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

Consumer Packaged Goods innovation
Consumer packaged goods innovation – CB Insights put together an interesting presentation on the changing landscape of the consumer packaged goods sector.

The key takeouts for me were:
- The similarity to the technology sector in terms of startups developing a brand and selling out to a bigger firm
- A key part of what they are buying is brand building – an activity that the likes of P&G and Unilever have excelled at in the past. Historically new product launches in CPG has a low success rate. Many brands have been going for decades. The startup acquisitions allow the Unilevers of the world to buy successes and change their portfolios faster
- Start-ups and partnerships focused on process improvements across all business functions from supply chain management to the final interface between customer and product prior to purchase. Success and institutional heritage have baked processes and infrastructure in existing businesses that might hold them back looking at new channels. When I worked on an assignment at Unilever there were best practice guides for everything. These guides were smart and well written with lots of good heuristics in them. But you also had to complete an eight page form to get a search run on a social listening platform
- Premium is defined around consumer values towards the environment rather than ‘luxury’. In this respect the CPG market kind of feels like the early 1990s in laundry products. Ecover started to get prominent place in UK supermarkets. You saw a good deal of product innovation from P&G and Unilever. You had liquid laundry dispensers that went in the tub and were supposed to reduce the amount of water used in the wash. However, pragmatism overran environmental concerns during the recession and supermarket’s own washing powder started to take off. Major brands were accused of brand washing
The Changing Landscape of Consumer Packaged Goods from CB Insights
May 26, 2016
The New Nokia
The New Nokia can rise from the ashes of the old. Microsoft finally let go of its licence for the Nokia brand license on May 19, 2016.

There is a lot of logic to this move:
- Microsoft has already written down the full value of the business acquisition
- It has got the most valuable technical savvy out of the team and moved it into the Surface business
- It removes problematic factories and legacy products
For the businesses that have acquired the rights to use the Nokia name and the factories the upsides are harder to see.

The factories may be of use, however there is over supply in the Shenzhen eco-system and bottlenecks aren’t usually at final manufacture, but in the component supply chain.

There is still some brand equity left in the Nokia phone brand. I analysed Nokia along with a number of other international Greater China smartphone eco-system brands using Google Trend data.

There has been a decline in brand interest over the past 12 months for Nokia of 37%

Nokia still has comparable brand equity to other legacy mobile brands such as BlackBerry and Motorola

The brand equity is comparable to other value mobile brands. Honor; Huawei’s value brand has had a lot of money and effort pumped into it to achieve its current position.

But it’s brand equity doesn’t stack up well against premium handset brands from Greater China. The reason for this is that smartphone marketing and fast moving consumer goods marketing now have similar dynamics – both are in mature little differentiated markets. Brands need to have deep pockets and invest in regular advertising to remain top-of-mind across as large an audience as possible. Reach and frequency are more important than social media metrics like engagement.

In addition to advertising spend needs to be put into training and incentivising channel partners including carriers.

They are entering a hyper-competitive market and it isn’t clear what their point of advantage will be. Given the lock down that Google puts on Android and commoditised version of handset manufacture, the best option would be to look for manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies – like Dell did in the PC industry. But that’s easier said than done.

Garnering the kind of investment required to seriously support an international phone brand is a hard sell to the finance director or potential external investors.

Growth is tapering out.

The average selling price is in steady decline

This is partly because the emerging markets are making the majority new phone purchases.

Consumers in developed markets are likely holding on to the their phones for longer due to a mix economic conditions and a lack of compelling reason to upgrade.

All of the consumers that likely want and can afford a phone in developed markets have one. Sales are likely to be on a replacement cycle as they wear out. Manufacturers have done a lot to improve quality and reliability of devices.

Even the old household insurance fraud standby of dropping a phone that the consumer was bored with down the toilet doesn’t work on the latest premium Android handsets due to water-proofing.

More information

The answer to the question you’ve all been asking | Nokia – Nokia’s official announcement
Gartner highlights a more challenging smartphone sector for Nokia than when it “quit” in 2013 | TelecomTV
Nokia is coming back to phones and tablets | The Verge
So the Nokia brand returns.. with a Vengeance | Communities Dominate Brands

Supporting data slides in full

1605 new nokia smartphone deck from Ged Carroll
May 23, 2016
Monster internet surveillance + more

Britain to pay billions for monster internet surveillance network | DuncanCampbell.org – lets park the moral dilemma this represents for a moment, would other countries come to the UK for expertise in terms of how to implement this locally? What countries would they be? What would the optics be on it? Who are the contractors that are likely to benefit from this work in the UK? More on security related issues here.

I think it will be pretty hard to make lemonade out of these lemons. The business opportunity probably won’t scale to get a ‘space race’ type benefit, the likely client countries may pose problems in terms of optics. After Snowden, you can count out the EU territories. An obvious contractor to benefit would likely be Huawei (mix of telecoms and enterprise tech, fast growing player in enterprise storage) – who wouldn’t need British expertise to sell this monster internet surveillance solution abroad

Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews: How We Spot the Fakes | The Wirecutter – Although many reviews on Amazon are legitimate, more and more sketchy companies are turning to compensated Amazon reviews to inflate star ratings and to drum up purchases

jenny odell • living a designed life – interesting essay on the rendered spaces used by developers in their sales pitches

Samsung 837 – JWT Intelligence – really interesting retail space

Italian Crime Series Gomorrah Kills Pornhub Traffic – Pornhub Insights – the power of mainstream media played out online, I am sure there would be a similar dip for something like Game of Thrones or the FA Cup Final in the US and UK respectively

WPP Mobile New technology service from Maxus makes marketing as easy as Pie – gives WPP a bigger arbitrage opportunity but if you were a large client wouldn’t you be demanding similar implementation times?

MSN Ceases Chinese Operations | ChnaTechNews – and that’s the last of the western portals when went there leaving the market

CK Hutchison mulls legal challenge as EC thwarts its UK ambitions | TotalTele.com – not terribly surprising. UK Government’s big mistake was allowing BT to acquire a cellular operator again

Misused English Words and Expressions in EU Publications – European Court of Auditors – Secretariat General Translation Directorate – fascinating document that explains why English speakers may feel exasperated at times with their EU counterparts

Xiaomi faces existential crisis | Techinasia – if it loses the Chinese middle classes, it loses the opportunity to sell its eco-system of smart home products to them

May 15, 2016
Google design

Google design has had a transformative effect on the world. It reminds me of Dieter Rams on the concept of design had said something to the effect of good design being invisible – once you see the product you couldn’t imagine things exist any other way.

That’s a really good description of the web with Google design. In the markets where it operates (with the exceptions of Czech Republic, South Korea, Japan and Russia) it’s a monopoly. Different regulatory authorities are investigating them for leveraging their monopoly into market domination in other categories.

With SERP (Search Engine Results Page) like this one above, I am not surprised that antitrust authorities are gaining an upper hand. This Urban Dictionary integration seems to cross the boundary from being useful to feature bundling. It deprives Urban Dictionary of an opportunity to put ad inventory in front of its audience. Urban Dictionary makes it’s money from retargeted banner ads and its own customisable merchandise. You can get any phrase in Urban Dictionary with its definition on a coffee mug, coaster set or tote bag.

It would be interesting to see if Google got into some sort of content agreement with Urban Dictionary. However I suspect that they have just gone ahead and done this? More about Google here.

May 11, 2016
Millennials are people too

Smart funny video by Adam Conover on the marketing obsession of millennials as a form of segmentation.

Show this to as many marketers as you can.

Having been involved in youth marketing and even spoken at conferences about it, many of the challenges and insights that ‘millennials’ as a cohort face aren’t unique insights per se.

You hear the same things over-and-over again. Being young presents its own set of challenges, these are tweaked accelerated by environmental conditions such as economy and housing. You feel the injustices of the world, adulting is hard. Responsibilities have a weight to them. Education has a cost.

Getting your first home is hard. Finding the right partner is stressful. Since the baby boomers the concept of youth has become elongated. The whole of society hasn’t been drafted into fighting a war and benefited from the rise of the industrial society.

But that doesn’t mean that it makes much sense for marketers to talk about millennials in such a broad brush way. At least gen-X whilst been written off as slackers were realised to have various different sub-cultures or tribes.

That level of nuance seems to have disappeared in ‘our’ collective understanding of millennials and gen-Z.

While we’re on about nuance, since when do adverts aimed at baby boomers appreciate that they don’t all look like Helen Mirren or Joanna Lumley. Or that they like going to rock concerts and festivals? Or that they might run for health and leisure?

Marketers are increasingly looking at big data, but lacking granularity in terms of segmentation and factors that might influence brand relevance.

My hypothesis is that the fetishisation of millennials as a single cohort is down to a deeper seated fear of disruption ambushing the marketers. Millennials aren’t an alien invasion, but people just like we’re used to. This fetishisation will end up as a feedback loop distorting their own view of what they expect to be and how they expect to be seen.

More on millennial related topics here.

May 7, 2016