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.

Luxury beliefs + more things
Luxury beliefs

Luxury beliefs is a term that I came across from the writings of Rob Henderson. Henderson has a similar kind of story to JD Vance. Addiction in the family and escaping his home environment by enlisting in the US Air Force.

After his service Henderson used funding via the GI Bill to go to Yale. He then got a scholarship to go to Cambridge to do a doctorate. Like Vance he had written a memoir: Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class that highlights the challenges faced in working class American society including violence and addiction. In his book Henderson explores the idea of luxury beliefs, how they benefit the privileged and harm the most vulnerable in society.

What are examples of luxury beliefs?

The luxury beliefs Henderson cites are seen to be widely held progressive views including:
- Defunding the police
- Defunding the prison system
- Decriminalising or legalising drugs
Getting rid of standardised exams – Henderson sees these as helping less privileged children get into college

Rejecting marriage as a pointless concept. – Henderson claims that one of the strongest predictors of success was if they were brought up in a nuclear family.

Henderson believes that the common thread that holds luxury beliefs together is that they are held by privileged people, the beliefs make them look good (and feel good about themselves), but harm the marginalised.

Luxury beliefs allow the privileged to look good by:
- Playing the victim
- Protest without penalty – which is less likely to happen to more marginalised protestors
- Push the less privileged down
Henderson labelled this ‘saviour theatre’. Henderson reminded of previous generation protestors like Patty Hearst and participants in the Weather Underground’s Days of Rage which would seem to fit Henderson’s definition of holding luxury beliefs.

More posts about new terms can be found on this blog.

Branding

What does Hong Kong airport smell of? Or your go-to hotel? The business of scent branding | South China Morning Post – If you are a fragrance enthusiast, you may have heard of Shiu Shing Hong, a quaint shop in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district that has been around for more than 50 years.

The store, which recently went viral on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, not only sells house-made essential oils – must-have souvenirs for visitors from mainland China thanks to the exposure – but recreates the signature scents of popular malls and other venues in Hong Kong.

On its shelves are familiar – sometimes odd – concoctions. Bottle labels reference K11, a shopping mall in Tsim Sha Tsui, the five-star Rosewood Hotel, and the Hong Kong International Airport. Sportswear brand Lululemon has one too.

J. D. Vance Has a Point About Mountain Dew | The Atlantic – brands and identity

China

Deaths in China to reach ‘an unprecedented scale’, peak at 19 million in 2061 | South China Morning Post – due to aging population

WTO says China is backsliding on key reforms and lacks transparency on subsidies | South China Morning Post – World Trade Organization report cites studies that say subsidies could top US$900 billion – providing fuel for critics of Beijing’s practices such as the EU and US

Consumer behaviour

Inside China’s Psychoboom – JSTOR Daily – mental illness has transformed from a bourgeois Western taboo into a legitimate public health concern.

The consequences of the psychoboom are both logical and contradictory. As the Chinese economy has expanded and citizens have grown wealthier, the demands of everyday life have grown in number and kind, expanding from physiological and safety concerns to a desire for love, esteem, and self-actualization. At the same time, such desires run counter to traditional Chinese values like the age-old concept of Confucian filial piety and the relatively new ideology imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), both of which place the well-being of the collective above the happiness of the individual.

Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, and the twice-born thrice-selected Indian American elite

Design

Adidas partners with Mexican artisans for hand-embroidered soccer jerseys | Trend Watching

Economics

Maersk says Red Sea shipping disruption having global effects | Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide

Ethics

Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI | WIRED

Microsoft DEI Lead Blasts Company in Internal Email After Team Is Reportedly Laid Off – IGN

Finance

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Say Recovery in Private Equity Deals and Fees – Bloomberg – Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are confident that their most important clients are about to get active after a long spell on the sidelines and help goose the long-awaited revival in investment banking fees.
The private equity deal machine has been mostly jammed up for the past two years, leaving many investment bankers twiddling their thumbs while their bosses talked up green shoots that failed to flourish. There are plenty of potential road bumps ahead, but there’s reason to put more weight on the better outlook now even compared with just three months ago: The wave of debt refinancing that has led banks’ revenue recovery this year has also been helping to fix the prospects of many companies owned by private equity firms

The Financial Instability Hypothesis* by Hyman P. Minsky, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College – interesting paper used in current negative critiques or private equity like Has private equity become a Ponzi scheme? – UnHerd

Gadgets

Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning | TechSpot – Sony admitted it’s going to “gradually end development and production” of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued. – the big shocker is the issue for archival formats

Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions – WSJ – a pet project of Bezos, and the Alexa voice assistant and the Echo speakers through which it communicated were inspired by his interest in the spaceship computer in “Star Trek.”

“When launching products back then, we didn’t have to have a profit timeline for them,” said a former longtime devices executive. “We had to get the system in people’s homes and we’d win. Innovate, and then figure out how to make money later.”

To do that, the team had to keep prices low. Amazon sometimes even gave away versions of the smart speaker as part of promotions in a bid to get a larger base of users.

Health

“It’s All Just F*cking Impossible:” The Influence of Taylor Swift on Fans’ Body Image, Disordered Eating, and Rejection of Diet Culture – ScienceDirect and 100-Pound Weight Loss: My health improved. My self-esteem didn’t. | Slate

Another Danish biotech can help investors’ hunger for obesity drugs | FT – this probably explains why Zealand pivoted from taking its medications to market to becoming research and selling on as its not big enough to exploit this opportunity on its own. (Full disclosure, I worked briefly on the diabetic emergency injection product until the company pivoted).

Ozempic Tracker Insights: Price Remains the Largest Obstacle – CivicScience

The economics of GLP-1 – Marginal REVOLUTION

Patients checking into rehab after abusing weight-loss jabs | The Times Online

Innovation

IKE and hyperice’s boots and vest massage athletes’ feet and keep their bodies cool

Dude, where’s my (flying) car? – POLITICO

RISC-V Thrives Through Research, International Collaboration – EE Times

Xiaomi’s ‘lights-out factory’ to mass produce new foldable smartphones | DigiTimes – but it doesn’t mean that the products will be better, just consistent. I keep thinking of the Fiat Strada, an ugly rust bucket of a car, that was ‘hand built by robots’.

Luxury

Luxury brands roll out 50% discounts as Chinese shoppers rein in spending | FT – this will destroy the intrinsic value of the brand

Italy’s competition watchdog probes Armani and Dior over alleged labour exploitation | FT – the question is more why now? It’s been known for years that Chinese workers are exploited in factories based in Italy.

Age of Ozempic: Predictions for the luxury industry | Vogue Business – Analysts agree that the pop culture influence of weight loss drugs is giving luxury labels and mass-market brands, alike, licence to refocus on straight-size. “Luxury brands have long been staunchly unwilling to cater to plus-sizes outside of the occasional token representation, but typically premium and mass players would invest more readily in plus-size,” says Marci. “Now we’re seeing the effects of Ozempic and weight loss culture on retail as a whole.”

Already, a host of US-based retailers and fashion companies including Rent the Runway are seeing boosted demand for smaller clothing sizes, and falling demand for larger sizes, according to The Wall Street Journal. Retailers have been investing in fewer products that offer larger sizing

Burberry’s new CEO has a task | FT Fashion Matters

EssilorLuxottica expands into streetwear with $1.5bn Supreme deal – the deal was a “no brainer” and had happened “very quickly” because VF was under pressure to divest its most “iconic asset”. EssilorLuxottica planned to use Supreme’s wealth of customer data and its Gen Z fans in China, Japan and South Korea to target new consumers – it shows how good a deal James Jebbia got with private equity and VF Corporation

Lewis Hamilton Named Dior Ambassador | BoF – formula 1 driver and pit lane dandy has also worked with Dior men’s artistic director Kim Jones to guest design a collection of clothing and accessories set to launch in October

Marketing

Rediscovered Absolut Blue Painting Inspires New Bottle | MarketingDaily

Focus on value pivotal for brands as consumers get more cost-conscious – The Media Leader

The King’s Speech 2024 – GOV.UK – restrictions on fast food advertising and energy drinks

Proportion of UK businesses increasing marketing spend hits 10-year high – The Media Leader

Evolution not revolution as Sorrell unveils Monks and reorganizes for easier client access | The Drum

Media

The return of piracy – net.wars

‘New model for human civilisation’: What is so unique about China’s style of modernisation? – CNA – interesting that CNA don’t provide a critical analysis on the positives and the negatives of the China model.

Online

Even Disinformation Experts Don’t Know How to Stop It | New York Times – Researchers have learned a great deal about the misinformation problem over the past decade: They know what types of toxic content are most common, the motivations and mechanisms that help it spread and who it often targets. The question that remains is how to stop it.

A critical mass of research now suggests that tools such as fact checks, warning labels, prebunking and media literacy are less effective and expansive than imagined, especially as they move from pristine academic experiments into the messy, fast-changing public sphere.

LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads – MacStories

Google Is Mind-Bogglingly Bad – On my Om – more ‘Google is Dead’ material – grist for the mill and Daring Fireball: Google Is Shutting Down Its URL Shortener, Breaking All Links

Apple Maps launches on the web to take on Google – The Verge

Retailing

Tesco takes on Waitrose and M&S in premium range fight | FT – implies that Tesco thinks consumer spend is likely to be going up again

The shifting world of e-commerce liability | The Daily Upside – Amazon’s legal issues and the fact it has over 553million SKUs

Security

American Hacker in Turkey Linked to Massive AT&T Breach | 404 Media

Software

Meta won’t bring future multimodal AI models to EU | Axios

GPT-4o mini: advancing cost-efficient intelligence | OpenAI – computing power per watt reduction is the most interesting part of this. You also see it in Mistral NeMo | Mistral AI | Frontier AI in your hands

Inside Microsoft, nobody really owns Copilot – The Verge

Taiwan

TSMC proposes Foundry 2.0 to alleviate antitrust concerns | DigiTimes – Trump-proofing the semiconductor industry

Technology

AI Chip Startup Graphcore Acquired by SoftBank – EE Times

Web of no web

The Future of AR Beyond the Vision Pro Is Already Brewing – CNET

Google’s XR Re-Entry Point | Spyglass

Wireless

China’s Transsion sued by Qualcomm and Philips as IP woes mount | FT
August 5, 2024
Roots

I spent a good deal of time thinking about roots and what they mean to me, with a change in my wider family situation. I spent a lot of my time growing up on the family farm owned by an Uncle. I knew the neighbours, knew the dogs and was familiar with many farm chores. The farm has gone up for sale a couple of months ago. My cousin who inherited the farm can’t run it part time and make it work.

The Island

As long as my Mum had known it the farm had been called The Island. There was never a reason given for the name, but one can guess from aerial photo below. Apart from a depression where the farm buildings are, the rest of the land slopes down and away from the farm.

The land never flooded. My great grandfather died as a relatively young man so my grandfather and his mother farmed the land. Before, during and after Ireland’s bid for independence.

My grandfather married late on life and had four children. My Mum, who wouldn’t inherit the farm because she was a girl. My eldest uncle inherited the farm and eventually left it to one of my cousins as he didn’t have children of his own.

Given the changing regulations in Ireland, in order for my cousin to operate the farm, they had had to put in logged hours on the farm under supervision of my Uncle in lieu of studying at an agricultural college.

The Island from the air.

The farm changed over that time. Originally the farm house was in the depression where there are now farm buildings. Only a small store room remains from that time. During British rule, houses were put in the most unproductive parts of the land, so the original house was dank and damp. The farmers didn’t own their land but instead paid rent to British landlords. The roots of the independence meeting was much about land ownership and owning one’s own future as it was about the irish identity, culture and language.

Externally the old farmhouse looked like a chocolate box thatched farm cottage, but the reality it was different. When my Mum was a child the current house was built, some of the furniture including cupboards, dressers and chairs were moved from the old house. Everything has been covered with an annual coat of ‘oil paint’ – a gloss household paint.

I can remember when the farm started to get grants from the EEC (also known as the Common Market), my grandmother decided to get rid of the old wooden chairs and buy new ones with vinyl covered foam seats.

Around this time, the rural areas of Ireland began to see bungalows and cars proliferate. The main reason was agricultural grants making farming less of a hand-to-mouth existence and the publication of an architectural plan catalogue by Jack Fitzsimmons called Bungalow Bliss. This allowed multi-generational living on the family farm and commuting to work in the town. The homes were modern, light, airy and despised by Ireland’s intelligentsia.

I am just old enough to remember electricity going into the farm house. While Ireland was economically backward; the farm was notably late in having electricity installed. In fact, pylons had gone across the land for years earlier and electricity had first been put in to power the milking parlour. When I was in my teens an extension was built with a hot water tank, radiators, a bathroom and flushing toilets.

The old house was replaced with a hay shed and a couple of outhouses. An animal crush was built by my Dad who is handy with building and steelwork, including custom-lengthened gates. The crush was to help with treatment of the animals. There’s not much else you can do if you want to vaccinate or give medicine to cattle that weighed as much as a small car (at the time). When we’d go back as a family, gates needed maintaining including remedial repairs and repainting. My Dad and I (ok I was very young and more of a hindrance) built a concrete flowerbed in the front of the house.

The front garden and front of the house.

When I lived there it was expected that I would start contributing labour by the time I was primary school age. Harvesting peas, carrots, parsnips, potatoes and rhubarb from the front garden. Sweeping inside the house, outside the house and fetching turf from the shed where it was stored to keep the solid fuel cooker (range) going.

Then I moved up helping herd in cattle or sheep, cleaning up after animals. Collecting bales of hay or moving them around for feeding. Feeding the farm dogs and chickens before finally collecting eggs. Helping to put up electric fences or ‘foot turf’ arranging it in a way to help it dry out prior to being stored as fuel. These were things my parents had done as children too. The Island felt atemporal linking past, present and future in the moment, the roots were clear. We never felt poor, there was always food on the table, a warm house in winter that was free from damp.

We didn’t even get bored. Doing manual labour on a farm tires you out, there was the weekly newspapers to read, and the countryside itself (particularly with a child’s imagination). Up to my teens there was sufficiently little light pollution that I could see the delicate band of the Milky Way and major stars. Because of this, I am comfortable with a good amount of rustic living if needs be.

If tractors were needed for making the hay or the silage, my Uncle would hire a contractor to take care of it. My cousin was the first person to introduce a tractor on the farm for the everyday chores such as putting out winter feed or cleaning up the yard and spreading manure.

Land

The land and the area around it had Maddens living there since at least the 15th century and likely earlier in one form or another. Madden is an anglicised spelling of Ó Madáin, meaning descendant of Madán. Over time, the family name spread around the world due to members of large families having to find their way in the world and economic emigration. Of my generation, we’re in the UK, Canada, Germany, the US and Ireland at the moment. Previously we’d been in China, Hong Kong and across the Middle East. In my family, we were the first generation to get a university education. But all of us have The Island in common.

Keeping people on the land, has been as much a political endeavour as it is a commercial one now. Yet despite government grants, small holdings like The Island struggle to keep going. Even if they are operated as a part-time farm. The countryside has been depopulated separating families from their roots, at the same time as a housing crisis sweeps the country.

Roots

Roots bind and also tie. Pre-internet letters and phone calls bridged the gap with those at home. My Mum and Dad still call home on a special phone tariff. I am connected to one of my cousins by WhatsApp and older family relatives and neighbours via Facebook.

Trying to go to school with an askew tie or scuffed shoes would bring an admonishment about disgracing the family name. And sure enough gossip did get home as I grew up both in Ireland and in an Irish neighbourhood with people who were schoolmates of my Mum. All of which reinforced the ties. More recently, they have mostly been awakened and reaffirmed going to funerals of family friends and relatives.

Roots have also been lucrative for Ireland. The country is an expensive tourist destination, yet managed to attract descendants from Australia, New Zealand, mainland Britain and the US to visit home. Often centuries after their ancestors had got on the boat.

Before decline in Irish immigration to the US, it was a market for made-in-Ireland products including Arklow Pottery, Carrigaline Pottery, Waterford Crystal and the Kilkenny Design Workshop. While the revenue was grateful, there is also largely a sense of otherness that the natives feel to their wider diaspora, which adds an underlying tension to those roots.

Up until they retired, my Mum would not go to our local GP or dentist, but instead suffer until she went home to Ireland and sought out to the local family doctor and a dentist that she’d gone to school with.

It’s not only Ireland that has this pull. Overseas Chinese flock to their ancestral home despite centuries of living in Singapore and elsewhere. Hong Kong Chinese supported the mainland due to complex family ties, even through the great leap forward and the cultural revolution.

Self

American academic Amy Cutler’s study on the sense of connectedness to roots had a number of results. Roots affected sense of self in Americans and an increased likelihood of negative life outcomes was found to correlated with the disconnected. Her work has been based on survey and interview research conducted from writing her doctoral thesis. She since kept up the line of research while holding a teaching position to find out more about these correlations.

Elias and Brown found some link between the connectedness to roots and mental wellbeing, but they also admit that understanding that linkage is nascent at best. Ambeskovic et al has work that suggests understanding one’s roots might help better understand challenges to mental wellbeing – based on animal experiments. Their work went back four generations.

Further information

Looking back to look forward | Irish in Britain

The “ideal self” stands alone: A phenomenological psychological descriptive analysis of Anglo Saxon American self-concept formation in relation to ancestral connectedness | Amy Cutler and Anglo Saxon American Self-Concept Formation in Relation To Ancestral Connectedness | Ame Cutler

At Home in the Ancestral Landscape by Solène Prince and Katherine Burlingame

The role of intergenerational family stories in mental health and wellbeing – Alexa Eliasand Adam D. Brown

Ancestral Stress Alters Lifetime Mental Health Trajectories and Cortical Neuromorphology via Epigenetic Regulation by Mirela Ambeskovic, Olena Babenko, Yaroslav Ilnytskyy, Igor Kovalchuk, Bryan Kolb & Gerlinde A. S. Metz

July 31, 2024
July 2024 newsletter
July 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my July 2024 newsletter, this newsletter which marks my 12th issue. I hope the wettest part of the summer is behind me. This time last year, I didn’t set out to get to 12 issues. I thought I would try three and see where I got to. You’d think I would have had it nailed down by now, but it’s still evolving, finding its voice in an organic process. Getting to this point felt significant, I think it’s down to the weight of the number 12.

12 as a number is loaded with symbolism. The Chinese had a 12 year cycle that they called the ‘earthly branches’ and were matched up with an animal of the Chinese zodiac.

Odin had 12 sons, the Hittites had 12 gods of the underworld. Mount Olympus was home to 12 gods who had vanquished the 12 titans. Lictors who were civil servants assisting magistrates with duties carried a bundle of 12 rods to signify imperial power. The Greeks gave us 12 member juries and both western and Islamic zodiacs have 12 signs.

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.
- Warped media constructs – what marketers and their advisers think about media channels versus what works and what should be measured.
- I contributed to the Rambull newsletter with a selection of my favourite places in London.
- End of culture – I disagree with some of what Pip Bingemann said about culture and advertising, but he made some interesting discussion points that I went through and annotated or knocked down.
- A bit about the Zynternet phenomenon and interesting things from around the web.
- A bit about BMW’s The Ultimate Driving Machine and other things that caught my interest.
Books that I have read.
- Dogfight – Silicon Valley based journalist Fred Vogelstein was writing for publications like Wired and Fortune at the time Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. He had a front-row seat to the rivalry between the two brands. The book is undemanding to read but doesn’t give insight in the way that other works like Insanely Great, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Accidental Empires did. Part of this might be down to the highly orchestrated public relations campaigns happening at the time. (Vogelstein wrote about his experiences with Microsoft’s PR machine for Wired back in 2007). Instead Vogelstein documents developments that I had largely forgotten about like music labels launching albums as multimedia apps on the new iPhone ecosystem. It’s a workman-like if uninspiring document.
- This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton seemed to be a must-read document in the face of an imminent Labour party victory in the general election. Hutton’s The State We’re In was the defining work of wonkish thinking around policy as Labour came into power under Tony Blair in 1997. Three decades later and Labour is poised to rule again during a time of more social issues and lower economic performance. The people are poor and the economy has been barely growing for over a decade. The State We’re In was a positive roadmap of introducing long-term investment culture into British business and upgrading vocational education. This Time No Mistakes is an angrier manifesto of wider change from media and healthcare to government involvement in business. Both books outlined a multi-term roadmap for politicians. In the end, Labour didn’t deliver on The State We’re In‘s vision; this time they are even less likely to do so.
- Dark Wire – Joseph Cox was one of the journalists whose work I followed on Vice News. He specialises in information security related journalism and turns out the kind of features that would have been a cover story on Wired magazine back in the day. With the implosion of Vice Media, he now writes for his own publication: 404 Media. Dark Wire follows the story of four encrypted messaging platforms, with the main focus being on Anon. Anon is a digital cuckoo’s egg. An encrypted messaging service designed for criminals, ran as an arms length front company for the FBI. Cox tells the complex story in a taunt in-depth account that brings it all to life. But the story isn’t all happy endings and it does question the threats posed to services like Signal and WhatsApp if law enforcement see criminals moving there.
- I went back and revisited Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff. Once a touchstone of public intellectuals and media wonks, it’s rather different than I remember it from the first reading I had of it at the start of my agency career. More of my thoughts on subjects covered in the book from authoritarian regimes to patient-centric medicine here.
Not a book, but really enjoying Yaling Jiang’s newsletter Following the Yuan that looks at a mix of consumer marketing stories in China with a balanced and analytical approach. Social listening platform YouScan have an interesting insights newsletter, where you can subscribe to here.

Things I have been inspired by.

Lean web design.

I have been keen on lean web design, especially has web page sizes have ballooned over the past decade with little benefit in functionality. However Wholegrain Digital have taken this idea in a new direction by looking at a websites typical carbon footprint. Mine came out better than 97 percent of websites they’d tested so far.

Crushing conformity with creativity

Samira Brophy of IPSOS and Tati Lindenberg of Unilever were at Cannes and talked through some of the dirt is good campaigns and how Unilever switched plot lines in an inventive manner to make better campaigns that fit in with Unilever’s socially forward orientation.

The Arsenal example that they show is a really nice twist on girl plays soccer, kit gets cleaned trope and captures the essence of fandom.

The Future Health Index.

Philips the former consumer electronics pioneer have surveyed healthcare leaders around the world to see what their concerns are and where they may be looking to invest in the future. It’s an interesting read. When I have worked on health clients in the past, we’ve usually focused on what the relevant prescribing healthcare professional thoughts and any patient insights we could glean.

There was a big focus on automation (AI was a particular focus for respondents in countries with distinct healthcare challenges. However the respondents caveated the move to automation with this bit of wisdom:

Automation can help relieve staff shortages, if used right
The Future Health Index 2024 – Philips

Given the old heuristic of about 70 percent of IT projects not meeting the goals set for them, one can understand why there is a degrees of healthy skepticism in leaders and the staff who work with them.

Remote monitoring was one of the most popular areas for healthcare leaders wanting to use clinical decision support software (powered by AI). Curiously, preventative care ranked much lower.

Finally, there was some good news for pharmaceutical companies, negotiating lower prices for drugs was pretty low down on the list for the way leaders thought that they could make financial savings. Though this was tempered in a greater interest in ‘value-based billing’.

State of the (online) union.

From the late 1990s onwards, Mary Meeker’s snapshot of the technology sector was a must read presentation. Meeker came to mainstream fame leading the Netscape IPO while at Morgan Stanley. Early the same year she published The Internet Report – which launched a thousand agency slide decks and was a reference for the investment community during the dot com boom.

The themes of Meeker’s reports over the years followed the development of online:
- E-commerce
- Mobile internet
- Online advertising and search
- Rise of Chinese internet companies
Meeker left investment banking to join VC Kleiner Perkins and eight years later set up her own venture capital firm. During COVID-19 Meeker’s internet report wasn’t published for the first time since 1995.

Now it’s returned, you can find the latest issue here. In the meantime, while Meeker took an AI-focused approach to her latest report LUMA Partners have looked at the advertising technology ecosystem in more detail. You can find their comprehensive report here. An honorary mention to Benedict Evans’ annual presentation as well that is even more theme based in style.

Marvel x NHS blood donation

Disney’s partnership with NHS opens up access to a wider potential donor base.

Things I have watched.

Dark Hearts (Newen)

I don’t watch BBC iPlayer all that much, but occasionally I do find some ‘gold’. Dark Hearts (or Cœurs noirs literally Black Hearts) is a French series about a team looking for terrorist weapons, terrorist schemes and French ISIS members in Iraq circa 2016. It’s got the kind of gritty tense feel of SEAL Team or Zero Dark Thirty.

Chronos is a short film very much in the vein of Koyaanisqatsi. In Chronos the director tries to journey through thousands of years in history through the medium of timelapse photography. It’s a beautiful piece of film, but looks very ‘everyday’ now due to the time-lapse functions provided in our smartphones and generative AI services. Film-maker Ron Fricke had to build his own cameras to shoot the footage.

Hong Kong cinema is in a bit of a weird place at the moment. Its most bankable stars are in their 50s and early 60s – though they are holding off aging well. Cantonese culture in general is being squeezed out by mainland media, as well as the rise of Korean and Thai cinema. The current national security laws mean that previous bestsellers like Infernal Affairs or Election can no longer be made in the territory and even a retrospective showing of them could be in a legal grey area. The Goldfinger gets around this by going back to Hong Kong’s go-go era of the 1970s and 1980s and draws on the story of the Carrian Group which went belly up in the midst of a corruption and fraud scandal saw a bank auditor killed and buried in a banana tree grove. Lawyer John Wimbush was found dead in his home swimming pool. A nylon rope around his neck tethered to a concrete manhole cover at the bottom of the pool. So The Goldfinger has a rich vein of material to mine. The Goldfinger starts off during the Hong Kong police mutiny against the ICAC. it follows the rise of Tony Leung as Henry Ching Yat-yin (presumably to avoid legal trouble with George Tan founder of the Carrian Group, who only died during COVID). Ching then has a cat-and-mouse chase with Andy Lau’s Lau Kai-yuen, an inspector of the ICAC. I enjoyed The Goldfinger immensely, CGI and green screen was used to fill in for old Hong Kong which is substantially changed over the decades since. The ‘gweilo’ in the film were over-acted which was distracting, but the Hong Kong talent was top drawer. The more fantastical aspects of it reminded me a bit of Paul Schrader’s Mishima biopic.

The Great Silence is one of the greats of the spaghetti western genre. It was shot in a ski resort in the Dolomites and in a studio of fake snow. That alone would have made it highly unusual. The film was directed by Sergio Corbucci who was more famous for Django. Eureka’s Masters of Cinema have done a fantastic job of putting together a great print and commentary from experts including Alex Cox. It’s probably the best role that Klaus Kinski played in his considerable film career. Even though it’s a western, the underlying politics of the film make it surprisingly contemporary. That’s as much as I can say without giving the plot away.

Useful tools.

Better Reddit search

Google search has become much more limited in its capability for a number of reasons. Giga uses Reddit posts as its source material for search results. It can be useful in research, beyond trying to trawl Reddit using Google advanced search.

Mood board research

Historically, I have been a big fan of Flickr’s image search because of its ‘interestingness’ feature. Same Energy is a tool that matches the vibe of an image that you submit with other images.

Manifestos

A great collection of manifestos and tools to help manifesto writing for brand planners.

The sales pitch.

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

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my July 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into August!

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
July 24, 2024
Zynternet + more things

Zynternet is a portmanteau made up of Zyn and internet. If you’re reading this internet is self-explanatory, the Zyn in question is tabacco-free Skoal bandit type nicotine pouches. Zyn comes in a tin and has various flavours.

According to journalist Max Read, the Zynternet is a kind of 90s to early 2000s sports obsessed ‘lad’ type culture; but in the 2020s. There are shades of ‘white van man’ in there as well.

a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings–mostly but by no means entirely male–has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture.
Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet | Max Read

Despite Read’s definition defining it as a 20 to 30-something thing, the subculture seems to bleed into 40-something Dads and draws on creators like Barstool Sports. They’re less extreme than the Andrew Tate acolytes. They care more about sports and professional golf than they do about current affairs and politics. But they’ll be voting Republican. They like college sports, sports betting, light beers and Zyn nicotine pouches.

The culture has grown prominent on the laissez-faire Musk era Twitter.

Zynternet stretch

It would be very easy to point to the Zynternet audience and draw parallels to the ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. And then go down a dystopian k-hole.

I’ll leave the last words to David Ogilvy for those despairing about the Zynternet:

You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who’ll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.
David Ogilvy

TL;DR if you’re not reaching the zynternet, you’re probably not doing political marketing properly. More related content here.

Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet | Read Max.

‘Hawk Tuah Girl’ has our attention. Next, she would like our money. | BusinessInsider

How the Right Won the Hawk Tuah Girl | Slate

‘Hawk tuah,’ the Zynternet, & the bro-vote; plus, cowboys are having a moment | It’s been a minute on NPR

Business

Destructive investing and the siren song of software • Apperceptive and Goldman Sachs on AI: GEN AI: TOO MUCH SPEND, TOO LITTLE BENEFIT? (PDF)

Consumer behaviour

Changing Trends Due To Japan’s Ageing Population – Tokyoesque

28% of Britons say the outcome of general elections has little to no impact on them personally | YouGov

Culture

Architect I.M. Pei never wanted a retrospective. How Hong Kong got to host one at last | South China Morning Post – iconic despite not teaching or having a theory, just by doing. What’s fascinating about the Hong Kong exhibition is how it looks to address the ‘Chineseness’ of Pei. The discussion goes somewhat along the lines of ‘Yes he had Chinese ancestors, but did he write or speak Chinese?’. We know that he at least wrote Chinese.

The Vogue Archive — Google Arts & Culture

Design

Longevity by design | Apple – interesting whitepaper on how Apple designs in reliability and physical resilience

A massive Lego theft ring was busted by the cops | Quartz – any form of value that can be resold will be taken

Energy

Generative AI is a climate disaster | Disconnect AI

Finance

Li Ka-shing’s CK Infrastructure considering secondary listing overseas | South China Morning Post

EU ends Apple Pay antitrust probe with binding commitments to open up contactless payments | TechCrunch

Gadgets

HP is ditching its bait-and-switch printer DRM — but only for LaserJets – The Verge

Can Samsung’s new Galaxy Ring smart device help its China comeback? | South China Morning Post

Health

David Beckham is ‘strategic investor’ in Hong Kong’s Prenetics to set up IM8 health brand | South China Morning Post – IM8 will focus on “cutting-edge” consumer health products, the Nasdaq-listed Prenetics said, without divulging the financial details of Beckham’s investment

How to

Marcus Byrne – Midjourney prompts

Innovation

Walmart delivery drones being shot by Americans | Quartz – only in America

Japan

Dami Lee on Akira’s Neo Tokyo.

Luxury

Content or couture? Balenciaga’s 30-minute dress becomes the flashpoint of the season | Vogue Business – “It feels a little like a fast fashion iteration of haute couture,” says Victoria Moss, fashion director of The Standard, of the swirling mass of black nylon. “This feels at odds with what fashion at this level should be, which is exquisitely made pieces that somewhat justify their extreme pricing.” She adds that many invest in couture to have garments perfectly fitted to their bodies — and made to last for years.

“Is it beautiful? That’s debatable. Is it impressive? Not really. Is it brazen? Absolutely. Is it a meditation on the creative process? Maybe. Are we bored of these kinds of gimmicks at Balenciaga? Clearly not, as Demna’s work continues to be both a lightning rod and a conversation starter. “Call it ‘pret-a-polarize’,” says fashion journalist and ‘Newfash’ podcast host Mosha Lundström. “To my eye and understanding, I see this look as content rather than couture.”

Why Peter Copping Is a Good Choice to Lead Lanvin – Puck

Materials

A New Age of Materials Is Dawning, for Everything From Smartphones to Missiles – WSJ

Marketing

In Singapore, McDonald’s new metaverse unlocks perks for Grimace NFT holders | Trendwatching – while crypto and NFTs were seen as a flash in the pan by western marketers, they seem to have had a deeper longer-lasting resonance in Singapore.

Opinion: Why Oracle Advertising Is Really Shutting Down | AdWeek

Playbrary – by national library board of Singapore. It uses text based games (think Dungeons and Dragons) to introduce Singaporeans to classic books

With AI-generated videos, Cadbury’s helps Aussies and Kiwis celebrate sporting volunteers – production-wise it is Jib-Jab vs. generative AI

Media

Paramount CEOs Say ‘Business As Usual’ After Merger, As Layoffs Loom – Business Insider

Lonely Planet exits China, sparking nostalgia among netizens | Dao Insights

Online

Google considered blocking Safari users from accessing its new AI features, report says – 9to5Mac

How Influencers and Algorithms Are Creating Bespoke Realities for Everyone | WIRED

OpenAI Faces More Lawsuits Over Copyrighted Data Used to Train ChatGPT – Business Insider

U.S. says Russian bot farm used AI to impersonate Americans : NPR and DOJ seizes ‘bot farm’ operated by the Russian government | The Verge

The trouble with age-gating the internet – POLITICO

Retailing

Fast fashion frenzy: 62M Zara items on Vinted reveal the paradox of recommerce | Trendwatching

Security

Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Reuters – yes stories like this are funny because ‘modern’ Japan with its flip phones, fax machines and floppy discs are an anachronism. But there’s a few other things to consider. There might be issues in terms of investment a la the NHS and critical systems that for whatever reason can’t be ported on to modern systems (like the problems had with security based on ActiveX).

Dumb systems also have security benefits, you can’t steal nearly as much data on even a compressed floppy disk as you can on a USB stick.

How Apple Intelligence’s Privacy Stacks Up Against Android’s ‘Hybrid AI’ | WIRED

Defense AI startup Helsing raises $487M Series C, plans Baltic expansion to combat Russian threat | TechCrunch

Software

Interesting use cases for generative AI in China which sounds like a plot line from Ghost In The Shell.

Baidu – World No. 1? – Radio Free Mobile – is Baidu ERNIE really the number one generative AI service? It depends on if the numbers are true. 14 million developers, 950,000 models within the eco-system

Alphabet Shelves Its Interest in HubSpot (GOOGL, HUBS) – Bloomberg

Technology

China plays down importance of lithography tools in semiconductor challenges – Interesting report from Taiwan’s DigiTimes semiconductor trade magazine: China seems to be deliberately playing down the importance of lithography tools as it identifies the challenges for the development of its semiconductor industry in a recently published dossier.

Telecoms

Starlink Mini is now available for anyone in the US to roam – The Verge

Tools

Cassidy | The AI Workspace for your team

Wireless

Germany orders ban on Chinese companies from its 5G network | FT

Switching from Google Photos to iCloud will soon be a lot less painful – The Verge

July 17, 2024
Warped media constructs
Where did warped media constructs come from?

Warped media constructs as an idea originated from a few observations I made. The first was an article by Magic Numbers that examined the distribution of marketing spend across various media channels compared to the percentage of profit they generate. It was based on a piece of research done called Profit Ability 2.

A chart in the article caught my attention. While all channels contribute to profit, some have more comprehensive long-term effects than others. Any channel below (or to the right of) the red line represents a greater proportion of contribution to overall profit returns than the proportion of the marketing budget allocated to it.

Based on this chart: linear television, radio and podcasts and print advertising offer the best value for money for businesses.

What’s interesting is that two out of three of these channels are viewed as legacy media that brands are keen to move away from. When I worked at Unilever, the global media spend for the brands I managed amounted to about 92 per cent on television advertising. Some markets allocated even higher percentages.

The second influence for this post on warped media constructs was a post by Tom Goodwin.

Goodwin spent the best part of a decade working in senior roles for media buying businesses in very technology-centred roles.

It’s only just dawned on me that the reason Traditional Advertising is quite good and Digital ads are uniformly terrible is this.

Media owners always knew they were in the business of selling eyeballs.

Digital media companies think they are in the business of selling clicks.

Our core competence becomes how we see the world.

If you were a traditional media owner , your “job” was to attract , to respect , to inform, to tantalize, to satiate attention and repeat business

If you were a digital media owner, you were a tech company using algorithms to trick, harass, optimize, chase , game, attention by trying out any one of Billions of bits of content , made for free by users.

So while TV companies and traditional media owners are selling attention and eyeballs.

Digital media companies are selling clicks and data that show they create success.

The philosophy of traditional media is actually far more useful for longer term business success with advertising

For MOST companies of any scale, taste and longevity, digital media thinking is entirely wrong

But tech thinking swayed the market , they became so dominant and valuable, and profitable, nobody has the balls to call out how dumb this actually is and how much it’s degraded advertising.

I just wish we could apply the thinking of traditional media , the need to respect , to seduce , to value , to reward human attention , to digital media , because that’s where most people spend ALL of their time.
Tom Goodwin on LinkedIn

His post made me wonder about why such warped media constructs were widespread, when the flaws of lower performing media were readily apparent?

What does the data tell us about media?

The Profit Ability 2 research is a robust study of the UK media market. It took data from five media buying agencies looking at 141 brands in 14 sectors. it was based on a three-year media spend (2021-2023) and across ten media channels. Over a third of the brands matched pre-and-post COVID.

Retail media is one area that I would have liked to see examined in a bit more depth, given its rising popularity and ability to challenge generic PPC and online display advertising.

Media that is often the most lionised and championed by media agencies, notably paid social and programmatic display media were outshone by media types that have been declining investment by marketing teams over the past two decades.

This isn’t a new phenomenon as Ebquity research back in 2018, showed that there was a considerable gap between what marketers and agencies thought were effective, versus real-world evidence.

Secondly, this data indicates that brands are not using the channels in the best way for the long term interests of their business. There is also a correlation with declining campaign effectiveness rates.

Why do we have warped media constructs?

This pivot towards warped media constructs has benefited everyone but advertising agencies. And it would be reasonable to hypothesise that agencies chasing incremental growth, enterprise software vendors and consultancies have been leading large corporates up a digital focused route that provides data and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and marketing ROI.

Agencies’ legacy businesses are fading as the vast majority of
incremental marketing spend is directed online. Digital growth is
accruing to leading publishers, enterprise software and consultancy
firms, while technology enables marketers to do more in-house.
Market share loss is already evident in slower organic growth, but
trading multiples fail to recognise the heavy dependence on M&A.
Fragmentation. Almost 80% of every incremental advertising dollar spent globally accrues to digital. As their legacy traditional media businesses are fading, agencies are failing to capture digital growth, resulting in a lower market concentration in favour of new entrants empowered by technology
Redburn Atlantic (equity research paper): Ad Agencies Marginalised (2016) by Bianca Dallal, Matt Coupland and Mandeep Singh.

Advertising industry commentator Michael Farmer alluded to this change in his newsletter Madison Avenue Insights back in 2020.

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.
Madison Avenue Insights | Creative agencies: winning the battle but losing the war

Platforms like Facebook have repeatedly tried to prove that they can substitute for linear TV in advertising campaigns since the late 2000s with varying degrees of success.

The Devil is in the details.

Remember the question about what the data tells us about media? Let’s examine the data in more detail.

One of the key phrases on the slide plotting out the different media sources is ‘full profit returns’. This term is quite important to bear in mind. Consider how these media channels work.

Long-term memory model or brand-building channels
- Linear television adverts
- BVoD (Broadcaster Video on Demand)
- Radio and podcasts
- Cinema
- Online video
- Print advertising
Good brand building content that we are sufficiently exposed to can stay with us for decades and even become part of culture.

Short-term brand activating channels
- Generic PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
- Paid social
- Display advertising
This means that once you have clicked on the ad and gone to a destination, the advertisement has largely had its effect.

The Long and the Short of it

Now if we look at the performance of these media types over full payback, sustained payback and immediate payback we see that each these media channels serve short-term or longer-term goals. Time matters, Profit Ability 2 found that 58 percent of advertising’s total profit generation happens after the first 13 weeks.

If you are a digital-first organisation, or looking at ‘last-touch’ attribution, your measurement is capturing less than 40 percent of profit generated by advertising depending on the marketing mix of the campaign. Your organisation’s marketing culture could be leaving substantial marketing generated profits unharvested with an overly short term focus and less efficient over longer timelines than a financial quarter.

Binet and Field established some useful heuristics for thinking about marketing spend, which can help shape media choices from a macro perspective of brand-building and brand-activating activities.
- Immediate payback – profit derived in the same week as the advertising.
- Sustained payback – profit derived from week 14 to 2 years of advertising.
- Full payback – profit derived over the full 2 year period.
Anything above the yellow line makes a positive contribution relative to the proportion of marketing investment. Linear television works when used consistently and has a long-term impact.

Paid social media is about achieving immediate results, being a very tactical channel by nature.

Print advertising is unique in serving equally well across immediate goals, sustained campaigns, and delivering long-term results.

Each media channel can play its role based on the communication objectives. Their effectiveness also depends on how they work together.

A second consideration is the channel’s reach in the population. Print is interesting as a universal channel for consumers who read print publications, from older Telegraph readers to Monocle magazine-toting hipsters. However, it’s less useful if you’re looking to reach a football-mad teenager. Ebiquity in its analysis of Profit Ability 2 talks about a related concept called saturation:

The study analysed the saturation point for each channel, which is the last point where every pound invested in a channel generates at least £1 profit.

It found that TV has the highest saturation point. Advertisers can increase investment in TV to a higher level than other media and it will continue to generate a profitable return.

Based on immediate payback (i.e. payback within one week of investment), Linear TV advertising on average hits saturation at the highest spend level – £330,000 – nearly triple the equivalent scale of the next largest channel (Print) and over 8-times the scale of Online Video.
Profit Ability 2: The new business case for advertising | Ebiquity

Reflecting on my experience at Unilever: I wasn’t brought in to help digitise the marketing mix away from television because digital was an ineffective channel, but because linear television wasn’t as good a platform for reaching busy young mums as it had been previously. We had to broaden the media mix to reach them, which meant more investment in online video and paid social media.
In retrospect, we focused on reach, deprioritising consideration of the communication objectives. BVoD, radio, and podcasts might have had greater weighting if I were to do it again.

This might all change

If a channel became more expensive, you would get less value for your money; it would be equivalent to raising the yellow line. Conversely, reducing the cost of the media would be equivalent to lowering the yellow line.

Cost inflation

Price inflation for larger clients likely endangers cinema, display advertising, online video and BVoD in client budgets first. There may be a strong case at present to allocate more spend to channels that would encourage branded searches, to improve the effectiveness of a reduced PPC spend. Examples of these channels would include public relations, print advertising and television.

Job to be done / payback period

An emergency locksmith will have a very different budget and timeline for marketing return compared to an aftershave brand. The emergency locksmith wants to rank top in local search on mobile devices to get a call-out; they are far less likely to consider brand building and word-of-mouth. The exception to this rule would be at the top of the market, like Banham in central London, which would be providing more of a concierge security service.

Regulation

I have worked with pharmaceutical clients where most of the communications we were doing had to be addressed directly to healthcare professionals. In that case, you have a much more limited palette of possible communication channels.

You face a similar situation if you are looking to market regulated consumer products like sports betting, gambling, alcohol, cannabis and tobacco-related products or vapes. The channel limitations are based on screening off protected audiences or reducing the chance of positive brand attributions. Regulators don’t want smoking to appear cool.

So what’s the best media channel based on our warped media constructs?

It depends. The good news is that all advertising channels analysed in Profit Ability 2 generated a positive payback from advertising when sustained effects are accounted for.

You can find similar posts here.

More information

How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp.

Madison Avenue Insights | Creative agencies: winning the battle but losing the war

Profit Ability 2: Thinkbox report, Ebiquity write up, The new business case for advertising presentation.

What the latest effectiveness stats reveal about moneyball media choice | Magic Numbers.

The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies by Les Binet and Peter Field.

Ebquity | Intel (2018). Re-evaluating Media: What the evidence reveals about the true worth of media for brand advertisers. United Kingdom: RADIOCENTRE. (PDF).

Facebook is a lower quality medium than TV, says marketing academic – Brand Republic News

TubeMogul Partners With Facebook to Help Brands Extend TV Audience Reach to Digital | Adweek

Do TV Ads Drive Facebook, Twitter Engagement? (Study) | AdWeek

Mediatel: Newsline: Starcom: TV is now twice the price… but not twice as good -“There’s still nothing better than [a 30 second ad],” Dan Plant said on a panel at Future of TV Advertising Global. “Unfortunately it costs twice as much now – and it hasn’t got twice as good at what it was doing. You pay twice as much to achieve the same thing.”

Facebook suffers setback in quest to topple TV ad dominance | Digital – Ad Age – couldn’t get sufficiently high rates on ads that it was showing on connected TV devices.

Facebook and Google, Two Giants in Digital Ads, Seek More – The New York Times – Facebook combining Nielsen TV data, treating its ads like TV. and Google plays catch-up with targeting by email address.

What’s behind P&G’s cutback on targeted Facebook ads? | EJ Insight (Hong Kong Economic Journal) – To reach 5,000 targeted viewers on Facebook, the spending needed can reach the equivalent of that required to reach a million TV viewers, according to Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, which tests ads for effectiveness

Thinkbox Media Mix Navigator.
July 1, 2024