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

  • John Markoff & more things

    John Markoff

    John Markoff and Steven Levy are better known to non-US audiences for their non-fiction books about the technology sector, but are actually veteran journalists who have covered the technology sector for the business press over the past three decades. I would recommend Steven Levy’s Insanely Great and What the Doormouse said by John Markoff respectively.

    Media

    Vice is being widely touted as a modern-day CNN or BBC, but a significant amount of its output looks to me like it is the modern day equivalent of the mondo film. This film on Mexican black magic being a classic example

    Retailing

    Step Aside Black Friday – Meet Prime Day | Business Wire – interesting that Amazon is not including it’s China business in this. More retailing related posts here

    Technology

    TSMC Overtakes Intel in Chip Capex Ranking | EE Times – interesting that Sony is surging up there as well with its CMOS sensors

    Wireless

    Dual-SIM smartphone sales to hit half a billion next year | TotalTele.com – waiting for the dual SIM option on the iPhone :-). A good deal of this is down to having SIMs that allow consumers to pick the best packages for them. For instance making weekend calls on one SIM; or using its data plan; whilst still being available for inbound calls on another number. This tends to be more popular in developing world countries

    Apple and Google Partners | Re/code – Google partners starts to look a look a lot like Microsoft in terms of the adverse relationships that its partners have. Google partners mirror the history of Microsoft partners like Nokia, HTC, Nortel, PC manufacturers and Sendo

  • Pizza Hut Projector Box + more

    Pizza Hut Projector Box

    Pizza Hut Projector Box + Subtraction.com – interesting Pizza Hut projector box design by Ogilvy for Pizza Hut. You know that the image from the Pizza Hut projector is likely to be a bit like watching an old VHS pirated recording of a film. I would have serious worries about a smartphone being bright enough to work. But I can also see how it enable impromptu social watching of content on the Pizza Hut projector box. It also cements the mental linkage between pizza and watching a movie at home

    Business

    Growth accelerates at WPP PR and public affairs arm, but not in UK | PR Week – All regions, except the United Kingdom and continental Europe, were up. It is interesting that public affairs was highlighted as a growth driver

    Fetchr just got $11M to take conventional mail to United Arab Emirates | VentureBeat | Deals | by Sindy Nanclares – so the future of the web is horizontal stratification of concierge services….

    Design

    Why Are Design Firms Stagnating? | Co.Design – some interesting takes on the state of the industrial design sector

    Gadget

    Pens Are Making a High-Tech Comeback | WIRED – first of all, a nice piece of storytelling by Waggener Edstrom; secondly an interesting take on tablet and pen computing which in some ways hasn’t moved on in the past eight years or so

    Distribution challenges for China’s flatlining smartphone sector | TelecomTV – slower movement at the bottom of the market

    Luxury

    Sunglasses Shape Up | Business of Fashion – using design rather than logos to sell. Interesting take on Luxottica being crippled by being unable to take risk – hence boring looking Oakleys and not replicating the variations seen in Bausch & Lomb era Ray-Ban

    Marketing

    Land Rover Adventuregram (@go_for_a_drive) • Instagram photos and videos – interesting creative

    Online

    Freebooting: Stolen YouTube videos going viral on Facebook. | Slate – how Facebook could leapfrog YouTube on the cheap by building critical mass through piracy

    Security

    Hospital Medical Devices Used As Weapons In Cyberattacks | Dark Reading – Some of these devices are based on Windows, for example, Rios says, so they are often susceptible to Windows exploits. “There have been previously reported cases where these devices have become infected by run-of-the-mill malware.  While this malware isn’t custom-made for medical devices, it shows that the devices are vulnerable to exploitation,” says Rios, who is founder of Laconicly LLC.

    PRESS RELEASE: House Passes Massie Amendment to Strengthen Privacy and Security | Congressman Thomas Massie – “When our government weakens encryption software to spy on citizens, it puts everyone at risk.  Hackers can exploit weak encryption to gain access to Americans’ confidential health records and financial information,” said Congressman Massie. More on security related content here.

    Software

    Microsoft Thinks the Smartphone Is Over. It’s Wrong | WIRED – the smartphone isn’t over, but Microsoft realises that there isn’t room for another mobile OS – learning the lessons of OS/2, BeOS and Linux for desktop in the PC eco-system. This comes on the back of Jolla’s decision to focus on software and give up its own hardware business. It has most success selling a secure mobile OS to governments, rather than selling handsets to consumers. More wireless related posts here.

    Telecoms

    Don’t believe the spin BT will not manage EE any better than it’s current owner – Ian Wood quite rightly calls BS on the PR campaign that positions BT as a viable triple play based on its ability to get more value out of EE. If one remembers their history, BT used to own Cellnet and spun it in 2002

    Wireless

    Xiaomi, China’s New Phone Giant, Takes Aim at World – WSJ – interesting that Xiaomi isn’t compared to other domestic brands in this article

  • Brand storytelling: a bitter pill to swallow?

    I have been thinking about brand storytelling after watching Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake over the weekend which is ostensibly trying to tell the story of Afghanistan from then end of the second world war to today. But it is also a parable on how the simplicity of storytelling used by the political classes to get the populace on side in the west has been ultimately counterproductive. This counterproductive nature of it, made me think about brand storytelling, that is often simple to aid both delivery and effectiveness.

    I have worked for businesses since the mid-noughties that put brand storytelling at the centre of offerings – often using simple mono-myths as models. In addition, my colleagues at one agency took this a stage further and sold their services as building on the ‘best practice’ of winning political campaigns – if you like Ogilvy on Advertising but written by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

    The truth is that our relationships with brand is often more complex and shifting than we has marketers let on. Brands have symbolic and status power which changes over time. The question that Bitter Lake seeded in my mind, is brand storytelling actually going to breed a future set of consumers with little to know brand engagement? Where brand values become a mill stone rather than a touch stone? It’s too early to tell and I don’t know the answers if it did happen, though my gut says going to an approach of radical honesty. More branding related content here.

    More information
    Bitter Lake | Wikipedia

  • Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation

    With the Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation  – Yahoo! published a list of properties that it was closing down and services that it was changing support on over the next few months. Most of the coverage amongst the people I follow has been around the shutdown of Yahoo! Pipes, as despite its flakey behaviour it was tremendously useful for putting together cheap, fast services to help with social media monitoring. I ‘built’ monitoring pipes for the likes of Microsoft and AMD after I had left Yahoo! that included careful key word filtering. This allowed them to take this feed and syndicate ‘good’ news machine translated into different languages on different micro-sites. This ‘Pipe building’ process took just a few hours.

    My friend Mat Morrison had put it up to much more inventive uses.

    Yahoo! Pipes, like the Fire Eagle location service came out of a golden age of web development. An influx of talent into the business like Bradley Horowitz, Simon Willison, Stewart Butterfield, Tom Coates and Joshua Schachter brought with it a web 2.0 philosophy of data being:

    • Portable – consumers could back up their own data at any time, or use it to move to a rival service. In stark contrast to the Facebook and WeChat walled gardens of today
    • Data is to be manipulated – data could be overlaid or processed through other services, like crime data on maps, or Pipes

    But enough eulogising; Pipes was an interesting idea that never got the support from consumers or Yahoo! that it needed. The service was flakey at times, if it was a car it would have been a late 1970s/early 1980s vintage Alfa Romeo or Lancia – it was that bad. It is obvious from the Yahoo! Pipes blog that it has been in a mode of minimal maintenance for years – the last post prior to the shut down notice was posted in 2012 to outline a work around from Yahoo! shutting down its Babelfish translation service (which was originally on AltaVista.com in the late 1990s and relied on technology licenced from Systrans).

    Lets look at some of the other services that Yahoo! has sunset this time around.

    The market specific services are interesting, as they paint a picture of Yahoo! under-performing across international markets and in sectors where it previously had a strong advertising offering. Take the cars section across the main European markets, looking at the UK offering – there is no page takeover by a car brand, there is no sponsored content and there is two banner ads (one for AutoTrader, one for BSkyB), one tiny rich content ad at the bottom of the page for the new Terminator film and one re-targeting module. If this is an indicator of what other European markets are like then automotive advertising at Yahoo! Europe is in a bad way.

    TV and film properties have little to no ads on the front page, again no takeovers or sponsored content. So Yahoo! seems to be struggling with getting advertising spend in two key sectors.

    If we go to Asia, the move out of the Philippines is particularly interesting, presumably driven by advertising opportunity – or the lack there of. But when you look at the economic indicators of the Philippines, there is a consistent growth predicted in retail sales according to Statista
    philippines retail sales

    According to Ken Research, the Philippines online advertising market grew with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.4% during the period 2008 – 2013 and is predicted to grow almost 15% CAGR between 2013 and 2018. E-tailing is expected to grow by 101.4% CAGR over 2013 – 2018. So why is Yahoo!, which has been established in the Philippines unable to capitalise on the in-market growth. Is it that Yahoo! sees ways to earn more money elsewhere and the opportunity cost is too high in the Philippines, or is it a broken advertising sales machine?

    The closure of Yahoo! Entertainment in Singapore is more curious as Yahoo! still manages to get advertising from major brands. As I write this Oreo has a full page frame running and there is a dynamic banner by group shopping site Qoo10.

    Yahoo! Mail and Contacts support of older Macs and iPhones. I was surprised that these were called out. Yahoo! Mail is depreciating support for devices running iOS4 or older and running the native mail application. A couple of things here; given Apple’s expertise at upgrading iPhone users speedily why would this even be an issue?

    Secondly,  why does Yahoo! need to make a special effort to support accounts that were presumably using POP3 or IMAP email standards? The webDEV standard would make a similarly curious point about Yahoo!’s depreciation of support for contacts on a Mac running OS X 10.8 and earlier. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

    Former CEO, Carole Bartz famously said of Yahoo! that you can’t cut your way to growth. So what do these ‘product updates’ say about Yahoo!? Over the past two years prior to this update, Yahoo! has already closed over 60 services, where does it all stop? More technology related content here.

    More information
    Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization | Yahoo! Blog
    Pipes End-of-life Announcement | Yahoo Pipes Blog
    Q4 2014 Progress Report | Yahoo! Blog

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.