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.

  • Politics of history + more things

    The Politics of History: Why Anniversaries Matter in China | Macro Polo – great reading

    Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds | The New Yorker – interesting reading material about China and the US. Read this in concert with the Macro Polo article on the politics of history

    On the Mac Pro, the G4 Cube and Their Shared Vent Design – 512 Pixels – interesting breakdown on details. I expect the difference is down to the explosion in CNC capability unleashed by the iPhone

    Why PMI is doubling down on wooing Cannes | Marketing | Campaign Asia – feels like snake oil, disappointed to see Cindy Gallop participating in this, given her role in steering the moral compass of the ad industry

    Report: Chinese spend nearly 5 hours on entertainment apps daily | TechCrunch – Chinese internet users now spend an average of 4.7 hours on their handsets a day just for entertainment purposes, according to new data (in Chinese) collected by research firm QuestMobile. The number is up from the 4.1-hour average from a year ago. By ‘entertainment’, QuestMobile is counting services like e-reading, music streaming, online karaoke, video streaming, mobile gaming, live streaming, and of course, short videos that are taking the world by storm. The total screen time could be much higher given the country now prefers taking QR code payments instead of cash, not to mention eyeball time contributed by children using smartphones to do their homework and housewives searching for the best deals on ecommerce platforms

    Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles | Motor Authority – really interesting from a UX perspective, I was surprised car companies hadn’t got to this conclusion faster

    100 Radical Innovation Breakthroughs for the future | European Commission – where the EU is likely to be placing big bets, a good read, better than the latest Mary Meaker analysis (PDF)

    “Six Stories of GORE-TEX Products Vol. 2”: ACRONYM | GORE-TEX Brand – interesting interview tie Errolson Hugh

    Huawei Testing Russia’s Aurora OS As Complete Android Replacement, Report Claims – this makes more sense than Huawei’s home brewed OS

    242 Year Old Birkenstock is Not Interested in Being on Fashion’s “Trendy Punch List” — The Fashion Law – Birkenstock also turned down a collaboration with Supreme, which could very well be the buzziest streetwear brand in the world, with its bouncer-flanked stores and incessantly sold-out wares. “It was never about function for them, just logos,” Klaus Baumann, Birkenstock’s chief sales officer, speaking about Supreme, which regularly draws long lines of consumers outside of its store every week on Thursday when it “drops” new products, including collaborations. “These were not product people.” Birkenstock’s management is seemingly unimpressed by such antics.  Not mincing words Baumann states, “If I put a bouncer outside our doors on Saturday and regulate letting people in, I too could have a queue outside.” – more on luxury here.

    HOW TO PISS OFF A CREATIVE – BBH – epic

  • Digital Rx + more things

    Digital Rx – JWT Intelligence – Digital Rx covers a wide range of services from telemedicine to AI mediated diagnosis and everything in between. Pharmaceutical companies are looking a digital companion app functionality to help keep patient adherence high. I only hope that they’re not as much of a car crash as the first lot of apps like Babylon Health

    China’s new creatives – JWT Intelligence – This new wave of consumers recognizes China’s rising economic status and thus possesses an acute sense of national pride; no longer are they reliant on Western fashion brands and influence to define how they express themselves as individuals. Yet the world is small, and despite crackdowns on international cultural imports like hip-hop and K-pop, there are echoes in China of what defines Gen Z tastes abroad in the streetwear, beauty, art, luxury and online landscapes. This is channeled through a powerful new creative lens

    High-art airports – JWT Intelligence – air travel need to lift its image after the TSA experience post 9/11 and discount airlines dragged it into the gutter

    Making Connections: 53 Teenagers Suggest Creative Ways to Link School Curriculum to the World of 2019 – The New York Times – great reading (paywall)

    Empire.Kred | Grow your Social Audience – gaming Facebook likes to drive engagement numbers. Not great for marketers but might benefit media companies on Facebook in terms of impact on reach

    Disgraced Korean Air Heiress Regains Executive Job – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea – Business > Business – surprised that they’ve pushed this through so fast

    Japan’s Hometown Tax | Kalzumeus Software – one of the best examples of cultural insight led marketing campaigns

    Agencies must redress decoupling damage | WARC – creative opportunities are lost without media thinking and media thinking needs to incorporate context that is so important for creative. Media also needs to fix basic hygiene issues

    Code Red | Logic Magazine – the nature of Chinese innovation versus US innovation

  • John Shaft & things that made last week

    Samuel L Jackson has a second go at playing re-conned blaxploitation private investigator John Shaft. This time it seems to be a bit more self conscious and ironic in tonality. Think Jackson’s first outing as John Shaft mixed with Snakes on a Plane

    Gillette Spain comes up with an advert that looks at masculinity without offending their customer base with heavy handed patronising messaging or ‘brandsplaining’ as I like to think of it.

    https://youtu.be/A5PHG9AHdhk

    A couple of weeks ago I showed the controversal advert featuring William Chan to promote Chanel’s J12 watch. There are parodies across the web of Chan’s Chinglish and general weirdness of the ad. This is my favourite one.

    Singapore newspaper TODAYonline | In Hong Kong, foreign maids are racing to reclaim their voices – foreign domestic helpers live outside society and at worst they are horribly mistreated, suffer from loneliness or are victimised with scams and MLM schemes. It’s great to see a positive story about this community managing to do fantastic achievements on their own terms.

    What we’d know as Eid in the UK, is known in Malaysia and Singapore as Hari Raya. You get seasonal tentpole ad campaigns. Here are some of the ones that I liked the most.

    Happy Hari Raya!

  • 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.”

  • Swatch and Brexit + more

    Swatch and Brexit

    Swatch have been doing some interesting things around personalisation of watch design, but Swatch and Brexit feels like a leap too far. They’ve got a really nice user experience in the web interface, which makes this a disappointing post to make. I do wonder about who they think Swatch and Brexit is actually aimed at? What other fashion or luxury brand has looked to exploit Brexit like a tawdry souvenir seller?

    swatch brexit

    More Beyond campaign

    Cathay Pacific – Move Beyond campaign might have passed by without a mention for me for a number of reasons.

    • It doesn’t say anything new, but reaffirms the Cathay Pacific that I’ve known and loved to fly with
    • It’s very much a campaign designed to top up brand awareness and consideration for the airline which has taken some brand knocks at home and declining awareness abroad
    • It’s about brand purpose, which seems to be a hygiene factor at the moment. More on that from Mark Ritson. I am not sure that Cathay Pacific’s brand purpose passes Ritson’s test of being prepared to stick with the brand purpose, even when it costs money – like when they moved away from having the Mandarin Oriental handling lounge catering…

    Creatively its nice. A generic, safe looking brand film with catalogue corporate video backing track. I know Jack Scott shot it and some of the cinematography is nice (that word again), the colouring of the film is on point for money well spent. As an audience member it is pleasant enough to watch drift by, but not necessarily enough to spike a change

    In fact, if it wasn’t for the MTR (Hong Kong’s equivalent of London Underground and Overground) and Hong Kong International Airport outdoor advertising it would be utterly forgettable. One of the print posters has a couple of clothed men holding hands running on a beach. An ideal compromise between a socially conservative society and western virtue signalling.

    Cathay Pacific LGBT

    The poster wasn’t initially allowed to run on the MTR or in Hong Kong International. I heard some murmurings of China’s dark shadow casting a censoring hand on the posters – by westerners on social media. To be honest, they’d be more concerned about dealing with free speech, Falun Gong supporters, the Hong Kong independence movement rather than homosexuals being encouraged to walk on a beach in business smart suits.

    Instead the reality is more mundane. A minority of Hong Kongers: Taoists, Buddhists, the non-religious and Christians alike are a bit ‘mid western American’ about the gay community. There is an obvious tension between deeply-held beliefs, the longevity of the family through children and grandchildren. Thankfully, the LGBT community and straight supporters managed to have the ban reconsidered.

    William Chan Chinglish

    I am guessing that Chanel has insights to show that women buy its J12 watches, whether as a gift for someone else or themselves. William Chan is an interesting brand ambassador choice in this video. There is criticism in the YouTube comments on his pronunciation and ‘Chinglish’. It also feels a bit too ‘sweet’ to me. At least he’s a good boy who loves his Mum.

    Royyal Dog

    Asian Boss put together this great documentary on Royyal Dog – Korea’s top graffiti artist.

    Sony

    Lastly I found this amazing corporate film by Sony of their corporate history that I guess was shot in the early-to-mid-1970s. The manufacturing process, in particular test and measurement being so labour intensive is fascinating. The 5 inch micro-TV set is a beautiful piece of product design, as is the early Trinitron TV set. The hi-fi equipment is achingly beautiful. Well worth watching it from start-to-finish. More Sony content here.