Ged Carroll

Category: japan |日本 | 일본

Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.

Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.

There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.

I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.

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

  • Web services I use

    Web services I use everyday has evolved over time. I thought I’d explore what I use now, compared to my essential services nine years ago.

    Bloglines –  I have an eclectic and wide range of online reading material that I like to keep up with. Whilst I have a Google Reader account, it is set up as insurance against IAC shutting down Bloglines. I find Google Reader intrusive and not as productive as Bloglines. In addition, Bloglines works better on a mobile phone and power my blogroll

    Delicious – is my memory. I am a web pack rat and it comes in handy for research or pulling together case studies for presentations. I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks on my computer, mostly bookmarklets to take advantage of Google Translate, subscribe to a blog and pull up the local weather

    Google – as well as it being my default search engine, Google is also my currency converter, calculator, spell checker and timezone checker. The site has a surprising amount of shortcuts that make my life a lot easier. They don’t require any technical skill, more details here

    Teoma – one of the best kept secrets of the web, Teoma is my back-up search engine if Google isn’t giving me the kind of results that I want. If anything Teoma is more relevant than Google is on its search responses. It naturally doesn’t trawl as much of the web as Google and it isn’t as good for real-time or semi real-time content like the latest blog posts. But it does have a clean interface reminiscent of Google previously. If you hit the ‘Google found approximately 150,000 results’ and you can’t find what you are looking for in the first page (which you should have set to 100 results per page) then give Teoma a go

    Email – my primary personal email account is an Apple IMAP account (now sold as MobileMe), but I’m old school so I have a .mac address. I also have a couple of other IMAP accounts with a more limited circulation. IMAP is great as it allows you to sync your account across multiple devices and not pay a fortune for Microsoft Exchange

    iDisk – I know lots of people swear that Dropbox is the best, but I still like to use iDisk for large file transfers like presentations. Apple has progressively improved the product and I know it inside out

    Flickr – if Delicious is my memory of facts and figures then Flickr is my visual memory I use it as an aide memoire, image storage for my blog and as a kind of photo scrapbook

    Twitter – is the new IM. Instant messaging on my iPhone and on corporate networks can be a bit haphazard. Twitter gives you the direct message capability of IM but also allows for broadcast messages and syndication of content

    Skype – whilst all the fuss is happening in the iPhone world about Facetime I am more interested in Skype. Its combination of reasonably-priced VoIP calls and free Skype calling together with robust file transfer and chat messaging has made it ideal for business communications and keeping in touch with friends in far flung places

    LinkedIn – I’ve got business out of LinkedIn, polled opinions on the best content management system for a particular purpose and received recommendations on a web hosting company in Hong Kong. LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool

    Ten Web Services I Can’t Do Without | renaissance chambara

    Lets have a look this in terms of numbers. In the space of nine years:

    • 3/10 services no longer exist in a meaningful way
    • 4/10 services I no longer use
    • 3/10 services I still use, but are just not important to me anymore

    The key lessons to take away from these are:

    • The importance of data portability. Which is one of the reasons why I am minimally invested in Facebook
    • Always be looking out for new services that serve as a plan B
    • Steady but niche beats aspirational mass services every time. Ok so services like del.icio.us had a mass expectation pushed on them by large corporates post acquisition
    • It’s easier to make a service less useful than more useful – Skype definitely had a tipping point into the second tier for me following a user experience redesign around about the time of the Microsoft acquisition

    What does my list look like now?

    • Newsblur is my RSS reader of choice. Bloglines was shut down by IAC, so I had a choice of moving to Google Reader or FastLadder. FastLadder was an English language version of their iconic Japanese RSS reader. Livedoor got wrapped up in a financial scandal. The English language service was a distraction and eventually got shut down. Thankfully, RSS readers have a standard format to export your list of sites that you want to read called OPML files. The downside is that it has become fashionable for web designers to turn off RSS feeds on websites
    • Pinboard is my social bookmark platform of choice. Yahoo! started stripping the delicious team of its developers and they eventually transitioned their personal accounts to Pinboard. That was enough of a recommendation for me
    • Duck.com is now my first string search engine. Google is bumped to second tier. The key reason for Duck.com is privacy. It’s search quality is good enough, the search engine results page has a clean design rather like Google used to. Google still has handy vertical search options like Google Scholar and Google Translate are still top class.
    • Email – my use of email hasn’t changed at all. It has been a constant in a sea of change.
    • WeTransfer – Apple’s move from iDisk as a file system on the web to more of a tight integration with the company’s productivity apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages)
    • Flickr is still my visual memory. It’s just an awful lot more web friendly than Instagram or Pinterest. It’s longevity is remarkable given all its been through with Yahoo!
    • Messaging got a lot more fragmented. I work with friends in China so WeChat is needed, as is KakaoTalk, Messages, WhatsApp and Slack. None of which offer a perfect fit
    • Skype has been replaced by a bridging conference call number and some people that I work with use Zoom. Skype still has some uses but my use has declined
    • LinkedIn is still an important business tool. Despite constant fiddling with the format, the spam on the platform and declining candidate functionality

    Listing these web services out it makes depressing reading. Declining functionality, good products (almost) sunk by large corporate shenanigans and corporate investors. In many respects things have stood still rather than moved forward with web services. More related content here.

  • Bullet time + more things

    Bullet Time – Logic Magazine – Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. Started in Japan, but popularised massively in China. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan — washes over whatever happens next. The bullet time interface reminded me of the realtime information one would see in things like trading desks. Its an emotional barometer amongst your people for real time content.

    Mark Ritson: Binet and Field aren’t perfect but it doesn’t make them wrong | Marketing Week – well deserved defence of Les Binet and Peter Field by Mark Ritson. Models are never perfect

    Why Strangers Are AirDropping You Memes and Photos – The Atlantic – everything old is new again as Bluetooth sharing ‘Bluetoothing’ gets a refresh. Taylor Herring used this to share a job advert at the recent PR Week Awards

    Does the UK Benefit From Chinese Investment? – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – short answer no – it’s actually harmed by it as investment is power projection and compromises the UK’s strategic capability

    Mark Read: CMOs have become too much like chief communications officers | PR Week – A lot of CMOs have become too much chief communications officers, not chief marketing officers,” Read said. “Our job is to help to put the ‘market’ back into the word ‘marketing’. “Communications has an important role, but it needs to be “the right element” within the wider marketing mix, according to Read: “Marketing means: what markets are we in? What products do we offer? What prices do we do? How do we understand and anticipate consumers?”

    Despite Fears, Aviation’s Future Will Be More Automated | Time – so why the move towards more automation in cars such a good idea based on what we know about airliners from this article?

    The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs – The Atlantic – context specific

    WalktheChat | WeChat Live Streaming Case Study: 48% Sales Conversion Rate! – really interesting read. China’s mix of live-streaming and e-tailing is shopping TV for the 21st century

  • Gundam into Space + more stuff

    Japan Wants to Launch Gundam Into Space for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – I am looking forward to the next Tokyo Olympics. Not for the athletics but everything else that the Japanese organising committee wraps around it. I mean if a Gundam goes into space, what’s next? Godzilla takes part in the olympic torch relay and hands off to Shotaro Kenada on his iconic bike?

    Challenging stereotypes has become a key trend in advertising recently. Part of it is down to the movements supporting diversity and LGBTQ communities. GS Caltex have chosen to challenge the stereotypes surrounding stepmothers in Korean society with this advert. These  were run on YouTube and distributed via online fairy tale platform “Iwing” and on Naver, a leading portal in Korea. You don’t need to speak Korean to understand the gist of where campaign was going.

    A bit of oil history for you. GS Caltex is a joint venture business between what was then GoldStar (now LG) and Caltex. Caltex was an joint international joint venture between Chevron (Standard Oil of California or SOCal) and Texaco. Both of which were part of the Seven Sisters of western oil companies who dominated exploration, production and refining until the 1970s.

    We’re starting to see an increased focus on craft in advertising after a decade of obsession with performance marketing to the detriment of brand. So now is as good time as any to revisit London agency CDP (Collett Dickenson Pearce) work on Hamlet cigars during the 1970s.

    I love this cheeky send-off and backhanded tribute that BMW gave Dieter Zetsche when he retired as CEO of Mercedes-Benz. In reality Mercedes-Benz and BMW have different brand attributes and strengths.

    IDEO has commissioned an oral history of itself as a corporate video. It covers their move from industrial design to the design of ideas.

  • Toxic masculinity with P&G + more

    Toxic masculinity P&G exec behind viral Gillette ad interview — Quartzy – I’d argue that some of this work shows poor judgement in the way its executed that damaged rather than helped toxic masculinity

    Reputation Inflation | National Bureau of Economic Research – A solution to marketplace information asymmetries is to have trading partners publicly rate each other post-transaction. Many have shown that these ratings are effective; we show that their effectiveness deteriorates over time. The problem is that ratings are prone to inflation, with raters feeling pressure to leave “above average” ratings, which in turn pushes the average higher. This pressure stems from raters’ desire to not harm the rated seller. As the potential to harm is what makes ratings effective, reputation systems, as currently designed, sow the seeds of their own irrelevance. Or in plain language how ratings programmes fail over time as they get bigger.

    Toyota Already Has Upgrades for the New Supra • Gear Patrol – really interesting tension in the Supra – leave space for tuning – which is where the passion for the car grew out of whilst not gouging customers with a shonky value proposition versus rivals

    Streetwear Global Market Research | Hypebeast – this was done in association with PWC’s consulting arm

    How Streetwear Brands and Consumers are Toppling Previously Understood Notions of Luxury and Exclusivity — The Fashion Law – great 101 guide to streetwear from the perspective of people working in luxury brands. I’d also recommend this piece I wrote that would provide a lot of context around the two

    My Way or the Huawei – Peter Zeihan – I’m not a blinkered fan of Huawei, but even I’ll admit that there’s not a great deal of balance in this article

    To Many Chinese, America Was Like ‘Heaven.’ Now They’re Not So Sure. – The New York Times – “…the perspective of young Chinese is different. They don’t respect you. Nor are they afraid of you.”

  • Record Store Day 2019

    Record Store Day 2019

    Record Store Day 2019 redux. Record Store Day has moved away from its origins, to drive music fans into independent record stores and support independent record labels in a time of iTunes and Spotify. For various reasons I didn’t do any any vinyl shopping but used The Vinyl Store to compile a list of what I would have considered buying if I had been in a position to.

    My picks from Record Store Day UK 2019

    A few things:

    • Madonna’s True Blue single was one of her classic 12 inch singles. I am less convinced by the fake ‘obi’
    • Cloud One were a studio-based disco production team
    • Jazzanova’s Heatwave was given a 1980s makeover which sounds amazing
    • Lonnie Liston Smith – Space Princess is a great disco cut from the man that brought you Expansions

    Online consumer behaviour

    danah boyd on the current state of play of participatory media. I first met danah back in 2005 at the Yahoo! Campus in Sunnyvale with Bradley Horowitz. She was working on a project for Yahoo! Research back then and has kept close to youth and ‘social’ media since then.

    Design

    Even if you don’t know eBoy, you’ll recognise their work and its distinctive style. They’re doing a collaboration in customised Swatch watches. The video talks about how they work together, which is an interesting process in and of itself.

    Korea

    Asian Boss have done a collaboration with a documentary maker to bring Crossroads to YouTube. Crossroads is a documentary that shows how the Sewol Ferry disaster shaped modern Korean culture and politics. It was as big as the Poll Tax riots or the Brexit vote in the UK. It pressed the reset button on the Korean public’s relationship with the government captured by chaebol which was business as usual.

    Japan

    And Tomy’s range of mini retro consumer electronics are amazing. I presume that these are all aimed at adults. The level of detail is impressive. More related posts here.