Ged Carroll

Search results for: “trends”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Five star living

    Trendwatching is back with a pattern that they call five star living, where property developers and high-end resort or hotels sell a home away from home to the super dumb but loaded.

    They put a whole pile of luxury living brand experience about it, but what they are seeing is the window dressing not the trends in five star living. Five star hotels are capital intensive and unless you have high occupancy all the time, expensive.

    Apartment complexes can draw on the service aspects of five star hotels; but farm off a lot of the capital risk to apartment purchasers and still charge them for premium rate services. Five star living is about hotels hedging their bets in a post-September 11 world. I realise that this is a less romantic and stylish explanation of this trend, but its all about the money.

    Mandarin Oriental have built suites in their Hyde Park hotel which would be a great example of five star living. Luxury brands like Giorgio Armani have extended into interior design to try and capitalise on this trend in combination with luxury property developers. 

    You also have people like the Trump Organisation extending themselves from real estate into hotel services and tourism in the opposite direction with its golfing themed resorts. More five star living related content here.

    Apple spoof product lifecycle article which can be found here. Its funny because there are a lot of underlying themes which are close to the truth as consumers see it.

    Finally, the New York Times have got a great interactive presidential election guide that they are going to keep updated. So go to this link, have a play and bookmark it until November. Interactive data like live dashboards in business allow you better understand the data. It makes for shareable content and is sticky in nature. 

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