Ged Carroll

Category: hong kong | 香港 | 홍콩 | 香港

哈囉 – here you’ll find posts related to Hong Kong. That includes the territory, the culture, business, creativity and history. I lived and travelled to Hong Kong a number of times, so sometimes the content can be quite random.

In addition, I have long loved Cantonese culture and cuisine, so these might make more appearances on this category. I am saddened by the decline in the film and music production sectors.

I tend to avoid discussing local politics, and the external influence of China’s interference in said politics beyond how it relates to business and consumer behaviour in its broadest context.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Apple Daily launched a new ad format that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in branding as well as Hong Kong.

If there are subjects that you think would fit with this category of the blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • People that made 2014

    2014 has been a year of disruption for me. I changed jobs. I changed where I lived. Here are some of the people that made 2014 for me:

    My Hong Kong partner-in-crime Calvin Wong who brought a wealth of expertise in measurement and analytics to our role at Burson-Marsteller and is a great friend

    My former colleague Emma Xu Meng lin, who has just started a new role at Landor Beijing, we learned a lot about WeChat as we set up and ran the CIVB (the Bordeaux wine marketing board WeChat account. Wine consumption is just one sign of China’s rapidly growing middle class.

    My good friend and go to creative Stephen Holmes at Bloodybigspider. If you are looking for someone to deliver a challenge brief in a tight timeline, pick up the phone and give them a call

     Tom List at Sysomos who has put up with some of my annoying questions around advanced use of the Sysomos social media monitoring tool.

    My good friend Cecily Liu at China Daily, who is always a great source of intellectual discussion across a range of topics.

    My friend Becky McMichael over at Ruder Finn, and Alex Banks at Social Bakers, both of whom I caught with far too little as this year was exceptionally hectic in nature.

    Who where the people that made 2014 for you? More about what I do here.

  • SLS coupe & other things that made last week

    Interesting and funny film from Mercedes for the SLS coupe AMG. The way the businessman loses his mind trying to define luxury feels like a parody of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Are the metaphysics of luxury and the metaphysics of quality the same? The SLS coupe AMG is a very impressive looking vehicle. But surely its performance is a bigger draw than its luxury, it’s ride is likely to be very firm. Especially given the AMG heritage.

    Vice put together a great documentary about a veteran tattooist in Hong Kong. His work goes back to when Hong Kong was a port of call for the merchant navy as well as the US and Royal navies.  More Hong Kong related posts here.

    I love the way Honda taps into the inner child of potential customers. With there being no truly bad cars now and green pressures, so brand and emotion becomes so much more important for car brands.  Honda has been consistently been ahead of the curve.

    PBS have animated interviews that were done with Robin Williams back in 1991, and they’re really good. Really smart and thoughtful stuff that makes you realise the huge hole that the loss of Williams made in the entertainment industry.

    TOMY’s Cocoro scanner which detects stress (and according to the maker, lies). I could see managers thinking that it would be a good idea to keep the Cocoro scanner ton their desk. Though I would keep it out of view if I were you,  as the display would be stress raising in its own right.

  • Shenzhen ecosystem

    It is hard to believe that the Shenzhen ecosystem was built over just a few decades. Just over 30 years ago China moved from a period of cultural isolation to gradually opening up to the commercial world beyond its borders. The place to naturally start this was in Guangdong province close to the then British colony of Hong Kong. A small fishing village grew to become the workshop of the world. The growth of Shenzhen was driven by investment from multi-nationals and overseas Chinese. One of the earliest industrial areas was called Overseas Chinese Town or OCT. OCT has changed from manufacturing to retail and offices for the creative industries in the former factory buildings.

    Hong Kong had built up capability and expertise in light manufacturing and clothing from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is still important for supply chain intermediaries. This was the ‘golden age’ of Hong Kong. This is how many of the Hong Kong oligarchs made their first fortunes; which they then invested overseas, in China and into the Hong Kong real estate market.

    Globalisation had started after the second world war. But the opening up of China threw it into overdrive. Hong Kong industrials moved manufacturing plants for clothing, shoes, toys, plastic goods and electrical appliances to China.

    They were joined by Taiwanese electronics manufacturers and then multinationals from Europe, America and Japan. Hong Kong clothing manufacturers provided China supply chain expertise to western retailers like Walmart.

    The Shenzhen ecosystem was built on manual production. The deft fingers of Chinese women workers allowed a lot more precision than Japanese pick-and-place machines. Which meant a lot more flexibility in manufacturing using the Shenzhen factories. You wouldn’t have an iPhone if you used pick-and-place robots on the production line.

    Electronics manufacturing

    At first, these companies were used to fatten the wallets of customers who took on the marketing and distribution of electronics in the West. The dirty secret about many PC and laptop designs was they were standard underneath. Then this cost saving was passed on to the customer as people like Dell went for close to lowest price operator based on a direct mail / online direct ordering and cut out the channel.

    Finally that wasn’t enough, and most of the laptop and PC resellers make no money. Instead the main people to profit from these sales were Microsoft which licensed it’s Windows operating system and Intel which provided the majority of compatible micro-processors capable of running Windows-compatiable applications. In the PC industry there is usually just two or three profitable manufacturers and one of them is Apple. Historically it was Dell, then Hewlett-Packard and now it is likely to have be Lenovo.

    Shrinking PC-esque computing power into the palm of one’s hand was inevitable with the rise of flash storage and Moore’s Law facilitating power-efficient processors. The challenge is battery technology, packaging and industrial design.  Apple pushed the envelope with suppliers. Hon Hai and other manufacturers installed hundreds of CNC machines to fabricate thousands of metal phone chassis. These radical changes in manufacturing capability were opened up to lower tier manufacturers raising the standard of fit and finish immeasurably over a few years.

    Now Xiaomi and Lenovo product handsets that have better build quality than many Samsung and HTC handsets. The performance is good enough (again thanks to Moore’s Law) and the handsets run the same applications. Sony, HTC and Samsung handsets look as marooned as Sony’s Vaio PC range in the Windows eco-system.

    Shenzhen’s ecosystem has been a great leveller of manufacturing and industrial design capabilities with Apple at the leading edge of what’s possible from an industrial design and materials technology.

    More information
    Shenzhen Government Online – this loads slow like they are phoning the pages in from 2002, but is informative
    The smartphone value system – An earlier piece I wrote about the challenges of the Android eco-system

  • Nescafe salesman + more things

    This Nescafe salesman is hard to refuse | Hong Kong Economic Insight – interesting use of technology, the robot Nescafe salesman in supermarkets. I wonder if other FMCG brands will look at this for shopper marketing? Softbank have used similar robot salespeople in their Softbank mobile phone shops. Softbank had an incentive, since it owned the French company that made their robots.

    Amazon to unveil new service for Chinese | Shanghai Daily – just in time for singles day

    PRSummit: ‘Earned Media Has A Distribution Problem’ | Holmes Report – pretty interesting take on things. Earned media has a relatively short time to get viewers, particularly on online platforms, compared even to newspapers. The panelists suggested using tactics for earned media amplification due to the short viewing window. The problem I see is that ‘more credible’ is trickier to prove than paid media measures

    Hong Kong can’t afford to lose the Umbrella Movement generation | Quartz – interesting analysis by Jack Ma. The loss of the umbrella movement generation would hit a city that is also greying. In addition, Hong Kong is less attractive to mainlanders than it used to be

    Game Changers | Wolff Olins & Flamingo – how consumers relate to brand and what brands get it. Game Changers is a report centred around five behaviours that Wolff Olins believe are shaping the future of business. These are ‘boundaryless’, ‘experimental’, ‘value-creative’, ‘useful’ and ‘purposeful’. What this hints at is a lot o tech related jargon around agile, iterative products and services. It also covers brand purpose.

    Apple Eyes New Uses for NFC Beyond iPhone Payments – The Information (paywall) – logical extension given that people like TfL are looking to do more of their ticketing using PayPass-like technology

    I, Cringely How to fix IBM – I, Cringely – interesting take, however it ignores the dynamic of the management with what will be increasingly active shareholders

  • Mr Switch & things that made last week

    The winning set by Mr Switch from the 2014 DMC mixing championship. What becomes apparent from the Mr Switch performance is how much digital changes turntablism as an art form and skill. Mr Switch uses a Churchill speech before cutting into hip hop standards. In the past there would be people each side to feed the records in. There is no stickered vinyl to mark cut and start points. Instead these seem to be preset on the laptop using Serato Scratch Live.

    There was much more of a focus on cutting rather than ‘musical scratches’ a la DJ Supreme.

    But a good number of skills remain, look at Mr Switch cutting from one to another record. This would be familiar to someone who had seen Chad Jackson, Cash Money or DJ Cheese win their crown. The behind the back cross fader flick is a flourish popular from when I started DJing.

    Tai Ping Advertising Co. Limited’s advert for Audi is as much an advertisement for the city of Hong Kong as much as it is for the car

    There is also a ‘making of’ film as well. The execution is right for Hong Kong, but isn’t necessarily on brand for Audi. Also the sound effects are very overdone for the pedestrian driving manoeuvres being undertaken. It makes a refreshing change from the usual Audi marketing, sponsoring society parties in showrooms

    Carli Davidson shake puppies video is just too awesome. The slow motion video captures the amount of force going on. Look at the torque steer as the front and rear paws slide in opposite direction with  each shake. Secondly the fluid nature of biology is obviously looking at the shakes themselves. You can see a similar effect when you see boxers hitting each other, but this is much cuter. 

    Ice Cube on Sesame Street. I can’t believe I just wrote that, but this is for real. It shows how hip hop has moved from underground culture that those in power tried to crush, to the mainstream. So what is it like? Ice Cube and Elmo is really, really good. 

    And finally for more serious content, a great article in Advertisng Age about Kraft getting real about online advertising, I am curious to know what took them so long and how this will impact online advertising around the world. Agencies have known about this for years, Unilever and Procter & Gamble have been trying to get change for a few years. Kraft is very behind the curve with this realisation.