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

  • Invisible cloaks + other things

    Invisible cloaks

    The possibility of invisible cloaks straight out of a Marvel comic hero’s tool kit or a wizarding wardrobe a la Harry Potter. The underlying technology involves some science that sounds more like science fiction. Could ‘Harry Potter’-like invisible cloaks really exist? – CNET

    On a more serious note invisibility cloaks have applications in the military, law enforcement and even urban design through the power of cutting edge science.

    Foxes on the moon

    Foxes and science fiction what could be more awesome? This reminded me of TinTin for some reason that I can’t put my finger on at the moment. Have a watch and let me know what you think.

    SIN R1

    The SIN R1 looks like the kind of car I would have had as a poster on my wall as a kid, but now it looks too outlandish to be on the road.

    The driver doing doughnuts on the public road reminded me of the young lads who would take their hot hatches down to Blackpool for the lights . Revving their engines and pulling similar stunts. Which makes me wonder, what do they think their customer is going to be like? A yob, the stereotypical young footballer?

    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