Category: consumer behaviour | 消費者行為 | 소비자 행동

Consumer behaviour is central to my role as an account planner and about how I look at the world.

Being from an Irish household growing up in the North West of England, everything was alien. I felt that I was interloping observer who was eternally curious.

The same traits stand today, I just get paid for them. Consumer behaviour and its interactions with the environment and societal structures are fascinating to me.

The hive mind of Wikipedia defines it as

‘the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services.’

It is considered to consist of how the consumer’s emotions, attitudes and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, marketing and economics (especially behavioural economics or nudge theory as its often known).

I tend to store a mix of third party insights and links to research papers here. If you were to read one thing on this blog about consumer behaviour, I would recommend this post I wrote on generations. This points out different ways that consumer behaviour can be misattributed, missed or misinterpreted.

Often the devil is in the context, which goes back to the wide ranging nature of this blog hinted at by the ‘renaissance’ in renaissance chambara. Back then I knew that I needed to have wide interests but hadn’t worked on defining the ‘why’ of having spread such a wide net in terms of subject matter.

  • Hydrogen power + more things

    Hydrogen power

    Hydrogen power and hydrogen fuel cells have been around for decades. Hydrogen power fuel cells as an invention were invented in the 19th century. The modern hydrogen fuel cell was refined before the second world war and have been used in NASA’s space programme since Project Apollo. The space programme’s use of hydrogen power inspired General Motors to create a hydrogen fuel cell powered van in 1966. By the late 1980s, BMW had developed a hydrogen-powered engine which it trialled in its 7-series vehicles a decade later.

    2016_Toyota_Fuel_Cell_Vehicle (11)

    By the mid-2010s there were four hydrogen power passenger cars using fuel cells: Honda Clarity, Toyota Mirai, Hyundai ix35 FCEV, and the Hyundai Nexo. BMW is collaborating with Toyota to launch another four models next year.

    2021 Toyota Mirai

    In addition in commercial vehicles and heavy plant Hyundai, Cummins and JCB have hydrogen power offerings. JCB and Cummins have focused on internal combustion engines, while Hyundai went with hydrogen fuel cells. The aviation industry has been looking to hydrogen power via jet turbines.

    Hydrogen power offers greater energy density and lower weight than batteries. Unlike batteries or power lines, hydrogen can be transported over longer distances via tanker. So someplace like Ireland with wind and tidal power potential could become an energy exporter.

    The key hydrogen power problem has been investment in infrastructure and an over-reliance on batteries. Batteries bring their own set of problems and a global strategic dependency on China.

    Toyota is now warning that if there isn’t imminent international investment, that China will also dominate the supply chain, exports and energy generation in the hydrogen economy as well. It feels like me reaching a historic point of no return.

    Swiss Researchers May Have Solved Hydrogen Storage | Hackaday

    Aviation industry calls for UK investment in hydrogen fuel | FT

    Hydrogen, take two | Axios What’s Next

    Hydrogen-powered drones could fly longer, farther | Axios

    The Japanese Companies Pursuing a Hydrogen Economy – The Diplomat

    Japan Recommits to the Hydrogen Society – Akihabara News

    A Chicken and Egg Problem: How Germany’s Hydrogen Boom Stalled – DER SPIEGEL

    Lex in depth: the staggering cost of a green hydrogen economy | Financial Times

    UK at risk of falling behind in race to become green hydrogen global leader, Johnson Matthey says | Business News | Sky News

    Alexander Brown on how industrial policy adds momentum to China’s push into hydrogen | Merics

    Hyundai Rolls out Big Hydrogen Truck – The Chosun Ilbo

    Japan Announces Roadmap for Hydrogen Introduction | Nikkei TechOn

    Beauty

    Skincare you can wear: China’s sunwear boom | Jing DailyA jacket with a wide-brim hood and built-in face shield. Leggings infused with hyaluronic acid to hydrate while shielding skin from the sun. Face masks with chin-to-temple coverage. Ice-cooling gloves designed to drop skin temperature. In China, UV protection apparel isn’t just functional — it’s fashionable, dermatological, and high-tech. Once a niche category for hikers or extreme sports enthusiasts, China’s sunwear market has exploded into a $13 billion category blending climate adaptation, anti-aging culture, and the outdoor lifestyle wave. While other apparel segments slow, the sunwear sector is projected to reach nearly 95.8 billion RMB ($13.5 billion) by 2026 expanding at a CAGR of 9%, according to iResearch.

    Business

    Online disrupters challenge traditional MBA providers | FT

    What’s the winning strategy in China’s “low-trust” society? – low trust driving a lack of M&A and vertical integration

    China

    China is trying to kneecap Indian manufacturing – Asia Times – China trying to starve India and the Philippines of inbound investment through coercion on Chinese and multinational companies

    Collapse of Chinese-built high rise spurs wave of anger in Thailand

    Consumer behaviour

    Have humans passed peak brain power? | FT

    Buy European: a new shopping movement takes hold | Trendwatching

    Hot girl economy | Substack

    Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates – interesting US-focused paper, but I expect that the findings would be mirrored far more widely

    AI and the New Impostor Syndrome | Psychology Today & Overreliance on AI tools at work risks harming mental health | FT

    Culture

    An unexpected link between Hong Kong’s Louis Cha ‘Jin Yong’ and Labubu doll | South China Morning Post

    Design

    Volkswagen reintroducing physical controls for vital functions | Autocar – VW’s design chief commits to “never” repeating the “mistake” of relegating essential controls to touchscreens

    Economics

    U.S. Tariffs: China shows the Rare Earth Nuke, the Detailed Rules; EU keeps Worst Projects out; Carester’s numbers don’t tally; Victory’s Self-Defeat; and more.

    Why does Britain feel so poor? – by M. F. Robbins

    The Three Tariff Problem – by Doug O’Laughlin & American Disruption – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

    White House slams Amazon tariff price display “hostile and political” | Axios

    FMCG

    TVB News| 29 Apr 2025 | Soft meal of classic HK dishes launched for people with chewing difficulties – YouTube – Hong Kong’s aging population is promoting innovation in FMCG categories including food

    Finance

    Y Combinator founders raising less money signals a ‘vibe shift,’ VC says | TechCrunch & A quarter of YC’s latest startups are letting AI write 95% of their code | This Week In Start-ups (TWIST)

    Daring Fireball: Costco Only Accepts Visa Credit Cards

    Portrait of the Trader as a Young Rebel | Jacobin

    Gadgets

    iRobot made Roomba into an icon. Now, it’s in a huge mess – Fast Company

    Health

    China’s obesity crisis is big business | FT

    Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush | The New Yorker

    Hong Kong

    MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報Beware of Li Kashing’s supersized value trapBut as the initial excitement starts to fade, investors are growing nervous, wary of a billionaire family that has a poor track record on shareholders’ returns. The Li clan takes pride in the myriad of businesses and markets it operates in. But what kind of value-add can a diversified conglomerate offer when globalization is out of favor and geopolitical risks are on the rise? CK’s de-rating has accelerated since Trump’s first term, with the stock trading at just 35% of its book value even after the recent share bump. The complex business dealings have made enterprise valuation an impossible task. In a sign of deep capital market skepticism, CK seems to have trouble monetizing its assets. Its health and beauty subsidiary A.S. Watson is still privately-held, a decade after postponing an ambitious $6 billion dual listing in Hong Kong and London. Softer consumer sentiment in China, once a growth market, has become a drag. Last summer, CK Infrastructure did a secondary listing in the UK, hoping to widen its investor base. – Rare direct criticism of CK Hutchison’s conglomerate discount.

    Why some mainland Chinese turn their back on HK after getting top talent visas | Hong Kong Free Press

    McDonald’s Admiralty Station location just got a vibey redesign – Fast Company

    Innovation

    DeepSeek founder says China AI will stop following U.S. – Nikkei Asia

    US Weather Agency Websites Set to Vanish With Contract Cuts – Bloomberg – NOAA Research related content. Sites were housed on Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and WordPress

    Japan

    Ghost in the Shell’s Creator Wants to Revisit the Anime, But There’s One ProblemProduction I.G’s CEO Mitsuhisa Ishikawa—who produced both Ghost in the Shell films—spoke at the event. Ishikawa revealed a key obstacle preventing a third film: finances. He explained that Innocence had an enormous budget, estimated at around 2 billion yen (approximately $13 million), with profits reaching a similar figure. However, the film was planned with a ten-year financial recovery period, and even after 20 years, it has yet to break even.

    Jargon watch

    Typing loudly, wearing AirPods: ‘taskmasking’ is how gen Z pretends to work at the office | US work & careers | The Guardian – One example of taskmasking: moving quickly though the office while carrying a laptop or clipboard – straight out of a West Wing walk-and-talk. Another example: typing loudly, like a DMV employee having a bad day, even if what you’re typing has no relevance to your job.

    The Mainframe Vocabulary Problem (And Why It Matters) | Mainframe Society

    Is DEI a Racial Slur? Rise in Term Outrages Black Americans | Newsweek

    Luxury

    Rolex, A Love-Hate Relationship – Watches of Espionage

    ‘Gucci’s 25% sales collapse should shock no one’ | Jing Daily“Gucci is so boring now.” “They’ve lost all their confidence.” “It feels desperate — just influencers and celebrities.” Comparing Gucci’s bold, visionary eras under Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele and today’s safe, uninspired iteration reveals a stark contrast. That classroom moment reflected a broader truth: Gucci’s Q1 2025 is not a temporary dip. It’s the result of a deeper structural identity crisis — arguably one of the worst brand resets in recent luxury history.

    Online

    Common Crawl – Open Repository of Web Crawl Data

    AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5% | Ahrefs

    ‘We Were Wrong’: An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website | WIRED

    Security

    EU: These are scary times – let’s backdoor encryption! • The Register

    Rafts of Security Bugs Could Rain Out Solar Grids

    Suspected Chinese snoops hijacking buggy Ivanti gear — again • The Register – cracked VPN appliances

    An Open Letter to Third-Party Suppliers | JP Morgan Chase

    Software

    Amazon can now buy products from other websites for you | The Verge

    Technology

    China-developed EUV lithography could trial in 2025 | EE News Europe and China’s EUV breakthrough: Huawei, SMIC reportedly advancing LDP lithography, eye 3Q25 trial, 2026 rollout | DigiTimes

    IBM plans US$150 billion spend to catch quantum computing wave EE News Europe

    Thailand

    Travel and T-pop fuel Thai beauty boom in China | Jing Daily – one of the brands doing well is Mistine.

    Wireless

    How our stolen mobile phones end up in an Algerian market | The Times and The Sunday Times – interesting that they are going to Algeria rather than China

  • April 2025 newsletter

    April 2025 introduction – key to the door (21)

    Welcome to my April 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 21st issue.

    21 marks a transition to full adulthood in various countries, hence ‘keys to the door’ in bingo slang. In Chinese numbers, symbolism is often down to phrases that numbers sound like. 21 sounds like “easily definitely fine” – indicating an auspicious association with the number.

    For some reason this month I have had Bill McClintock’s Motor City Woman on repeat. It’s a mash-up of The Spinners – I’ll be Around, Queensrÿche – Jet City Woman and Steely Dan – Do it Again. It’s a bit of an ear worm – you’re welcome.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Cleaned up copy of an interview I did as a juror for the PHNX Awards. More here.
    • From the challenges faced by Apple Intelligence to drone deliveries and designing in lightness.
    • I thought about how computing tends towards efficiency along the story arc of its history and its likely impact on our use of AI models.

    Books that I have read.

    Currently reading
    • The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok. The book is a complex thriller. The story is straight forward, but the books covers complex, fraught issues with aplomb from misogyny, the male gaze to the white saviour complex.
    • The Tiger That Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot focused on the use of numbers in the media. But it’s also invaluable for strategists reading and interrogating pre-existing research. As a book is very easy-going and readable. I read it travelling back-and-forth to see the parents.
    • A Spy Alone was written by former MI6 officer Charles Beaumont. I was reminded of the dreary early 1970s of George Smiley’s Britain in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by the tone of the book. However A Spy Alone is alarmingly contemporary, with oblique references to UK infrastructure investments in the UK attached to a hostile foreign power, private sector intelligence, open source intelligence a la Bellingcat, nihilistic entrepreneurs and a thoroughly corrupted body politic. Beaumont’s story features a post cold-war spy ring in Oxford University echoing the cold war Cambridge spy ring. Beaumont touches on real contemporary issues through the classic thriller, in the same way that Mick Herron uses satire.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Big brand advertising isn’t as digital as we think.

    Trends in TV 2025 by Thinkbox threw up some interesting data points and hypotheses.

    • Advertising is eating retail property. A good deal of search and social advertising gains is not from traditional advertising, but traditional retailing, in place of a real-world shop front. This is primarily carried out by small and medium-sized enterprises. I imagine a lot of this is Chinese direct-to-consumer businesses. 80% of Meta’s revenue is not from the six largest advertising holding companies.
    • Viewership across video platforms both online and offline have stabilised in the UK. (Separately I heard that ITV were getting the same viewership per programme, but it’s been attenuated with the rise of time-shifted content via the online viewership.

    World views

    WARC highlighted research done by Craft Human Intelligence for Channel 4 where they outlined six world views for young adults. While it was couched in terms of ‘gen-z’, I would love to see an ongoing inter-cohort longitudinal study to see how these world views change over time in young people. This would also provide an understanding of it it reflects wider population world views. BBH Labs past work looking at Group Cohesion Score of gen-Z – implies that this is unlikely to be just a generational change but might have a more longitudinal effect across generations to varying extents.

    Anyway back to he six world views outlined:

    • ‘Girl power’ feminists. 99% identified as female. About 21% of their cohort. “While they’re overwhelmingly progressive, their focus tends to be on personal goals rather than macro-level politics. They underindex heavily on engagement with UK politics and society.”
    • ‘Fight for your rights’. 12% of cohort, 60% female, educated and engaged with current affairs. “Although they consider themselves broadly happy, they believe the UK is deeply unfair – but believe that progress is both necessary and achievable.”
    • ‘Dice are loaded’ are 15% of their cohort. 68% female. “Feeling left behind, they perceive themselves to lack control over their future, and are worried about finances, employment, housing, mental health, or physical appearance.”
    • ‘Zero-sum’ thinkers comprise 18% of their cohort. Over-index at higher end of social-economic scale, gender balanced. “…they lean toward authoritarian and radical views on both sides of the political spectrum.”
    • ‘Boys can’t be boys’ are 14% of the cohort and 82% male. Supporters of traditional masculinity.
    • ‘Blank slates’. 20% of their cohort, all of them male. “They aren’t unintelligent or unambitious, but they pay little attention to matters beyond their own, immediate world. While some follow the news, their main focus is on just getting on with life”.

    More here and here.

    FMCG performance

    At the beginning of March, Unilever abruptly replaced its CEO. Hein Schumacher was out, and in the space of a week CFO Fernando Fernandez became CEO. That showed a deep internal dissatisfaction with Unilever’s performance that surprised shareholders AND the business media. Over the past decade Unilever has leaned hard into premium products and influencer marketing.

    “There are 19,000 zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them,” Fernandez said. “That’s a significant change. It requires a machine of content creation, very different to the one we had in the past . . . ”

    Fernandez wants to lean even harder into influencer marketing. But I thought that there was a delta on this approach given his goal to have higher margin premium brands that are highly desirable.

    “Desirability at scale and marketing activity systems at scale will be the fundamental principles of our marketing strategy”

    Meanwhile Michael Farmer’s newsletter had some datapoints that were very apropos to the Unilever situation.

    “…for the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the combined FMCG sales of P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive grew at about an 8% compounded annual growth rate per year. The numbers associated with this long-term growth rate are staggering. P&G alone grew from about $1 billion (1960) to $79 billion in 2010. Throughout this period, P&G was the industry’s advocate for the power of advertising, becoming the largest advertiser in the US, with a focus on traditional advertising — digital / social advertising had hardly begun until 2010. Since 2010, with the advent of digital / social advertising, and massive increases in digital / social spend, P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive have grown, collectively, at less than 1% per year, about half the growth rate of the US economy (2.1% per year). They are not the only major advertisers who have grown below GDP rates. At least 20 of the 50 largest advertisers in the US have grown below 2% per year for the past 15 years. Digital and social advertising, of course, have come to dominate the advertising scene since 2010, and it represents, today, about 2/3rds of all advertising spend.”

    Mr Fernandez has quite the Gordian knot to try and solve, one-way or another.

    Automated communications and AI influencers

    Thanks to Stephen Waddington‘s newsletter highlighted a meta-analysis of research papers on the role of automation and generative AI in communications. What’s interesting is the amount of questions that the paper flags, which are key to consideration of these technologies in marketing and advertising. More here.

    LinkedIn performance

    Social Insider has pulled together some benchmarking data on LinkedIn content performance. It helps guide what good looks like and the content types to optimise for on LinkedIn. Register and download here.

    Chart of the month. 

    The FT had some really interesting data points that hinted at a possible longitudinal crisis in various aspects of reasoning and problem solving. There has been few ongoing studies in this area, and it deserves more scrutiny.

    reasoning and problem solving

    In his article Have humans past peak brain power, FT data journalist John Burn-Murdoch makes the case about traits which would support intelligence and innovation from reading, to mathematical reasoning and problem solving have been on a downward trends. The timing of this decline seems to correlate with the rise of the social web.

    If true, over time this may work its way into marketing effectiveness. My best guess would be that rational messages are likely to be less effective in comparison to simple emotional messages with a single-minded intent over time. This should show up in both short term and long term performance. A more cynical view might be that the opportunity for bundling and other pricing complexities could facilitate greater profit margins over time.

    Things I have watched. 

    Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is a film that I can watch several times over despite the film being over 75 years old now. Detective Murakami’s trek through the neighbourhoods of occupation-era Tokyo and all the actors performances are stunning. The storytelling is amazing and there are set pieces in here that are high points in cinema history. I don’t want to say too much more and spoil it for you, if you haven’t already seen it.

    Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex – Solid State Society – this is a follow on to the original GiTS manga and anime films touches directly on the challenges faced looking after Japan’s aging society. Central to the story is the apparent kidnapping over time of 20,000 children who can’t remember who their parents are. The plot is up to the usual high standard with government intrigue, technical and societal challenges.

    The Wire series one – I stopped and started watching The Wire. Films better suited my focus at the time. I finally started into series one this month. The ensemble cast are brilliant. The show is now 22 years old, yet it has aged surprisingly well. While technology works miracles, the slow methodical approach to building a case is always the same.

    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster – is a fantastic documentary covering the career of architect Sir Norman Foster. I remember watching it at the ICA when it originally came out and enjoyed watching it again on DVD. Foster brings a similar approach to architecture that Colin Chapman brought to his Lotus cars. When we are now thinking about efficiency and sustainability, their viewpoints feel very forward-thinking in nature.

    Useful tools.

    Fixing the iOS Mail app

    You know something is up when media outlets are writing to you with instructions on how they can remain visible in your inbox. The problem is due to Apple’s revamp of the iPhone’s Mail.app as part of its update to iOS 18.2.

    So how do you do this?

    Open Mail.app and you can see the categorised folders at the top of your screen, under the search bar.

    Find each tab where an a given email has been put. Open the latest edition. Tap the upper right hand corner. Select ‘Categorise Sender’. Choose ‘Primary’ to make sure future emails from this sender are in your main inbox view.

    That’s going to get old pretty soon. My alternative is to toggle between views as it makes sense. Apple’s inbox groupings are handy when you want to quickly find items you can delete quickly. Otherwise the single view makes sense.

    Fixing mail app

    Inspiration for strategists

    Questions are probably the most important tool for strategists. 100 questions offers inspiration so you can focus on the right ones to ask for a given time.

    The sales pitch.

    I have been worked on the interrogation process and building responses to a couple of client new business briefs for friends (Red Robin Ventures and Craft Associates) and am now working a new brand and creative strategy engagement as part of an internal creative agency at Google.

    now taking bookings

    If you’re thinking about strategy needs in Q4 (October onwards) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me on YunoJuno and LinkedIn; get my email from Spamty to drop me a line.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my April 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the May bank holidays.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

    Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.

  • Liberation day + more things

    Liberation day

    Liberation Day was a glorified press conference where the Trump administration revealed their tariff scale on every country around the world. Weirdly enough, Russia wasn’t tariffed. Here’s some of the interesting analysis I saw prior to, and after the event.

    Liberation day social media post.

    The Trump administration leant into an aesthetic influenced by patriotic memes, the steeliness of The Apprentice and generative AI – a look I call Midjourney Modern. Liberation Day was no exception.

    The Economist did a hot take that calls the whole thing a ‘fantasy’.

    America’s Cultural Revolution – by Stephen Roach – Conflict – Stephen Roach was an Asian focused chief economist at Morgan Stanley. The American Cultural Revolution narrative is something I have heard from a few contacts in China and Roach echoes that perspective in this article.

    China says weaponising agriculture in US trade war should be off-limits | South China Morning Post – agricultural price shocks in the past have led to civil disruption in China

    Liberation Day and The New World Order | Fabricated Knowledge

    Opinion | I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America. – The New York TimesPresident Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all our factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation to be permanently liberated from Trump’s tariffs.

    Beijing’s message to America: We’re not afraid of you. You aren’t who you think you are — and we aren’t who you think we are. – Thomas Friedman – Overall, I would agree with the sentiment, BUT, you have to remember what he’s been shown is the best view of what China can do and reality is much more complex. I still think that there is a lot of the future being made in places like France, Finland, Latvia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – as well as China. What China does best is quantity that has a scale all of its own, something America has historically excelled at.

    Consumer behaviour

    Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, Joseph Winkelmann :: SSRN

    Culture

    Montreal DJs move clubbing from midnight to morning, adding coffee and croissants | Trendwatching – early morning clubbing, reminds of Marky J‘s mornings at the Baa Bar in Liverpool.

    Health

    Is Gen Z more mentally ill, or do they just talk about it more? | Doomscrollers

    Europe Rapidly Falling Behind China in Pharma, Astra Chief Warns – Bloomberg

    Ideas

    I’m Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better | Joan Westenberg

    Innovation

    Samsung Develops Groundbreaking Achromatic Metalens With POSTECH – Samsung Global Newsroom

    Korea

    South Korean movie theater launches monthly knit-while-you-watch screenings | Trend-Watching

    Luxury

    Counterfeit luxury goods: London raids miss the target | Dark Luxury

    Vogue Business Index top 10: Preppy is back and so is Ralph Lauren | Vogue Business

    Polène: The global success of the French handbag made with love | Le Monde

    Marketing

    X-tortion: How Advertisers Are Losing Control Of Media Choice | Forrester – I am surprised how ‘on the nose’ Forrester is in this post.

    Technicolor, Parent Company of The Mill, MPC, and Mikros, Facing Potential Closure | LBBOnline – this hit the creative industries like a lightning bolt.

    Influencer Marketing: The quiet reset in the influencer economy, ET BrandEquity – the total number of influencers has shot up from 9,62,000 in 2020 to 4.06 million influencers in 2024, reflecting a staggering 322% growth.

    Materials

    DIY Birkin? China’s Gen Z 3D print dupes, share on RedNote | Jing Daily – Armed with affordable 3D printers and free design templates, young consumers are crafting their own versions of iconic luxury accessories. – Homage flowerpots or penholders rather than ‘dupes’ but 3D printing feels mainstream

    Online

    Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests | Censorship | The Guardian – After requests from the governments of Russia and China, Google has removed content such as YouTube videos of anti-state protesters or content that criticises and alleges corruption among their politicians. Google’s own data reveals that, globally, there are 5.6m items of content it has “named for removal” after government requests. Worldwide requests to Google for content removals have more than doubled since 2020, according to cybersecurity company Surfshark.

    The reason you feel alienated and alone | Madeline Holden – your Dunbar number is filled with para-social relationship rather than social relationships.

    China’s fragile online spaces for debate | Merics

    AI Discoverability: Amazon’s Mistakes NN Group

    Retailing

    Lidl TikTok Shop launch sells out in under 20 minutes | Retail Gazette – I am curious about Lidl fulfilment approach

    Security

    Military delegates lose sway at China’s signature political gathering | FT

    Putin is Unlikely to Demobilize in the Event of a Ceasefire Because He is Afraid of His Veterans | Institute for the Study of War – which poses economic challenges in Russia and a greater incentive to attack outside Ukraine once the conflict winds down

    Exclusive: Secretive Chinese network tries to lure fired federal workers, research shows | Reuters

    FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado – Ars Technica

    Technology

    Google’s Sergey Brin Asks Workers to Spend More Time In the Office – The New York Times – 60 hour weeks are productivity sweet spot according to Sergey Brin. Silicon Valley looks more-and-more like Huangzhou.

    Alibaba exec warns of overheating AI infrastructure market • The Register

    Telecoms

    SoftBank and Ericsson agree to collaborate on next-gen telco tech

    Web-of-no-web

    Meta announces experimental Aria Gen 2 research smart glasses | CNBC

    WeRide to open driverless taxi service in Zurich | EE News – Chinese operator is set to launch a fully unmanned taxi service in Zurich in the next few months. This follows the launch of its latest generation Robotaxi, the GXR, for fully unmanned paid autonomous ride-hailing services in Beijing. The GXR, with a L4-level redundant drive-by-wire chassis architecture, is WeRide’s second Robotaxi model to achieve fully driverless commercial operations in the city following pilot trials.

    Wireless

    London’s poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, Huawei ban • The Register – the comments nail it

  • March 2025 newsletter

    March 2025 introduction

    Welcome to my March 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 20th issue. Or one score, as they used to say down the Mecca bingo hall. A score is a common grouping used in everything from selling produce to indicating the scale of an accident in a news headline. In Japan, it signals legal adulthood and is celebrated with personal ceremonies.

    I didn’t know that March was Irish-American Heritage month. I just thought that we had St Patrick’s Day.

    Hopefully April will bring us warmer weather that we should expect of spring. In the meantime to keep my spirits up I have been listening to Confidence Man.

    New reader?

    If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • I curated some of the best analyses on DeepSeek, and more interesting things happening online.
    • Pharmacies are blatantly marketing prescription-only medicines. It’s illegal, there is no GLP-1 permission that allows consumer marketing of prescription-only medicines used for weight loss and weight management.
    • Clutch Cargo – how a 1960s animation managed to transform production and show the power of storytelling.
    • A look back at Skype. I will miss its ring tone when it shuts down in May.
    • Looking at the Majorana 1 chip promising a new generation of quantum computing, generative AI production, refrigeration and an oral history of Wong Kar wai’s In the Mood for Love & 2046.

    Books that I have read.

    • Now and again you come across a book that stuns you. Red Sky Mourning by Jack Carr, is one such book, but not in a good way. Carr is famous because of his service in the American military which he has since parlayed into a successful entrepreneurial career from TV series to podcasts. So he covers all things tactical knowledgeably. Conceptually the book has some interesting ideas that wouldn’t feel that out of place in a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel. So Carr had a reasonably solid plan on making a great story. But as the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Carr’s enemy was his own writing style without aggressive editing. The editing process is a force multiplier, breathing the artistic brevity of Ernest Hemingway into a manuscript and protecting the author from their own worst impulses. I found the book hard to read because I would repeatedly run up against small niggly aspects, making it hard to suspend disbelief and get into the story. Carr loves his product brands, in this respect Red Sky Mourning reminded me a lot of early Brett Easton-Ellis. Which got me thinking, who is Carr actually writing for? Part of the answer is Hollywood, Carr’s books have been optioned by Amazon, one of which was adapted as The Terminal List. I imagine that another audience would be young (privileged caucasian male) management consultant types who need a bit of down time as they travel to and from client engagements – after a busy few days of on-site interviews, possibly with a tumbler of Macallan 12 – which was purchased in duty-free. The kind of person who considers their Tumi luggage in a tactical manner. The friend who gave it to me, picked it up for light reading and passed it on with a degree of incredulity. On the plus side, at least it isn’t a self-help book. It pains me to end a review so negatively; so one thing that Jack Carr does get right is the absolute superiority of Toyota Land Cruisers in comparison to Land Rover’s products. If you have it in hard copy, and possess sufficient presence of mind, it could serve you well in improvised self-defence as it comes in at a substantial 562 pages including the glossary and acknowledgements.
    • The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a classic murder mystery. A university crime club with each member named after a famous fictional detective gather to investigate a murder on an isolated island. The book slowly unravels the answer to the K-University Mystery Club’s annual trip bringing it to a logical conclusion.
    • She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan was an interesting piece of Chinese historical fiction. It is less fantastic than the wuxia works of Louis Cha that dominated the genre previously. More here.
    • Chinese Communist Espionage – An Intelligence Primer by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil tells the story of modern China through the story of its intelligence services. From the chaos under Mao purges and the Cultural Revolution to forces let loose by ‘reform and opening up’. More here.
    • In the early 2000s, as we moved towards a social web, we saw a number trends that relied on the knowledge of a group of people. Crowdsourcing channeled tasks in a particular way and became a popular ‘innovation engine’ for a while. The wisdom of crowds captured the power of knowledge within nascent question and answer platforms. Prediction markets flourished online. Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner try and explain who and why these models work, particular where they rely on knowledge or good judgement. The book does a good job at referencing their sources and is readable in a similar way to a Malcolm Gladwell book.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Why does humour in advertising work?

    My Dad is a big fan of the Twix bears advertisement, so much so, that he repeats the script verbatim when it comes on. We know that humour works and that it’s under-used in advertising, but it would be good to have data behind that in order to support it as a suggestion to clients.

    twix bears

    WARC have published What’s Working In Humorous Advertising which goes a good way to providing that support.

    The takeouts from the report include:

    • Humour as a memory hook: Comedy surprises and delights, it makes consumers stop, engage and then remember. Over time it builds into nostalgia.
    • It relies on universal insights – that work across age cohorts, cultures and geographies. Its also intrinsically shareable – and not just on social platforms.
    • Celebrity x humour drives fame: Well-executed humour paired with celebrity endorsements, (Ryan Reynolds being a standout example) boosting brand impact.
    • Well executed humour can supercharge marketing ROI. Ads with humour are 6.1x more likely to drive market share growth than neutral or dull ads.

    Accessible advertising

    The Ad Accessibility Alliance have launched The Ad Accessibility Alliance Hub, which made me reflect on accessibility as a subject. I can recommend the hub as it provides good food for thought when considering mandatories for creative. ISBA’s reframing accessible advertising helps make the business case beyond the social benefits of inclusivity. The ISBA also provides links to useful assets. Finally, I can recommend Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge which provides a broader context to help think about accessible advertising as part of a system.

    Social platform benchmarks

    RealIQ have done great research of engagement rates across thousands of brands in a number of sectors. What we get is an engagement benchmark set across platforms and industries. We can debate the value of engagement, and the different nature of platforms, so you can’t compare across platforms.

    Chart of the month.

    What I could compare in the RealIQ data was the rate in change in engagement rates year-on-year. The clear losers over time were Facebook and Twitter at an aggregate level. This also explains the x-tortion (as Forrester Research described them) tactics being deployed by Twitter. Combining high rates of engagement decline and reduced reach means that Twitter doesn’t look particularly attractive as a platform vis-a-vis competitors.

    Change in platform engagement

    Things I have watched. 

    Hunt Korean spy film

    Hunt (헌트) is a great Korean film. It provides a John Le Carré style spy hunt story in 1980s era South Korea prior to the move towards democracy. It’s a stylish, if brutal film that touches on parts of South Korea’s history which we in the west tend to know very little about. Hunt takes an unflinching look at the legacy of the military government as well as their North Korean rivals.

    Philip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff is a movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account based on US post-war fighter development through to the height of the Mercury space programme. The film went on to receive eight nominations at the Academy Awards. You have an ensemble cast of great character actors who deal with the highs and lows at the cutting edge of aerospace technology. The Right Stuff is as good as its reputation would have you believe. The film captures the drama and adventure that Wolfe imbued his written account of the journey to space. As a society it is good to be reminded that if we put our mind to it the human race is capable of amazing audacious things.

    Disco’s Revenge – an amazing Canadian documentary which has interviews with people from soul and disco stars including Earl Young, David Mancuso, Joe Bataan, Nicky Siano – all of whom were seminal in the founding of disco.

    It also featured names more familiar to house music fans including DJ Spinna, Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez – who was key in proto vocal house productions.

    The documentary also shows hip-hop was influenced by disco mixing.

    Along the way it covers the fight for gay rights in the US and its easy to see the continuum onwards to house music and the current dance music scene. It’s one thing knowing it and having read the right books, but the interviews have a power of their own.

    It takes things through to ‘club quarantine’ during the COVID-19 lockdown.

    I hate that’s its streaming only, rather than Blu-Ray but if you can put that one issue aside and watch it. If you try it and enjoy it, you’ll also love Jed Hallam‘s occasional newsletter Love Will Save The Day.

    I picked up a copy of Contagion on DVD, prior to COVID and watched it with friends in a virtual social manner during lockdown. This probably wasn’t the smartest move and I spent the rest of lockdown building my library of Studio Ghibli films instead. It’s a great ensemble film in its own right. Watching it back again now I was struck by how much Contagion got right from Jude Law’s conspiracy theorist with too much influence and combative congressional hearings.

    The film makers had the advantage of looking back at SARS which had hit Hong Kong and China in 2002 – 2004. Hong Kong had already been hit by Avian flu H5N1 from 1997 to 2002. Both are a foot note in history now, I had a friend who picked up their apartment on the mid-levels for 30 percent below 1997 market rates due to the buffeting the Hong Kong economy took during this time. The only thing that the film didn’t envision was the surfeit of political leadership in some notable western countries during COVID, which would have added even more drama to Contagion, not even Hollywood script writers could have made that up.

    Leslie Cheung photographed while playing

    Hong Kong film star Leslie Cheung was taken from us too early due to depression. But the body of work that he left behind is still widely praised today. Double Tap appeared in 2000. In it Cheung plays a sport shooter of extraordinary skill. The resulting film is a twisting crime thriller with the kind of action that was Hong Kong’s trademark. It represents a very different take on the heroic bloodshed genre. At the time western film critics compared it to The Matrix – since the US film was influenced by Hong Kong cinema. Double Tap has rightly been favourably compared by film critics to A Better Tomorrow – which starred Cheung and Chow Yan Fat.

    Useful tools.

    Knowledge search

    Back when I worked at Yahoo!, one of our key focuses was something called knowledge search. It was searching for opinions: what’s the best dry cleaner in Bloomsbury or where the best everyday carry items for a travelling executive who goes through TSA style inspections a few times a week. Google went on to buy Zagat the restaurant review bible. Yahoo! tried to build its own corpus of information with Yahoo! Answers, that went horribly wrong and Quora isn’t much better. A more promising approach by Gigabrain tries to do knowledge search using Reddit as its data source. I’ve used it to get some quick-and-dirty qualitative insights over the past few months.

    Digital behaviour ‘CliffsNotes’

    Simon Kemp launched this year’s Digital 2025 compendium of global online behaviours. It’s a great starter if you need to understand a particular market.

    Encrypting an external hard drive

    I needed to encrypt an external hard drive to transfer data and hadn’t used FileVault to do it in a while. Thankfully, Apple has a helpful guide buried in its support documents. From memory the process seems to have become more complicated over time. It used to be able to be done by using ‘control’ and click on the drive before scrolling down. Now you need to do it inside Disk Utility.

    The sales pitch.

    now taking bookings

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my March 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the Easter break.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

    Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.

  • Skype retrospective

    A Skype retrospective was called for once I read that the service was being closed by April 2025.

    Skype retrospective origins.

    Skype was a thing right from the get-go when it launched in August 2003. There had been voice-over-IP (VoIP) services before Skype. Full disclosure, I worked on Deltathree; an Israeli predecessor of Skype.

    About this time, if you needed to make cheap overseas call, you would dial in to a special service and then dial the overseas number. This would relay your call via VoIP. These calls were also facilitated direct from a PC as well using VoIP.

    Previously, telephone calls were charged per voice minute. The further away the call was, the more expensive it was. VoIP disrupted the telecoms cost model.

    Enabling technologies.

    As broadband networks became more prevalent and Wi-Fi meant that you were no longer tethered to the ethernet connection of your router. At the time homes had an area delegated for internet access. Laptops were much less commonplace.

    Classic iMac in residence at Manchester Digital Development Agency

    The original iMac was a success because it was a plug-in and play solution for internet access. It’s iconic ‘candy design’ helped differentiate it from the competitors beige PC.

    By the time Skype was released I had an Apple iBook, a consumer laptop that pioneered the adoption of Wi-Fi, back in 1999, but my first broadband router at home didn’t support Wi-Fi. Broadband, Wi-Fi and 3G networks facilitated the start of Skype. Those networks provided the always-on connectivity to get the most out of the app.

    Low-key start.

    If there was any ‘thought leader’ on VoIP at the time, it would have been Jeff Pulver. Pulver didn’t bother discussing Skype at the time. Instead he was focused on expected government regulation, Vonage, PC VoIP software X-Lite and Windows Messenger.

    Skype first appeared on Pulver’s radar in December 2003, after Red Herring announced that they had secured a first round of venture funding. Pulver praised their ‘viral marketing’.

    It wasn’t obvious that Skype would be a winner.

    Messaging at the time.

    The primary messaging platform at the time in Europe was SMS. Instant messaging was starting to be used informally in workplaces. It was as much about the community norm as anything else. I started off using ICQ with Israeli clients, then Yahoo! Messenger, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and MSN Messenger. It was all a bit messy, so I pulled all my accounts together using Adium.

    Take-off.

    Skype quickly took its place on my laptop when it released its first Mac client in March 2004. By the summer, one of my clients at the time got rid of their desk phones when they moved office and had employees do internal and office-to-office calls via Skype-to-Skype instead. Giving someone your Skype ID became as common as giving out your email.

    At the time Skype offered encrypted voice calls held over a peer-to-peer network. The encryption was contentious as it something of Skype’s own design and wasn’t audited.

    In 2005, Skype was sold to eBay. The synergy between them wasn’t clear.

    Joost

    A year later, the Skype founders left and founded The Venice Project aka Joost – a peer to peer video platform. It was a photo-streaming platform. I liked Joost for its sub-Amazon Prime Video film library including obscure 1970s English language overdubbed martial arts films. But there was also Viacom content available.

    Meanwhile under eBay’s ownership, Skype incorporated video calls into its offering. I ended up in a long distance relationship with a Hong Kong-based fellow Mac user and we ended up talking every day via Skype. It even worked when she visited across the border in Shenzhen.

    Mobile impact

    You can’t write a Skype retrospective without talking about its role on mobile.

    3 Skypephone logo

    Hutchison 3G (known as Three), was a cellular carrier brand put together by CK Hutchison to build a global 3G network in Asia and Europe. In 2007, Three launched Skypephone with Skype. The key part of this as an unremarkable looking candy bar handset.

    3 Skypephone (white and pink)

    The Skype phone allowed you to see the status of your Skype contacts on the phone, allowing for presence on the go, in real time (network permitting) which was revolutionary. But we take it for granted on WhatsApp now. There was a couple of forums that gave out widely copied workarounds for the clunky implementation of Skype.

    For some reason Hong Kong always got the best features. You could have two numbers on your phone there. The first number was your proper mobile phone number that worked like you would expect it to. The second was your ‘SkypeIn’ number – a soft telephone service.

    I had worked on pioneer mobile app Yahoo!Go previously, which only allowed email and no VoIP calls. The Skype phone was a major leap forward because it allowed synchronous communications when connected to a network.

    There would have been no WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat or LINE without Skype leading the way.

    A nerdier fact was that the Skype phone ran on the BREW application development platform by Qualcomm. It allowed Java apps to be downloaded directly from early app stores before the iPhone. At the time I was side loading apps from my Mac on to my Palm and Symbian phones.

    Beginning of the end.

    The peak of my Skype use was keeping in touch with my parents when I was working in Hong Kong. Video calling made the world feel closer and they got to see some of Hong Kong with me because of its higher quality 3G network.

    Soon after I got back, we switched to FaceTime. This was for a couple of reasons. Skype had an increasing number of spam accounts and phishing attacks. Secondly, FaceTime had an easier to use interface.

    This is the point in the Skype retrospective when I think that the rot started to set in.

    From a software point of view a big decline occurred in 2016, Microsoft had settled into their purchase of Skype and decided to re-architect the system. Out went the peer-to-peer connections and the system moved onto Microsoft servers to mediate Skype-to-Skype calls.

    The irony of it all is that the distributed web is now the technology du jour.

    Microsoft messed with the user experience and I distinctly remember moving from one version to another and hated the new layout. From then on, it didn’t improve. Skype’s ability to dial out to international numbers was still something that I put to good use, pretty much up to the time of writing. But like an old cheque book, I came to use it less-and less often; knowing that I could still use the service, allowed Skype to be a back-up to a back-up of a back-up.

    At the time I was also using Skype for Business in the office where I worked. It was shambolic with each call timing out around the 30-minute mark.

    Om Malik had a similar experience.

    Skype, was once a beloved product, one that I loved using every day. It was a product I wrote about long before it was trendy. I sent the team feedback. Like all tiny apps that are good at what they do, it became popular and grew really fast. It was sold to eBay, and then re-sold to Microsoft. And that’s when the magic disappeared. Through series of mergers and managers, Skype became an exact opposite of what I loved about it — independent outsider which was great at — chat, messaging and phone calls. It had just enough features, and its desktop client was minimal in its perfection.  Now, as I tweeted in the past, it is “a turd of the highest quality.”

    The final bow

    A Skype retrospective would be remiss, if we didn’t cover the impact that the service has had. While Skype has struggled with scammers and Microsoft’s sub-optimal operation, its legacy lives on.

    The culture of desktop video calls started with Skype. Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack are its spiritual successors. A combination of software capability, hot-desking, hybrid working and COVID resulted in long term business behaviour change.

    As I write this, IAG – owners of British Airways, Aer Lingus and Iberia admitted that “business travel had settled into a ‘new normal’ that involved fewer one-day trips with flights, in part because of video meetings.”

    Skype had some current cultural relevance, particularly on TV where presenters would interview someone from outside the studio, for instance an expert calling in from home, Skype would still be the client used.

    At the time of writing, I am looking at Rakuten Viber to substitute my need for a ‘SkypeOut’ analogue.