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

  • Jose Padilla + more stuff

    This week mean’t late nights in the office to the sounds of Jose Padilla courtesy of the legends at Test Pressing. Jose Padilla is responsible for the Ibizan sound and its place in modern club culture

    Complex magazine have been delving into the story behind some of the great hip-hop records. I was switched on to Jeru the Damaja by a mancunian in college with me called Chris Bellis.

    Chris was really into his urban music: lovers rock and hip-hop; notably Jeru. I saw this remember and it took me back. Interesting that McDonald’s are sponsoring the content.

    Honda have banged out another thoughtful advert for the Japanese market:

    What’s interesting about this is how the company is reliving its Formula 1 glory days. Honda seems to be one of those companies who manage to make these victories work harder for longer in terms of the brand halo effect.

    By comparison Mercedes and Audi have worked hard at having continuous motorsport programmes that burnish their brand halo effect.

    Paul Armstrong flagged up this nice slide deck from comScore talking about mobile gaming behaviour.

     

    Casual games have brought back a more gender balanced gaming experience, but it’s the boys who will pay for the virtual goods. A lot of casual games allow for levelling up by inviting contacts to play socially. I have had these invites exclusively from female friends. Are men paying for virtual goods as they lack social currency? I wonder if this gender specific behaviour is reversed for virtual goods and stickers in messaging apps?

    Finally check out the Martini guest list app on Facebook it is like a voice-activated version of the old text-based adventure games; where you have to use the right key words in order to get past the door staff and on to the guest list of a brand party.

  • Awesome tapes from Africa and other things from last week

    Awesome Tapes From Africa

    My listening has alternated between the comfort food for the ears of early 1990s dance on the Deconstruction label to streams from the Awesome Tapes From Africa blog. The Awesome Tapes From Africa blog collects African music that has been

    Social media ready reckoner

    Social@Ogilvy came up with handy ready reckoner for social media platforms: Hong Kong’s social media equivalents: Infographic.


    It was interesting to watch Aldi and Kellogg’s duke it out on YouTube over copy cat brands.

    In stark contrast, at the tail-end of the early 1990s recession; United Biscuits successfully took ASDA to court in 1997 for passing off over the supermarkets Puffin biscuits which were considered a copycat brand of UB’s own McVitie’s Penguins.

    Web 2.0 is dead long live Fluent. O’Reilly Conferences finally left behind the web2.0 conference as the web as a platform became ubiquitous. It’s successor Fluent which is about extending out in different ways to create what I call the web-of-no-web.

    The most interesting interview done at that where things move beyond the browser was Brady Forrest of PCH International (an Irish company based in Shenzhen).

    The programmable world is interesting because of its potential, but it poses two problems that aren’t addressed:

    • Privacy
    • Information security

    Also how will this programmable world / internet-of-things affect energy consumption, given that the internet and associated data centres created a spike in energy consumption? We can see how the blockchain and cryptocurrency consumes more power What will be the net net? Any energy gain is likely to be diffused and harder to address. More here.

    This week I am reading Millward-Brown’s iPad magazine Perspectives on the iPad.

  • Rituals and artefacts

    I have been reflecting on rituals and artefacts. This line of thought started when I met up with Marc Sparrow and we talked about many things. The one that stuck out in my mind the most was that we were two tablet computer owners, but we both insisted on reading the Sunday newspaper in a dead tree format.

    Marc went on to tell me that he saw from his friend’s Facebook updates that they were passing on rituals including getting a print Sunday newspaper on to their children too. The Sunday Times was no longer about news and analysis but a marker for Sunday like the traditional roast dinner or church service and a way of unwinding before the week ahead.
    Patek Philippe advert
    When one looks at Patek Philippe’s adverts the thing that stands out is the strapline:

    You never actually own a Patek Philippe.
    You merely look after it for the next generation.

    Whilst being a clever bit of marketing, I think that it says a lot about some brands and contexts. In particular, how rituals and artefacts are central to context. Whilst brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci have blurred the line between fashion and luxury; the great Swiss watch brands like Rolex rely on old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Omega is part of my evoked set (despite my not liking a lot of their watch designs or the way way they have fashionised the brand) because of my parents. I got my first Rolex because I had a bad experience diving with a Seiko watch and my dive buddies explained why they thought Rolex was more resilient.

    This didn’t happen in Facebook but in Snowdonia, in the dead of winter in front of a man-made lake that had killed a number of scuba divers. Within half an hour of my having made a forced ascent as my dive watch had popped off my wrist and sailed to the bottom of the lake some 80 metres down.

    As an industry we often forget about physical context, rituals and artefacts. Ironically it is about going back to marketing 101 and the year 1960. E. Jerome McCarthy came up with what was then the four Ps, to which were added another three over time. Since then marketers have thought about looking at these from a consumer point of view and you had other models like the four Cs, but for the sake of simplicity I will list out the 7 Ps:

    • Product
    • Price
    • Place
    • Promotion
    • Physical Evidence
    • People
    • Process

    I would argue that physical evidence is more than the salesroom experience and people are the customer base as well as the sales and supply chain. Think about how on the road arrogance affected the perception of certain car marques in the UK:

    • Mondeo Man
    • The Volvo Driver
    • White-Van Man

    All of these stereotypes have had a grain of truth to them and affected the way we think about the brands. Look at the way Burberry and Stone Island got affected by their football casual customer base.

    As clever marketers we can also create rituals:

    • Mother’s Day
    • Take a break, have a Kit-Kat
    • Royal British Legion poppy campaign
    • Guinness co-opting St Patrick’s Day

    More related content can be found here. 

  • Bosch brand

    I mean’t to publish this a while ago but a lack of time got the better of me. Lucre‘s social media team were supporting Bosch UK in their positioning of Bosch is all around us.
    Untitled
    It got me thinking about what Bosch meant to me. Primarily the brand was about three things:

    • Power tools – I used Bosch power tools to prepare my O’level project in Craft, Design and Technology. My Dad worked in a plant hire company and so I could get hold of a power sander and a power router which made the whole process much easier. Bosch and Makita are still the gold standard of power tools, if anything Makita has managed to edge power tools
    • Electrical car parts – in particular the iconic brown distributor cap that sat under the bonnet of my first car and doled out electricity to the Bosch spark plugs. Their windscreen wiper blades are made to a similarly high standard
    • Kitchen appliances – my 40 something fridge which finally got thrown out when I moved out of my house in London. It still worked and had served as a store for cold drinks in my garage when I listened to records during the summer. My parents had bought it after they moved into their first house and it got relegated to their garage when they bought a fridge freezer in the mid-1980s. They are now three fridge freezers on whilst I was still using the Bosch fridge. It is probably sitting on a landfill in the south of England punching a hole in the ozone layer with its vintage CFCs

    While Bosch may have been all around me, it stayed around me because the products were generally very well made. Something that many of it’s competitors can’t truthfully claim. More brand related content can be found here.

  • Chinese brands opportunity

    Chinese brands opportunityl – a sister company of my agency has launched a report on the top 50 Chinese brands. The report is exhaustive and has lots of smart stuff in it that will undoubtedly make it into the PowerPoint presentations I have to churn out over the next year. Leafing through it though I was immediately struck by one aspect of the data in particular.  Four of the top ten brands derived less than 20 per cent of their turnover from outside China. And nine of the top ten brands derived more more than a third of their revenues from outside the country.

    In fact, it was only Lenovo that made over half its money outside China. This immediately struck me: abroad was Chinese brands opportunity. As the bulk of these brands have services that would certainly work internationally and there is an unreleased potential to create the next Shell, Citibank, British Airways or Whirlpool. Given that China is looking to move up the food chain as countries like Vietnam and the Philippines have lower cost workforces than areas like Shenzhen, international brand growth by these Chinese companies or their peers is only a matter of ‘when’, rather than ‘if’.

    The biggest barrier for fulfilling Chinese brands opportunity is the ability of the management team to move past hubris and a China-first focus. This is something that ‘struggle’ or wolf culture organisations like Huawei fail to do that well.

    More information
    BrandZ – Top 50 most valuable Chinese brands 2013

    Archived from blog posts I wrote for PR Week. More business related posts here.