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.

  • Heavens Bankers by Harris Irfan

    I was given Heavens Bankers to read as a friend. I can’t say I had thought that much about Islamic finance before. I knew that it had a couple of patches of ‘heat’ behind it in the banking sector. One was in the late 1990s. It then took a back seat post-911 and took off again as Dubai boomed.

    It helps that Harris was not only an insider, but passionate about banking in its widest sense. He’s also sickening polymath who is a top flight racing driver.

    History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends. – Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

    Irfan delves into the intricacies of how modern Islamic finance grew and contracted. The industry he provides us an inside view of is now worth a trilliion dollars.  The start of history like most things were pretty straight forward. As the industry grew more arcane and complex financial instruments became the norm. This reminded me of a lot of Mark Lewis’ Liar’s Poker. Lewis dealt with bonds and modern derivatives became so complex customers didn’t understand them. The Savings and Loans debacle of 1985-1996 foreshadowed subprime mortgages.

    Where Irfan really excels for the non-banker as reader is in his ability to break down the basics. He takes the concepts many of us learned in business or economics classes back into pre-medieval history. He provides a historical perspective on modern capitalism as we know it. So the book becomes invaluable regardless of how you feel about the current economic system. The background gives you a more informed perspective. More on Heavens Bankers here. More book reviews here.

  • Millennials are people too

    Smart funny video by Adam Conover on the marketing obsession of millennials as a form of segmentation.

    Show this to as many marketers as you can.

    Having been involved in youth marketing and even spoken at conferences about it, many of the challenges and insights that ‘millennials’ as a cohort face aren’t unique insights per se.

    You hear the same things over-and-over again. Being young presents its own set of challenges, these are tweaked accelerated by environmental conditions such as economy and housing. You feel the injustices of the world, adulting is hard. Responsibilities have a weight to them. Education has a cost.

    Getting your first home is hard. Finding the right partner is stressful. Since the baby boomers the concept of youth has become elongated. The whole of society hasn’t been drafted into fighting a war and benefited from the rise of the industrial society.

    But that doesn’t mean that it makes much sense for marketers to talk about millennials in such a broad brush way. At least gen-X whilst been written off as slackers were realised to have various different sub-cultures or tribes.

    That level of nuance seems to have disappeared in ‘our’ collective understanding of millennials and gen-Z.

    While we’re on about nuance, since when do adverts aimed at baby boomers appreciate that they don’t all look like Helen Mirren or Joanna Lumley. Or that they like going to rock concerts and festivals? Or that they might run for health and leisure?

    Marketers are increasingly looking at big data, but lacking granularity in terms of segmentation and factors that might influence brand relevance.

    My hypothesis is that the fetishisation of millennials as a single cohort is down to a deeper seated fear of disruption ambushing the marketers. Millennials aren’t an alien invasion, but people just like we’re used to. This fetishisation will end up as a feedback loop distorting their own view of what they expect to be and how they expect to be seen.

    More on millennial related topics here.

  • Predict ISIS attacks + more news

    How Traffic to This YouTube Video Could Predict ISIS Attacks – Defense One interesting, but is it actionable intelligence? This reminds me a lot of the term ‘chatter’ as used in the series ’24’. Or prediction markets, which may be better for financiers investing in related areas rather than providing something that the military and law enforcement can use effectively. For instance it would affect your stance on Insurance stocks and oil futures if you were able to predict ISIS attacks. More security related posts here.

    You can now hang out with Totoro and explore Studio Ghibli worlds in virtual reality | Rocket News 24 – indicates an interesting interplay between linear media and VR. Linear media storytelling sets the scene; VR allows you to explore it. I feel that we don’t ‘get’ storytelling in VR yet, having worked on a project for New Balance. This work by Studio Ghibli offers a complementary option that media companies could get onboard with

    Lenovo and Apple are fastest growing among India’s top 10 smart phone vendors | TelecomTV Insights – we’ll see how long this lasts, India like China is focused on domestic smartphone makers. I could see Apple appealing to elites like their peers globally, but the great bulk of handsets is going to come in at the bottom.

    brandchannel: The Language Of Now: Pepsi Kicks Off Global PepsiMoji Campaign – please millennials engage with our brand! To be fair PepsiCo have tried innovations for a good while. They were one of the first brands to use QRCodes for western consumers. Western consumer usage is only now starting to catch up with it a decade or more later.

    [Podcast] Tencent And QQ With Eva Xiao | Technode – great interview as a primer on Tencent. Tencent is one of the BAT of China. BAT stands for Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. The BAT are a set of companies with a similar position to what GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) have in the west.

  • What about the work desk phone?

    I was in touch with a former colleague of mine the other day and they sent me a picture of my old work desk phone. It was still logged into my account and with a divert through to my mobile phone.
    Untitled
    The office had hot desking because there wasn’t enough space for everyone to be in at the same time.  We had email account size restrictions and people walked around with secondary hard drives plugged into their laptops as local and network storage wasn’t adequate enough to schlep all the documents on to a file server. There wasn’t a cloud-based equivalent of a file server in use 3either.

    Yet my former work desk phone remained logged in because no one was bothering to use it. So they have a surplus of desk telephones, when there was a shortage of pretty much every other resource the knowledge worker needed.

    Often times, people still used the land line number which followed them due to the Cisco VoIP PBX, but they diverted it to their mobile handset. The culture was very much based around conference calls, international teams would dial into a bridge number and be connected. You would see people pacing the common spaces such as corridors or reception and participating in conference calls on headsets wired into their smartphone.

    At the point of my project finishing they were just starting to roll out Skype for business. I suspect that this wasn’t going to change dramatically the use of mobile handsets, just the nature of how the call got to the recipient.

    Mobile infrastructure manufacturers have been expecting this for years, they rolled out pico-cell products aimed at enterprises to deal with reception dead spots in metal framed office buildings. What really seemed to have spurred things into action is the rise of all-you-can-eat voice tariffs.

  • China tech data slides

    I have been pulling together China tech data slides for me that were useful for some work that I have been doing. I thought it would be worthwhile sharing these slides with a wider audience.

    This month, I have selected a few slides that shed a light on advertising and consumer behaviour in China.
    May online marketing
    Looking at platforms it is hard to over play the importance of Tencent in the Chinese internet which is show at the heart of the China tech data I have collated. Looking at mobile behaviour Tencent is responsible for at least four of the top ten properties: WeChat, QQ, QQ Browser and Tencent Video.
    May online marketing
    If we look at two Chinese internet companies Tencent and Netease we can see how the companies have massively increased the number of non-game apps that they provide to keep consumers in their eco-system for their digital lives.
    May online marketing
    (Microsoft’s high number is driven by a number experimental project apps and enterprise apps). What this means is that the mobile OS becomes less important, which is one of the reasons why western brands from Samsung to Apple have been hit in the market. Their platforms give them less leverage.

    Tencent’s WeChat is one of the most popular methods of payment in China
    May online marketing

    If we look at advertising spend in the Chinese market we can see that digital and radio advertising spend over-indexes. In some ways this is surprising. Online content is huge and historically the government controlled traditional media much more tightly than online media – to the detriment of watchable content on the television. More recently, government regulation has tightened across platforms.
    May online marketing
    Print advertising only slightly over-indexes in comparison to digital or radio. On the face of it there looks to be a massive opportunity in television advertising.

    If we look at the media market consumption habits two things immediately stand out. Television and radio are largely holding their own in the face of rapidly growing digital consumption. The rapid growth in digital consumption is being driven by non-PC devices.
    May online marketing

    If you want to know why Huawei has partnered with Leica to boost the perception of its smartphone camera function, one of the factors involved is the massive growth of photography in Chinese mobile behaviour. This is especially interesting when one compares it to messaging and social – WeChat the largest mobile social platform is all encompassing in its functionality and place in modern Chinese life. A second factor is the way manufacturers are trying redefine the premium smartphone sector, at a time when innovation and experiential difference have become incremental.
    May online marketing
    May online marketing


    You can see the full presentation here. More posts on China and technology related subjects.