Ged Carroll

Category: branding | 品牌推廣 | 브랜드 마케팅 | ブランディング

The dictionary definition of branding is the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.

I have covered many different things in branding including:

  • Genesis – the luxury Korean automotive brand
  • Life Bread – the iconic Hong Kong bread brand that would be equivalent of wonder loaf in the US
  • Virgil Abloh and the brand collaborations that he was involved in
  • Luxury streetwear brands
  • Burger King campaigns with Crispin Porter Bogusky
  • Dettol #washtocare and ‘back to work’ campaigns
  • Volkswagen ‘see the unseen’ campaign for its Taureg off road vehicle
  • SAS Airline – What is truly Scandinavian?
  • Brand advertising during Chinese New Year (across China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia)
  • Lovemarks as a perspective on branding
  • BMW NEXTGen event and Legend of Old McLanden campaign
  • Procter & Gamble’s Gillette toxic masculinity ads
  • Kraft Mother’s Day campaign
  • Kraft Heinz brand destruction
  • Porsche Design in the smartphone space
  • Ermenegildo Zegna
  • Nike’s work with Colin Kaepernick
  • Counterfeit brands on Instagram, Alibaba and Amazon
  • Gaytime Indonesian ice cream
  • Western Digital
  • Louis Vuitton collaboration with Supreme
  • Nokia
  • Nike Korea’s ‘Be Heard’ campaign
  • Mercedes SLS coupe campaign
  • Brand collaborations in Hong Kong
  • Beats headphones
  • Apple
  • Henrion Ludlow Schmidt’s considerations of branding
  • Cathay Pacific
  • Bosch
  • Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid
  • Microsoft Surface launch
  • Oreo Korean campaign
  • Chain coffee shop brands and branding
  • Samsung’s corporate brand
  • North Face’s brand overeach in South Korea
  • Mr Pizza Korean pizza restaurant and delivery service brand
  • Amoy Hong Kong food brand
  • Chevrolet Corvette ‘roar’ campaign promoting a build your own car service

  • Connected leadership + more

    Connected Leadership

    Connected Leadership, Powered by Brunswick | Brunswick – worth a read during your lunchtime. 9 out of 10 financial readers cite the importance of social media communications by CEOs during a crisis. There were also findings that equate CEO social presence with employer brand. Reading about connected leadership reminded me of the oft quoted wisdom that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Connected Leadership had reminded me of research that I remember seeing around the time of the original dot com boom (and bust). I think that the research had been done by Weber Shandwick in the US; and I had heard Larry Weber cite it when he came through Europe every so often.

    At that time the connected leadership type content was focused on CEOs with a media profile. The research showed a positive correlation between a highly visible CEO, better stock market performance and greater resilience when the brand was facing challenging times. This was back when Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates courted the business and ‘business of technology’ media. Like any model it can be only taken so far, as Bernie Ebbers at WorldCom, Jeff Skilling at Enron and Steve Case at AOL showed that a high profile won’t stop a terminal decline.

    Prior to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, then CEO was criticised for a lack of focus on the business problem. The twice weekly blog posts that marked his connected leadership style were not appreciated by activist shareholders.

    A more modern example of connected leadership would be the cult like following that Donald Trump managed to build up over the past five years in politics. A future Democratic president would like appear less on social and in the media, being more focused on the task at hand rather than demonstrating connected leadership.

    For businesses, a connected leadership style brings challenges from a regulatory point of view, could their content be sifted for potential class action suit material?

    WGSN – Future Drivers 2023 – WGSN – After the dust settles on the tumult of 2020, companies and consumers will shift to new ways of designing, making, selling and consuming in 2023. In an age of uncertainty, executives can bank on the importance of the four C’s – connection, conservation, communication and community. This report identifies seven global drivers that will reshape the macroeconomic and business landscape in 2023, and provides key strategies that businesses can action today for future success. 

    • Radical Reform: this will be front and centre for 2023. Be prepared to be held accountable for diversity, sustainability and CSR practices 
    • Safety & Security: this will drive innovation in defensive materials, an increase in home and neighbourhood security networks, and make touchless payments and products mainstream 
    • The Tech Paradox: cobots (collaborative robots that interact with humans) and democratised digital literacy will gain ground, but on the flip side, infodemics, influencer fatigue and the politics of global technology will drive a tech reset 
    • Community 3.0: look to the growth of community supply chains, staff who are steps away from the stores, and up-skilling locals to keep community money intact 
    • Environment: From Urgency to Emergency: regenerative businesses are creating a sustainable future, while made-to-order manufacturing and nearshoring are reshaping distribution models 
    • The Recession Generation: unstable job markets and a new gig economy will drive new generational spending and consumption habits 
    • New Alliances: international relations are being reshaped and this is underscoring political tensions, with growing knock-on effects

    Lightest 5G smartphone with graphene battery – Appear is launching the lightest and first graphene battery-powered smartphone with innovative water-resistant technology. There is already a lot of interest in this smartphone. Appear has begun receiving orders and projections call for a million units sold in the first six months. The smartphone would be available in stores and major online retailers by March 2021. To meet growing demands, Appear has partnered with Foxconn India for its manufacturing needs

    Research specialist Qamcom joins European partners in 6G drive – Hexa-X research project is EU funded and expected to run for two and a half years with the aim of laying the foundation for next generation 6G networks. Bringing together a number of technologically advanced European partners, the Hexa-X research project aims to develop the next generation of mobile networks, namely 6G or sixth generation. The project, which is EU-funded, is expected to start in January 2021 and last for about two and a half years. The purpose of the project is to lay the foundation for a global standard and to define principles for the 6G system itself – which will serve as a base for the entire telecom industry and its future services and products. On a more philosophical level, the project’s purpose can be described as technology connecting our human and physical world with the digital world. Qamcom’s research will focus on localisation and network optimisation

    Why minimalists are maximally important » strategy – the minimalist demo are predominantly suburbanites, more than half of whom (59%) are married couples with kids, with moderate household incomes. While they haven’t previously been majorly digitally inclined, the group has been making its first major foray into online shopping. Minimalist shopping activity on mobile phones and tablets was up 31% among this audience segment, with gaming activity increasing by 19% and 43% on mobile devices and consoles, respectively. Minimalists’ propensity to order online food has almost doubled since lockdown began, and marketers should be mindful that QSRs could really benefit from attracting this segment

    Boots UK sales struggle despite better than expected results for parent company | Cosmetics Business 

    The Chinese ski market: how China is going crazy for snow with the upcoming Winter Olympics 

    Banning Trump from digital platforms sets a dangerous precedent | ProMarket – I find them a dangerous precedent, which concentrates power irreversibly in the hands of a few private firms. Everybody, but especially people from the Left, should be worried: soon, this power will be used against them.  If Trump violated the law with his tweets, he should be prosecuted according to the law. Why did Twitter and Facebook take the law into their own hands as self-appointed vigilantes? If his tweets did not violate the law, why did Twitter and Facebook kick him out? Twitter and Facebook, many would object, are private companies, which can create their own rules of engagement. This is certainly true. But these rules should be consistently enforced and here they are not. According to Twitter’s own statement, Trump was permanently suspended because of the following two tweets, sent on January 8:   “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.” “These two Tweets,” writes Twitter, “must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence.” The context Twitter is referring to are the potential plans for a secondary attack on January 17—even though Trump’s tweets did not mention such plans

    Pennies to Dollars: The Problems With Amazon’s Plans for Detroit – Amazon Chronicles – sketchy property deals and minimum wage jobs

    A bit reactionary but it’s still worthwhile watching Chris Chappell interview with Winston Sterzel and Matthew Tye. Sterzel and Tye’s observations are spot on and tally with my own experience in China and Hong Kong.

    Escapist retail – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence – Digital fashion and virtual spaces are getting dreamy, engaging shoppers’ imaginations—and dissolving the traditional boundaries of retail. All of which is fine if you’re on the ‘upper leg’ of the K-shaped economic recovery. Not so great if you’re Primark. More retailing related content here.

    Well worth a read: Beatie Wolfe, digital artist and musician – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence 

    Why going global has proved so hard for the big banks | Financial Times – despite gains from globalisation in the lead-up to the financial crisis, the overall international record of the industry is poor. Just last week came a reminder of the challenges of a global bank: Deutsche Bank agreeing to pay US regulators $125m to resolve allegations that it paid bribes to win clients in the Middle East. Its not an isolated example, though Deutsche Bank does have a higher appetite for risk than many of its peers. Other examples, Goldman Sachs had to pay $3.9bn to settle the 1MDB bribery scandal in Malaysia. JPMorgan agreed to pay $264m to settle a US probe into its practice of hiring scions of the Chinese elite as its new business strategy. Its not like these bank failings are a new phenomenon. HSBC was able to buy the Midland Bank because it had been so weakened by its majority stake holding in Crocker National of California. At the time of purchase in 1980, Crocker was the tenth largest bank in the US. It has been one of the first banks in the US to use ATMs. Eventually it was sold due to the losses that Midland endured while owning it. Crocker had a large amount of bad loans on its books.

    2021 and the Conspiracies of ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ | WIRED – Gibson’s cyberspace was always bound up with the body. Data can be wet-wired; manipulating files requires Power Gloves and an “Eyephone.” When Johnny jacks in, it kind of hurts. Such meat-meets-metal has, in the quarter-century since Johnny Mnemonic came out, been called a failure of prediction. Our internet ended up disembodied, virtualized, socially distanced, our iPhones more of a figurative prosthesis. Yet, this last year, we sat slack at our desks, muscles atrophying, nerves attenuating, as we doomscrolled our way to new aches, new anxieties, new ailments. Some wild-eyes went so far as to claim that 5G triggered the pandemic, which is the most Gibson-sounding conspiracy of all. In Johnny’s world, the black shakes are caused not by a virus but by a signal. Epidemic through technic. There’s something in the air, no matter what you do. You’re already sick, you’re already dying. Connectivity is killing you

    Don’t Toss It, Fix It! Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the “Right to Repair” – expect a wide range of protests from auto manufacturers (like Tesla), to gadget makers (Apple) and agriculture titan John Deere

    Solar power – How governments spurred the rise of solar power | Technology Quarterly | The Economist – like other developments before it, solar demonstrates the need for government to play a role in innovation

    China consumer prices rise but worries persist over core inflation | Financial Times 

    Twitter vs Trump: has Big Tech gone too far? | Financial Times – Mr Trump has been barred from Facebook and Twitter due to events in the US last week. Apple, Google and Amazon have all taken steps to clamp down on Parler, the right wing social network.  This has set up a fierce debate about where the balance lies between a tech company’s right to censor users who breach their content policies versus an individual’s right to freedom of expression. A second aspect is the right for governments to regulate services versus the US approach of laissez faire – Angela Merkel attacks Twitter over Trump ban | Financial Times and a more US perspective – Superspreader Down: How Trump’s Exile from Social Media Alters the Future of Politics, Security, and Public Health – Defense One 

    Taiwan manufacturers quit China over trade tensions and rising costs | Financial Times – really interesting article. Taiwan’s biggest weakness seems to be the small and medium sized manufacturers with operations in China.

    I’ve chosen to not get drawn into the events at the Capitol in Washington DC. It is interesting that Arnold Schwarzenegger is far more articulate and coherent than the politicians in office.

    Quantum science leaps forward in China under Xi’s support: report ｜ Apple Daily 

    Announcement for the connection problem faced by Hong Kong users｜HKChronicles – From the evening of 6th January, 2021 (Hong Kong Time), the chief editor of HKChronicles, Naomi Chan, has received numerous reports from users located in Hong Kong. They noticed that the website was inaccessible when using the Internet service provided by some ISPs in Hong Kong. After looking into the analytics, we also found that the number of visitors from Hong Kong decreased drastically. Because of the scenario, there are some rumors on the Internet regarding to the status of service on our website – Hong Kong ISPs blocking the site. It has lots of good information on organised crime affiliated police, business people and political extremists. More Hong Kong related content here.

    Sex workers say ‘defunding Pornhub’ puts their livelihoods at risk – BBC News 

    Bitcoin Mining and Its Environmental Effects by Şerif DİLEK* & Yunus FURUNCU – an academic paper that show just how bad bitcoin is for the environment. It isn’t just bitcoin mining, but even blockchain and wallet management. TL;DR here is the money quote: Bitcoin’s energy consumption causes serious damage to the environment and faces us as one of the most significant obstacles in the development of Bitcoin.

    Concerns raised about cameras at self-service supermarket checkouts | Irish Examiner – not terribly surprising that Tesco loss prevention techniques give people the privacy creeps. But then they wouldn’t need to if the tills were manned….

    How PewDiePie is trying to dodge his taxes | Input magazine – clickbait headline, the real point is that top level influencers now are big enough to give effective tax management serious consideration

    Telegram: Contact @durov – Telegram laying into WhatsApp. But a little something to think about from seven years ago to consider before you move to Telegram: Cryptography Dispatches: The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen • Buttondown 

    Mark Ritson’s marketing effectiveness lessons

    • Qualitative and quantitative diagnosis
    • Clear strategic objectives
    • Long, mass-marketing brand building
    • Shorter, targeted performance
    • Tight, differentiated position
    • Heavily, consistently codified
    • Investing more than competitors
    • Astonishing creativity

  • Cyberpunk and things that made my week

    Cyberpunk history part one and two have been done by Indigo Games. I blogged about part one a while ago on the blog. But now I get to share both parts of this Cyberpunk history. The gap reflects the amount of time and effort that went into both series.

    Part one covers cyberpunk culture up to the early 1980s.

    Part two moves the cyberpunk story via personal computing, the end of the cold war, gulf war and mainstream Hollywood. I hadn’t made the Philip K Dick connection with Screamers. It also delves into a wide variety of early computer games that I didn’t know and the cult anime Armitage III.

    I can’t wait until their next instalment drops. Watch this cyberpunk history instead of the staid Christmas TV programming. More culture related posts here.

    Mercedes-Benz managed to create its own ‘Baby Yoda’ moment with the ‘plushie’ in this winter TV advert. However Mercedes don’t seem to have thought about how to exploit this cultural moment that they’ve created.

    https://youtu.be/-bE16foH9m0

    The Irish government’s department of foreign affairs has put together To Be Irish | at Christmas that provides an Irish experience to the COVID stranded diaspora. I’ve put together a playlist of Christmas music you can enjoy here.

    The Korea Culture Centre has put together online experiences based on the works of Korean artists. More here. They’ve made an interesting use of video and VR type experiences in this work. The KCC has kept its artist curation at its usual high standard.

  • Creatives outputs + more things

    Different times | Campaign magazine – It’s tempting to look at the best of today’s creatives and compare them with the greats: David Abbott, John Webster, Helmut Krone, George Lois, Ed McCabe, Mary Wells, Bill Bernbach, Paul Arden, Sir John Hegarty. And to think there’s no-one around who could hold a candle to any of them. But is it a fair comparison? They were working with account men like Frank Lowe, Tim Bell and Nigel Bogle, they were working with media guys like Mike Yershon, directors like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson, and planning hadn’t even been invented then. Of course it was easier to do great work, everyone wanted great work. There weren’t hundreds of TV channels and big data and micro-targeting, and ad tech, and dozens of different platforms, and five campaigns shown at creative pitches. What was wanted was quality not quantity, one fantastic ad not a dozen space-fillers. It was, in fact, much easier in those days to do great work. Sure the competition was tougher, but everyone was agreed on what they wanted, ads that made the public sit up and take notice. I know the people working today may not have stood up against the greats. But I’m not sure that if any of the greats had been working today, they would have been able to produce great work either. – Dave Trott on the futility of comparisons that relate to now, versus then and changing ad environment for creatives (and everyone else for that matter). The contrast in creatives and their output is very striking. One cannot ignore the nature of the medium in the creative process. The move to social seems to have kneecapped creatives and creativity. By comparison earlier media revolutions like television enhanced creativity. Creatives were constantly learning new ways of creativity within the medium. The copywriters seems to have reduced their standing in creatives even more than visual designers. How can platforms provide creatives with a similar range that legacy media did? What can creatives do to recover their own mojo as a profession? More marketing related content here.

    Pop Mart/Asian IPOs: go figure | Financial Times – Pop Mart, which sells $8 boxes of figurines, has taken advantage of its newfound popularity to join the listing boom in Hong Kong. Shares nearly doubled in value on the first day of trading on Friday. As with other recent Asian listings, a redirection of money previously set aside for the postponed Ant Group listing appears to have fuelled the frenzy. Demand has also been boosted by the approaching holiday shopping season.

    Coca-Cola Launches Global Creative and Media Agency Reviews –Coca-Cola is launching a full global review of its media buying and planning services. The creative portion of the review encompasses creative, experiential marketing, production management and shopper marketing. “We are on a journey to fundamentally transform and dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our marketing investments,” a Coca-Cola spokesperson told Adweek. “By improving our processes, eliminating duplication and optimizing spend, we will generate significant savings to fuel reinvestment in our brands. “Media and creative agency services require significant investment from our brands. They are also a crucial component of our ongoing digital transformation journey to drive our business. With that in mind, we have decided to undergo a complete redesign of our media and creative agency models in an effort to align the strategic, operational, and commercial needs of our new, networked organization,” the spokesperson added. “This will necessitate a full review of our media and creative planning and buying practices, as well as our media and creative agency appointments and commercial relationships around the world. We expect this process will be completed by the end of 2021.”

    Pompeo shames MIT, calls Chinese authorities ‘jackbooted thugs’ in remarks about academic freedom | South China Morning Post – “A Fulbright student coming in from some country ought not be returned to their home country and to suffer from the jackbooted thugs that now want to take the information that they got, send them back into the United States only to have them just take a little bit more information that they’re going to hand off to the Chinese [Ministry of State Security] … or the People’s Liberation Army”, he said. “MIT wasn’t interested in having me to their campus to give this exact set of remarks,” Pompeo said in his opening address. The school’s president, L. Rafael Reif, he added, “implied that my arguments might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors”. – interesting, if true, that US universities are no platforming politicians to avoid offending Beijing

    The Hottest Campaign Ads on Twitter Didn’t Really Work: Study – The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money. They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for. The idea wasn’t to be petty or adversarial towards the Lincoln Project, which drew both fans and detractors for the scorched-earth spots it ran imploring fellow Republicans to abandon Trump. It was, instead, to see if Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing, which took funds and time. If it turned out that what the Lincoln Project was doing was proving persuasive, the thinking went, then Priorities USA could use Twitter as a quasi-barometer for seeing how strong their own ads were. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. According to Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics—likes and retweets—and persuasion was -0.3, “meaning that the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.” The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested. – I think that there a lot of lessons for creatives and strategists in this piece of research in terms of eliciting behaviour change, beyond politics

    China shadows the rise of Hong Kong’s next tycoons – Nikkei Asia – Avoid politics, build trust: One dynasty heir speaks on a generation’s dilemma

    How The 1985 Downturn Set The Silicon Wafer Industry On A Path To Consolidation That Continues Today – Semiconductor Digest – a great read

    A transatlantic effort to take on Big Tech | Financial Times – Companies are counting on the incoming Biden administration, which will include a number of tech-friendly officials from Barack Obama’s time in the White House, to help them stand up to Europe. It shouldn’t. One of the huge risks for the new administration is that it will be seen as too cosy with concentrated corporate power. Witness the cries already coming from the left about some of Mr Biden’s appointees who have backgrounds in private equity. Individual appointees should be judged on their own merits. If we didn’t let anyone from either the finance or the technology industries into the new administration, we would be the poorer for it. Take Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who is now Mr Biden’s chief markets adviser. He cleaned up derivatives trading while at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama years – grab the popcorn

    About Google’s approach to research publication – Google Docs – A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper. Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date

    Pioneer DJ reports 82 per cent rise in the sale of entry-level DJ controllers during lockdown – Tech – Mixmag 

    Hong Kong’s Civil Servants Under Siege – The Diplomat – I think the oath taking is a big deal. If you don’t sign it, they will immediately assume you will be against the government one day. Most of us don’t agree with this practice. Those who are almost retired and are older think it’s quite normal. They stress that Hong Kong is a part of China, and civil servants have the responsibility to uphold the policies issued by the government and support it no matter what we think. But most of the newer recruits, what we care about is that freedom of speech is protected. The Basic Law guarantees our freedom of speech. No matter what career we have, we should enjoy this right.

    RTOS port to RISC-V core for high reliability designs | EE News Europe – opportunities that previously would have gone to ARM

    Wikipedia Matters by Hinnosaar, Hinnosaar, Kummer and Slivko – we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists’ choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding information to Wikipedia in- creases overnight stays in treated cities compared to non-treated cities. The impact is largely driven by improvements to shorter and relatively incomplete pages on Wikipedia (PDF)

  • Luxe streetwear

    I started thinking about the latest developments in luxe streetwear after leafing through the FT to see the following advert marking the proposed purchase of Stone Island by Moncler. (Stone Island had already sold its parent brand CP Company and intellectual property back in 2015 to Hong Kong manufacturer Tristate Holdings Limited).

    Moncler buys Stone Island
    R+R SpA – published in the Financial Times – a luxe streetwear merger

    It follows hot on the heels of Supreme being purchased by VF Corporation.

    Luxury disruption

    From the luxury market point of view their customer base over the past 30 years has done three things:

    • The customers have become younger. Luxury shopping is no longer dominated by dowager heiresses in Europe and the New World. Now the man purchasers of luxury are much younger and are second generation money. They’ve had money in their families for somewhere between 20 and 50 years. They are the scions of political leaders or business leaders. Money has allowed them access to the world’s best education institutions. They might have had etiquette classes, but they’re no more than two generations away from having known deprivation.
    • The customers are in a different place. Globalisation massively changed their customer base. First it was the Japanese middle classes who picked up a taste for luxury brands whilst travelling abroad. As the Asian tigers took off, you started to see luxury purchases being made in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and China. When the Soviet Union fell luxury consumption also sprang up in the East as some people had money to burn. Much of the luxury retail in traditional shopping areas like London and Paris are derived from tourists rather than local purchasers. A change in the luxury tax regime in China has seen more domestic luxury consumption. China is now looking to build Hainan into a domestic luxury shopping and holiday resort.
    • Luxury serves a different purpose. Luxury has traditionally reflected status. Goods of a superior nature that the ‘wrong sort’ of people would never be able to afford. Luxury then became a symbol that you’d made it. In Asian markets, particularly China, luxury became a tool. People gifted luxury products to make relationships work better. It also signified that you are the kind of successful business person that partners could trust. You started to see factory managers with Gucci man bags and premium golfwear to signal their success. Then when the scions of these business people and figures in authority were adults, luxury has become about premium self expression. It has been mixed up with streetwear in a manner reminiscent of the Buffalo Collective.

    So from the perspective of the luxury industry, they are feeling a massive amount of disruption going on. And that’s even before you get into digital transformation.

    It is this transformation of customer segments, geographies and use cases which is forcing the luxury industry to ‘go casual’ fit in a luxe streetwear space.

    Streetwear evolution

    The perspective from the streetwear side of the table is more exemplified by my favourite Thai English phrase: same-same, but different. Their market hasn’t been disrupted in the same way as luxury. It has got a lot bigger.

    Rise of Streetwear
    Growth in streetwear

    The internet has meant that streetwear culture has become global and trends catch on much faster. It has become more popular around the world and there are thriving secondary markets like StockX and GOAT.

    Streetwear has pushed into luxury pricing models led by Japanese brands; who brought a higher attention to detail to the market. It has continued the trend of innovation that companies like Stone Island started. This is best exemplified now by the likes of German label ACRONYM.

    From a design perspective right back to the origins of what we know as streetwear by the likes Shawn Stüssy or Harlem’s Dapper Dan co-opted luxury product language. In Dapper Dan’s case using fake fabrics and labels to make clothing. His customer base of African Americans from poor neighbourhoods whether early hip hop stars or criminals didn’t see the items that they wanted in boutiques. And even if they did, many of them didn’t feel welcome in the uptown boutiques.

    From Stüssy’s point of view it was the pop art ethos and DIY fanzine culture that infused his work. The reversed double S in a circle is an obvious reference to Chanel’s design language.

    Over the space of a decade Supreme went from being sued for aping Louis Vuitton’s design language to collaborating with them. Dapper Dan has recently been collaborating with Gucci.

    Does luxe streetwear lack ambition?

    Highsnobriety asked the question five years ago and concluded that no streetwear company had shown the serious ambition to become an umbrella brand the size of LVMH or Kering. Skiwear, skate wear and snow sports equipment are sectors that are a tenth of the size of streetwear. Yet they have seen consolidation into larger holding groups. These groups provided the financial cushion for these companies through the 2008 financial crisis.

    The closest that luxe streetwear has got to the holding group is likely to be New Guards Group. New Guards Group describes itself as a contemporary luxury fashion holding group. It owns Off-White, Opening Ceremony and Palm Angels. This in turn was bought out by luxury e-tailer Farfetch. Farfetch in turn has Richemont and Alibaba as minority shareholders.

    Surfwear is also described as having a generational strain. Dads keep wearing the gear. Kids no longer want to wear it. Given the commonality with the streetwear lifestyle. You could see similar things happening at even the largest of streetwear brands eventually. Some of the people wearing Supreme in the mid 1990s are still wearing it. The original international Stüssy Tribe are still going strong, repping streetwear in their 50s and 60s.

    Luxe streetwear brand A Bathing Ape has definitely seen better days, by the time Nigo sold the business to Hong Kong I.T. Group. The transitory nature of streetwear brands is littered with names that were formerly prominent like XLarge (that came back) or 90s icon Massimo.

    Stone Island and luxe streetwear

    Moncler get a technically proficient firm in Stone Island. It was built on a foundation of experimenting with materials. It is the only company able to garment dye polyester fabric for lightweight applications like summer jackets.

    The brand is widely respected and has collaborated with other innovators like Nike. It has been worn by Drake regularly that opened the brand up to hip hop fans. This has helped the brand widen its association beyond football hooligans and scally culture.

    More luxury related content here.

    More information

    Moncler to buy Stone Island in deal that values rival at €1.15bn | Financial Times

    VF snaps up streetwear line Supreme in $2bn deal | Financial Times

    Luxury brands set sights on Chinese tourists in Hainan as extended duty-free quotas and pandemic-free shopping attract travellers | South China Morning Post

    Dapper Dan’s collaboration with Gucci – focused on ‘hip hop style ready to wear and accessories featuring the GG logo

    Everything we know about the Supreme x Louis Vuitton collection | High Snobriety

    The umbrella brand: is streetwear ready for corporate takeover? | Highsnobriety

    Billabong’s demise is emblematic of a wider crisis in the surfwear industry | Guardian

    Silk or Synthetic | Financial Times

  • New Balance factory closure + more

    New Balance Boston factory closure

    New Balance to Layoff Dozens of Workers as It Closes Boston Factory – Footwear News – this is huge for New Balance. It is a major knock to the perceived wisdom around the New Balance brand and its differentation versus other footwear vendors like Nike or Adidas. New Balance his made US manufacturing a big part of its corporate story. Being private owned, it can take a longer view than competitors. But that doesn’t seem to have helped New Balance during the pandemic. It will be interesting to see how New Balance handles this moving forwards.

    Business

    The inadequate trials of Philip Green | Financial Times – There is something else at work too — distaste for the wheeler-dealer made good. His parties and celebrity schmoozing were considered vulgar. He was accused by MPs of being a “spiv”. Three commenters under one FT article this week described him as a “barrow boy”. A campaign was launched to strip him of his knighthood, as if that is what mattered. – interesting op-ed that makes a valuable point about the discussion around Philip Green

    Consumer behaviour

    Streetwear in China: hip-hop influence and form of expression for the Chinese youth – Daxue Consulting – Market Research China 

    Economics

    Hong Kong chief has ‘piles of cash’ at home after US sanctions – A government survey taken between June and September registered for the first time in 11 years a reduction in the number of foreign businesses operating in Hong Kong. The survey found 9,025 companies had offices in Hong Kong compared with 9,040 the previous year. Only 15 per cent of the companies said they had plans to expand in the city in 2020, whereas last year 23 per cent expected an expansion. – I thought that this quote was interesting in the FT article. What becomes apparent is that the Chinese government thinks that internal circulation is more important than Hong Kong as a gateway to foreign direct investment (Paywall)

    Media

    NSFW TikTok Porn: Bree Louise OnlyFans Is the Future of Adult Content – According to Alex Hawkins, Vice President of xHamster, Gen Z and young millennials are “disproportionately” willing to pay for adult content compared to previous generations, especially if the star of the video is also the one creating it. “We see the shift from studios to performer-producers dramatically changing the industry,” he says. Aesthetically, this translates to “a surge in realistic situations and more natural bodies.” In other words, more of what you might find on TikTok, albeit with fewer clothes. “We believe that consumers are much more likely to pay for performer-created content than they are traditional porn,” says Hawkins. “It feels more intimate.” – Mirrors the record labels have been historically looked at from at least the 1980s.

    Francis Fukuyama: How to Save Democracy From Technology | Foreign Affairs – everyone hates big tech. Fukuyama is famous for his Warsaw Pact break-up era book The End of History and The Last Man. Here’s his opinion on social paltforms: But few recognize that the political harms posed by the platforms are more serious than the economic ones. Fewer still have considered a practical way forward: taking away the platforms’ role as gatekeepers of content. This approach would entail inviting a new group of competitive “middleware” companies to enable users to choose how information is presented to them

    How Biden’s Rebels Blew Up Trump’s Death Star | AdExchanger – on combating disinformation: “Instead of chasing down and knocking down every ANTIFA rumor, we knew that the best defense was convincing people that the Joe Biden they did like, whose values they shared, would be the author of his own presidency,” said BPI partner Danny Franklin. “And when we reminded them of those values … and validated that through trusted endorsers, we could win the argument and defeat the attack.”

    Technology

    Warning lights are flashing for Big Tech as they did for banks | Financial Times – The pandemic has emphasised our reliance on technology. It’s not just the interminable video calls or the technology that underpins deliveries to our locked-down doors. It is the mountains of data that dictate the ads we see as we scroll through coverage of the latest coronavirus briefing. Digital transformation is sweeping through my industry, too. Consumers have squeezed years-worth of adoption of apps and online banking into just a few months. Yet the risks go much deeper than the risk of hastily managed change. The algorithms that determine how much work delivery drivers get and what we see when we go online are no better understood than the structured credit products that brought the banking system to its knees in the financial crisis. – Interesting and provocative analogy to the financial system

    Teaching in the Pandemic: ‘This Is Not Sustainable’ – The New York Times – vehement debates have raged over whether to reopen schools for in-person instruction, teachers have been at the center — often vilified for challenging it, sometimes warmly praised for trying to make it work. But the debate has often missed just how thoroughly the coronavirus has upended learning in the country’s 130,000 schools, and glossed over how emotionally and physically draining pandemic teaching has become for the educators themselves. In more than a dozen interviews, educators described the immense challenges, and exhaustion, they have faced trying to provide normal schooling for students in pandemic conditions that are anything but normal. Some recounted whiplash experiences of having their schools abruptly open and close, sometimes more than once, because of virus risks or quarantine-driven staff shortages, requiring them to repeatedly switch back and forth between in-person and online teaching. Others described the stress of having to lead back-to-back group video lessons for remote learners, even as they continued to teach students in person in their classrooms – I imagine that it is probably pretty similar levels of burnout in knowledge workers as well. (Paywall)

    Do serious games help you learn? – Hello Future Orange – Serious games are more effective than traditional teaching but they do not produce better results than more active forms of knowledge transmission and are often more costly to implement.

    Thailand

    Pornhub, along with several other adult entertainment sites have been banned in Thailand. This has been part of a wider political debate within the country on government performance and what role the royal family should play. Asian Boss asked Bangkok residents on their opinions. What pleasantly surprised me about this video was thoughtful opinions on both sides of the argument

    More Thai-related posts here.