I started to think about brand collaborations in Hong Kong. On of the more unusual aspects of marketing in Hong Kong is the amount of co-marketing brand collaboration deals done and the unusual nature of these tie-ups. For instance last year I saw high-end Japanese streetwear brand Neighborhood have it’s brand on Coke Zero cans and worked on a ‘midnight rider’ influence programme.
This was used by Coke Zero to promote nighttime cycling. (It would be cooler and Hong Kong looks spectacular at night.) It also fits in with Neighborhood having been influenced by motorcycle culture. The programme was more Schwinn meets Easy Rider than Rapha style pelotons.
Meanwhile McDonalds is usually better known for tie-ins with Sanrio character franchises. However, now it is running a promotion with Chinese personal care brand Walsh. Think of Walsh as similar to Cussons in the UK. With certain breakfast dishes, consumers get a bottle of body wash free. Beyond encouraging product trial I don’t get the brand collaborations like this which seem to happen regularly in Hong Kong.
Here is the TV advert being run to support the promotion. And no, I can’t really make that much sense of the synergies either, but it seems to work. More on marketing here.
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
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Brand collaborations in Hong Kong
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Carbon nanotubes & other news
Carbon nanotubes
IBM betting carbon nanotubes can restore Moore’s Law by 2020 | ExtremeTech – interesting, IBM research has been at the leading edge of a lot of semiconductor manufacturing techniques including:
- Copper interconnects
- RISC architecture design
- Multi-core design
- Strained silicon substrates
Carbon nanotubes may join particularly as there is so much speculation about the state and future of IBM’s chip business as management moves towards a software and services based future. Is IBM preparing to sell the chip manufacturing business to the highest bidder?
Business
Amazon China chief replaced with another expat | WantChinaTimes – the back story is that Amazon has about 2 per cent of the e-commerce market in China
Design
Waterproof CD player with vocal removal function | AkihabaraNews – interesting thinking about context. Japan is still a big physical media market (they still have Tower Records) and people love to sing in the shower
Economics
HK’s retail sales fell in May | RTHK – its all about valuable gifts: watches, bags etc dropping by 25%
Ideas
The Future of the Workforce May Be Part-Time, Says Google CEO Larry Page | Re/code – utopian spin on zero-hour contracts?
Korea
S Korea to break away from Windows by 2020 | WantChinaTimes – interesting move: Windows 8 partly to blame, I suspect also the security decisions made around Active X made Koreans think twice before attaching themselves to Microsoft
Online
An Online Shift in China Muffles an Open Forum – NYTimes.com – “This is a new phase for social media in China,” said Hu Yong, a journalism professor at Peking University. “It is the decline of the first large-scale forum for information in China and the rise of something more narrowly focused.” – the authors have positioned this as a Chinese -specific move yet it is mirrored in the west with the rise of Whatsapp, Telegram and other OTT messenger services
Google bans porn from its ad network | CNBC – Google obviously doesn’t need the revenue, which bodes well for ongoing quarterly number going forwards
UK’s Porn Filter Triggers Widespread Internet Censorship | TorrentFreak – The results of ORG’s new tool show that what started as a “porn filter” has turned into something much bigger. Under the guise of “protecting the children” tens of thousands of sites are now caught up in overbroad filters, which is a worrying development to say the least – interesting that some are blocking the Open Rights Group and open source software sites
Thanks To “Right To Be Forgotten,” Google Now Censors The Press In The EU | Marketingland – once you take the 1st amendment driven angst viewpoint out of this, its a great summary of things by Danny Sullivan
Tencent Opening Up API for Wechat Login — China Internet Watch – expect WeChat’s app constellation to mushroom outside the Tencent family. More on WeChat here.
Security
3 Real Security Risks Threatening Your Smart TV Entertainment | Make Use Of – make mine a dumb TV
Technology
CHART OF THE DAY: Apple Is Invading The Enterprise – Business Insider – there is also a credibility issue, go to a developer conference and there is a sea of silver lids, this will knock on into the enterprise
Telecoms
I, Cringely The Secret of Google X – I, Cringely – I think untethered balloons aren’t a smart move either
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Happiness blanket & other news
Happiness blanket
British Airways Happiness Blanket Changes Colors To Reflect Your Mood | PSFK – the happiness blanket is a nice bit of technology meets art, less sure how it works from a research point of view as being a valid output. The measurement is actually done using sensors in a headband. The blanket provides a visual cue though fibre optic fibres woven into the front of the blanket. The happiness blanket is a great cyberpunk maguffin.
Economics
Startup Incubator Economics, Revisited | Excapite – are incubators part of the problem or the solution
As China’s wages increase, so does its rich-poor gap, says study | Shanghaist – interesting challenge, explains crack down on corruption etc
Ethics
Data Science: What the Facebook Controversy is Really About | The Atlantic – the last Facebook emotional research link that I am going to post
Ideas
The Military Is About to Get New Spy Glasses – Defense One – closer to what the vision of Google Glass et al should be
A Breakthrough in the Checkered History Of Brain Hacking – Defense One – probably a little longer for the Johnny Mnemonic-style brain implants
Luxury
Why Chinese luxury consumption continues to surge | Marketing Interactive – driven by e-commerce
Marketing
Cannes 2014: PR’s Battle For Marketing Relevance | Holmes Report – interesting debate
The changing face of Facebook | iCrossing – handy infographic on Facebook
5 tips for B2B social media marketing | Marketing Interactive – nice piece for agencies
Online
Google Discontinues Q&A Services | Google System – no Yahoo! Answers competitors
Alibaba boss Jack Ma says he has never used Taobao or Alipay, and doesn’t plan to | Quartz – did Jack Ma use TaoBao or not?
Facebook Still Dominates Teens’ Social Usage | Forrester Blogs – Facebook is still important for teens with 28% saying that they use it all the time
“Buy Now” Buttons Start Appearing in Tweets. Is Twitter Shopping Here? | Re/code – Twitter follows where Weibo led
Google shuts down Orkut | Marketing Interactive – not terribly surprising. Though with all eyes on Brazil with the World Cup and Brazil having been Orkut’s lead market there is a certain amount of irony in the timing
Tencent’s SY Lau : Mobile First | Holmes Report – interesting interview with Tencent executive SY Lau on WeChat
Technology
24 million Internet-connected TV Sets Sold in China in 2013: iResearch Report – but nothing about how they are used
Web of no web
Smart Picture Technologies Turns Your Smartphone’s Camera into a Measuring Tape | TechnoBob – really nice idea
Multi-touch Haptic Display Vibrates Desired Points on Screen | Nikkei TechOn – this is exciting stuff, will change interface design
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Auditing in China & other news
Auditing Chinese companies
Democracy and auditing | China Accounting Blog – given that auditing big four are under pressure in China, this might have been an effort to curry favour. But the auditing firms have screwed themselves over in Hong Kong and other countries with this move in China. I could imagine that in the years to come, the lack of transparent auditing will hurt Chinese companies listing on other stock exchanges.
Consumer behaviour
The Rising Importance of Single Person Households Globally | Euromonitor International – interesting data points, I am waiting for food packaging to better represent this demographic
Do Screens Make Us Stupider? Time for a Rethink of Reading | Discover Magazine – the challenge is that books might be written for a reason around learning, but are published to make money, unless there can be a special cognitive edition that makes even more money…
[1406.2293] Gossip: Identifying Central Individuals in a Social Network – market research as a network analysis tool
Economics
Banks in China make as much profit as those in the US, Europe, and Japan combined | Quartz – by comparison the European banking system is a minnow and has horrendous losses
FCMG
Confectionery Trends and Innovations at the 2014 Convenience U CARWACS Show in Toronto – Euromonitor International – focus on sharing occasions is a marketing agency opportunity
P&G’s Always celebrates the “Like a Girl” way of doing things | PopSop – interesting bit of culture hacking
Legal
APAC has highest software piracy rate – combination of being gadget driven and piracy is easy. More related content here.
Luxury
WeChat + Vivienne Tam = International Model Search 2014!| WeChat – interesting campaign for mass affluence brand. Tam is also trying to encourage usage of WeChat amongst English language customers, so I suspect that this is partly funded by Tencent.
Marketing
mirador – interesting application for analytics
Study: Social Media is Not a Trusted Media Source for PR Pros | Convince & Convert – interesting-ish piece I guess
Online
Ikea built a website inside Instagram | The Verge – gimmicky idea that would work as a one-off
Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment · The A.V. Club – and people will be surprised why? Good TV consumer product advertising is all about inducing anxiety with current states and promising some sort of emotional reward on purchase
Software
QuickOffice Will Be Discontinued | Google System – bad news for mobile workers
Technology
An Online Course For FPGA And CPLD Development | Hackaday – Reddit as an old time free university – but without the hippy politics
Xiaomi founder Lin Bin reveals global ambition | Marketing Interactive – no real surprise, but interesting how they will expand the web services side of the Xiaomi experiences
Wireless
Huawei’s Honor 6 cannibalizes sales of its Ascend P7 | WantChinaTimes – poor product management or a larger sign of the smartphone as a commodity?
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Emotion research paper by Facebook
Over the weekend if you went on to quality (not Buzzfeed) news sites you would have probably seen something about a scientific paper that was published by researchers in the pay of Facebook on how emotion spreads through social networks.
Emotion research explainer
There was a lot of copy written already about the experiment, so I recommend that you read The Atlantic‘s piece on it instead. There has been a lot written about whether it is moral, legal or ethical. As far as it being legal, Facebook’s highly paid legal counsel could provide a better steer on it than I could; and I suspect they would tell you it was completely legal.
As for the morals and ethics of it, I rather think that those are a mute point. Consumers emotion states have been tweaked for decades, the question of morality sailed with the rise of the mass market consumer product.
Whilst public relations as it is practiced now is more of a mechanistic craft; its father Edward Bernays viewed propaganda as a ‘modern instrument’ driven by scientific thinking including understanding of audience psychology to move people.Advertisers utilised motivational research from the early 20th century on to create cognitive dissonance with a consumer and then provide the product as a solution. The Atlantic carried an article on the psychology of advertising back in 1904. You are a better Mum if you wash your kids clothes with Persil, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk will put a smile on your face. All of which mine directly into consumer’s emotion, spreading dissatisfaction.
Political pollsters use voter psychographic profiling to induce a constituency result. We already live in the world of a malleable proletariat envisioned by by George Orwell in his novel 1984.
The people who are outraged by this need to get over it, log-in to Facebook less and realise that they are already sheep with a gallery of multinational shepherds herding them through their consumer lifecycle. What you can do is become more informed and read your environment in a more critical way. More related content here.
More information
Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment | The Atlantic
Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks by Adam D. I. Kramera, Jamie E. Guillory and Jeffrey T. Hancock
The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies (Oxford Handbooks) the Auerbach and Castronovo edited anthology gives you pretty much everything you need to know from Bernays onwards about psychology and audience manipulation
The Psychology of Advertising by Walter D Scott | The Atlantic (1904) – no that’s not a typo
Frontline: The Persuaders | PBS
Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals | Jib Fowles