Month: November 2011

  • Mr Pizza in Korea

    Pizza in Korea is a unique experience compared to other countries. Pizzas in Hong Kong were generally more premium and had more of a focus on sea food. Pizza in Korea was remarkably different:

    • Packaging – unlike the UK or most other countries I have been to for that matter, pizza can come in a four-colour patterned box. Part of the reason for this is cultural, Korea like Japan puts a lot of emphasis on presentation of products from product packaging design to the fit and finish of clothing. A second reason for the quality of the packaging is intense domestic competition: in addition to food mega-corporations Dominos Korea and similar brands also has its own giant brand: Mr Pizza with 350 branches in South Korea
    Mr. Pizza
    • Product – whilst UK pizzas follow US influences at the low end of the market and faux foodie Italian accents for ‘posh’ pizzas, Korean pizza options incorporate local foods including kimchi and bulgogi on the menu. This is especially true for this brand, though foreign brands like Pizza Hut try to adapt to local tastes too.

    About the company

    Mr. Pizza was founded in 1990. They have one branch in the US, one in Vietnam, 15 in China and some 350 branches in South Korea.

    They created a mockumentary  video The true origins of pizza as a satirical viral campaign to promote their brand, (presumably internationally). It considers the dish to be a Korean national treasure. However it did touch a nerve amongst other Asian countries as it’s similarity to Korean nationalist fringes meant that some of the film’s satire was lost to the audience.

    The company looked to further differentiate itself to eat-in diners by developing a new store format and sub-brand called MIPIHAUS. The concept of MIPIHAUS is to mix an art gallery environment with their restaurant. MIPI is a contraction of Mr. Pizza and the HAUS is a reference to the Bauhaus art movement.

  • CIC on China’s luxury market

    CIC who provide the IWOM set of reports and flakey tools (think Sysomos, Radian6 or Adobe SocialAnalytics for the mainland Chinese internet eco-system) have come up with an interesting report on online conversations around the Chinese luxury market. CIC is increasingly being integrated with GroupM. It will be interesting to see how CIC copes as China exerts increasing control over social and marketing data access.

    Key take-outs

    • They are motivated to buy luxury goods as a way to ‘show-off’ and most of the online conversations are around this subject. Status itself is a tool designed to engender trust in things like business interactions rather than self actualisation per se
    • The distribution system is complex with overseas purchasing and purchasing agents (presumably to avoid China’s luxury goods tax and for more choice) also a popular subject. For luxury brands it means that Chinese expansion needs to be tapped by also having presence in places like Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Paris – France and the major cities of the US
    • Real-time reporting of runway shows initiated by the brands doing webcasts has been extended by netizens to their own platforms. Much of the commentary is similar to the social television interactions you used to see on early video platform Joost; and on Twitter during shows like The Apprentice or The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE)
    • Counterfeit – there was a significant group that own both counterfeit and authentic versions of a product because it is ‘interesting to mix and match usage between real and fake’. This is a really interesting brand interaction and raises the question: what if authentic isn’t authentic enough in terms of brand experience? This is something that I could see impacting the likes of Louis Vuitton. Gucci, Chanel and Hermes as they become over-exposed in the marketplace. One of the ways to approach this is to educate consumers on what luxury means: craftsmanship, heritage or being at the forefront of something (which may mean an intersection between streetwear and luxury)

    More related content here. More from CIC here.

  • Systeme D

    According to Foreign Policy, the D in Systeme D comes from the French word débrouillard which is used to describe people who are ingenious or resourceful. In the Francophone companies being resourceful means operating outside of proscribed government regulation and bootstrap entrepreneurship hence, systeme D. Back in France, this might have been applied to people smuggling in a new fangled personal computer into the workplace.

    Foreign Policy writer Robert Neuwirth argues that this grey economy exists across the developing world and has been driving economic activity from Chinese factories to African bazaars. Back when I was first visiting Hong Kong, there was a stream of west African business people travelling to Hong Kong. They would go to Chungkung Mansion. Buy a suitcase full of electronics (predominantly cellphones)  and then get a flight home. 

    There was then larger scale players based in Shenzhen and Guangzhou buying product. They then either supplied the merchants of Chungkung Mansions or shipped product home by the container load. Who knows what would happen with the customs in their destination country. Systeme D often relies on the kind of manufacturers relying on shanzhai style innovation. 

    Whilst this black economy would be seen as detrimental in developed countries due to it undermining a system that broadly works (look at the Greek government’s problems with non-payment of taxes). In developing countries where governments are less likely to be looking out for their citizens interests – so the black economy can be considered to be having partly a positive impact.

    The latest trend is that a lot of mainland Chinese people who have worked on infrastructure projects in Africa staying behind and becoming merchants, cutting African entrepreneurs out of the Systeme D model. There are well over a million of these Chinese entrepreneurs now doing business across sub Saharan Africa.

    More information

    The Shadow Superpower – By Robert Neuwirth | Foreign Policy

  • Dealer chic

    If the working class and the lower middle class are worried about financial security with trends like extreme couponing; the upper-middle classes are also interested in the thrill of a good deal with the changing economic environment a distant secondary motivator. With this in mind Trendwatching talked about dealer chic; reading their profile its almost as if they are thinking about their lifestyle in business terms. Looking for:

    • Increased efficiency – getting more for less – the buzz of a bargain
    • Value add – provided primarily through an improved experience

    Dealer chic is supposed to be caused by a move towards perfect markets – the use of reviews and comparative pricing facilitated by the web parallels the kind of techniques that procurement professionals would use. It also echoes the promise of disintermediation that web 1.0 was supposed to bring use with the first generation of shopping comparison sites in the late 1990s

    A more worrying by-product of the dealer chic trend is that brands are increasingly commoditised and access to mobile devices have accelerated the consumer buying process by providing them with the necessary research and the opportunity for instant gratification – potentially having a micro-chunking time effect on the timings and tweaking of pricing strategies.

    It means that luxury goods are seen as an asset class. This will mean an acceleration in price appreciation, but in order for luxury brands to benefit they will need to get involved in running pre-owned platforms. They can add value in validating each and every item, for a commission. 

    The space won’t be uncontested. You have established players from eBay and Yahoo! Auctions to Japanese retail brands like Brand-Off are already in this space. The Japanese have built up a formidable opportunity

    More information

    Trendwatching | dealer chic – find out more about dealer chic and sign up for Trendwatching’s free email newsletters

  • Video futures

    Peter Jackson has been shooting a really interesting video diary for the forthcoming Hobbit two-part film. Whilst all the Tolkien geeks are pouring over it salivating at what they are going to spend their next ten year’s disposable income on, I was curious to know what it was likely to tell us about the future of video. Jackson heads up Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, constantly innovating in video production. Below is the first entry, it is worthwhile working through all of them

    • Technology still hasn’t addressed the need to shoot 3D in an elegant way. Much of this is down to the fact that the economics and scale that has driven semiconductor innovation hasn’t been replicated in other aspects of technology such as camera optics, so they use Heath Robinson-esque mirrored set ups to get around the interocular (replicate the distance between your eyes) distance issue
    • The amount of dedicated cameras that Jackson is having to use suggests that 3D product isn’t likely to come down in cost anytime soon; so we are still likely to have shoddy post-production versions plied on cinema audiences for a good while yet. I could see the demand for 3D dying out, at least until VR starts to make a serious impact on lean back experiences.
    • Higher frame rates make a difference. I hadn’t realised that the human eye can distinguish at up to the equivalent of 60 frames per second. Shooting at this speed makes imagery more believable. So we are more likely to go to 60fps 4K video than 24fps at 8K resolution.
    • Digital doesn’t mean perfect reproduction. If you’ve listened to an iPod versus a decent CD player; or a decent CD player versus a decent record player – it would be easy to understand this point; despite the historic branding as digital having a higher fidelity to the original. However it was still interesting to hear how the high quality digital cameras de-saturate the video and the make-up artists and set designers have to work hard to compensate for the colour loss on screen

    More related content, alongside other aspects of technology can be found here.