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.

  • Innovation in hardware + more

    Innovation in hardware

    How Streetwear Is Driving Innovation in Hardware | HYPEBEAST – the innovation in hardware that Hypebeast is concerned about is fasteners clips and connectors in clothing and accessories. Some streetwear brands are using zips in a similar way to Vivienne Westwood during punk. They are borrowing from technical clothing, military gear and alpine sports for inspiration. More design related content here.

    Branding

    Cause Marketing Isn’t Working for Young People – Adweek – according to DoSomething’s survey, “Nike still only secured a 60% aided awareness of an association with any cause at all and only 27% with racial justice.” – doesn’t work unless it goes beyond a single campaign. This also has implication for this work and ZBB

    FMCG

    P&G’s Pritchard wants to ‘reinvent’ advertising with films as streaming disrupts landscape – literally going back to soap operas

    Legal

    Brussels poised to probe Apple over Spotify’s fees complaint | Financial Times – Spotify trying to weaponise anti trust law against Apple in a similar way to Amazon did in the US over Apple Books a number of years earlier. Spotify | Time to Play Fair – of course, fails to discuss issue of when is Spotify going to play fair with artists?

    Luxury

    Ralph Lauren’s CMO on retelling its brand story to ‘reach the kid looking for Supreme’ | The Drum – “We’ve marketed those in a very bespoke, very direct way to newer audiences. We can market on one hand to someone who’s been into the brand for 20, 30 years, who wore Polo Sport back in the 90s, but we can also market that product mix and that story to a younger kid who’s looking for Supreme. – hype isn’t only about media targeting yet according to this puff piece its all about digital media technology which is BS. It indicates a wider lack of focus there on craft, planning style insights, design, curation, the move to online ‘drops’ on certain collections

    Media

    Where North and South Korea Meet: On TV – The New York Times – I do feel a bit concerned that these people aren’t treated with more respect (paywall)

    Vince McMahon’s XFL Sets TV Deals With Disney, Fox | Hollywood Reporter – second time around. The league originally ran in 2001 and then folded with a 50+ million dollar loss

    Technology

    Anki shutting down despite $200 million in funding – Axios – bigger question consumers must start to have about having cloud in the product, is it really that smart as a model. I personally don’t think so. Also should cloud and product be sold by different companies a la Alexia and Harmon Kardon etc

    Why doesn’t Britain have a Huawei of its own? The answer speaks volumes | The Guardian – goes back further than Thatcher with the wider UK banking culture, Walker, Goldsmith, Rowland. The lack of a long term management culture and lack of equivalent to the landesbank’s of Germany. But a good deal of the blame has to be laid at the feet of BT

    How the Apple Store Lost Its Luster | Bloomberg – Angela Ahrendts was a paper tiger in Apple’s retail stores. But I’ve not had as bad as an experience as the ones outlined in the article

    DeepGlint: the Chinese AI firm that helped police catch a criminal who had been on the run for 20 years | South China Morning Post – is it China’s technology or its implementation that is more of a paradigm shift. I am inclined to think implementation

  • Peepy and Mother Lee + more things

    Peepy and Mother Lee take influence to the next level. These Thai influencers are on point with style that crosses gender boundaries and is atemporal in nature. I am surprised the Peepy and Mother Lee don’t get more publicity outside Thailand. I am also surprised that they haven’t become the muse of a prominent fashion house or two.

    They look like precisely the kind of people someone like Vivienne Westwood would embrace as a muse. More on luxury here.

    Yet another way of landing the same Burger King message: Burger King’s flame-grilled glasses are too hot to handle | Creativepool. Having worked on FMCG brand, I know how hard it is to continually land the same messages in different ways that won’t generate groans from the client base. These are brands that people have known for decades, it’s hard to say the same thing in different ways that don’t jade audiences.

    This Adobe marketing gimmick was going around a lot of the people that I know – Creative Types – the characters are nicely drawn, but I don’t know how accurate they are. I suspect something even less accurate than the MBTI. This was clever because people want to find out more about themselves, its an itch that they can’t help but scratch. In return Adobe builds their marketing email list.

    Great economic analysis on China from the DLD Conference earlier this year

    Tristan Harris is getting a lot of traction for his message in wonkish circles and I don’t see big technology firms having their ducks in a row to deal with the outcome. I suspect that some of the problem might be what I describe as a wilful autism. 20 years ago, Silicon Valley was a place with utopian outlook, the unforeseen outcomes happened when the internet reached a societal critical mass.

  • Spy craft disruption + more

    The Spy craft Revolution – Foreign Policy – really interesting to read from a privacy perspective, spy craft affected as much as general public. Intelligence agencies are apparently just like the rest of us and spy craft reflects this. More security related posts here.

    Algocurios – this is what happens when you plug Matt Muir into a machine learning algorithm. I’m just thankful SkyNet didn’t evolve. It doesn’t capture the desperation, profane language and ennui prevalent in Matt’s real posts

    Vodafone Found Hidden Backdoors in Huawei Equipment – Bloomberg – lots of reasons why this might be mostly dilute to poor software engineering practices but it doesn’t help Huawei reputation

    Opinion | Is China the World’s Loan Shark? – The New York Times – academics who have studied China’s practices in detail have found scant evidence of a pattern indicating that Chinese banks, acting at the government’s behest, are deliberately over-lending or funding loss-making projects to secure strategic advantages for China.

    A Conversation With Christopher Wray | Council on Foreign Relations – China poses multi-level threat to US (and the rest of the world if we’re honest about it)

    KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly – Wizard of OS – given Google’s investment in KaiOS it could still be considered a duopoly of wireless OS’ – also shows what Nokia left on the table

    Brit spy chief: We need trust or we won’t have a ‘licence to operate in cyberspace’ • The Register – “must have the legal, ethical and regulatory regimes to foster public trust, without which we just don’t have a licence to operate in cyberspace”.

    Ralph Lauren Unveils The Super Woke Polo Shirt | Luxury Insider – a debut line of polo shirts made from recycled plastic bottles and dyed using a waterless production process. Besides being environmentally woke, the initiative has the noble aim of eradicating 170 million plastic bottles from landfills and oceans by 2025

    How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell | Fortune – just wow

    INTERVIEW: China seeking win with information warfare: professor – Taipei Times – interesting if depressing interview

    UK High Court confirms the way GSM gateways were banned was illegal • The Register – interesting reading

    Spotify Premium Adds 3 Million US Members | Consumer Intelligence Research Partners – keeping churn stable and improving conversion from free to paid (PDF)

    Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah closes London office: Report – probably a mix of 1MDB and Brexit

    A Specter Is Haunting Xi’s China: ‘Mr. Democracy’ | The New York Review of Books – interesting if very optimistic reading for the papers quoted

    Baidu is reportedly incubating a music app to defend itself against ByteDance – KrASIA – Tencent already has a number of music apps in China

  • The Apple – Qualcomm deal post

    The Apple and Qualcomm deal ceased legal hostilities and lots of people have kicked around theories. But no one seems to definitively know what happened. And what the implications are for Apple.

    • If Apple was on such a sticky wicket, why didn’t it make a deal with Qualcomm earlier? A judge had asked them to sit down right at the beginning and they got nowhere
    • Did Intel explain to Apple that it wasn’t going to hit its engineering targets on the 5G modem (a la IBM and the PowerPCs that used to power Macs)? Or did Apple cut Intel off at the knees?
    • What does this all mean for Intel processors and components in Macs? From CPUs to USB C connectivity Apple is dependent on Intel. Even if Apple decided to move to an ARM architecture they would still likely need Intel foundries and connectivity processors. Before you talk about the Mac now being a small part of the business. Consider what mobile apps and even the iOS is developed upon. Secondly a Mac user is far more likely to be an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV customer
    • From a functional handset perspective I am not convinced about the benefit of 5G. But from a marketing perspective it could be very damaging to Apple eventually. How far behind would Apple developing a new 5G solution from scratch be? It would be reasonable to expect for Qualcomm to service other clients first and then only put under performing engineers on Apple as a punishment duty. Given that Qualcomm laid off engineering teams, engineers may only work on Apple grudgingly. Is it even viable for Apple to bother with 5G iPhone? If we look at history, the Qualcomm – Nokia IP deal was the beginning of the end for the Nokia handset business in 2007. Apple might lose money up front, but it would save on the kind of value destruction Nokia went through
    • What is the state of Apple’s relationships with the rest of its supply chain and can it expect a kicking?
    • Whilst mobile carriers wouldn’t be happy to have a single OS eco-system in smartphones, they’ve had zero success in championing other platforms (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, WebOS and SailfishOS). All of this would make them even more beholden to Google. So would an alternative OS’ spring up to fill the iPhone gap?
    • Can Qualcomm use this to try and smother antitrust investigations outside the US?


  • Easter & things from last week

    Easter Week has mean’t that I’ve been exceptionally busy closing things before taking the long weekend break. Easter isn’t a huge holiday in the Carroll household, but its the first break that we get since the Christmas holiday, so always welcome. For many students in Europe Easter signals a hard push on revision in advance of exams. If you are studying or relaxing Happy Easter and Passover.

    Kerri Chandler went through one of his Dad’s record boxes, that he hadn’t previously opened. His Dad had been a DJ and inspired Chandler to get behind the turntables himself.

    Chandler Senior’s box is an eclectic collection of songs but also had impeccable taste.

    1. Cerrone – Love in C Minor (1976)
    2. Kerri Chandler – Get It Off (1990)
    3. Kerri Chandler – Super Lover (1990)
    4. Kerri Chandler – Drink On Me (1990)
    5. Ronnie Laws – Always There (1975)
    6. The John Coltrane Quartet – Greensleeves (1961)
    7. Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes – Summer Nights (1975)
    8. The Impressions – People Get Ready (1965)
    9. The Delfonics ‎- Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) (1969)
    10. Crown Heights Affair – Dreaming a Dream (Goes Dancin) (1976)
    11. Crown Heights Affair – Dancin (Special Disco Mix) (1976)
    12. The Dells – Always Together (1968)
    13. The Dells – I Want My Momma (1968)
    14. The Dells – Agatha Van Thurgood (1968)
    15. Bob James – One Mint Julep (1976)
    16. Bob James – Westchester Lady (1976)
    17. Roy Ayers – Searching (1976)
    18. Teena Marie – Portuguese Love (1981)
    19. Jakki – Sun…Sun…Sun.. (1976)
    20. Donald Byrd – Lansana’s Priestess (1973)
    21. Roy Ayers – Running Away (1977) 
    22. Kerri Chandler – Atmosphere E.P. – Track 1 (1993) 
    23. Martin Circus – ‘Disco Circus (Disco Version) (1979)
    24. Quincy Jones – Killer Joe (1969)
    25. Michael Franks – Tell Me All About It (1983)

    You can here it here via Mixmag

    More related posts here.

    Beats in Space put together yet another amazing mix

    Amazon leaving China. Amazon bought into an e-commerce business which at the time had just over 10% of the country’s e-commerce market. At the time I had colleagues in Hong Kong who worked on promoting the newly acquired business. A number of years ago I spent an inordinate amount of time creating a three-page document pitch for the Amazon China business. At that time Amazon’s market share was between 1.5 and 2% of the Chinese e-commerce market place. Five years later and its down to 0.6%.

    1904 - Amazon China

    What’s going on? Like most things there are a wealth of factors impacting foreign competitors in China. But one big one that people probably don’t want to admit is that Silicon Valley isn’t insurmountable. For decades the US technology has managed to concentrate wealth and talent in a small place and then benefited from market scale. Europe has been unable to replicate this success. It’s home market is an aggregation of markets that aren’t as integrated or coalesce as well as the US. And US companies exploit the European single market treating as divisible international components illegally.

    When US companies like Google, Uber and Amazon hit China they come up against:

    • Smart people – Chinese universities churn out huge amounts of developers, engineers, designers and business managers
    • Huge home market scale
    • Equally well motivated entrepreneurs who know their home market better than the foreigners. They are also willing to work very hard with a 996 culture
    • Local market conditions that are divergent from their own. For instance, Google failed to predict how fast it needed to grow its search indexing to match the Chinese web. Baidu kept throwing in the boxes needed. Google had lost when it suddenly changed its mind on censorship
    • Government regulation (but that isn’t as important as they’d have you believe in most cases)

    Amazon thinks that its cross border business where Chinese consumers buy abroad from online will grow. Consumers do this to get products that they can trust. Domestic platforms have made big gains in this market sector too though.

    I wouldn’t buy a Range Rover Evogue, even if I was richer than Bill Gates. But I did love this advert.

    And this old video of Jim Carroll talking about ideas as they relate to account planning.