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
The book was a bit repetitive in parts and could have been reined in with some proper direction and editing, but that’s a problem of the editor rather than the author per se. Despite these flaws it provided an interesting insight into how a company had become such a colossal success in spite of itself and a parable on what happens when you try and shaft distribution channel partners.
The Coca-Cola Company used interesting accounting arrangements and stuffed its distribution channel in order to deliver results. But this just moved revenue allowed them to book revenue early rather than creating business growth. In this respect is similar to the way IBM started selling rather than leasing mainframes to book sales early whilst personal computing ate into its business market. It used an off-balance sheet transaction to set up a separate distribution company and then buy up its partners bottling operations. Eventually this arrangement together with product disasters like New Coke and Dasani caught up with them
Unlike Enron these weren’t bad people, they were just trying to keep Coke enjoying the kind of success it had always been in a changing world. The changing world increasing dominated by savvy consumers and operators like Wal Mart that have a touch of the night about them. Where it gets interesting is how someone like Warren Buffett could get taken for the ride by the Coca-Cola Company.
It is full of high-drama like directors being called to meetings in distant aircraft hangars, being fired by key shareholders and then all of them going home in their own Gulfstream jets – quality, you couldn’t make Pop Truth and Power up, even if you wanted to.
Hallyu – The rise of Korea as a cultural hotbed (what’s called the Korean wave in some quarters) in Asia: from the sexiest mobile phones, or well written and produced cinema to K-pop (the Korean equivalent of J-pop: sugar-coated Japanese pop music that carries well in other Asian markets and performed by young performers so physically perfect, you wonder if Sony hasn’t a secret laboratory protected by ninjas inside of Mount Fuji to manufacture J-pop artists).
Interestingly the Korean wave has not yet impacted on Japan in the same way as its neighbours, which was an interesting aside that came out of Richard Edelman’s keynote at the London presentation of his agency’s global trust barometer survey. Kudos to the New York Times Online (registration required).
Expect to see more of hallyu: the mix of professional product perfection and the conservative nature of Korean culture produces a product that travels better around the world than much US culture.
Mociology – The study of how mobile technology impacts with sociology from purchasing concert tickets to organising political rallies, raves and flash mobs. (Derived from mobile and sociology).
Microchunk – A product or service sold traditionally as a package broken down into its constituent parts so buyers can purchase a la carte for consumer electronics to news feeds. Think sachet marketing for the digital world. People like 37signals have successfully built ‘microchunk’ applications and services (like Backpack) that do one thing extremely well and compete against other much larger software companies that take a bundled approach leveraging an effective desktop monopoly (mentioning no names). Kudos for mociology and microchunk to Wired Magazine. More related content here.
Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, ten years after the peak of the Happy Mondays. London creative team Lee and Dan made an Al Qeada inspired calling card for Volkswagen that managed to leak out on to the web. Analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston won the monthly award for stating the bleeding obvious. We did a bit of homegrown analysis with the help of information from Popbitch to work out just how much News International made from the Prince Harry Nazi pictures. We also found that the Watchman character that the rc personality most resembled was The Comedian, more details on testing your Watchman Personality Inventory here.
February 2005
Words of the month were Mum Truck and KAGOY (kids get older, younger). Hunter S Thompson killed himself and half the media world pretended that they were avid readers of his work. The books of the month were Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (another pioneer of the gonzo school of journalism). The US Army released details around its successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign to attract recruits. America’s Army a realistic 3D game garnered interest in soldiering as a career and was far more fruitful than their television advertising campaigns. Bob Cringely highlighted how 25 billion USD needed to be invested by VC funds in the next 18 months or else they would lose their management fees. This of course wouldn’t have anything to do with the bubbling up of Web 2.0 would it? Carly Fiorina was finally ousted from H-P much to the relief of its employees. Sci-Fi London hosted a fantastic all-nighter of Shaw Brothers classics including Super Infra Man and Monkey Goes West.
March 2005
renaissance chambara turned 1 years-old. Forrester mapped out trends in consumer electronics for 2005. March’s word was Search Arbitrage. Seymour Hersh highlighted the Pentagon’s plans for axis-of-evil club member Iran. Hersh’s pioneering journalistic approach contrasted with general media malaise. The Sony PSP picked up a lot of interest on the web with some hailing it as the new iPod, I don’t think so…. And most importantly the rc towers local pub got recognised as Pub of the Year by the Evening Standard.
April 2005
PR gossip blog Spin Bunny was shut down for the first time as an unnamed PR agency called in the lawyers. Red Bull’s Art of Can exhibition brought a bit of culture to the Truman brewery. Word of the month is Kronenbourg. H-P manages to launch survey results that make them look foolish. There was less content overall as we were burning the midnight candle at work.
May 2005
Flying Records, one of the UK’s foremost dance record shops finally closed its shutters after ten years at the forefront of the scene, however its spirit lives on as Andrew Baker now champions new tracks online working for distributor Goya Music. Palm launched the LifeDrive and it didn’t look that impressive compared to an iPod, retail therapy was thus avoided. Michelle Delio was found to have made up some of her stories that she contributed to Wired News. The word of the month was Sachet Marketing.
June 2005
Country Music Television appoints a vice president of Dukes of Hazzard in a brilliantly executed PR campaign to promotes its re-runs of the original series. Omega releases its Planet Ocean watch – the watch that the Seamaster should be. WTF Apple goes Intel! Web 2.0 starts looking bubblicious. It was a few months since the Miami Winter Music festival and the Ibiza season was just starting to kick-off so a bumper month was had in the vinyl stakes. Michael Jackson is found not guilty, but the court of public opinion isn’t so sure. The word of the month is Mommy Consultant, Burson-Marsteller’s phrase e-fluential missed out because it was too close to effluent and we wouldn’t want you to be under the opinion that we thought all bloggers were full of sh!t now would we?
July 2005
Cracks start to show in the eBay edifice. Fatigue for consumerism starts to set in. Coke rolls out their Love poster campaign, arguably the best piece of creative this year. The ongoing rising price of oil gives Hubbert’s Peak a mainstream audience as consumers wake up to the fact that oil isn’t going to get any cheaper or more plentiful. The New York Times celebrated the tenth birthday of e-commerce.
August 2005
Wired issues its ten-year netrospective ‘celebrating’ the original of the bubble with the Netscape IPO. Citizen journalism sees its first cynical cash in with the launch of Scoopt, a picture agency for the general public and their camera phone. Paparazzi sleep easy though. Music industry bodies blame everybody but themselves for the continued under-performance of their industry. Bob Cringely launches his NerdTV series of interviews and Stussy’s 25th (XXV) anniversary collection is full swing. Towards the end of the month I managed to survive Silicon Valley. In Utah, the heavy mob is used to deal with kids listening to repetitive beats in an incident rather like the infamous police raid in Nelson near Blackburn back in the day. I am sure American’s everywhere feel safer already. The harvest of quality dance music on an acid house tip.
September 2005
Chigger is the word. Nick Love’s film The Business reminds us why the 1980s were so good and so crap at the same time. Palm previews a Windows device, Dell stumbles and I try hard not to snigger, its especially hard when some bright spark calls Dell’s answer to the iPod Shuffle the Dell Ditty and styles it like a Ronson lighter. Apple launches the iPod Nano and gadgeteers recoil in horror from the Motorola ROKR. Nestle re-releases the Texan bar. Geek-in-chief at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, appeals to the troops to stop leaking confidential news via their blogs; via a blog!
October 2005
Designers Burro shut up shop, while Criminal opens a Covent Garden boutique and Matmos see sense and re-release the Telstar lamp. Disgraced analyst Harry Blodgett starts his own blog. Super Southerner is the phrase of the moment. Spin Bunny gets shut down for the second time, this time it looks like its permanent as the entire site is removed from Typepad, speculation is that a South Bank based agency was responsible for letting loose the dogs of law. The tune of the moment is Tiger Stripes – Spirited Away. In a pre-Halloween push Burger King’s clumsy viral marketing efforts get unmasked by Slate.
November 2005
Lynx launches a bespoke perfume in conjunction with Oki-Ni, research shows that music downloads have plateaued proving the proving the point that you can only buy so much crap. Talking of crap, Hypercolour looks like it may be making a come back. AOL makes its first interesting move in years by taking TV to the web and my even have a good business model. The word is Shorty (at least according to DJ Tim Westwood).
December 2005
Christmas comes in with a whimper and Sony messes up a street marketing campaign for the PSP. rc floats the concept of a media bond and futures market to capitalise on the digitisation of content, the long tail and too much sloshing around waiting to be invested. Bootlegs mixes of Aretha Franklin and Pink Floyd move the feet so that the mind will follow. The word of the month is Uncanny Valley. Designers Terratag have some awesome gear in their latest fashion collection. Amazon take a Hermann Goring approach to email marketing in the final run-up to Christmas. A brief trip to Ireland left me with a number of contradictory observations about the state of the Celtic Tiger.
Image courtesy of Sanrio. More related content here.
A design and marketing company called 3iYing has enlisted the help of 15 – 25 year old girls to help develop more effective marketing strategies.Earlier this year a group of 8 young women enlisted by 3iYing walked into the Virgin Mobile office and told them their teen marketing strategy was all wrong. The girls pointed out that pay-as-you-go tariffs cost too much for teen girls who usually resort to using ‘guilt-tactics’ on their parents to get them to pay.
3iYing spurs guilt marketing
Virgin listened and subsequently ran a campaign in CosmoGIRL that included tear out phones that allowed teens to make fake calls in front of their parents, thereby pushing their ‘guilt button’. 3iYing’s Chief Executive Heidi Dangelmaier came up with this approach having been a leading voice in girl market trends. The teen demographic has increased by 17 per cent over the last 10 years, Moreover the financial muscle of these teens in terms of home spending is growing even faster.
Companies like Virgin, realising they cannot properly relate to this market are turning to alternative approaches like that offered by 3iYing. User-centred design and marketing has always proved a successful approach, by designing relevant services and consumer experiences. By listening to what teens really want will make for more compelling, teen-centric brands and products.
Teens also provide insights into their parents, who were the best people to advise on how to manipulate the parents. Parents still hold the purse strings, but teens are the key to accessing their spend. Kudos to Steve. More related content here.
Update: USA Today has an article about Gen Y in the workplace, basically they want a dot.com style work environment with a decent pension plan. Sounds similar to Gen X really, apart from the fact they are more mouthy and high maintenance. Kudos to Blake Barbera.
Swiffer is a US homeware brand owned by Proctoer & Gamble. Proctor & Gamble had to do a product recall last week on a battery operated vacuum cleaner that they sold in the US market under the Swiffer name. The product could overheat in certain circumstances and they had received 14 complaints. I was impressed by the recall notice on the front of the website, it showed real class. Rather than hiding behind legalese, they put personality to it and even had it signed by ‘Kris from the Swiffer team’. This conduct is likely to help them protect their Swiffer brand and reduce panic amongst consumers whilst still ensuring an orderly recall of the product.
I have pasted the copy below because I have no idea how long P&G will keep it on their website.
Swiffer Sweep+VacImportant product news
As you know, we are very sorry to announce that Swiffer will be voluntarily recalling our new product, Sweep+Vac. The Sweep+Vac is our new battery-operated vacuum cleaner brought to you in September 2004.
We are pleased to reassure you that this product recall does not involve any of our other great Swiffer products.
We have identified an isolated Sweep+Vac product quality issue. Click here for complete details.
If you have this product at home, we are asking that you stop using the Sweep+Vac immediately and disconnect the Sweep+Vac by removing the top section of the handle. Click here for instructions on how to disassemble your Sweep+Vac.
Even though this issue has been observed in just a few Sweep+Vac units, we have taken this voluntary measure to ensure the highest standards of quality, safety, and satisfaction by recalling Sweep+Vac as quickly as possible. If you have purchased a Sweep+Vac, we would like to provide you with a refund. Click here for refund instructions.
We’d like to thank the initial consumers who alerted us to this problem. We are very committed to delivering the highest standard of product quality and take these types of issues very seriously.
We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your continued support of Swiffer,
