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

  • Weight lightening + more things

    Midgards Messer Shop – interesting weight lightening techniques in their product designs. It reminds me of the weight lightening techniques racing cars used to use. Drilling out metal on parts like bonnet hinges to retain strength but not the weight. More design related content here.

    In U.S. and UK, Globalization Leaves Some Feeling ‘Left Behind’ or ‘Swept Up’ | Pew Research Center – which gives a good idea of where populism came from

    Rolex Panerai 3646 Service Invoice from 1955 – Vintage Panerai and other iconic timepieces under the loupe at Perezcope – interesting implications on brand provenance and heritage

    Mulberry warns on sales after falling to £14m loss | FT – the comments on online shopping by the CEO in my opinion don’t ring true.

    Facebook to defy new Turkish social media law | Financial Times – Facebook must feel that the Turkish market isn’t worth taking negative PR in the US and EU. It must have relatively meagre advertising revenues for them to make this decision. Why put their foot down in Turkey and not in other markets like Hong Kong or Russia?

    People love products with rituals – Ariyh – the role of rituals in product consumption can drive sales, interesting research. Examples would be:

    • The different ways one would eat a Cadbury’s Creme Egg
    • Twisting to separate the biscuit from the filling on an Oreo
    • Waiting for the head to settle on a pint of Guinness
    • Cadbury’s Flake bath adverts the emphasised enjoying the bar in private ‘me time’ moment

    Facebook Says Government Breakup of Instagram, WhatsApp Would Be ‘Complete Nonstarter’ – WSJ – interesting that the 14-page briefing document was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Tim Wu’s takes on the claim are interesting ‘A government antitrust case against the company would likely rely on the argument that Facebook made serial acquisitions to reduce competition, a question that wasn’t considered when the Federal Trade Commission originally chose not to oppose the Instagram and WhatsApp deals‘

    Reebok teams up with fashion brand Yoshiokubo for traditional-culture-inspired sneakers | SoraNews24 -Japan News – interesting how they’re incorporating Japanese culture motifs

    Winston Privacy – ad blocker as hardware appliance

  • Cobblers

    Much of the work in the developing world relies on self employment. Be it farming, fisheries, a small retail operation or repairing products like cobblers or seamstresses. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, self employment accounts for over 70 per cent of the workforce *.

    my tie-dye Toms are here! I LOVE THEM. thank you @annzas!!!!!!!
    A pair of tie-dyed Toms shoes by Rachel

    Let’s use the brand TOMS for a thought experiment about self-employed cobblers.

    TOMS brand purpose came from supplying shoes to the poor. The brand story was that the founder met a lady in Argentina who was providing shoes to shoeless children. The iconic TOMS shoe is actually an alpargata. This is a style popular in Argentina. Blake Mycoskie came up with the TOMS name from ‘tomorrow’. The business promised to donate a pair of shoes for everyone bought.

    You could argue that those people who get the shoes, would likely be unable to buy their own. That it isn’t disrupting delicate market economies and the livelihood of some people in the developing world. But if you could afford to buy local shoes and chose to wear a donated pair – it would be rational decision to make. That would then disrupt the delicate market for cobblers.

    Globalisation

    Back when cobblers and boot makers started to disappear from the high street in the UK, the work started to disappear gradually. There was also a long process of industrialisation to make up for the jobs being lost. There was a process of creation and disruption in the job market. Cobblers business of shoe repairs and boot making bifurcated:

    • The Timpson type model that can repair some issues with modern formal shoes. The heels can be repaired on women’s shoes if they snap off. They cut keys, change watch straps, fit watch batteries and do engravings to keep the business ticking over
    • The Jermyn Street model where one buys a pair of shoes at a premium. They are made on a last with your name on; and repaired and resoled as necessary

    A lot of people now wear sneakers and casual shoes for most of the time. The way that they’re manufactured means that there is little that can be done to repair them.

    So going to a cobbler is no longer a mainstream regular activity for much of UK society. I very rarely wear formal shoes. I have a pair of black leather loafers by Churchs. I used to get them repaired by and old Irish gentleman called Mr Cavanagh. He eventually closed his shop when the business rates meant it was no longer viable. But until he closed I would bring shoes home to be repaired by him, as my Mam and Dad had also done.

    Getting back to our developing world cobblers. The problem in a lot of developing world countries is that there isn’t a similar employment substitution happening for local cobblers. Donated shoes come on top of deindustrialisation. TOMS does try to negate this impact and currently manufactures shoes in Kenya, India, Ethiopia and Haiti.

    But most manufacturing has been centralised in South and East Asia.

    Brand purpose and unintended consequences

    Mark Ritson discussed how brand purpose shouldn’t boost profit, but should become before profit **. When Uncle Ben’s changes its name to Ben’s *** and Aunt Jemima **** because of racial overtones, that isn’t brand purpose (or putting purpose into a brand).

    When an FMCG company stops using palm oil in their food products, that isn’t brand purpose. Brand purpose would be putting money into ways to support farmers so that they didn’t resort to slash and burn palm oil plantations.

    More marketing related content here.

    IZA World of Labor – Self-employment and poverty in developing countries *

    Marketing Week – A true brand purpose doesn’t boost profit, it sacrifices it**

    Marketing Week – Mars put purpose into Uncle Ben’s rebrand ***

    Business Insider – 15 racist brands, mascots, and logos that were considered just another part of American life ****

  • Rival device makers on Amazon + more

    Amazon Restricts How Rival Device Makers Buy Ads on Its Site – WSJ – interesting that his is confirmed by both according to Amazon employees and executives at rival companies and advertising firms. Would rival device makers have an antitrust case? It would be harder for Amazon to argue that it doesn’t have a monopoly position in retail. More on Amazon here.

    China’s Sina Agrees to Go Private in Deal Valued at $2.6 Billion – Bloomberg – will probably list on a home stock market like Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong

    Oxford moves to protect students from China’s Hong Kong security law | The Guardian – one can see this is a direct reaction to Hong Kong’s national security law and also as a reaction to Chinese influence operations on campuses across the western world

    Will The Chinese-Owned French Luxury Brand Baccarat Survive? | Jing Daily – combination of bad management and circumstances. It is interesting that the owner Coco Chu has disappeared

    Mark Riston: It’s time for ‘share of search’ to replace ‘share of voice’ – Peckham’s Formula posits that when you launch a brand you should set its advertising budget based on your desired share of market. Specifically, your initial share of voice should be 1.5 times the desired market share you want to achieve by the end of the brand’s second year.

    Older People Have Become Younger – Neuroscience News – in terms of their mental faculties

    Netflix called out for “Three-Body” author Liu Cixin’s Xinjiang remark — Quartz – Mulan seems to have become a verb in US media in a similar way to ‘it’s all gone Pete Tong’ in late 1980s vernacular English. Although originally ‘gone Pete Tong’ meant that something had gone commercial and mainstream – in effect a sellout, which was a bad thing in the 1990s, when credibility was everything. Netflix might be able to see dramas into China a la the BBC and Sherlock; but I can’t see it being allowed to be a platform. China already has QQVideo iQiyi and PPTV

  • Carhartt Labor Day + more things

    Carhartt Labor Day colouring book – the American workwear brand put together a great children’s colouring book for labor day weekend. It allows parents to explain what they do for their kids and provides an activity for a socially isolated public holiday. You can download your Carhartt Labor Day colouring book here.

    Carhartt Labor Day colouring book

    Vox Media have done a great video on rotoscoping and animation. Rotoscoping as a technique allowed animation to have life-like motion, but the creativity of animation.

    I was introduced to rotoscoping with the Ralph Bakshi Lord of The Rings animated movie. Peter Jackson’s live action version borrowed from this version shot for shot, but I find the animated version more enthralling because of Bakshi’s use of rotoscoping.

    Video shot from an original 35mm trailer print

    Simon Peel of Adidas’ now famous speech that recommended a healthy skepticism on short term performance marketing and the impact of longer term brand marketing. He realises digital is important, but lays out why marketers should ask why? Peel talked honestly about marketing effectiveness, marketing efficiency and misleading metrics. I had read the articles, but this is the first time that I’d seen his talk. More on marketing effectiveness here.

    IPA Eff Week talk 2019 by Simon Peel of Adidas

    Microsoft had been experimenting with sealed underwater data centres to see if they were possible and what the benefits were. Prior to the project starting there would be some predetermined benefits:

    • Reduced energy costs as refrigeration wouldn’t be needed. (You could achieve a similar effect, if you buried the data centre deep enough)
    • Reduced data centre costs. Internet hotels and server farms can cost a lot if built in cities with expensive real estate

    But there were questions over corrosion, damage and reliability. Microsoft got around corrosion by filling a submerged data centre with a nitrogen atmosphere. They found that a data centre without human intervention had much less faults than a matching data centre on-shore.

    Microsoft are now working on how the end of life process would work for an underwater data centre.

    Microsoft’s Natick project on underwater data centres

  • Gaming the charts

    Gaming the charts has been going on for decades. Economist Tyler Cowen documented how prosecutions in the US for what was called payola started in the 1950s in his book: In Praise of Commercial Culture. Prior to this the process for ranking and gaming the charts was opaque at best. It destroyed the career of radio DJ Alan Freed, who helped pioneer the rock and roll sound. American Bandstand presenter Dick Clark almost had a similar fate. Clark sold a stake in a record company and turned snitch for the authorities.

    Over time labels relied on legal promotional means to radio stations. Here’s what KLF’s The Manual had to say about them circa 1988:

    Your plugger. The man responsible for getting the nation to hear your record. From now on in this man will undoubtedly be the most important person in the jigsaw. Without his faith, vision and understanding of the fastest lane in this particular rat race, you will be nowhere.

    So go with the plugger that’s got the faith, vision and understanding – indefinable qualities – but you will know within five minutes of meeting them if they have it. Top grade bull is something else they should have.

    The plugger will try and explain what his job is. Each of them view their role differently but all must be able to deliver the following:

    1. Concrete advice on what has to be brought out on your record for him to be able to do his job.

    2. Appointments with Radio One producers where he is able to get them to listen to your record under the most favourable light.

    3. Advice and help in putting together a video that will be acceptable for children’s television and a lead on some of the hungry young video makers who are out there.

    Money and pluggers. They will want a lot and when your record starts happening pluggers will want more. Scott [The KLF’s plugger] wanted a thousand pounds to start working the record and then all sorts of bonuses related to our record reaching certain positions on the charts. We had to pay him five grand altogether once it had made Number One. He had a lot of costs and his team worked flat out for it, but we had to give him the first thousand the day of release. We had a couple of months to pay the other four. Anybody who can do it much cheaper won’t be much good.

    The KLF – The Manual – How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way

    Plugging services also worked with club DJs to get their artists in club play charts. When I used to send returns to these charts I used to receive ‘promotional copy’ records from promo agencies. Some of them were good, some indescribably bad. One of the agencies I used to get material from was IRP; my contact there Lohan Presencer went on to become executive chairman of the Ministry of Sound Group.

    With the rise of hallyu and online voting you saw early breakout artists like the Wonder Girls galvanise fans and home and abroad to get them on to the likes of Disney Radio in the US and assist in gaming the charts.

    Miles Guo
    Miles Guo cover art – which makes the thing even slightly more surreal.

    Now it seems political activism has merged with the art of plugging. Miles Guo, a critic of the Chinese government based in New York has provided the vocals and money behind ‘Take Down the CCP‘. It feels like the Team America soundtrack, but without the irony.

    It went to number one on the iTunes download chart in three countries on the one day America, Canada and Australia (you need to make an allowance for the international date line, so Australia appears on September 11th, rather than 10th). It has all the hallmarks of a coordinated promotion. The reduced prominence of downloads versus streams obviously paid a part in their chart choice. Promotions of streams are structurally very different, with playlists along genres being much more important; so for Guo it would be much harder in terms of gaming the charts. Gaming the charts for streaming does happen; but with more conventional agendas. More music related posts here.