Interesting and funny film from Mercedes for the SLS coupe AMG. The way the businessman loses his mind trying to define luxury feels like a parody of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Are the metaphysics of luxury and the metaphysics of quality the same? The SLS coupe AMG is a very impressive looking vehicle. But surely its performance is a bigger draw than its luxury, it’s ride is likely to be very firm. Especially given the AMG heritage.
Vice put together a great documentary about a veteran tattooist in Hong Kong. His work goes back to when Hong Kong was a port of call for the merchant navy as well as the US and Royal navies. More Hong Kong related posts here.
I love the way Honda taps into the inner child of potential customers. With there being no truly bad cars now and green pressures, so brand and emotion becomes so much more important for car brands. Honda has been consistently been ahead of the curve.
PBS have animated interviews that were done with Robin Williams back in 1991, and they’re really good. Really smart and thoughtful stuff that makes you realise the huge hole that the loss of Williams made in the entertainment industry.
TOMY’s Cocoro scanner which detects stress (and according to the maker, lies). I could see managers thinking that it would be a good idea to keep the Cocoro scanner ton their desk. Though I would keep it out of view if I were you, as the display would be stress raising in its own right.
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
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SLS coupe & other things that made last week
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FES watch + more things
Who’s Behind the E-paper FES Watch? – Digits – WSJ – interesting the way Sony has become an internal VC operation. It makes sense since they need disruptive innovation and they still have smart people. they also need to allow their engineering talent to keep having an outlet for their creativity. The FES watch is a classic quirky Sony product that is very clever. The disappointing bit was hearing them working with an external product design agency on the FES watch. Especially given the internal industrial design capability to deliver iconic designs and a wider design language across product ranges. More design related content here.
Tightening too frightening for UK | HSBC – interest rate increase and lower than expected economic growth
Oh No They Didn’t: European Parliament Calls For Break Up Of Google | SearchEngineLand – inevitable but not sure it will make an impact, Google must have expected this?
Maglev elevators are coming that can go up, down, and sideways | Quartz – I love this
Flickr is about to sell off your Creative Commons photos | Dazed – Tech entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield left the company in 2008, but says that Yahoo-ordained plan is “a little shortsighted”. He added: “It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill”. It’s the equivalent of looking for pennies that may have fallen down a crack in the sofa. Flickr photos are already used in the online and offline media. They have also been used to train image recognition algorithms, both of which are allowed by the licensing. The prints seems like a cheap, low value move.
Supermarket own-brands generate more than half of UK grocery sales | BrandRepublic – bad news for CPG brands. And bad news for brands in general, particularly when one thinks about how Amazon is building its private label lines across several sectors
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Duracell, Buffett & more things
Duracell
Warren Buffett buys P&G’s Duracell business | Marketing Interactive – I think that this is smart, Duracell is a powerful brand. It has been extended from beyond its traditional high quality alkaline batteries to include rechargeable batteries, chargers and related products. Beyond distribution, the fit for Procter & Gamble is less obvious. Having Duracell under more focused management should bear dividends
Branding
Nokia would like you to know that it’s “up to something” — Tech News and Analysis – Nokia is more focused on the business to business space now, I wonder if its more than a licenced brand deal? Nokia says vanishing consumer brand may return | Reuters – as a licenced brand, think Bush, RCA or Philips
Consumer behaviour
Instagram is killing teen girls’ self-esteem – Quartz – an exaggeration, am sure you could have put in magazines, models or TV role models in this title just as well
Finance
China bad loans rise as growth slows | SCMP – medium businesses suffering
Kuwaitis to get Dow’s divested shares | Shanghai Daily – interesting move
Morgan Stanley pushed murky China stock to market | AP – Tianhe story probes and is a warning for due diligence`
Marketing
Is Adblock Plus Killing Your Conversions? | Kissmetrics – it is more the issue that they are counted as false impressions
Hong Kong Tramways: West Island MTR Line opportunity to grow ad revenue | Marketing Interactive – Hong Kong’s trams are a great outdoor advertising option which I’ve used to Tommy Bahama in the past
Security
The Nor » All Cameras Are Police Cameras – interesting article on the paranoia imbued by surveillance technology. It opens serious questions about devices like Ring security cameras
McChrystal warns against ‘police state’ | Politico – sweet spot between police state and anarchy
Technology
TSMC Predicts Next Big Thing | EE Times – MEMs and CMOS together on the one chip
Tencent’s Quarterly Earnings Disappoint As WeChat And Mobile Gaming Growth Slows | TechCrunch – games growth wouldn’t run at the same rate in the west anyway?
Build Your Own Tiny Titan Supercomputer for Less than a Grand | Motherboard – gives you an idea of how technology has changed
Tools
YouGov Profiler – so handy for throwing together personas
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Chinas massive foreign reserves + more
No easy fix for Chinas massive foreign reserves | SCMP – Chinas massive foreign reserves surplus presents a similar challenge to what Japan faced in the 1970s and 1980s. China massive foreign reserves will likely be used to try and reinforce its existing hegemony. We are already seeing state banks giving mobile network providers negative interest loans to buy Huawei equipment, software and services. Funds will be made available for sovereign debt capture, strategic technology acquisitions and undermining the US dollar as a defacto word reserve currency. This means that US treasury bonds will be less attractive to China. It also explains why it has laid the foundation for a ‘Euroyuan’ market alongside the ‘Eurodollar’ market in the financial district of London. (paywall)
Richemont H1 profits down 23pc – Luxury Daily – looking at this they were hit by a slowdown in APAC and the increase in Japanese sales tax
China’s 24-hour online shopfest explodes into life with $2 billion spent in first hour | Techinasia – 11/11 is remembrance day in many western countries but in China it is singles day, a made up festival to drive online sales
Foreigners buying from Japan get free stuff?! But not all buyers are impressed | Rocketnews – the UK is too cynical and jaded
Michael Douglas | Canali – I love this content that Canali have done with Michael Douglas
Masque Attack: All Your iOS Apps Belong to Us | FireEye Blog – iPhone users, enterprises are a security weak spot for you
Obama says FCC should reclassify the internet’s regulatory status – Vox – this is huge. Seriously.
Meet Shingy, AOL’s “Digital Prophet” | The New Yorker – how the fuck haven’t I managed to blag a job like that?
Uber is recruiting 50,000 veterans as drivers | The Verge – the sub header is ‘are they being taken for a ride’ as sub prime Uber driver debt mounts
HKTV eyes second test after problems in first round | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – reading this gives you an appreciation of how much of an achievement the likes of RTE Player and BBC iPlayer achieve
A major misconception about Facebook visibility – Campaign Asia – tips: mirror audience language and semantics, have opinions
We’re seeing a very different Microsoft — Gigaom Research – a very different Microsoft: one that is willing to partner, willing to accept the new economics of mobile, and learning how to coax customers to its web services with premium features instead of absolutist tactics.
Juniper shrinks its MX monster router onto a USB stick • The Register – really interesting development, I wonder what’s the minimum hardware it could run on?
Tech giants who encrypt comms are unwittingly aiding terrorists’, claims ex-Home Sec Blunkett – odd the way this is a consistent message from politicians, it feels like softening up for regulation in the UK that will look more like China’s harmonising the internet. It could be good for PRs involved in reputation management – only a matter of time before censorship is a service purchased like media relations. Expect innovation and digital competitiveness to suffer as the UK loses out to other EU countries. Google HQ in Germany or Ireland anyone?
prosthetic knowledge — ABB Robots Katana Fight – we’ll look back on this clip as history when we’re all cut down to size by katana wielding terminators
Adidas China Social Campaign Report | Resonance China – interesting work done including trying to encourage behavioural change amongst groups of young women’s social interactions in the real word – positioning sport as a competitor activity to spa treatments, eating out or shopping
‘Smart factories’ could revolutionize production | Shanghai Daily – interesting move as China tries to move up the value chain and deal with the demographic time bomb
Parallel car imports | Shanghai Daily – interesting action. This will be competition for imported and made-in-country but foreign brands of cars like Mercedes. Will the parallel cars be looked after by the dealer networks? I remember in the UK, BMW disliked servicing parallel imported cars from Belgium and other countries
Middle East authorities are cracking down on audio that gets you “high” | Quartz – like something straight out of a William Gibson novel
GT Bankruptcy Provides Rare Look at Apple’s Relationship With Suppliers | Re/code – can imagine ‘put on your big boy pants’ being quoted in business schools for years to come
CBSN – Live Streaming Video News Channel – CBS News – interesting direct from TV to online transfer of news, I wonder if the ad revenues will stack up? More media related content here.
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Nescafe salesman + more things
This Nescafe salesman is hard to refuse | Hong Kong Economic Insight – interesting use of technology, the robot Nescafe salesman in supermarkets. I wonder if other FMCG brands will look at this for shopper marketing? Softbank have used similar robot salespeople in their Softbank mobile phone shops. Softbank had an incentive, since it owned the French company that made their robots.
Amazon to unveil new service for Chinese | Shanghai Daily – just in time for singles day
PRSummit: ‘Earned Media Has A Distribution Problem’ | Holmes Report – pretty interesting take on things. Earned media has a relatively short time to get viewers, particularly on online platforms, compared even to newspapers. The panelists suggested using tactics for earned media amplification due to the short viewing window. The problem I see is that ‘more credible’ is trickier to prove than paid media measures
Hong Kong can’t afford to lose the Umbrella Movement generation | Quartz – interesting analysis by Jack Ma. The loss of the umbrella movement generation would hit a city that is also greying. In addition, Hong Kong is less attractive to mainlanders than it used to be
Game Changers | Wolff Olins & Flamingo – how consumers relate to brand and what brands get it. Game Changers is a report centred around five behaviours that Wolff Olins believe are shaping the future of business. These are ‘boundaryless’, ‘experimental’, ‘value-creative’, ‘useful’ and ‘purposeful’. What this hints at is a lot o tech related jargon around agile, iterative products and services. It also covers brand purpose.
Apple Eyes New Uses for NFC Beyond iPhone Payments – The Information (paywall) – logical extension given that people like TfL are looking to do more of their ticketing using PayPass-like technology
I, Cringely How to fix IBM – I, Cringely – interesting take, however it ignores the dynamic of the management with what will be increasingly active shareholders