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
  • Galloway on Louis Vuitton & more

    Section 4’s Scott Galloway on Louis Vuitton. Professor Scott Galloway talks about the way Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer consumer’s needs and tastes.

    Modern consumers are younger and based in Asia rather than the traditional older luxury purchasers in Europe and the US. This has meant that digital became more important, as had casual luxury over formal luxury.

    All of that innovation was extended by Louis Vuitton with streetwear type drops rather than seasons. Shops are a brand experience in their own right. Including online games and pop-up Instagrammable stores. They focused on products that can be driven into the market faster with an agile supply chain.

    Casual styling allows you to go to smaller goods with a lower price point and replaceable more often.

    The line between streetwear and luxury has been blurred. More on luxury related issues here.

    A great mix of the hits of European disco producer Daniel Bangalter (Vangarde). Daniel Bangalter started with a husband and wife team, writing and producing their songs. Around this time, he partnered up with Jean Kluger. Their first project was a pseudo Japanese band called the Yamasuki Singers. It was the early 1970s and a bit strange. Kluger and Bangalter then went on to produce Ottowan including D.I.S.C.O. They also produced the Gibson Brothers song Cuba. You can hear the influence of his sound (and probably at least some of his studio equipment) in the Daft Punk sound.

    Daft Punk includes his son Thomas Bangalter. Apparently Daniel helped Daft Punk when they were starting out.

    Mark Ritson on 50 years of Effies. Some of the content is as worth watching as listening to Ritson’s commentary.

    Scott Galloway on online business. Some interesting points here

    Fabio Wibmer does to the Austrian city of Wien (Vienna) what Bullit did to San Francisco.

  • Choi Hyun woo & things that made last week

    Choi Hyun woo

    TV shopping channels are huge in Korea. Asian Boss did this great interview with Choi Hyun woo, one of the most successful shopping TV pitchmen (pitchwoman) in Korea.

    Looking at data from home shopping company CJ ENM Commerce division, sales are starting to focus more on premium and luxury products from international brands like Karl Lagerfeld and Vera Wang. Overall TV viewship has been declining; but TV home shopping has been steadily growing.

    Good document on how consumer behaviour and technology will affect the future of retailing and e-commerce by Sparks & Honey. Its a book rather than a presentation.

    Amazing bit of creative work by Alzheimer’s Research UK.

    We’re in a golden age of TV drama and it looks like thins are only going to get more interesting with this trailer from HBO’s adaptation of The Watchmen universe. This seems to go in a very different direction to the original Watchman series. It is picks up from the end of the original book when a ‘trans-dimensional’ invasion fails. It doesn’t have the cold war orientation of the original series and is instead a show for our times. The HBO series focuses on issues of race and class. It looks as if it could be more entertaining than the original film adaptation that felt a bit flat.

    https://youtu.be/-33JCGEGzwU

    McDonalds have pushed these ads about trust and they play on human truths like the discomfort of formal restaurants or the tyranny of choice in grocery stores. A classic example of this tension is that many people I know refuse to eat on their own in a restaurant. I don’t have that hang up at all. McDonalds deserves credit for really listening to consumer insights and playing them back tot the audience for added brand resonance.

  • Laundry category innovation + more

    Laundry without guilt

    A load of laundry without a load of guilt | Trendwatching – white good manufacturer looks to combat micro fibres. Laundry is a major CPG category and this project offers a potential for partnership with manufacturers, beyond the usual ‘X manufacturer recommends X laundry detergent’.

    Anti-solar panel

    Transmission lines and railroad near Salton Sea. District of Los Angeles smog obscures the sun, May 1972

    The Anti-Solar Panel – A Device That Generates Electricity From Darkness – at a very early stage. What’s interesting the potential for energy handover with other alternative sources to provide constant current

    Branding

    Why strategy should embrace execution | WARCThe Nike ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ campaign was a really long process – about a year. In the beginning we had a vision to get really local. Then about halfway through the process, the terrorist attacks happened in London. And a picture emerged of a man fleeing the scene with a beer in his hand. Everyone inside London said that’s what it means to be a Londoner: no matter what happens, they hold onto their beer. And off the back of that, I wrote the line ‘nothing beats a Londoner,’ which wasn’t supposed to end up as the final line but it did. It just gave the creative more depth and a place to springboard from. It changed the energy of the work.

    Consumer behaviour

    Baby Boomers click with online shopping – Trend-Monitor – interesting statistics around overall spending versus millennials

    The more voters hear no-deal warnings, the more they support it | The TimesMuch of this is simply because voters have heard it all before. Trust in politicians and the media, also seen as responsible, is at record lows. The legacy of the 2016 referendum campaign runs deep. Promises from both sides, from the infamous £350 million a week to forecasts of a recession, still endure as easy-to-reach examples as to why you should not trust anything a politician says.  For up to about a year after the referendum, a handful of voters would repeat a number long forgotten in Westminster — that the Remain campaign had said leaving would make households £4,300 a year worse off. This was the archetype of nonsense, largely because of its precision. How could anyone know in such detail, to the nearest hundred, with such certainty, what the effect would be? It can only be a lie. But the aversion to anti-no-deal messages is about more than distrust. Where there is support for no deal in the country, it is fused to a deep sense of patriotism. A feeling that we are British, we have endured so much and thrived, of course we will be okay if we leave without a deal

    The last days of the middle-class world citizen | Financial Times – interesting mix of Extinction Rebellion type environmental despair, economic globalisation, populism and dot.com busts (paywall)

    Design

    Hong Kong students invent self-sanitising door handle | Dezeen – interesting, it is said that brass fulfils a similar self-sterilising role as well

    Legal

    WSJ City | Nike CEO was briefed by banned coach on doping effects – this looks damning for Nike

    US blacklists 28 Chinese entities in latest trade war escalation | Financial Times – interesting that all the companies are focused on surveillance or machine learning (paywall)

    Luxury

    Tiffany deletes ad that looks like Hong Kong protest message – Inkstone – China is getting too sensitive la. FFS its huge, powerful, has nuclear weapons. It needs to grow a skin rather than being raw to the touch

    Off-White, Vetements and The Paradigm of Luxury“Disruption is evolution. Defining the word ‘luxury’ might be a start for defining disruption and evolution as the word and the concept of luxury has different meanings following the demographics of peoples and cultures according to age, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, income, and education”

    Extreme micro-living in San Francisco | Financial Times – luxury upwards storage. What about the economics of furniture versus technology? (paywall)

  • Juul sales halted in China + more

    Juul Sales Halted in China, Days After Launch – WSJ – this could be as much about IP as anything else that caused the Juul sales halted in China. The e-cigarette was invented by a Chinese engineer looking for a healthier option to cigarettes. Secondly tobacco is a monopoly in China run by a state owned enterprise that is a valuable source of government revenue. There are even tobacco sponsored universities. I am only mildly surprised that Juul sales halted hadn’t happened in the US, given that Juul is so popular with teens

    Trend-bucking Maccas turns back to tradition | The Australianthe most interesting implication of McDonald’s selection of W+K is what it says about client conflict. W+K already has the North American account for KFC and has been producing spectacular work for the brand. McDonald’s made no request of W+K to drop KFC in order to work for it, with its North American chief marketing officer, Morgan Flatley, noting the potential client issue “doesn’t concern us”. “We wanted to make the decision around getting the best work that this business deserves,” she said. – it wouldn’t have been that long ago that a major client would tolerate that degree of client conflict

    Exclusive: Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties – sources    – Reuters – the Australians were too scared of the Chinese to confront them about it at the moment. This is a situation that could

    Gasp | The Blogfather | Brand Building Breakdown – nice summary which emphasises why brand is more important than activation in terms of marketer focus

    McDonald’s picks Wieden & Kennedy New York as lead U.S. creative agency | AdAgeit “also suggests that a bespoke agency model … may not be the definitive answer for major marketers when it comes to creative partners.”

    The New Target That Enables Ransomware Hackers to Paralyze Dozens of Towns and Businesses at Once — ProPublica – similar to tactics that Chinese hackers have been doing for years. Yet another argument against cloud

    China’s TikTok social media app has captured the NFL, but not Hong Kong protesters – The Washington Post – you know ByteDance are censoring the sh*t out of it to keep the Xi administration happy, more online related content here

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Pablo Mauron, DLG (Digital Luxury Group) – luxury brands need to find ways to adapt and integrate their globally-developed creative assets for use in different markets

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Kai Hong, JINGdigital – how brands can truly engage and grow their WeChat communities with the right social CRM strategy

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Jacques Roizen, EVP Digital Transformation and New Ventures, Baozun – the evolution of omnichannel retail and how brands can leverage new opportunities to create better customer experiences

    Frankfurt Motor Show: Winter Is Coming | EE Timesthe moon shot of autonomous driving may one day lead to falling accident rates, but that the development costs — and liabilities of public testing — may destroy them on the way. Almost everyone has stepped back from the brink of a ludicrous business model. This begs the question about autonomous driving as a killer app for 5G

    Standing out is the key brand challenge, so great brands play with their codes | Marketing Week – purpose-wank aside, removing every single letter from your packaging is actually a very smart and very effective move. Because when companies play with well-established codes like this and remove or alter their appearance, the impact on salience and brand image is significantly improved – great article by Mark Ritson, but requires decades of brand consistency to work well

    Design: pharma’s next frontier | eyeforpharma – on human centred design

    Facebook warns about Apple iOS 13 privacy improvement – the blog post appears to be a way to get out in front of software changes made by Apple and Google that could unsettle Facebook users given the company’s poor reputation for privacy.

    The new Microsoft To Do is here – pity the poor product manager who is trying to transfer Wunderlist which built up an amazingly loyal following

    Underwear Ads Lose the Macho: How Marketing Has Embraced Real Men – The New York Times – I suspect that it’s like Gillette in that men who buy Hanes by out of habit and women buying for men are the people to influence

  • China set traps for attacks + more

    China Set Traps To Capture Dangerous NSA Cyberattack Weapons: New Report – the implications of China set traps for attacks and repurposing the NSA’s expensive code has seriously difficult optics. Leaked NSA tools have already been used by cybercriminals, it is likely the China set traps may faciliate it. More security related content here.

    The 10,000-hour rule has been disproven. Now what? — Quartz – what another Malcolm Gladwell ‘truth’ disproved? His books are entertaining but the amount of people who take them as gospel is astounding. His works are the QAnon of middle class dinner party discussions

    China’s Sinopec launches coffee brand with 27,000 locations | News | Campaign Asia – I like the way they’ve named the coffee after RON (octane) values of petrol. It harks back to the cup of joe which would have been filter coffee in a roadside diner or doughnut shop. You can take your flat whites and hipster shite and shove it up your (well you get the idea). But I do wonder if it fits in with the Chinese consumption pattern of coffee being essentially middle class in nature?

    Unpacking Berlin’s mysterious, ubiquitous tote bag – TODAYonline – the iconic Hugendubel bag has become a fashionista go to like Birkenstock sandals.

    The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian – whilst people like famous computer science professor Dave Farber believes this article is ‘way off base’ – it’s an accurate reflection of policy makers views on big tech and I am surprised that the Republicans haven’t managed to rally around the idea of skewering academics, metropolitan elites and big tech.

    A magician whose tricks constantly get exposed – Inkstone – I really like this as social content. Its smart, clever, entertaining and could be bent to suit a brands need

    The Venezuelan Diaspora: Spain’s Other Refugees – SPIEGEL ONLINE