Celine + more things

Work & Co.’s clean looking website for Celine. Its a beautiful piece of luxury orientated user experience for Celine. It was founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana. Celine was originally a made-to-measure children’s shoe business. In 1960, the brand decided to pivot, focusing its business on a ready-to-wear fashion brand for women with a sportswear approach. The brand offered a range of leather goods such as bags, loafers, gloves and clothes. By the 1970s Celine had boutiques in Switzerland, Monte Carlo, the US, Canada and Hong Kong. They were bought by Bernard Arnault in 1987 or 1988 around about the time that he took over at LVMH to build it into the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. More luxury related content here.

I have deliberately ignored a lot of the brands trying to cling on to the proverbial vapour trail of the Apollo space programme; but this video caught my eye because it showed the amazing engineering chops of Sony. Just look at the detail-orientated design. You can understand why Sony was held in such high esteem as a brand when you watch this video.

Dentsu (the agency network formerly known as the Dentsu Aegis Network) released its CMO survey (registration wall). From the almost 40 pages of content, one paragraph struck me as being the single most important take out:

CMOs are often simply not incentivised to deliver long-term change. In terms of performance metrics, they’re primarily accountable for growing the customer base (see Figure 3), while medium/ long-term brand health and digital transformation are way down the pecking order. Coupled with the fact that, in many markets, CMOs often ‘enjoy’ the shortest average tenure of anyone in the C-suite (around three and a half years in the United States, for example) there is little reason for many CMOs to look beyond the near-term.

2019 Dentsu Aegis Network CMO survey (sample size 1,000 CMOs)

If you take into account the relatively short tenure of CMOs, it looks like a toxic brew for businesses in the medium to long term.

It’s like as if this opinion piece was written with marketing in mind…. Watermelons vs. Sesame Seeds | World Bank.

Interesting academic research paper that reflected on the triad actions against Hong Kong’s civil society and democracy movement in 2014, which seems sensible to revisit. Resurgent Triads? Democratic mobilization and organized crime in Hong Kong – Federico Varese, Rebecca WY Wong, 2018