Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • Japanese environmental sounds + more

    The meticulous design of Japanese environmental sounds – ‘kankyō ongaku’ – a strand of Japanese minimalism that emerged in the 1980s to soundtrack the architectural wonders and commercial advancements of the country’s economic boom years. In the west we put up with muzak; but the Japanese environmental sounds are highly engineered minimalistic experiences

    Visualizing the Most Loved Brands, by Generation – you do have to wonder about of the quality of the data

    The Internet Used to Make Us Smarter. Now, Not So Much. | Douglas Rushkoff – we too easily lose sight of what it is that’s truly revolutionary. By focusing on the shiny new toys and ignoring the human empowerment potentiated by these new media — the political and social capabilities they are retrieving — we end up surrendering them to the powers that be – I think this is as much about how is online as the online tools

    macos – How to find cause of high kernel_task cpu usage? – Ask Different – this is quite surreal TL;DR charge your laptop on the right hand side – what on earth is going on here.

    #SafeHandFish – I love this idea of repurposing packaging, but I wonder where they got the blue lids from?

    Amazon makes books, video, music and more available for free – Amazon sees if it can get UK consumers to adopt its services during the COVID lock-in – this is all about habit building

    Imagination Commits to Keeping U.K. HQ – For Now | EE Times – underlying this is very likely to be a worry for Imagination that a move to China could end up with its intellectual property owned by China. And that could worry its major customers, including Apple  — a customer that the now former CEO Ron Black worked hard to win back

    Luckin fraud admission leaves more questions than answers · TechNode – using part of his handsomely-valued Luckin shares as collateral to take out loans, Lu Zhengyao has made away with in excess of $500 million. That amount would have been much, much smaller if Luckin’s numbers were accurately reported. All this makes it hard to believe that COO Liu Jian would commit fraud without the actual or constructive knowledge Chairman Lu Zhengyao, CEO Qian Zhiya and CFO Reinout Hendrik Schakel. My present hypothesis is that Liu, as a long time errand boy for Chairman Lu Zhengyao, has taken the fall to buy time for Luckin’s management to work out their next move – interesting read. It does make you wonder about other Chinese firms

    Booking Holdings to announce lay-offs after securing $4bn loan | Financial Times – (Glenn) Fogel told the 530 employees on the call, which was first reported by the Dutch newspaper NRC, that bookings on the travel company’s platforms had dropped 85 per cent year-on-year in the preceding week and that the loss in revenue because of reduced rates at hotels was even greater. – I’d imagine that’s going to blitz their Google advertising spend reputedly 10 billion dollars a year pre-COVID

    Why China is losing the coronavirus narrative | Financial Times – just wow, it won’t affect public opinion that much, but will affect government and wonks : When Roger Roth received an email from the Chinese government asking him to sponsor a bill in the Wisconsin state legislature praising China’s response to coronavirus, he thought it must be a hoax. The sender had even appended a pre-written resolution full of Communist party talking points and dubious claims for the Wisconsin senate president to put to a vote. “I’ve never heard of a foreign government approaching a state legislature and asking them to pass a piece of legislation,” Sen Roth told me last week. “I thought this couldn’t be real.” Then he discovered it was indeed sent by China’s consul-general in Chicago. “I was astonished . . .[and] wrote a letter back: ‘dear consul general, NUTS’.”

    ‘A level playing field’: digital giants will have to pay for news | Sydney Morning Herald – interesting move ‘Josh Frydenberg will impose a mandatory code on the digital giants after losing faith in their work on a negotiated settlement with Australian media companies to reimburse them for news and other content.’

  • TSMC to SMIC + more things

    Huawei is gradually shifting chip production from TSMC to SMIC  – this is China decoupling from western supply chains. TSMC to SMIC also has the additional benefit of damaging Taiwan’s leverage on China. More on Huawei here.

    Plastic surveillance: Payment cards and the history of transactional data, 1888 to present – Josh Lauer, 2020 – interesting but hardly surprising conclusions from data-mining

    ‘Furious and scared’: Long before COVID-19, these families knew Canada’s long-term-care system was broken | The Star – issues with Chinese government-owned companies and a complete lack of accountability

    HNA in chaos as internal divisions erupt in public | Financial Times – One investor who sought to buy a large real estate portfolio from HNA in late 2018 said that the deal fell through because it was no longer clear who was in control of the assets – this is interesting when you start about thinking allegations of all Chinese businesses (like Huawei) essentially being state-directed businesses. Especially when you consider it in the context

    Inside Icebucket: the ‘largest’ CTV ad fraud scheme to date | Advertising | Campaign Asia – White Ops has uncovered what they report to be the largest-ever connected TV fraud operation in history, affecting more than 300 publishers and millions of dollars in ad spend.

    Local TV Is Back (With an Assist From Coronavirus?) | The National Interest – yet broadcast TV isn’t in mix when experts talk about advertising at the present time

    What really happens to the clothes you donate | Macleans – interesting complex supply chain for fibres and nothing. Also interesting how grading of garments stayed within the Asian diaspora formerly based in the British colonies of East Africa

    Sorry Huawei, the P40 Pro without Google apps is just too broken to live with – probably one of the best rundowns on how the lack of access to Google mobile services is handicapping Huawei handsets

    China’s top chipmaker says it can match Samsung on memory tech – Nikkei Asian Review – how much of it is stolen technology?

    Contingency planning: where should brands be moving their ad spend? – GlobalWebIndex – an interesting read but needs the additional lens of channel effectiveness as well

    Cam Girls, Coronavirus and Sex Online Now – The New York Times – it will be interesting to see if it continues on post crisis

  • How brands grow part 2

    I’ve been re-reading How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp. Part 1 is well known. It is the go-to bible for consumer marketers written by Sharp.

    part2
    How Brands Grow Part 2 by Romaniuk and Sharp

    In part 2 Sharp and Romaniuk looked at business-to-business marketing, luxury marketing and influencer marketing. The things that I found particularly interesting in part 2:

    • The heuristics around business-to-business marketing are remarkably similar to consumer marketing. This means that even in B2B marketing, the importance of brand building is paramount. This is very much at odds with the way in which business-to-business marketing is practiced
    • Part 2 provides a much needed dose of pragmatic realism on influencer marketing. Influencer marketing carries the most weight with people that would be interested in the brand anyway. It is less efficient than marketers seem to believe. If you look at Unilever at the end of the Keith Weed era; influencer marketing took an outsized proportion of marketing spend that could not be explained in a world of zero based budgeting (ZBB) that the company had brought in
    • Romaniuk and Sharp manage to explain why luxury brands need sustained advertising to sustain their standing despite the very nature of luxury being hard to find (and so discover) unless you’re part of the cognoscenti

    Regardless of your marketing area both part 1 and part 2 will help you to be a better marketer. What immediately becomes apparent is that empirical research done by Sharp and company outlined in part 1 and part 2 are best viewed selectively.

    Fads become orthodoxy in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary. A classic example would be the headlong dash into digital regardless of its role in the marketing mix.

    It would be great if these books were paid attention to as well as read by marketers.

  • Misleading ad metric + more news

    Facebook executives ‘knew for years’ about misleading ad metric | Financial Times – The lawsuit claims that Facebook represents the potential reach metric as a measure of how many people a given marketer could reach with an advertisement. However, it actually indicates the total number of accounts that the marketer could reach — a figure that could include fake and duplicated accounts, according to the allegations. – Facebook’s misleading ad metric isn’t news in its own right. What’s interesting is that the FT article goes on to claim that potential audience size in some states were bigger than publicly available data and seemed nonsensical in comparison to say census data

    UK lays out plans for legal e-scooters, medical drones and more transportation innovation in test cities | TechCrunch – if electric scooters is going to be anything like what I saw in Paris, it’ll be carnage

    Xenophobia amid the coronavirus pandemic is hurting Chinese immigrant neighborhoods – Vox – anti-Asian xenophobia and racism have become a bigger issue around the world as a result of Covid-19. As Nylah Burton reported for Vox, in major cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, and Toronto, East Asians have been targeted — from racist comments made by TSA agents to verbal street harassment. Meanwhile, Chinese restaurants across the globe say they are struggling for business because of widespread misconceptions about the “cleanliness” of their food – exceptionally dark reading

    Time Out rebrands to Time In as coronavirus ‘social distancing’ takes effect | The Drum – circumstance encouraged Time Out to rebrand, but the strong equity they have in their brand allowed them do so successfully, like Pizza Hut’s Pasta Hut or the Google Doodle

    Madison Avenue Insights | Creative agencies: winning the battle but losing the war – Creative agencies have mastered the requirements of integrated campaigns, from TV to online video, websites, Facebook, Instagram, ad banners and e-mail marketing. It’s a pity, then, that this victory is being undermined by agency price-cutting strategies that leave agencies understaffed and underpaid. Senior agency executives need to create winning business practices – they’re losing the business war. – great read by Michael Farmer. I suspect the piece that’s missing is the devastation wrought by procurement

    Russian influence operations using netizens in Ghana to target African Americans – Grapfika – The operation used authentic activists and users, fronted by an ostensible human rights NGO, to covertly propagate an influence campaign. It is not the first time such an attempt has been made, but the tactic is of concern. The unwitting individuals co-opted into the operation bear the risk of reputational or legal jeopardy; indeed, CNN reported that the Ghanaian operation was raided by law enforcement as a result of their online activities. For the human rights community, the risk is that genuine NGOs may be misidentified as being involved in influence operations by accident or malice, and there is also the danger of tarnishing the reputation of important work and organizations across the field – its a fascinating read – a mix of information ops, subterfuge and offshoring. The west African link is interesting

    The Public Interest and Personal Privacy in a Time of Crisis (Part II) – Google Docs – part two of an essay by a Chinese academic- l linked to part one in this post

    Between Privacy and Convenience: Facial Recognition Technology in the Eyes of Citizens in China, Germany, the UK and the US by Genia Kostka, Léa Steinacker, Miriam Meckel :: SSRN 

    Lao Dongyan, “Artificial Intelligence” – Reading the China Dream – piece on biometric recognition

  • Salience overloads advertising

    Salience is the buzz word of the moment in advertising circles.

    What is salience?

    According to Siri salience is a noun. It’s definition:

    the property of being particularly noticeable or important.

    Historically, when you tested an ad through the likes of Kantar. One of the attributes that an ad would be measured on is salience. Relatively recently salience has become a more important attribute in advertising from a marketing science point-of-view. But this shouldn’t be to the extent of eclipsing other attributes such as distinctive brand building.

    Salience becomes pre-eminent

    But now you see campaigns where salience is pre-eminent. I had only seen this in Asia in the past, where random endorsement choices looked to drive impact.

    At one stage in the early noughties you could see Jackie Chan side-by-side with over 20 products including:

    • Canon cameras
    • Mitsubishi cars
    • An anti-hair loss shampoo that allegedly contained carcinogens
    • Zhongshan Subor – games consoles with a basic home computing capability. Subor ‘Learning Machines’ had educational programmes, games and provided Chinese children with an opportunity to try computer programming. Think of it as an analogue the Sinclair range of home computers in the UK
    • Fenhuang cola drink
    Jackie Chan-branded Canon Rebel T2i / 550D
    Jackie Chan branded Canon Rebel T2i / EOS 550D via M.I.C Gadget

    A classic example of an ad that personifies salience is Burger King’s The Moldy Whopper.

    The campaign is a one-off stunt designed to drive water-cooler talk. Some colleagues were at a breakfast event last week. The outtake that they took from the event was that the future of advertising is PR. Or to be more exact the publicity stunt.

    I get it, creative directors are measured on memorable award-winning campaigns. They are less worried about effectiveness and brand lift. It’s sexy. And it moves things away from soul-crushing digital disruption-driven work. Big data, A-B testing that’s just aimed at sales conversion.

    But publicity is just a short term effect, contrast this with effective advertising that can keep paying off for decades!

    But when you’re doing stunt-after-stunt what does the brand stand for? I agree that a brand has to be distinctive, but to make a brand distinctive you need to reinforce it. Think about Coca-Cola; distinctive and instantly recognisable.

    Don’t believe me, here’s what Mark Ritson said about it. Ritson uses ‘brand image’ as a way to discuss brand distinctiveness and visibility at a granular level in the ad:

    The new global campaign from Burger King features a month old burger complete with the mould and decomposition that comes with it. Supposedly, this is a campaign aimed to promote the absence of preservatives. But is it good advertising? No. Showing a disgusting, mouldy version of your hero product to target consumers is – believe it or not – a really bad idea. So why are Burger King doing it? First, we see the ultimate exemplar of the focus on salience over image that is sweeping much of the advertising world. “It got me talking about it, so it is great marketing,” has been the response of many addled marketers to the new campaign. While it’s true that salience is a much bigger goal than we once thought, there is still a need to focus on brand image. All publicity is not good publicity. It’s also the latest in a long line of marketing stunts that Burger King has pulled. Hiding Bic Macs behind Whoppers in all their ads, asking consumers to order a Whopper online from a McDonalds, the list is long and stupid. It wins awards and gets marketers talking but it is eclipsed by KFC and McDonald’s less flashy, more enduring and more effective tactics. Same store sales growth over the last two years tells its own story. This is flashy, ineffective fare.

    Mark Ritson on LinkedIn

    Or Phil Barden who wrote Decoded:

    From a behavioural science point of view this is a bizarre use of marketing money; Firstly, our attention and perception are implicit (‘system 1’) processes that are stimulus-bound. System 1 can’t imagine, it responds to stimuli. Kahneman uses the phrase ‘what you see is all there is’ and it is the stimulus (what you see) that will be decoded using our associative memories. The brain metaphorically asks the questions, ‘what is it, what does it represent, what’s in it for me’? The answers to these questions are ‘rotten food’ and ‘nothing’ because rotten food is a threat to survival. This triggers ‘avoid’ behaviour. Secondly, this image is highly likely to trigger ‘reactance’ which is emotional arousal with negative valence ie it’s unpleasant. Thirdly, memory structures are built on the basis on ‘what fires together wires together’. In this case, Burger King and rotten food. Fourthly, the category is hedonic; it’s all about enjoyment. Rotten food and enjoyment have no implicit intuitive association. The only saving grace for BK may be that their logo is such low contrast and the food is so salient that the brand may not be attributed to the image.

    Phil Barden on LinkedIn

    Many of Barden’s points are very specific to the mouldy burger creative. But points like attention and perception are implicit processes that are stimulus bound works against salience. It triggers related memories, which is distinctive brand building allows you to tap into. The importance of hedonic enjoyment plays against a lot of shock tactics used to get salience.

    I am not saying that marketing campaigns shouldn’t have salience. Some of the best ads of all time use salience like Coca-Cola’s ‘Hilltop’ advert.

    But that they shouldn’t be salient at the expense of other attributes of brand building. A side serving of salience adds cut through to consistent distinctive brand building. But balance in different attributes for an ad is needed.

    For more on how to achieve a balance in attributes, I can recommend Building Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk. The book is based on research by the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.

    More on advertising here.