Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
Dimensions of luxury as a post came together thinking about fictional influence account Gstaad Guy, Horizon Catalyst’s New Codes of Luxury report and Sense Worldwide’s Future of Luxury report.
Dimensions of luxury breaks down into three areas which Catalyst calls:
Traditional luxury
Contemporary luxury
Personal luxury
Nowadays, most luxury brands won’t fit neatly into these classifications. For instance the Swiss watch brand Blancpain would be considered to be traditional luxury, but the Swatch x Blancpain collaboration which borrows the design language of the 50 Fathoms dive watch is very much contemporary luxury. Part of this has been driven by many brands being part of large combines:
LVMH – depending when you look at the stock price, Europe’s largest company by value run by Bernard Arnault. Related to L Catterton private equity fund which has been financed deals such as Birkenstocks.
Kering – LVMH’s rival best known for Gucci. It is currently run by François-Henri Pinault
Richemont – Swiss listed group focused more on jewellery and watches than rivals. It has a range of brands including Dunhill, Montblanc and Panerai.
Swatch Group – which owns most of Switzerland’s premier watch brands
Fosun – China-based multi-sector conglomerate which owns a hodge podge of western heritage and luxury brands including Ahava, Folli Follie, Lanvin, Sergio Rossi, Silver Cross prams and St John knitwear.
Notable independents include The Rolex Trust and Hermés.
Traditional luxury
Unsurprisingly this is the kind of luxury that most people would think of. Timeless style, heirloom designs and peerless quality are likely to be the kind of language that springs to mind. When the luxury industry talks about sustainability and the circular economy, the lives of these traditional luxury products come into focus, since they are often passed down. The influencer behind Gstaad Guy in an interview with the FT talks about his favourite item of clothing being a Loro Piana vest that was his Grandad’s.
What we think of as ‘traditional’ luxury brands came out of businesses with heritage that are known for their quality
Loro Piana and Zegna were both high end fabric manufacturers before becoming ‘luxury brands’
Rolex made high quality reliable tool watches, as did Omega and Panerai.
Louis Vuitton made high quality robust trunks for travellers.
Zero Halliburton and Rimowa made cases that were ideal for air travel and protecting sensitive instruments and camera equipment. The Halliburton in Zero Halliburton actually refers to Halliburton Company who are famous for providing oilfield services.
Contemporary luxury
Contemporary luxury is where the greatest controversies of luxury tend to lie. Horizon Catalyst tend to tie up premium brands like AirBnB and Apple together with the luxury sector. It includes values like innovation and sustainability. But it doesn’t discuss what Dana Thomas calls the massification of luxury, with traditional European brands being more often being ‘Made In China’. This has driven a drive for brands to try and ‘shortcut’ their way to success. Luxury brands have adopted the techniques of streetwear brands were scarcity and limited drops fuel the ‘hype’. What Sense Worldwide called ‘Supremification’. Chanel is opening special UHNWI only boutiques. And ‘Made In China’ allowed China to develop its own ateliers.
Personal luxury
Catalyst defines personal luxury as subjective in nature, individual to each person and having a deeper connection with personal values. It could be items that might be considered treats like having their groceries delivered. Their discussion of everyday luxury would be familiar to marketers in terms of the ‘Lipstick effect’ familiar from Juliet Schor’s work during recessions. But it’s interesting that luxury is being defined by consumers and followed by brands. The classic example of this would be brands from Nike to LVMH getting on board with NFTs, following consumers and creators.
IPSOS conducts CX research on an annual basis. They surveyed 1,000 CX (customer experience) specialists around the world about the current state of CX in their businesses. The IPSOS CX research painted a complex picture of organisations. Key take outs of the CX research:
82% of respondents believed that CX investment will provide a competitive edge, but only 52% were expecting an increase investment over the next 12 months.
28% of respondents admitted that their organisation’s CX was worse than promised and only 15% of respondents consider their organisations ‘CX leaders’.
Only 52% have CX governance policies in place.
At the present time the majority of CX leaders have data integration issues and 46% now have to integrate AI as well, adding to their business challenge.
Environmentally friendly clothing brand Patagonia gets called out about the ‘greenwashing’ design of its buffalo work boots by the Rose Anvil YouTube channel who specialise in analysing boot and shoe design.
Standard Model: The Chanel J12 Eclipse Set – LUXUO – interesting, particularly given the manufacturing problems that Rolex has had with dual colour ceramic bezels. Chanel has managed to master this and master it across the whole watch. Matching bezel and case divisions.
Interesting analysis on supercar prices.
Profile of Lacoste.
Marketing
A few days of lunch time viewing from the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) media planning and strategy summit. Interesting mix of presentations and case studies.
Really interesting case study on McDonalds and how the brand has evolved over two decades in the UK.
As I write the October 2023 newsletter. it’s getting noticeably darker outside earlier, but the sunrises reward us with a wider variation of colours. And we all have Halloween to look forward to. This is the third issue and I am still finding my way writing these things. I hope that the third time’s a charm, but I will let you be the judge of that. You can read the earlier ones here.
I looked into where the phrase ‘third time’s a charm’ came from. Apparently it comes from Old English Law, if a prisoner survived three attempts at hanging and survived, they would be set free.
You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. Let’s get it started!
Things I’ve written.
Climate despair – how NGOs and companies are failing young people in the way they talk about climate change and what they can do to change their communications to increase active participation in reducing the degree of climate change.
Technopolarity – how technology is subverting the power structures of elected governments and instead empowering the likes of Elon Musk.
Clustomers – how Intuit MailChimp’s ad campaign, whilst clever, might reinforce C-suite misconceptions around marketing and advertising
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Fogg’s simple model for understanding individual behaviours has helped drive everything from health campaigns to online services. Tiny Habits how consumers and businesses can help foster behavioural change, one tiny habit at a time. More on my review of the book here.
The long awaited Mick Herron book The Secret Hours did not disappoint. It’s from the Slow Horses universe, but not a Slough House story per se. More than a nod to Boris Johnson’s stint as foreign secretary and prime minister. I will leave it at that rather than give you plot spoilers.
China A History by John Keay. Keay’s book was recommended to me by a number of people. In 535 pages he attempts the impossible in terms of covering China’s history as a civilisation through the start of Xi Jinping’s first administration. It’s a dense read – it’s well written, covering the complexity of history well. The current communist government is barely a footnote (ok exaggerating a bit here), but it puts things in perspective.
Spain A History edited by Raymond Carr. The book highlights the notable trends, intellectual and social, of each particular era in its history. Roman rule created the notion of ‘Spain’ as a distinct entity. The chapters on the Visigoth monarchy, Moorish Spain, the establishment, an empire, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, all chart the cultural, political and economic arc of Spain. It then goes on to explore 19th century liberalism and the pivot during much of the 20th century towards authoritarian rule, followed by a return to democracy and onwards up to the 21st century. My favourite chapter was about the Visigoths, which was a period I didn’t know much about prior to reading this book – the author did a particularly good job of bringing the Visigoths to life on page.
Things I have been inspired by.
Halloween. I have been looking forward to the holiday for at least a month. Growing up in an Irish household with rural origins, I had an appreciation of the changing seasons and loved the traditions around Halloween, especially tales of the fairy forts and the banshee. It’s also a big money earner, in the advertising world allowing for interesting tactical executions that couldn’t otherwise be attempted. Outside advertising, ignoring increased food sales, a third of consumers will spend 51 – 100 USD on putting together their own costume, or buying one off the rack. The most hardcore 10% of those surveyed admitted to spending 250+ USD.
I was not into costumes, instead I look forward to the most is my Mum’s barmbrack. For the first time in a few years my Mum baked a few barmbracks and sent one of them to me. It’s a Halloween tradition. The barmbrack itself is a spicy fruited bread with a texture somewhere between brioche and and a pan loaf. Traditionally, the brack would contain a ring or trinket, which would turn up in a random slice.
When I was small, commercial bakeries still used to have a an aluminium ring that looked like it was from a cheap Christmas cracker contained wrapped in greaseproof paper baked into the brack.
Downloadable recipe PDF here (Dropbox) or here (Google Drive) if you fancy baking your own over the weekend.
While we’re on the subject of food, Hope & Glory’s collaboration between Lick paint and Heinz ketchup for a ketchup shade of wall paint creates talkability, though I wouldn’t be buying it for my own home.
Buoyant Bob – I am stil not sure if Buoyant Bob is a social object, a brand, both or something else. Buoyant Bob was a successful entry into the US cannabis marketplace. The brief in the campaign was to work around restrictions in cannabis advertising and show it as the most fun brand in the space.
Buoyant Bob was released as a single: retail takeovers, vinyl records at dispensaries, and fans sharing Instagram Stories using “The Man Who Got So High” all followed.
OnlyWatch – an auction in Geneva in aid of research Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy features one-off luxury watches from all of the major Swiss timepiece houses. Some of the entries are unique colour ways but Bulgari went the extra mile with their Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble. Their watches are already well known for being some of the thinnest timepieces available. A tourbillion is a demonstration of the watchmakers art. The one in this watch is just under 2mm thick – that’s just over double the thickness of a credit card for a moving mechanical assembly. And then they managed to cover the entire titanium case and strap of the watch in marble and make a marble dial – without making the watch any bulkier than its usual ridiculously slim case. It’s not something I would wear even if I could afford it, but I am in awe of the ingenuity.
Bulgari for OnlyWatch – Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble
Finally Dentsu Health published a great must-read byline on how media and entertainment can aid health equality. More here.
Things I have watched.
I got to see The Boy and The Heron early at the BFI London Film Festival. You won’t get any plot spoilers from me here. Official release is December 26 in the UK, December 8 in Hong Kong. It’s Studio Ghibli, what else do you need to know?
General Magic – a great documentary about a Silicon Valley start-up of the same name.. Back in the early 1990s General Magic was as visionary as Apple and as hyped as WeWork. If you’ve ever worked with a start-up or care about technology give it a watch. More on my thoughts here.
The Pentagon Papers – Despite this being a made-for-TV film, James Spader does a great job of playing Daniel Ellsberg; the RAND researcher to gave the materials to the media. In terms of pacing acting and storytelling, I would put this on a par with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s film adaptation of All The President’s Men.
Tampopo is a beautifully shot Japanese film with comedic moments that tells the story of a widow, her son and their ramen shop. More on what I thought of here.
A relatively modern Halloween tradition in the Carroll family has been watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown – recommended for young and old alike. While my Dad and I usually end up watching The Crow later on. If you want more classic horror, then you could do worse than watching the livestream by the Creature Features show.
Useful tools
ITV Adlabs and Magic Numbers recovery budget planner
Pretty much essential to look at if you have responsibility for UK media spend at a brand. This allows you to examine various scenarios and see likely outcomes based on media spend. More here.
Google bundles generative AI and LLM with search
I downloaded Chrome especially to try this out, it looks a bit more mature than Bing’s initial integration of ChatGPT. Go here to give it a try if you’re a Chrome browser user.
Post-It Z-Notes
You’re workshopping something with clients or thinking something through on your own – Post-It notes are key. The own brand ones can vary from really good to useless, so spend a bit more and get proper Post-It notes. In fact, I’d advise that you go one step further and get Post-It Z-Notes. The notes alternate sides in terms of where the ‘sticky end’ is and if you lift them from the pad you get a ‘Z’ before they peel away. They come away effortlessly and work brilliantly if you have them in a desk holder.
Foldable wireless keyboard
At the start of my career, I used to have a Palm PDA ( personal digital assistant – think a smartphone, without the phone and communications bit). I also had a long commute to Luton on a daily basis. I got a lot of reading and writing done thanks to a ‘Stowaway’ foldable keyboard made by a company called Think Outside. The company no longer exists, but the desire to be able to turn my iPhone into a simple writing tool lives on. Recently, I have been using this foldable Bluetooth keyboard. It folds up, can be used on a train seat table or even an economy class aircraft seat and recharges easily. The keyboard isn’t the usual rubbery mess that you tend to get in a lot of these devices. It’s one fault so far is that it feels flimsy, but I have already got my money’s worth out of it in just a few months. I fire up the iPhone’s notes app and get to work. I can then edit and refine once I have a bit more time on my Mac at a more convenient time.
The sales pitch.
Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
The End.
Ok this is the end of my October 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. DON’T FORGET TO PUT YOUR CLOCKS BACK BEFORE YOU GO TO BED ON SATURDAY. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
Intuit Mailchimp are brave in terms of the the approach that they take to their marketing and Clustomers is a prime example of this.
Clustomers is a great campaign that builds on the frustrations that marketers face about segmentation and personalisation of communications. It is fantastically single-minded in its execution, which is what you want in an effective advert. I could have been seen how the rats nest of people could have come across as creepy rather than surreal and the art direction gets the tone right wonderfully.
But I think that the communications around clustomers to be more nuanced.
The Clustomers campaign
The Clustomers advert itself is the first point of evidence I would use is a brand building, distinctly non-personal campaign. The fact that I am writing about it, speaks a lot to its ‘talkability’. It has carved out its own small part of culture.
It looks to place MailChimp as the marketing technology vendor for start-ups and small to medium sized businesses. But like many political campaigns, it promises a simple solution to a challenge that might be more complex.
But this isn’t a campaign that will be only seen by the small business owner, or someone with a slide hustle. The message of personalisation might be received, without the nuanced understanding of marketing that MailChimp has demonstrated in the way that they’ve built the campaign. CFOs don’t have a sufficient understanding of marketing to understand this. For many of them it’s just a set of line items on the wrong side of a spreadsheet.
C-suite misconceptions
As I’ve said, I think that the message Clustomers gives is problematic in a wider context. A good deal of that problem is down to business founders and the C-suite having fundamental misconceptions on what marketing communications purpose is and how it does it.
Advertising isn’t fluffy or all about colouring in. It’s a legitimate and important tool for driving business success. The trouble is that CEOs, CFOs, founders and investors sometimes forget that fact. They’re sceptical about advertising at the best of times and often pull the plug when the economy feels wobbly.
Clustomers fuels a perception that personalisation is the key to marketing and by implication performance marketing is the only marketing required. The reality is more complex. The Ehrensberg Bass Institute’s Byron Sharp talks of ‘smart mass marketing’ and brand building as being the key for the majority of marketing activity in conjunction with personalised communication. The Institute of Practioners in Advertising has been doing sterling work trying to educate the C-suite, but technology specialists like Adobe, Google and Meta have been negating a lot of that good work done.
Portumna
Prior to COVID-19, back when I presented a lot more in public I used to present the following slide and when I talked to it I probably reflected some of what MailChimp customers would look for, and was behind Clustomers.
Portumna is the closest market town to where my family originated. My cousin still works part-time on the family farm. Portumna has been a commercial centre for centuries because of geography. It sits at a strategic crossing of the River Shannon. The Shannon divides the east of Ireland from the west of Ireland and has been a shipping way from centuries past to the present day.
A number of the shops including grocery stores, hardware and farm supplies, the sub-post office and the local pharmacy are family businesses. At least four generations of shopkeepers in the town knew my family and did business with them over the centuries.
There were life-long relationships formed. When I go home, I am loyal to the grocery store and pharmacy that my Uncle and grandparents used. The shopkeepers understood the needs of relatives who lived in the area and the kind of farm that they ran. The kind of online marketing that clustomers seeks to bring forward, is the kind of relationships that were in place in Portumna for centuries.
But those relationships were not just about personalised communications. There was a wider cultural context and even ‘brand’.
The fact that the family in question had built up trust in the community.
That they were known to be ‘respectable’.
That they had delivered for my family and people that they new in the past.
These brands were local oligarchs. They had one or two competitors at best.
So the customer mental models around farm supplies, the butcher or the grocer were very strong and constantly reinforced. And this is the kind of stuff that advertising as part of non-personal communications is best at doing.
DeBeers have resurrected their tagline A Diamond is Forever. What’s interesting is that DeBeers is focusing the campaign only in China and the United States. Whilst the heritage of A Diamond is Forever may resonate with the American audience. I am less sure about how it might resonate for Chinese consumers.
While diamonds are a good store of value, the move towards guo chao – Chinese things for Chinese people is another dynamic that may affect receptivity.
Beauty
Gen X men prefer gently-scented bodycare products over heavily-scented ones | Mintel – Despite having body odour concerns, Gen X doesn’t go for heavily scented products as they have dry, sensitive and acne-prone body skin. Among Gen X, itchiness, excessive sweat and rashes concerns stood out from those of other consumers. They are also concerned with the odour associated with the result of sweat.
Welcome to the Anti-Woke Economy | The New Republic – A fledgling parallel economy has emerged on the right, hawking everything from coffee to vitamin supplements to anti-abortion protein bars. But can a business movement born of political and cultural grievance be viable over the long term?
An inconvenient truth: Difficult problems rarely have easy solutions | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core – Individual-level interventions are often interesting and easy to implement, but are unfortunately ill-equipped to solve most major global problems (e.g., climate change, financial insecurity, unhealthy eating). Resources spent developing, pursuing, and touting relatively ineffective i-frame interventions draw resources away from the development and implementation of more effective s-frame solutions. Behavioral scientists who want to develop solutions to the world’s biggest problems should focus their efforts on s-frame (system level) solutions
Ideas
The AI and Leviathan series examining what it means if AI did actually change everything including extreme techopolarity.
Part 1 – institutional economics of an intelligence explosion
Dentsu launches paid search tool that uses AI to speed up creativity and optimization – Digiday – d.Scriptor — a new proprietary offering it’s developed to supercharge paid search, mainly in the area of ad copy development but also as a means to optimize and adapt execution. Dentsu is announcing the tool today, after pilot testing over the last several weeks. It’s meant to help with boosting the volume of creative messaging with an eye toward improved engagement rates, as well as to speed up the process of creative experimentation, and cut down on the time required to perform optimization tasks – the more variants that you cram into a Google Adwords programme the better a job it can do on optimising display based on what works. I spent a lot of time coming up with variants in spreadsheets to do this when I was freelancing
We’re Updating our Community Standards – Linktree – changes on conditions, particularly focused on sex work, presumably to cover themselves from US legislation. There are also restrictions on regulated sectors like vaping and alcohol
