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

  • Korean churches lessons

    I was talking with a friend over dinner about the success of Christian churches gaining a foothold in Korea. There are lessons learned from Korean churches in the way that they have managed to grow. On the face of it Korea would be stony ground for a ‘new religion’.  While Korea was part of the Japanese empire for a good while.  Korea still managed to maintain a strong culture and sense of identity of which Buddhist and Confucian belief systems are a key part. (This isn’t meant to be a theological or politics-related discussion).

    A number of the success factors struck me as being classic factors for marketing success as well:

    • Location – Buddhist temples tend to be away from the population up in the hills and the mountains. This is because Korean Buddhism, like Japanese Buddhism puts a strong emphasis and place on nature. Contrast this with churches that are located in people’s neighbourhoods. It’s easier to get to your place of worship. From a marketing point of view look how Apple has improved, first by going in-store at CompUSA and later building its own stores because it is easier for people to get to an Apple retailer
    • Ritual -this kind of extends from the first point, because when you can get to your place of worship easier, it is easier to do a regularly repeatable ritual that reinforces how you feel about your religion of choice. People go to Church every Sunday. Again if you can get people to do something on a regular basis they are more likely to incorporate your product or service into their lifestyle: Google being a great example, which is why Yahoo! failed to dislodge the search giant from its position despite having a comparable product five or so years ago
    • Evangelists – people who are involved in the Korean churches already seem to do a good job in terms of word-of-mouth marketing encouraging their friends to trial Christianity. If these guys had a net promoter index they would be hitting 8+ consistently; again mirroring Apple’s rise
    • Network effects – the rise of Christianity is a virtuous circle with more of the converted going out there bringing in yet more people. From a virtual standing start, now over 29 per cent of Koreans identified themselves as Christian according to 2005 Korean census data quoted by Wikipedia. I’ve been a Mac user long enough to remember when it was unusual to own Apple products. I was one of only two people in my halls of residence of college who had a Mac; yet now you can’t move in Starbucks because of the see of glowing Apple logos on the laptop lids
    • Smart engagement process – when you start at one of these churches they put you into a study group to get a download on what Christianity is. You get to meet more people, so your engagement with the church moves beyond the person who originally encouraged you to come along to other members of the church. In marketing companies are always looking for multiple touch-points of engagement. There’s definitely lessons learned from Korean churches in terms of customer experience and customer journey. 

    Korean christianity was covered in The Economist here. More marketing related posts here.

  • I want to work in PR…

    I’ve had a number of messages on LinkedIn and emails over the past few months as graduates started to look for first jobs and start with ‘I want to work in PR’. So I figured it might be useful sharing the advice here. There are lots of obvious things you can do to make you more employable in terms of highlighting potential useful skills and getting the basics right – spelling and grammar being a major bugbear.

    But beyond all that generic advice here are some things to think about that are PR-specific:

    Don’t lose heart. I want to work in PR means commitment to beat out thousands of other talented smart graduates.

    Let’s start off with the maths, the job market is basically a numbers game, I got my first agency role after sending out over 200 CVs/ job application forms. It is just a matter of being at the right place at the right time

    When I started off, being a mature graduate, coming from an Irish working class household in the North West of England put me at a disadvantage. The clients and colleagues were all bothered about mojitos, wine and six nations rugby. The industry is still as white, middle class and English as it ever was. You have to be the change and that is really lonely. You’ll be on your own. Mentors can help, but you’ll be relying on your own resilience whether you’re:

      • From another country
      • Working class
      • Teetolaller
      • From an ethnic minority
      • Being older than the ‘norm’

    Classism and age are the last acceptable prejudices, but the others will be signalled through micro-aggressions, gaslighting and omission. Your allies won’t always be allies, dragging you down will help them get a leg up.

    So how can you tilt the odds in your favour?

    • You can increase your odds by becoming more visible through social media, just in the same way that you probably wouldn’t buy a brand that you couldn’t find on Google, having your own personal brand that is visible in a positive way online can only be a good thing. I realise that this isn’t necessarily easy however if your name is John Smith
    • Many of applicants have read all the pieces about innovative ways of applying for jobs and every second CV seems to have a QRcode on it. Innovation is great; my former colleague and friend Doug Winfield got himself noticed using Facebook advertising a year or two ago and is now holding down a senior role with with MS&L in New York. All I am going to say about innovation is that whilst it might get you  on to the initial pile of CVs to read; you also need to think about your CV also in terms of usability. When interviewing people you want to get the salient points of the CV prior to meeting them as easily as possible mainly because your working life will be time poor. Many larger HR departments will look to save your data on a database that they can interrogate, that means your information needs to be easy to put in. So there is a balance in your decision: getting noticed versus getting a job in competitive environments
    • Go where there will be less competition. How about applying to agencies working in less popular sectors and by looking to do PR at small-to-medium sized firms or even junior roles in-house.  Whilst people want to work with brands that their friends will know, third sector PR where they can feel good about themselves, or do celebrity PR – that is only a small part of the industry. I focused on the technology sector when I started off mainly because it was (and still is if we’re honest about it) deeply unsexy. The vast majority of the population don’t care about ERP, SCM, BPM and BPO; nor should they
    • Take advantage of disruption in the PR industry. Digital has started progressive change in the PR industry. The media industry is being disrupted; there are less gainfully-employed journalists writing more coverage, and publications  are earning less money from product and recruitment ads. This means that there less opportunities for traditional media relations. So PR has had to look to new influencers like bloggers and having direct dialogue with perspective product / service purchasers. This overlaps with business functions such as sales and customer services and other marketing disciplines. At the moment media buying, search and advertising agencies are staffing up with digital PR expertise and are killing PR agencies in new business pitch situations. Consequently it is worthwhile looking beyond the PR sector for PR roles

  • Bomb warning on social

    Last Monday, there was a credible bomb warning in London by dissidents within the Irish republican movement. The bomb warning information swept across Twitter as everyone looked for credible sources. The Metropolitan Police’s own press statement was linked to at least 139 times according to backtweets.com.
    Met Police - Press Bureau JPG
    Its a great well-written piece of communication. What was more interesting to me however was a piece of text at the bottom which says:

    IMPORTANT NOTE: This site is for the use of media organisations only.
    Media organisations should not publish links to this site.

    Given that the medium of Twitter had become the media it showed a lack of understanding in how social and breaking news now operate. There could have been numerous reasons for this:

    • Not wanting to have the press office deluged with calls from the general public
    • Not having their web server come down with a high-volume of inbound traffic

    But it struck me that a real opportunity was missed. Why not have a separate version of the page sans contact details that the media could link to, rather than having the social media swarm trying to second guess mainstream media sources. When the July 7 bombings took place in London, I worked at Yahoo! and the front page team took down the home page of the site, took all the hard-to-load elements off the page like banner ads. Instead they hard coded updates to minimise server loads and keep the information flowing for concerned Londoners.

    A simple updated page on a well-hardened web infrastructure is one of the best ways of communicating with people at times like this. Thankfully this time it wasn’t put to the test. But this will become more important in future events when as the internet fills will fake news and state sponsored online bad actors. More online related content can be found here.

  • Amoy online marketing

    Amoy Asianate yourself application on Facebook

    For those of you who haven’t seen it Amoy, a Hong Kong-based company who sells Asian cooking product put an ‘Asianate’ yourself application on Facebook. Quite frankly, I was surprised by the creative. I might have expected it from a mainland brand. But Hong Kong is cosmopolitan enough to realise that this wasn’t a bright move.
    amoy facebook application
    It seems to have sparked quite a conversation in social media so I looked into it a bit further.

    Amoy facebook conversation – click through for Slideshare deck.

    I was expecting the kind of mess that appeared when the Spanish basketball team did their Asian ‘slant eyes’ photo. And some comments on Twitter compared the Amoy application with Black & White minstrels blacking up.
    amoy JPG
    However at the time I write this post the backlash doesn’t seem to have arrived at least in the kind of volumes I was expecting and much of the criticism seems to be from chatter within the agency world. Is the Amoy Asianate application just too mediocre for anyone to care? Did they pull out the media spend supporting the campaign or it is just taking a while for the consumer controversy to gather a decent head of steam?

    If so how much of the outrage will be stoked by mainstream media outlets? More related content here.

  • Cross border NFC services + more

    DOCOMO and KT Agree to Launch Cross border NFC Services— To develop international services building on partnerships with key players — | Press Center | NTT DOCOMO Global – interesting move, I wonder if the big five wireless companies in Europe (Telefonica, Vodafone, France Telecom, Three, Deutsche Telekom) can do something similar in terms of cross border NFC services? If they did, what impact would it have on mobile payments adoption and traditional credit card payment platform usage? Would existing career billing systems be able to cope with the volume of payment transactions from cross border NFC services?

    Nigo Talks About His Sale of Bape » Kineda – woah interesting feedback. BAPE without Nigo at the helm is like Stüssy without Shawn. Out of the Japanese brands only BAPE managed to get western sizing right. Looking forward to Nigo’s next thing. More on the luxury end of fashion here.

    How To Tell a Story Through Photos – aimed at prospective photojournalists, but ideal for PRs

    Major retailers ditch the Amazon Marketplace | Econsultancy – shame, Marketplace is one of the reasons why I shop Amazon

    Microsoft’s Bing Gains Search Market Share in January | AllThingsD – explains Google’s imminent weather report

    Chinese men: saviors of the It bag? | FT.com – very different consumer patterns

    Timeline: Facebook’s Stormy Relationship with Privacy | PBS – evil.

    To Understand Your Market, Harness The 7 Elements of Customer and Social Data « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang – if you only click on one link out of this lot make it this one

    Asiajin » Facebook Japan Takes Hard Line, Banning Pseudo Names And Requires ID – Facebook doesn’t get Japanese consumers

    Eureka lost: How the Internet has destroyed the thrill of the hunt. – By Matthew J.X. Malady – Slate Magazine

    Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally honest ‘burning platform’ memo? (update: it’s real!) — Engadget – I am not sure moving platform is the right one for them. A third party platform will hollow the value out of their margins. Double down on MeeGo instead? Nokia watcher Tomi Ahonen poured cold water on the accuracy of the memo and offers his own opinion

    Sanders Shoes – Sanders & Sanders Ltd is liked by Shawn Stüssy and Mark McNairy

    Carl Zeiss to look at 22-nm circuit connections – nano-manufacturing

    BBC Research and Development: Orchestrated Media – Beyond second and third screen – interesting concepts that agency planners are going to have to get to grips with

    Mulberry / Love Blossoms – really nice Valentine-themed digital campaign

    Responsible Staffing and Resourcing in Social Media | Ed Lee – good points on the realpolitik of a business versus the pervasive nature of social media

    De-Finnistration: Nokia to shift HQ to US? • The Register – ok, the US is only 8 per cent of the world phone market in terms of value. Not sure an over-focus here is smart

    Not all iPhone apps work on the Verizon iPhone — fragmentation looming? | ZDNet – may also be due to the fact that CDMA can’t do data and voice at the same time…

    What Does Reported Sharp-CMI Alliance Mean? — Tech-On! – consolidation in LCD panels as markets mature and become commoditised whilst the cost of improving production and screen technologies becomes progressively more expensive

    Not A Faster Horse » PR creates Ideas That Grow – does advertising repeat, or if its done well does it riff off the one theme the way PR campaigns coalesce around key messages

    Shrinking International News Output of UK Papers Creates Opportunity for PR Pros « BusinessWired – Business Wire Blog – not sure about the conclusions, but the research is nice

    Early Facebook execs back AI startup Vicarious Systems | VentureBeat – AI again, ex-Numenta people involved. Seems to be similar kind of work to what Virage tried a decade ago or more

    China devotes its energy to green development – likely to develop a technological over the west

    Biting into exabytes – huge data backup

    Trunk.ly | Home – kind of like Pinboard.in

    The era of cheap capital draws to a close | McKinsey Quarterly – The global economy will soon have to cope with too little capital, not too much. And worries about hot capital moving too quickly into emerging markets could soon be replaced by an era of financial protectionism—in which governments restrict outflows of capital as a defense against rising interest rates for corporations and consumers

    3 Sources of Conflict in Remote Teams, and How to Avoid Them: Online Collaboration – good set of tips

    Promotions lose favour | Warc.com – wondering whether the consumer behaviour pattern seen by CPG manufacturers will evolve into a similar pattern for businesses like GroupOn? – Offer fatigue

    Nofollow Link Attribute – So How Does Google Treat It (& Do We Need to Care?) | Search Engine Journal – interesting paradox between the nofollow tag and social media

    Estée Lauder targets China: News from Warc.com – interesting move since most of the noise hasn’t been from mid-market brands yet. However health and beauty is a very competitive field

    Here’s Why Groupon Was Forced To Run A Super Bowl Ad – low customer loyalty and low barriers to entry

    Patterns of Temporal Variation in Online Media by Yang & Leskovec (Stanford University) – interesting correlation between the process of the news media’s agenda and the way Twitter hashtags operate. Memes have similar dynamics across very different media vehicles. Blogs tend to have longer lasting influence than news coverage

    Google: “Expect Some Big Changes Here Very Shortly” – big algorithmic changes, what we used to call at Yahoo! a weather report. The fact that they are flagging it means it may be traumatic for SEO at least for a little while

    HTC Invests In Multimedia Delivery Platform Company Saffron Digital – HTC building an eco-system for Android phones beyond the hold of Google

    Asiajin » AKB360: Experience The Town On Your Desktop Anywhere – think Google earth versus QuickTimeVR interior shots

    How US Government is using security researchers | VentureBeat – interesting article on Feed Over Mail technology

    Before you can pay with phones, near-field communications needs better security | VentureBeat

    Web-Based E-Mail Is Losing Popularity – NYTimes.com – due to mail applications

    Yahoo Is Said to Move Toward Personalized Content – NYTimes.com – so its going to be a portal company for non-PC devices? How very 1999

    How to Break into a Mac (And Prevent It from Happening to You) – lock down your firmware with a password

    Software firms cotton on to the value of social media | New Media Age – this is more about continuing the upgrade ‘crack’ for IT managers in enterprises rather than pushing social further into enterprises in a lot of cases

    Leading mobile developer: “No more free apps” – a sign of things to come? | Mobile Industry Review – interesting take on the app economy from a developer perspective

    Disney Looks to the Cradle to Expand Business – NYTimes.com – taking product placement to it’s logical conclusion

    AOL to Buy The Huffington Post – NYTimes.com – recursion. Steve Case merged AOL with Time Warner media. Time Warner spins out AOL, which then builds a media conglomerate

    Egypt’s Internet Blackout Cost More Than OECD Estimates – Forbes – gives some good insight into how interconnected the world commerce system is

    It is the structure of social networks that shapes influence… and the structure is changing | Trends in the Living Networks – some interesting ideas here

    Criticism of imitation Sunday Tribune masthead – RTÉ News – Irish Mail on Sunday used a Sunday Tribune as a wrap on its own paper