Ged Carroll

Category: luxury | 奢華 | 사치 | 贅沢

Over the space of 20 years, luxury changed enormously. The Japanese had been a set of new consumers for luxury, but in terms of numbers they hadn’t eclipsed the US as the biggest market for luxury.

China’s ascent into the WTO (World Trade Organisation) made a lot of business people and politicians a lot richer. China challenged the US in terms of luxury market size. On their rise, Chinese consumers changed a lot in their sophistication as they educated themselves on luxury consumption.

These new consumers picked up new traits such as wine drinking. This also meant that luxury goods became new asset classes as Chinese money looked to acquire only the best. Chinese culture in turn impacted luxury design. Chinese new year became more important than Christmas.

Then there was the second generation money. Young rather than old consumers. Consumers who were looking for something less formal, either because they didn’t wear anything but streetwear or they worked in the creative classes rather than the traditional professions and high finance.

The industry had traditionally avoided rap artists and R&B singers, now Jay Z and Beyonce are the face of Tiffanys and Fendi had collaborated with Rihanna.

They no longer wanted to have to wear a jacket and tie to have afternoon tea at the Mandarin. They took an eclectic look more attuned to the Buffalo Collective than Vogue Italia.

You had hybridisation with the street to create a new category of luxe streetwear in a way that also owes a debt to football casual terrace wear and the pain.

Now you have Zegna badge engineering approach shoes from alpine brand La Sportiva and Prada has done a similar thing with adidas’ iconic Stan Smith tennis shoes. Balenciaga with their Speed Sock looks like a mix between Nike’s flyknit football boots and the Nike Footscape sole.

As I have written elsewhere on this blog:

Luxury has traditionally reflected status. Goods of a superior nature that the ‘wrong sort’ of people would never be able to afford. Luxury then became a symbol that you’d made it. In Asian markets, particularly China, luxury became a tool. People gifted luxury products to make relationships work better. It also signified that you are the kind of successful business person that partners could trust. You started to see factory managers with Gucci man bags and premium golfwear to signal their success. Then when the scions of these business people and figures in authority were adults, luxury has become about premium self expression.

  • Galloway on Louis Vuitton & more

    Section 4’s Scott Galloway on Louis Vuitton. Professor Scott Galloway talks about the way Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer consumer’s needs and tastes.

    Modern consumers are younger and based in Asia rather than the traditional older luxury purchasers in Europe and the US. This has meant that digital became more important, as had casual luxury over formal luxury.

    All of that innovation was extended by Louis Vuitton with streetwear type drops rather than seasons. Shops are a brand experience in their own right. Including online games and pop-up Instagrammable stores. They focused on products that can be driven into the market faster with an agile supply chain.

    Casual styling allows you to go to smaller goods with a lower price point and replaceable more often.

    The line between streetwear and luxury has been blurred. More on luxury related issues here.

    A great mix of the hits of European disco producer Daniel Bangalter (Vangarde). Daniel Bangalter started with a husband and wife team, writing and producing their songs. Around this time, he partnered up with Jean Kluger. Their first project was a pseudo Japanese band called the Yamasuki Singers. It was the early 1970s and a bit strange. Kluger and Bangalter then went on to produce Ottowan including D.I.S.C.O. They also produced the Gibson Brothers song Cuba. You can hear the influence of his sound (and probably at least some of his studio equipment) in the Daft Punk sound.

    Daft Punk includes his son Thomas Bangalter. Apparently Daniel helped Daft Punk when they were starting out.

    Mark Ritson on 50 years of Effies. Some of the content is as worth watching as listening to Ritson’s commentary.

    Scott Galloway on online business. Some interesting points here

    Fabio Wibmer does to the Austrian city of Wien (Vienna) what Bullit did to San Francisco.

  • The future of fashion + more things

    Are sneakers the future of fashion? – i-D – not a bad article. Native advertising for Christian Louboutin’s sneaker collection – though they remind me a lot of various vintage of ASH and Alexander McQueen sneakers. More on the why of streetwear and sportswear merging with luxury. The reason why the future of fashion is more casual is because the big markets are in East and Southeast Asia. They are younger, often the scions of first generation money.

    French Billionaire Arnault Calls Greta Thunberg ‘Demoralising’ | News & Analysis | BoF – interesting commentary with a philosophical angle

    Volvo is asking people to share seat-belt selfies so it can improve safety in future cars | AdAge – Grand Prix for Creative Strategy – interesting approach to norming

    Black & Abroad, Volvo grab Grand Prix glory at Cannes | AdAge – Forsman & Bodenfors achieved something similar, but with a completely different message to a entirely different audience. The agency was tasked with promoting equal road safety for men and women, and set about sifting through decades of crash data that Volvo had been collecting since the 1970s. It found that women are more likely than men to suffer injuries from a crash, in part, because most auto companies use male crash-test dummies to test their cars—which over the years has hindered how car manufacturers design safety features for their vehicles.

    Dentsu creative: Ill-conceived purpose campaigns are ruining the industry | Advertising | Campaign Asia – good point by Toshihiko Tanabe. 16 out of 21 Grand Prix awards at Cannes were social purpose / cause campaigns

    UK ministers accused of sealing Thomas Cook’s fate | Business | The Guardian – “Two governments were prepared to back a British brand, the UK government wasn’t,” said the source. “Without that, there wasn’t enough confidence around the table to make it work.” 

    In a separate move, the German government were providing Thomas Cook subsidiary airline Condor with a bridging loan, allowing the company to keep flying.

    U.N. postal union clinches deal to keep U.S. in club – Reuters – interesting move given the subsidies Chinese companies are given on postage for small things sold in Amazon Marketplace, eBay etc

  • Snowden revelations + more things

    Looking back at the Snowden revelations – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering – The brilliant thing about the Snowden leaks was that he didn’t tell us much of anything. He showed us. Most of the revelations came in the form of a Powerpoint slide deck, the misery of which somehow made it all more real. And despite all the revelation fatigue, the things he showed us were remarkable – this is such a good read. I suspect that the level of surprise expressed is mostly a US thing. I was disappointed, but not shocked by it all. Back in the day the NSA used to publish one of the best guides to ‘hardening’ macOS – documents that they no longer seem to host online. The Snowden revelations were nothing new. I grew up in Europe when:

    • GCHQ were tapping all of Ireland’s overseas telecoms and data traffic via the Capenhurst tower. Having lived in the neighbourhood of Capenhurst during the 1980s and 1990s, this was well known but only confirmed in the media in 1999
    • The ECHELON network was hoovering up microwave, fax, satellite and telephone calls

    After Duncan Campbell’s lifetime of work, the Snowden revelations are part of a decades long pattern of behaviour. Admittedly the US’ rivals will be up to the same things and worse.

    Luxury watch maker Patek Philippe and Leagas Delaney launch new Generations campaign – Marketing Communication News – the most interesting aspect of this to me is the way its looking to address a younger audience. Secondly, if you look at the background with the plants and rain its moved the look and feel to more tropical than their previous campaigns that were northern European in feel. (It was actually shot in Italy). Because? My guess, China. Younger rich people due to second generation wealth. Two children reflecting the recent law changes around family size in the country

    Is the era of the $100+ graphing calculator coming to an end? | The Hustle – don’t feel too sorry for Texas Instruments: over a 20-year period, TI set out to manufacture demand by making its calculators mandated classroom tools. The company established partnerships with big textbook companies that integrated TI-specific exercises (complete with screenshots of buttons) into classroom curricula. It sought approval for standardized test use from administrators like the College Board. And every time a competing tech innovation came along, it lobbied to maintain its perch atop the parabola. According to Open Secrets and ProPublica data, Texas Instruments paid lobbyists to hound the Department of Education every year from 2005 to 2009 — right around the time when mobile technology and apps were becoming more of a threat. The company campaigned against devices with touchscreens, internet connection, and QWERTY keyboards” – hate the game, not the player etc. etc.

    Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier – WSJ – which is being used in an antitrust investigation. No real surprises for anyone who has followed Facebook over the years. This negates Facebook’s main defence of ‘if it wasn’t us, it would be China’

    The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism | The New Yorker – the sub heading ‘Big technological shifts have always empowered reformers. They have also empowered bigots, hucksters and propagandists

    New York in 1984 was the time, and the place, dance music became a culture – Features – Mixmag – great write up, the only thing missing is a name check for the Latin Rascals, Cutting Records and the Freestyle scene

    Jason Dill HYPEBEAST Magazine Interview | HYPEBEAST – great interview, partly due to the car crash of journalist interviewing technique

    Parenting’s New Frontier: What Happens When Your 11-Year-Old Says No to a Smartphone? – Vogue – my son had decided three things about smartphones. 1. They’re infantilizing, a set of digital apron strings meant to attach you to your mother. (He was onto something there.) 2. They compromise a boy’s resourcefulness because kids come to rely on the GPS instead of learning Scout skills. 3. They make people trivial. This final observation bugs me the most, because he still expresses it whenever he sees me jabbing at my own device: “Texty texty! Emoji emoji!” And when I play my word games, he shouts, “GAMER!” That hurts. In short, my son says, he doesn’t want a phone because he wants to be free

  • Juul sales halted in China + more

    Juul Sales Halted in China, Days After Launch – WSJ – this could be as much about IP as anything else that caused the Juul sales halted in China. The e-cigarette was invented by a Chinese engineer looking for a healthier option to cigarettes. Secondly tobacco is a monopoly in China run by a state owned enterprise that is a valuable source of government revenue. There are even tobacco sponsored universities. I am only mildly surprised that Juul sales halted hadn’t happened in the US, given that Juul is so popular with teens

    Trend-bucking Maccas turns back to tradition | The Australian – the most interesting implication of McDonald’s selection of W+K is what it says about client conflict. W+K already has the North American account for KFC and has been producing spectacular work for the brand. McDonald’s made no request of W+K to drop KFC in order to work for it, with its North American chief marketing officer, Morgan Flatley, noting the potential client issue “doesn’t concern us”. “We wanted to make the decision around getting the best work that this business deserves,” she said. – it wouldn’t have been that long ago that a major client would tolerate that degree of client conflict

    Exclusive: Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties – sources    – Reuters – the Australians were too scared of the Chinese to confront them about it at the moment. This is a situation that could

    Gasp | The Blogfather | Brand Building Breakdown – nice summary which emphasises why brand is more important than activation in terms of marketer focus

    McDonald’s picks Wieden & Kennedy New York as lead U.S. creative agency | AdAge – it “also suggests that a bespoke agency model … may not be the definitive answer for major marketers when it comes to creative partners.”

    The New Target That Enables Ransomware Hackers to Paralyze Dozens of Towns and Businesses at Once — ProPublica – similar to tactics that Chinese hackers have been doing for years. Yet another argument against cloud

    China’s TikTok social media app has captured the NFL, but not Hong Kong protesters – The Washington Post – you know ByteDance are censoring the sh*t out of it to keep the Xi administration happy, more online related content here

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Pablo Mauron, DLG (Digital Luxury Group) – luxury brands need to find ways to adapt and integrate their globally-developed creative assets for use in different markets

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Kai Hong, JINGdigital – how brands can truly engage and grow their WeChat communities with the right social CRM strategy

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Jacques Roizen, EVP Digital Transformation and New Ventures, Baozun – the evolution of omnichannel retail and how brands can leverage new opportunities to create better customer experiences

    Frankfurt Motor Show: Winter Is Coming | EE Times – the moon shot of autonomous driving may one day lead to falling accident rates, but that the development costs — and liabilities of public testing — may destroy them on the way. Almost everyone has stepped back from the brink of a ludicrous business model. This begs the question about autonomous driving as a killer app for 5G

    Standing out is the key brand challenge, so great brands play with their codes | Marketing Week – purpose-wank aside, removing every single letter from your packaging is actually a very smart and very effective move. Because when companies play with well-established codes like this and remove or alter their appearance, the impact on salience and brand image is significantly improved – great article by Mark Ritson, but requires decades of brand consistency to work well

    Design: pharma’s next frontier | eyeforpharma – on human centred design

    Facebook warns about Apple iOS 13 privacy improvement – the blog post appears to be a way to get out in front of software changes made by Apple and Google that could unsettle Facebook users given the company’s poor reputation for privacy.

    The new Microsoft To Do is here – pity the poor product manager who is trying to transfer Wunderlist which built up an amazingly loyal following

    Underwear Ads Lose the Macho: How Marketing Has Embraced Real Men – The New York Times – I suspect that it’s like Gillette in that men who buy Hanes by out of habit and women buying for men are the people to influence

  • Jeremy Renner store + more stuff

    The Jeremy Renner store – this must be the 21st century equivalent of the celebrity infomercial on cable TV: @ Amazon.com. The Jeremy Renner store is interesting because it’s an odd choice of celebrity. More on Amazon here.

    Amazon UK 2

    Nike China with Weiden + Kennedy did these great basketball-themed adverts

    Laundry Musical. Procter & Gamble invented the soap opera back during the great depression as sponsored radio serials. They were instrumental in building P&G as a brand powerhouse. Riffing on the theme P&G Philippines launched the first ‘laundry musical’ with Broadway star Lea Salonga.

    It is hard to explain how musical Filipino culture is. Wherever Flipinos are as a community, there is music. In Hong Kong they do group singing and dance routines. Music has been a huge export for the Philippines. You go to bars around the world and there will be a Filipino band who can pivot from hard rock to soulful R&B standards.

    Filipinos make up most of the bands on cruise ships too, which isn’t surprising given the amount of recruitment for the shipping industry that goes in the Philippines from sailors to engineers.

    TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Lee Clow on the making of Apple’s Think Different campaign. Chiat\Day still have this campaign as their calling card a quarter of a century later. The opening statement that technology is not a substitute for an idea is something that feels more relevant now. It is also interesting seeing the creatives working on MacOS Classic.

    Apple used the creative process as a way to showcase the creative hardware and software used on the campaign

    • Microsoft Word
    • Quark Xpress
    • Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat
    • AVID non-linear professional video editing
    • Claris eMailer – which was an email client similar to mail.app on macOS now. I had never used it, as I was using Netscape Communicator at the time

    Irish department store Brown Thomas launches its first brand anthem film