huge US deficit. Running Money explains that America is now an IP economy and assumes that the developing world will follow on behind as a wave sweeps across national borders moving the economic status through hunter gatherer, agriculture/extractive, industrial, service and intellectual property economies. In some respects the US with its IP economy is following Europe; what is the Swiss banking system, LVMH’s luxury brands and the continents big pharmaceutical firms if not part of an IP ecosystem?

    Conclusion

    I would recommend anybody to read Kessler’s book. I thought I would end however on some of the differences in viewpoint I have with his writing. Where some of Kessler’s writing differs from my own perspective is when he outlines his analysis of the current state of affairs and some of his future vision:

    • Kessler considers markets to be a perfect instrument in the long term; which I am not convinced about at all. Think the great depression, the S&L debacle of the 1980s for instance, markets can break and require occasional interference
    • The neat model of China being an industrial workshop for US intellectual property is simplistic. China is fast moving into building its own brands from mobile handsets to luxury watches (the first Chinese astronaut went into space with a relative expensive Chinese brand of chronograph. China and India has a huge film industry. It isn’t only China either, Japan is now a source of numerous fashion trends, hot movies in Korea have their scripts optioned by Hollywood, some of the best advertising creative teams come from South America and India)
    • Kessler talks about the entertainment industry as being part of this US IP powerhouse but this fails to see the many flaws and mismanagment in the music, media and film industries that make Worldcom seem well managed. The RIAA and MPAA have hid behind piracy to hide a deeper malaise highlighted in Michael Wolf’s Autumn of the Moguls
    • Kessler doesn’t talk about what the inevitable post-intellectual property economy looks like

    More book reviews here.