Ged Carroll

Category: marketing | 營銷 | 마케팅 | マーケティング

According to the AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. This has contained a wide range of content as a section over the years including

  • Super Bowl advertising
  • Spanx
  • Content marketing
  • Fake product reviews on Amazon
  • Fear of finding out
  • Genesis the Korean luxury car brand
  • Guo chao – Chinese national pride
  • Harmony Korine’s creative work for 7-Eleven
  • Advertising legend Bill Bernbach
  • Japanese consumer insights
  • Chinese New Year adverts from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
  • Doughnutism
  • Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
  • Influencer promotions
  • A media diary
  • Luxe streetwear
  • Consumerology by marketing behaviour expert Phil Graves
  • Payola
  • Dettol’s back to work advertising campaign
  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders
  • Dove #washtocare advertising campaign
  • The fallacy of generations such as gen-z
  • Cultural marketing with Stüssy
  • How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp
  • Facebook’s misleading ad metrics
  • The role of salience in advertising
  • SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? advertising campaign
  • Brand winter
  • Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting
  • Lovemarks
  • How Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer’s needs and tastes
  • Korean TV shopping celebrity Choi Hyun woo
  • qCPM
  • Planning and communications
  • The Jeremy Renner store
  • Cashierless stores
  • BMW NEXTGen
  • Creativity in data event that I spoke at
  • Beauty marketing trends
  • Kraft Mothers Day marketing
  • RESIST – counter disinformation tool
  • Facebook pivots to WeChat’s business model
  • Smartphone launches

  • Richard Edelman is wrong, PR isn’t at a crossroads…

    I recommend that readers check out Richard’s PR is at a Crossroads post. Edelman cites changes at PR agencies owned by marketing conglomerates as indicators. He thinks this due to a lack of confidence in the PR industry. There may be some truth in it; 2016 had the lowest annual growth in seven years for Edelman. As PR is at a crossroads, on the cusp of transformation? No, it is already being transformed.

    Richard Edelman, head of Edelman PR

    Public relations has already crossed the Rubicon. The Rubicon crossing happened years ago. Richard noticed the signs back in April 2011:

    …as PR continues to expand, encompassing digital, research, media planning and content creation, should we consider rebranding ourselves as communications firms?

    At the time the question was prompted from London colleagues. Richard disagreed with the premise.

    By 2012 Edelman was in the AdAge Agency A-list in the US. In March 2015, Edelman’s boiler plate changed from:

    Edelman is the world’s largest public relations firm…

    to

    Edelman is a leading global communications marketing firm

    Edelman hasn’t been a PR agency for the past 2-5 years. The transformation in the industry has been going on for at least a decade.

    Why this has happened is down to six factors:

    • Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing
    • Technology-driven marketing strategy
    • CMO perspectives shaped by marketing thinking
    • Talent
    • Advertising changes
    • Media landscape changes

    Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing

    Lets break things down a bit, some bits of PR are about the corporate parts of a company.
    Corporate PR covers a large area including:

    • Public affairs
    • Educating investors
    • Shoring up shareholder confidence
    • Internal communications
    • Community affairs

    Some corporate and social responsibility actitivities could fall under PR. When we’re talking about who is responsible for organisation moral purpose /meaning. This should come from the CEO down.

    Thinking about marketing communications the situation changes a lot. It depends on the sector and the audience that you are communicating to. For consumer marketing; the role that PR plays as part is a subordinated part with the marketing mix. Byron Sharp’s works How Brands Grow (parts 1&2) outline PR’s small, but intricate role with clarity.

    For mature consumer brands, engagement (and by extension PR) is less important. Instead the focus would be on efficient reach and frequency of repetition. Being top of mind is more important. The only way for marketing communications-orientated PR teams to grow their billings is service expansion.

    Technology-driven marketing strategy

    Many business-to-business marketers are using content marketing as a key channel. The content shaped by analysis from marketing automation software.

    In marketing automation, strategy is outsourced. Rules embedded in the software platform dictate approach. PR becomes a source of content to feed the machine. The idea is to determine an effective approach. Then optimise to reduce the price of engagement over time. I could write a blog post or two about the problems with this approach, but it is tangental to PR. Content creation is an opportunity for PRs, all be it one with perpetually squeezed margins.

    Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing

    In B2C marketing there are large research projects on what works. These include Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the IPA. In marketing mature consumer brands, we know that reach, frequency and recency matters. Engagement is less important. Public relations then becomes an afterthought at best. Taking an integrated media planning led approach makes sense.

    There isn’t a comparable set of research for the PR industry like IPA or Ehrenberg-Bass. Outside the US public relations generally doesn’t have budgets for tools and data. Clients tend to be more action-orientated. Media agencies tend to have the best insights – which aids planning and creative.

    The benefits of an integrated advertising-led approach goes back decades. Edelman cites Y&R’s ‘whole egg’ concept. Dentsu’s ‘Cross Switch Marketing’ is similar with roots going back to the 1960s. The PR industry mistook integrated thinking for a primitive view of PR practice. The reality lies somewhere between communications myopia and macro marketing thinking.

    From a CMO perspective

    • PR spend is a small part of their budget. It may not even sit in their budget if there is a CCO (chief communications officer) role in the company
    • PR isn’t supported by good quality secondary insights like the IPA or Ehrenberg-Bass
    • Advertising works
    • Advertising agencies foster high trust through visualisation of ideas backed by insights
    • Media relations is low cost, low efficiency but can be high engagement
    • Integrated simplifies the client/ agency dynamic (one ass to kick)
    • Successful integrated agency engagements. Examples include Red Fuse (Colgate), GTB (Ford, Purina) and TBWA Media Arts Lab (Apple)
    • The memory of Enfatico has disappeared

    Talent

    Edelman has done a better job than most agencies in getting digital and paid media talent. I’ve worked as an in-house marketer. I have worked as a PR person. I’ve also worked in PR agencies doing digital and paid media. I now work as a strategy director in a creative ad agency and the difference is huge.

    For most specialists working in a PR agency can be thankless task:

    • PR agency leaders don’t get other disciplines. This is particularly true outside North America
    • I’ve worked with too many agency leaders who think digital is an infographic or a video
    • The briefing process in PR agencies is awful. ‘We’ve got a video, make it viral’ was the worst brief I had
    • Outside North America budgets are very tight
    • You can get better working conditions elsewhere. Tools, people you can learn from, research and ambience. Real conversation at a PR agency: “can you wear a shirt and suit?” “Why?” “We’d just like it” “Can I quadruple my day rate?” “No, why?” “That’s my inconvenience of wearing a suit fee”
    • PR agencies don’t win the awards that matter to us. PR publications wring their hands about the lack of PR wins at the Cannes Lions. This matters for your career

    If you have capability built up in the ad agency, creative shop or media agency; use it. Publicis, WPP and Interpublic have deep expertise they can draw on. Publicis talks about this as ‘The Power of One’. It is much easier than recruiting more technical, creative and planning talent into a PR shop.

    Advertising changes

    As PR has changes so has advertising. There is a far greater understanding of what efficient and effective looks like. While I lament the the decline of advertising’s golden age; multichannel storytelling has improved. Advertising agencies have learned how to combine earned and paid media. Earned media is an incremental revenue increase advertising agencies. Advertising agencies have done earned media and not even thought about it being PR.

    By comparison creative represents a big budget bump for your PR agency. That causes the client to pause and think. The expansion of advertising has wiped out the crossroads; so PR isn’t at a crossroads anymore.

    Media landscape changes

    As advertising has changed so has the media landscape. The online environment is shaping out with two winners around the world. The pattern of online advertsing spend is clear. Everywhere outside China online advertising is static; only Facebook and Google see increases. In China, is is Tencent due to WeChat that wins. Sina benefits from Weibo. Baidu would have been an obvious winner due to it being a Google analogue. Instead Baidu’s earnings have been static.

    This decline in media fortunes adversely affects editorial space. This impacts the efficiency of media relations. By some accounts in the UK there are now 3 PR people for every journalist. PR agencies have needed to expand beyond media relations. This means trying to get more involved in owned and paid media. The challenge is that advertising agencies are also in that space – extending their storytelling. In the case of the media landscape, PR isn’t at a crossroads because the crossroads no longer exists it has become a singularity at the centre of the media sector

    More information
    PR not communications | 6am blog – yeah I called bullshit on this one. I could afford to be right; Richard had a global family business to defend
    Whole Egg Theory Finally Fits The Bill For Y&R Clients: Global Agency Network Of The Year: Team Space System A Winner For Citibank, Others Set To Follow | AdvertisingAge
    The Dentsu Way – a great book, right up there with Ogilvy on Advertising in my estimation

  • Pam Edstrom

    PR Week and The Holmes Report carried an obituary for Pam Edstrom who passed away last night. I worked at her agency for a few years and came across her a few times.

    Pam had an intensity and an energy to her. She was also a true believer; you could break her open like a stick of rock and there would be the Windows squares running through her. For many years Pam Edstrom was the media voice of Microsoft. She had a tremendous belief in the ability of IT to deliver tremendous things. If you’ve read this blog you’d realise that I’m not a true believer in the same way that Pam Edstrom was; we were on opposite sides of the Windows | Mac (and Unix) religious divide.

    Pam had an absolute focus on controlling the message and organisational process (optimised for alignment to Microsoft) and championed ‘gold standard’ delivery. Over time Microsoft came to represent more than half the agency billings.

    My Pam Edstrom story

    When I worked at the agency building digital capability, I also was assigned to keeping the company name in the usual industry debates. I found it handy to do as it kept my PR skills warm as I did the nascent digital work at the time. I managed to keep a constant drip feed of coverage in the industry media.

    At the last minute I was asked to arrange a profile of Pam. Clare O’Connor who worked at PR Week at the time agreed to write a profile – Pam Edstrom, the doyenne of tech PR.  Give it a read as it captures Pam quite well.

    The article was taking ages to come out as it was ‘evergreen’ appearing some six months after the interview had taken place. Clare asked Pam for the name of a journalist who she interview for colour about Pam Edstrom. 

    The article threw a bit of a curveball when a longtime journalist contact was asked about Pam Edstrom and referred to her daughter Jennifer’s book Barbarians led by Bill Gates. The initial reaction from Pam Edstrom was to tell PR Week that if they ran a story mentioning ‘the book’, they would never get a Waggener Edstrom story again. I pointed out that we  didn’t have that outsize an impact in the marketing press, that Microsoft had in the enterprise tech press and PR Week wouldn’t care.

    I never did  hear if Pam got to thank the New York Times’ Steve Lohr for bringing up that book. More information here.

  • Friends from Yahoo!

    The highlight of this week was briefly catching up with a couple of friends from Yahoo!. The people that I met along the way at Yahoo! were great and I am proud to say that I have more than a couple of friends from Yahoo! The company got culture right, but board level business wrong.

    I didn’t get to watch The Oscars, but even I was aware that it was FUBAR’d. The Mobile World Congress saw the launch of new handsets by Sony, LG and Huawei – but were drowned about by Nokia reinventing their iconic 3310 feature phone. This showed that smartphone manufacturers had crafted their products to a high degree and no longer came up with products that amazed us. They are all now much-of-a-muchness.

    Rolex broke out an advertising campaign across TV and online to coincide with The Oscars. It shows the heritage that Rolex had in Hollywood. It surprised me that Rolex felt the need to do this

    More luxury related content here.

    The Worst Mission Statement Of All Time – Medium – epic

    Siberian tigers take out a drone that had been harassing them

    A Bathing Ape (BAPE) have done a tie-in with the new King Kong film. Given the Vietnam era setting I think that they could have done so much more such as ‘combat Zippo’ lighters, embroidered jackets and fatigues – instead there’s a t-shirt. You can tell that Nigo is no longer behind the wheel over there.

    A BATHING APE®︎ X KONG:SKULL ISLAND #bape #kongskullisland #KongIsKing #キングコング映画

    A post shared by A BATHING APE® OFFICIAL (@bape_japan) on

    A really nice film on data featuring Faris Yakob

  • Toshio Nakanishi + more news

    Toshio Nakanishi aka Tycoon To$h

    Toshio Nakanishi of Major Force and Skylab has died aged 61 – FACT Magazine – so long Tycoon To$h. I knew of Toshio Nakanishi through his work alongside Hiroshi Fujiwara on the Major Force label producing amazing hip hop tracks. I didn’t know until much later that Toshio Nakanishi had been a member of The Plastics – think a Japanese take on the B-52s or Devo. Toshio Nakanishi met his wife through The Plastics and they went on to form Melon together. From Melon, Toshio Nakanishi branched into hip hop and trip hop under different guises.

    Business

    The case for creativity | Cannes Lions – which should have a sub heading ‘Pockets of financial performance that 3G Capital (Kraft Foods / Heinz) will miss out on’

    Warren Buffett’s letter to Berkshire Hathaway investors explains how to use fear to your advantage — Quartz – First, widespread fear is your friend as an investor, because it serves up bargain purchases. Second, personal fear is your enemy. It will also be unwarranted.

    ‘Uber Is Doomed’, Argues Transportation Reporter – Slashdot

    Economics

    Saudi Arabia’s Oil Wealth Is About to Get a Reality Check – Bloomberg  – only about 20% of what Saudi Arabia has bargained on which will make their sovereign fund plan difficult to achieve

    Scraping by on six figures? Tech workers feel poor in Silicon Valley’s wealth bubble | Technology | The Guardian – great indicators of a bubble

    Economic Research | Age Discrimination and Hiring of Older Workers – interesting research by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

    Innovation

    Who Needs GPS? The Forgotten Story of Etak’s Amazing 1985 Car Navigation System | Fast Company | Business + Innovation – this is an epic piece of engineering. They had to make their own maps and relied on in car sensors to do dead reckoning calculations from.

    Marketing

    Australia found the Achilles’ heel of tobacco companies, and a record number of smokers quit – inverse proof of how valuable brand and design are

    Media

    How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017 | Zhubert – I’d imagine that this is also true for non-fiction

    Which Grand Tour presenter should you be mates with? | The Grand Tour | The Guardian – since when did the Guardian start doing Buzzfeed listicles? Since Amazon got native advertising done for The Grand Tour

    Web of no web

    MWC 2017: Telcos cannot afford another ‘OTT’ in the IoT age – NEC | total telecom – changes business model of IoT businesses

    Sony Xperia Touch projector makes any surface a multitouch computer (nifty, expensive niche product) – Liliputing – its lovely tech and a really nice design, but the price is hard to justify

  • Have we reached peak streetwear?

    At the end of January I wrote a blog post about the landmark luxe streetwear collection by Louis Vuitton and Supreme.

    I delved into the history of streetwear and the deep connection it shared with luxury brands. This linkage came from counterfeit products, brand and design language appropriation.

    This all came from a place of individuality and self expression of the wearer.

    obey

    I reposted it from my blog on to LinkedIn. I got a comment from a friend of mine which percolated some of the ideas I’d been thinking about. The comment crystalised some of my fears as a long-time streetwear aficionado.

    This is from Andy Jephson who works as a director for consumer brand agency Exposure:

    The roots of street and lux that you point to seem to be all about individuality and self expression and for me this is what many modern collabs are missing. To me they seem to be about ostentatious showmanship. I love a collaboration that sees partners sharing their expertise and craft to create something original. The current obsession with creating hype however is creating a badging culture that produces products that could have been made in one of the knock-off factories that you mention. Some collabs that just produce new colourways and hybrid styles can be amazing, reflecting the interests of their audience. But far too many seem gratuitous and are completely unobtainable for the brand fans on one side of the collaborative partnership.

    The streetwear business is mad money

    From Stüssy in 1980, streetwear has grown into a multi-billion dollar global industry. Streetwear sales are worth more than 75 billion dollars per year.

    By comparison the UK government spent about 44.1 billion on defence in 2016. Streetwear sales are more than three times the estimated market value of Snap Inc. Snap Inc., is the owner of Snapchat.

    Rise of Streetwear

    It is still about one third the size of the luxury industry. Streetwear accounts for the majority of menswear stocked in luxury department stores. Harvey Nichols claimed that 63% of the their contemporary menswear was streetwear. Many luxury brands off-the-peg men’s items blur the boundary between luxe and streetwear.

    The industry has spawned some technology start-ups acting as niche secondary markets including:

    • Kixify
    • K’LEKT
    • THRONE
    • StockX
    • SneakerDon
    • GOAT

    Large parts of the streetwear industry has become lazy and mercenary. You can see this in:

    • The attention to detail and quality of product isn’t what it used to be. I have vintage Stüssy pieces that are very well-made. I can’t say the same of many newer streetwear brands
    • Colour-ways just for the sake of it. I think Nike’s Jordan brand is a key offender. Because it has continually expands numbers of derivative designs and combinations. New Balance* have lost much of their mojo. Especially when you look at the product their Super Team 33 in Maine came up with over the years. The fish, fanzine or the element packs were both strong creative offerings. By comparison recent collections felt weak
    • The trivial nature of some of the collaborations. This week Supreme sold branded Metro Cards for the New York subway
    • Streetwear brands that sold out to fast moving consumer products. This diluted their own brand values. While working in Hong Kong, I did a Neighborhood Coke Zero collaboration. The idea which had some tie-in to local cycling culture and nightscape. Aape – the second-brand of BAPE did a deal wrapping Pepsi cans in the iconic camouflage

    Hong Kong brand Chocoolate did three questionable collaborations over the past 18 months:

    • Vitaminwater
    • Nissin (instant noodles)
    • Dreyer’s (ice cream)

    By comparison, Stüssy has a reputation in the industry for careful business management. The idea was to never become too big, too fast. The Sinatra family kept up quality and selective distribution seeing off Mossimo, FUBU and Triple Five Soul. Yes, they’ve done collaborations, but they were canny compared to newer brands:

    “The business has grown in a crazy way the past couple of years,” says Sinatra. “We reluctantly did over $50 million last year.”

    Reluctant because, according to Sinatra, the company is currently trying to cut back and stay small. “It was probably one of our biggest years ever — and it was an accident.”

    Sinatra characterises Stüssy’s third act as having a “brand-first, revenue second” philosophy, in order to avoid becoming “this big monstrosity that doesn’t stand for anything.”

    The Evolution of Streetwear. The newfound reality of Streetwear and its luxury-like management academic study uncovered careful brand custodianship.

    It’s not clothing; it’s an asset class

    Part of the bubble feel within the streetwear industry is due to customer behaviour. For many people, street wear is no longer a wardrobe staple. Instead it becomes an alternative investment instrument. Supreme items and tier zero Nike releases are resold for profit like a day trader on the stock market.

    Many of the start-ups supported by the community play to this ‘day trader’ archetype. It is only a matter of time for the likes of Bonham’s and Sotherby’s get in on the act.

    A key problem with the market is that trainers aren’t like a Swiss watch or a classic car. They become unusable in less than a decade as the soles degrade and adhesive breaks down.

    There is the apocryphal story of a Wall Street stock broker getting out before the great stock market crash. The indicator to pull his money out was a taxi driver or a shoe shine boy giving stock tips.

    Streetwear is at a similar stage with school-age teenagers dealing must-have items as a business. What would a reset look like in the streetwear industry? What would be the knock-on effect for the luxury sector?

    More information
    USA Streetwear Market Research Report 2015 | WeConnectFashion
    Louis Vuitton, Supreme and the tangled relationship between streetwear and luxury brands | renaissance chambara
    New Balance Super Team 33 – Elements Collection | High Snobriety
    New Balance ST33 – The Fanzine Collection | High Snobriety
    1400 Super Team 33 (ST33) trio | New Balance blog – the infamous fish pack
    How Stüssy Became a $50 Million Global Streetwear Brand Without Selling Out | BoF (Business of Fashion)
    The Evolution of Streetwear. The newfound reality of Streetwear and its luxury-like management by de Macedo & Machado, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (2015) – PDF

    * in the interest of full disclosure, New Balance is a former client.