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

  • These4Walls

    Actually, the original title extolling Lederhosen was total fiction: there is no leiderhosen related content here and I will not be putting any up in the future, instead this post is about These4Walls. I was inspired to write the title after having received a mail from a former colleague of mine – Jacqui. And no I won’t write about Dunlop Greenflash trainers (running shoes to our non-British readers).

    Back to reality, I attended a seminar by marketing group these4walls on research versus creativity. These4walls are lovely people and have some groovy video clips here. The evening went well, with the audience plied with a modicum of wine, Becks bier or mineral water (in my case). The crux of much of the discussion revolved around poor problem definition, client realpolitik and ignorance intruding on strategic thought and how innovation can be ‘ironed’ out through research. I decided to pose the question: how do you improve your client? Given that the underlying form of my parts of the discussion was that clients were at the root of many problems. Steps that I have taken in the past have included:

    – bringing the client in to sample agency life (I had to skip my three-hour lunch at Hakkasan that day, I couldn’t disappear to the gents to have a line of creative pick-me-up every 15 minutes and had to book some meetings in to pretend that I provided creative input and drove campaigns forward)

    – get a feel for the realpolitik clientside and suggesting ways around it in a constructive manner whilst still delivering a programme aimed at providing business benefits (usually for Americans)

    – resign the account

    As the great PR maestro Larry Weber once said to me “Agency life is great, you work five years and then go in house and demand a fortune. When your in an agency to get to work on a range of clients and if one of them is an asshole you can tell them to go fcuk themselves”. Like the magic shopkeeper in Mr Benn my governor Cathy Pittham appeared and explained that telling a client to perform a sexual act on themselves was a career limiting move. (But I can dare to dream)

    In the UK we have holidays on the Friday through to the Monday, so expect little if any content to be added to this blog.

  • Dasani’s UK problems

    Coca-Cola’s Dasani have had a rough couple of weeks with their entry into the UK bottled water market.

    Dasani is a respected brands in the US, China and across the developing world. Its manufactured approach to mineral water is at odds with the bottled at source manufacturers that dominate in Europe.

    A few weeks ago the UK tabloid press ‘exposed’ Dasani as tap water from Sidcup. To be fair Dasani does use some interesting NASA developed purification technology and then re-adds minerals in a carefully controlled amount to provide consistent taste. Then the water mains burst in Sidcup, and now Dasani have bromate contamination. This contamination forced parent company Coca-Cola to initiate a complete product recall, pulling Dasani off supermarket shelves around Britain.

    Of course this did not stop me pouring petrol on the fire by bending over backwards to help a CNBC Europe researcher who phoned up looking for expert comment on how this may affect the Coca-Cola and Dasani brands, I managed to place Mark North, creative director of Henrion Ludlow Schmidt’s London office on the European Closing Bell programme as an expert commentator. The product recall means that it will be very hard for Coca-Cola to relaunch the brand in the UK – at least in the near term. Their main concern will be protecting the reputation of Dasani in markets were it is currently established and successful.  Coca-Cola’s misfortune wouldn’t stop me drinking Dasani whilst travelling as it provides safer drinking water in places like China.

    What really astonished me was that in less two hours after the story broke in the late editions of London’s Evening Standard it had appeared on 89 different news sites listed by Google News including the San Jose Mercury and Straits Times. There is no longer such a thing as a local brand. News truly is 24 hours and global in nature….

    More on Coca-Cola here.