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

  • Brand proposition

    The brand proposition is what fires creative thinking in advertising and the bane of junior planners. In fact, the brand proposition is a topic of conversation for advertising planners, in the same way that the weather is for British and Irish people. It is a source of endless debate and discussion.

    Firstly, let’s discuss what’s a brand?

    Cantata Coral 2009. (60)

    How you define brand would likely come down to two camps. Those that broadly agree with either of two statements that branding:

    • Is the act of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product or service from others
    • Is the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company, with what people actually think about your company

    The second option is closer to where my viewpoint would be, but neither are completely right or wrong. Brands have various attributes including:

    • Brand / customer relationships
    • Brand personality
    • Country of origin
    • Emotional benefits
    • Organisational associations
    • Self-expressive benefits
    • Symbols
    • User imagery

    Product specific attributes that affect brand

    • Scope
    • Attributes
    • Uses
    • Quality / value
    • Functional benefits

    JWT London’s seminal planning guide said that a brand’s appeal is built up over time by three different sorts of appeal

    • Appealing to the senses: feel, smell, tastes, sounds or looks
    • Appeals to reason: function, when would you use it, what does it contain, how does it perform
    • Appeals to the emotions: the brand style or nature, brand associations, what mood it evokes or satisfies, any psychological rewards for usage

    How does planning come into it?

    What’s a brand planner?

    “The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.” 

    Stanley Pollitt

    The JWT Planning Guide, which can be considered to be the stone tablets of account planning as a profession were handed down written in 1974.

    The planning guide said

    … any systemic approach to planning advertising has to do more than simply provide controls and disciplines. It must actively stimulate imagination and creativity too.

    PLANNING GUIDE (March 1974). United Kingdom: J Walter Thompson (JWT) London.

    Ok, that’s quite a big ask. But it didn’t stop there. The ideal advertising planning methods had to also fulfil four criteria

    • Realistic – based on ‘best practice’ and must be capable of being optimised and evolved.
    • Pragmatic – They must work to help people create advertising that is relevant and creative. Simple in nature, memorable and easy to follow
    • Fundamental – based on ‘coherent theories’ of how advertising benefits marketing, how communications works, how people collaborate productively and create new ideas
    • Structured – set a sand pit that imagination can work in. Chunking complexity down to simple elements and providing regular evaluation of work done
    https://flic.kr/p/7rtT7Q

    Brand proposition

    Realistic, pragmatic, fundamental and structured dictate the shape and form of a planner’s tools and outputs. And sometimes we lose sight of this, which is very much the case with the brand proposition.

    A definition

    A brand proposition could be considered to be the foundational concept that highlights the unique identifying features of your brand.

    Attributes of a good brand proposition

    A good brand proposition will be:

    • Single-minded in purpose and being succinct – which can be a pain the 🍑
    • Almost, but not quite an endline
    • Interesting / thought provoking
    • An ongoing investment
    • Occasionally multiple – creative briefs are as much a dialogue with your creative director as they are the product of the heroic lone planner. Having multiple ways in is a good way of doing that, and there might be multiple insights that don’t easily reconcile with each other
    • Open to evolution – its more important to be interesting than correct, it is unlikely that you will get it right first time

    Rich nuggets, stimuli, creative brief delivery and post-brief discussion

    The brand proposition is a small part of the overall account planners contribution to the creative process. You could consider it a sub-set of the insightful ‘rich nuggets’ – the behavioural observations in a creative brief, which is about a quarter of the strategists contribution. Every bit of a brief that a planner writes should have these rich nuggets in it. Examples of rich nuggets that I have had in my career as a planner

    • Even in a digital world, people get annoyed and can be spurred into action when they find their mail has been opened
    • After mental health, consumers care most about having a healthy immune system. It came to fore during COVID and seems to have remained with us
    • Glow, the look of healthy skin due to a moist top layer of the skin can sell products in many markets. But it doesn’t work well in high-humidity tropical, and sub-tropical clients
    • A majority of Hong Kong beauty consumers would prefer not to interact with concession staff, they consider them to be closer to over-pushy sales people than trusted advisors
    • A majority of primary care practitioners (GPs) feel a degree of disgust when they see an obese patient
    • Chinese luxury hotel guests are likely to be younger and less formally dressed than the older western and Japanese clientele – with a dress sense that somewhat harks back to the mix-and-match approach of the Buffalo Collective

    The other three quarters are:

    • The quality of stimulus that the planner provides – Stimulus for consumer brands might be much more visual than say prescription medicines where science facts and sandboxes of regulatory restrictions could be much more important. There is usually a good deal of discussion that goes into help writing this brief that helps filter which stimulus makes the cut and the emphasis placed on it.
    • Quality of delivery on the creative brief
    • Post-brief discussion

    So the amount of ‘pain’ that junior planners have on the brand proposition is out of proportion to the brand proposition’s role in the planning process.

    Criticisms of the brand proposition

    Perceived solutions orientation

    The brand proposition puts the emphasis on a potential answer; rather than the initial problem. And I can understand how this occurs. Going back to the JWT London Planning Guide:

    Advertising involves producing a long series of unique solutions. Each piece of work requires innovation. Every script, every layout, every recommendation is Ian some way different from any that has gone before. Each client operates in a different market, and each brand in a market has different needs.

    I would argue that yes the brand proposition can be perceived to be solution focused, but I’d also argue innovation means reframing and looking at a problem in a different way – this is much of the success behind Eno & Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies.

    Brand proposition locks the planner in to a certain perspective

    The idea is that the very act of writing a brand proposition locks the planner in to a certain perspective and consequently starts making the process of developing ideas territorial and creates unhelpful barriers.

    I can see where the ‘lone heroic planner’ mode might kick in. I found it happened when I was freelancing in a team made up of freelance creative talent and there wasn’t any ‘connective tissue’ in the team.

    I think that a planner needs to be humble enough to recognise that:

    • They don’t have a monopoly on good ideas
    • They are humble enough to recognise better ideas were ever they may come from
    • They are constantly in searching mode

    Perceived traditional media focus

    Propositions are considered by some to encourage to think in ‘traditional media’ by asking what should we say rather than

    • What might we do?
    • What experience might we create
    • What interaction might we host

    My argument against this point-of-view is that its a very literal interpretation of ‘say’. If we think about person to person communication about 70 percent is non verbal cues. And I would argue that more experiential aspects fall into what we say.

    Secondly, it depends on where you are in the process. For instance in many of the assignments I worked on as a freelancer, the channel had already been defined by the client and or the media agency partner who was further upstream in the decision making process.

    A brief for Unilever’s Dove specified that they wanted a 30-second TV spot and online video clip. It has to contain an end ‘pour and pack shot’ which took another 5 seconds at the end of the video. For the online video clip you had to have the brand logo up front. This is very common when you are working on creating marketing assets for international markets.

    OK, why Japanese KitKats?

    They have one uniform brand proposition behind them, but a whole variant of different ways of solving it from a product and packaging design perspective. And, they’re really, really tasty. Japanese KitKats have the crispness I remember from my childhood eating Irish-made KitKats from the old Rowntree-Macintosh factory that was in Kilmainham, Dublin.

  • Carl Schmitt + more stuff

    Carl Schmitt

    Carl Schmitt was a German jurist, legal theorist and political theorist. The common narrative around him is that he came up with the legal principles that justified most of Nazi Germany’s greatest excesses. His work has also been used to justify the Xi-era legal system in China with legal thinking leaning heavily on the work that Carl Schmitt did. But there is more to the Schmitt story than that.

    Conservative state theory

    While the current Communist Party of China thinkers see Schmitt as a like mind, the German legal system and Schmitt’s legal system would have appealed to China from the founding of modern China with the monarchy being deposed, through warlord era though to the leadership of the Kuomintang. Germany had consolidated into a modern nation and built an empire in a relatively short space of time thanks to its legal system and a conservative state theory.

    Cautionary tale of the Weimar Republic

    Post World War One, the Weimar Republic put checks and balances on the government through the courts, which was seen as a negative given the relative performance of the country. Into this political change came Carl Schmitt. Ryan Mitchell does a good job at bringing Carl Schmitt’s story to life and talk through his relevance to China through the years.

    Moving forward to Xi-era China, the Weimar Republic that Carl Schmitt lived in looks like a living nightmare in the the same way that German Empire looked like an exemplar. Secondly, socialism didn’t provide an appropriate legal system for Communist China, so they adapted the German system that the Kuomintang had used previously with Chinese socialist characteristics that Hitler would have approved of.

    Carl Schmitt comes across as a more complex figure than he has been recently portrayed.

    Consumer behaviour

    How to make friends as an adult | The Face – really interesting that The Face felt that they had to write this article. I made some of my long term friends in London during my late 20s and early 30s. Many of the readers will also have friends from college or university as well. It implies that they aren’t socialising at house parties, going to concerts, club nights or bars. Work also seems to be a spartan supply of friendships.

    Economics

    China’s Oct exports and imports contract, missing expectations | Reuters 

    Energy

    South Korea and Japan ask US to loosen EV tax credits requirements | DigiTimes 

    BritishVolt sits on the brink … | EE News 

    Ethics

    Machine-learning systems are problematic. That’s why tech bosses call them ‘AI’ | John Naughton | The Guardian 

    FMCG

    ‘China’s hottest woman’: the driving force behind crunchy chilli sensation Lao Gan Ma | China | The Guardian 

    Asahi now sells hot bottled water in Japan as an alternative to coffee or tea | SoraNews24 – the amount of my Asian friends who carry around a thermos drinking bottle of hot water makes so much sense. More combini related content here.

    Germany

    Chartbook #168: Germany’s economic entanglement with China recommend reading with: Germany Can Afford to Spurn China | Foreign Policy 

    Hong Kong

    HSBC strains reach breaking point | Financial Times – Last week, a row between HSBC and its largest shareholder, Chinese insurance group Ping An, spilled into the public arena after Michael Huang, chair of the insurer’s asset management unit, told the Financial Times the bank should break itself up and be “far more aggressive” in its cost-cutting. The extraordinary dust-up, brewing in private for several years, according to people close to the bank, first came to light in the spring when it emerged that Ping An had told HSBC management they should pursue a break-up. HSBC has largely sat on its hands in the interim, fuelling growing frustration at Ping An. “The global finance model that once dominated and shaped the global financial industry in the last century is no longer competitive,” Huang told the Financial Times. “Just divesting a few small markets or businesses” would not be enough to address the challenges. He urged the bank to “adopt an open attitude by studying the relevant suggestions carefully and prudently [ . . .] rather than attempting to simply bypass and reject them”. Ouch

    Ireland

    ‘There’s not many left now’: census shines spotlight on Britain’s dwindling Irish community | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian – The Irish came in waves that started in the 19th century and continued through the Great Depression, the post-war boom, the swinging 60s, the Thatcher era and into the 21st century, one of the great migrations. Many were unskilled labourers, or navvies; others were plumbers, teachers, nurses, dentists, writers and entertainers. Some became famous – Oscar Wilde, Fiona Shaw, Graham Norton – or had children who became famous – Shane MacGowan, Morrissey, Piers Morgan. However, last week brought confirmation that the Irish community, for so long Britain’s biggest source of immigration, is withering. Census figures showed the number of Irish-born people living in England and Wales last year numbered 324,670, a fall of 80,000, or 20%, from a decade ago, when they numbered 407,357. The UK’s Office for National Statistics says this is a long-term trend that started in 1961, when the Irish-born population peaked at 683,000, more than double the current number. Once the biggest group of those born outside the UK, the Irish are now fifth behind India, Poland, Pakistan and Romania

    Japan

    Japan to sign military pact with UK as allies eye China threat | Financial Times 

    Marketing

    The relationship between word count and engagement | Chartbeat Blog – Our analysis shows that up to almost 4,000 words, the longer article, the more engaging it will be. If your articles are falling short of the benchmarks we’ve shared, a real-time optimization tool like our Heads Up Display can show you how far readers are scrolling and give you an opportunity to make changes at the point of exit. Beyond 4,000 words, variability in engaged time grows, but that doesn’t mean there’s a ceiling. As we see with our year-end list of the most engaging stories, unique topics can require more depth than daily reporting. This doesn’t mean you should shy away from covering them. It just means you’ll need to devote more attention to optimizing these pages for engaged time.

    Airbnb Says Its Focus on Brand Marketing Instead of Search Is Working – WSJ – Airbnb Inc. said its strategy of slashing advertising spending, investing in brand marketing and lessening its reliance on search-engine marketing is continuing to pay off. Its marketing spending is now low enough that it doesn’t anticipate drastic reductions even if economic headwinds worsen next year, it said.– some really interesting feedback that implies Google has lost its position as the front door of the web despite dominance in both mobile and desktop browsers

    Security

    $2.5 billion was stolen by blockchain attackers in the first three quarters of 2022 / Digital Information World 

    Technology

    Apple’s hope for record quarterly sales damped by Zhengzhou restrictions – Apple continues to see strong demand for iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models, and expects lower iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max shipments than previously anticipated, adding that customers will experience longer wait times to receive their new products. Apple said it is working closely with our supplier to return to normal production levels while ensuring the health and safety of every worker. According to Barclays’ research notes, the COVID outbreak in Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant, which accounts for 70% of worldwide iPhone production, is estimated to affect the output of 10-12 million iPhone Pro models for the fourth quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank Securities said in a research note that according to Apple’s 10-K document filed on October 28, the company had manufacturing purchase obligations of US$71.1 billion for the third quarter, up 65% annually and 30% quarterly – a sign leading Deutsche Bank Securities to believe that Apple forecasts better iPhone growth than last year. Manufacturing purchase obligations represent non-cancelable purchase orders of components ahead of unit sales and typically covers periods up to 150 days

  • Subprime attention crisis

    Subprime attention crisis is a short book, or a long essay depending on the way you want to look at it. It was written by Tim Hwang.

    IMG_1929

    About Tim Hwang

    Hwang is a lawyer working for email newsletter platform Substack. Prior to this he worked in a US think tank attached to Georgetown University: Center for Security and Emerging Technology and in public policy at Google focused on machine learning. So he brings a deep set of knowledge to writing Subprime attention crisis. One also has to bear in mind that his current employee Substack is based on the online media model moving from online advertising driven to subscription driven.

    Timing is everything

    I read this book over a couple of days at the beginning of this month. By this time, Meta and Alphabet has published quarterly results that were below what investors expected with falling sales. Add into the mix that the problems that Twitter and Snap have had (which are are bigger issues than just down to the dynamics of the online advertising market), all of which makes this book feel timely.

    On the other hand, one could also argue that much of the crisis had already landed. Ad tech businesses like Rubicon Project have either gone under or merged with their peers creating a massive amount of consolidation. The latest wave of consolidation happened in 2020 – 2021.

    Meta-specific issues

    Even with Meta and Alphabet there are business specific issues. Meta has struggled to compete effectively with TikTok. The poisonous nature of debates on Facebook, together with an aging audience on the platform hasn’t helped. In fact it’s a wonder that the context collapse that the platform has suffered from for at least the past six years hadn’t dragged it down yet. WhatsApp has helped enrich Facebook data and provided a channel for business services. At the time Facebook bought the business partly because Zuckerberg needed a brain trust for the future. The brain trust is gone and Zuckerberg’s dive into the Metaverse looks very similar to Apple’s peak John Sculley moment with the Knowledge Navigator concept. You can see glimpses of the Knowledge Navigator in the smartphone, the iPad, the now abandoned WikiReader product or the use of contextual information and national language processing like Siri. Apple didn’t waste the kind of money that Meta has spent chasing an illusory vision of the future.

    Alphabet-specific issues

    I was surprised that Alphabet growth had lasted this long based on the following considerations:

    With mobile, Google also pivoted a different type of search from product search to where is my nearest coffee shop with free wifi and has managed to sell search ads against them. This meant that Amazon and eBay managed to capture a lot of product searches, with consumers only hitting up Google afterwards and Amazon’s advertising has been eating Google’s lunch. Secondly a lot of the high street and neighbourhood shops have been eaten alive by food delivery services and this was then exasperated by the COVID which has changed at least some people’s consumer behaviour

    Historically, Google has been too focused on looking for multi-billion dollar opportunities which haven’t panned out and closed down smaller services that were making money and bringing in attention. In essence, over the years they have thought Google Reader, the Google Search Appliance, Google Health, Boston Dynamics and several other projects were the big payday. They weren’t, but they were respectable business opportunities, just too small for Google to want to pursue. In its wake Google had destroyed entire sectors, or turned them into cottage industries such as enterprise search and knowledge management, RSS newsreaders autonomous robots

    Web search in general has become less effective at doing deep research for consumer and B2B needs – no more support for boolean operators is a case in point. This has had some tech forward netizens wondering if the likes of Reddit fulfils the vision of knowledge search in place of Google and Alphabet being concerned about young people using TikTok as their local search box instead

    “something like almost 40% of young people when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.”

    Google internal report quoted by Business Insider

    YouTube seems to struggle getting brand building advertising dollars in the face of TikTok, Instagram and this explains why you saw a decline in sales over 2 percent. Instead you see a lot of D2C product ads a la day trading and drop shipping courses advertised. Part of this might be down to the product. YouTube has been screwing over creators and creators have made it clear that they’re not happy. You don’t need to go to YouTube if you get the directors cut of your favourite creators content on Patreon or Curiosity Stream. Censorship of political analysis content around China or Ukraine seems to be particularly bad. 

    Back to Subprime attention crisis

    Hwang in Subprime attention crisis points out many of the things that agency employees and owners have known for years:

    • Online advertising effectiveness has declined compared to its performance 25 years ago
    • Audiences don’t see a lot of the ads that are displayed. Different reports will give you different numbers on this
    • Online advertising is destroying the very media industry that its content is shown on
    • Online advertising fraud is a big problem
    • Online advertising business practices are an even bigger problem with up to 70 percent of of online programmatic advertising spend going to advertising technology intermediaries such as The Rubicon Project (now Magnite) and Xaxis
    • This has allowed businesses like Procter & Gamble and adidas to reduce advertising spend at no loss in effectiveness. In the case of P&G Subprime attention crisis highlights how they cut $200 million in online advertising spend, moved that spend on to offline media like radio and print AND managed to increase their reach by 10 percent.

    More on adidas via its inhouse head of media Simon Peel

    One of the most notable things for me was being introduced to the work of Australian based academic Nico Neumann who has done some great research on online advertising effectiveness related areas including Frontiers: How Effective Is Third-Party Consumer Profiling? Evidence from Field Studies.

    So nothing surprising for insiders, but….

    Hwang marshals his facts well. Which is what you would expect from a lawyer. He uses analogous examples from the US financial services sector including the 2008 financial crisis. The book itself is 141 pages in length and there is a substantial section detailing his sources. Subprime attention crisis is based exclusively on desk research.

    More on the book here.

  • Ford Fiesta

    My Ford Fiesta driving experience

    The Ford Fiesta will be forever linked to my early driving experience. I started learning to drive in the 1990s. Back then leasing agreements and car finance weren’t really a thing due to high interest rates. (There is a whole other blog post that I should write at some point about the risk of sub prime car loans, but not today.)

    Car insurance was cripplingly expensive. It was even more expensive when you had no no claims and three points on my licence for an accident that I still claim wasn’t my fault.

    I also have a Dad who is a time-served mechanical fitter and all-round engineering wizard. At the time we had access to a garage with a vehicle pit, welding equipment and an engine hoist on the evenings and from Saturday afternoon on during the weekend. My Dad had good personal relationships with a number of people who ran scrapyards. You went in, tore the parts you wanted off the cars and took them to the owner and negotiated a deal.

    One salvage yard took things a step further by tearing cars down themselves and selling the parts alongside the basics that you’d need for servicing and usually buy from a motor factors. They’re still going strong and still only do business in-person or over the phone. No fax machine, email or website.

    My Dad had been servicing and repairing cars since the mid-1960s and worked repairing a wide range of tracked and wheeled vehicles for the likes of Bord na Mona and Massey Ferguson.

    Driving bangers

    The vehicles that I owned were nothing to brag about, but they were really, really cheap and at least one of them was really, really dangerous. The most dangerous car was a Fiat 126. It cost £150 and I bought it off a former colleague who I met working one summer repairing tools and equipment rented out for use on construction sites. Even in the early 1990s that was a ludicrously cheap car.

    The engine was terrible, as were the drum brakes. The body work crumbled in a way that one would expect for a Fiat made in the 1970s. Drum brakes ‘fade’ with repeated use (like going through a set of turns), they don’t work particularly well in the wet and they were prone to locking up on occasion.

    Because of the noise, dangerous brakes, exceptionally poor build quality and Russian roulette-like standing starts it was tiresome to drive anywhere for anything more than an hour. The lights were pathetic the wipers were ineffective and the all the rubber seals leaked.

    But it also put a smile on my face more times than any other car that I have owned. It handled really well. You could go sideways around corners and still stay in lane. You had a ludicrously low seating position and an exceptionally direct gear change. As a young man with a complete lack of appreciation for risk, it taught me that small cars can be fun.

    Also as a cash-strapped young man, I appreciated that paying less to run a car was a good idea, so I aspired to own a diesel.

    Building a Ford Fiesta

    Eventually, through my Dad’s contacts I managed to get the diesel engine from a Ford Escort van that had been rear-ended and a Ford Fiesta delivery van with a blown petrol engine. At the time a friend that I knew through scuba diving had done a diesel engine swap into a mark two Ford Fiesta XR2. My vehicle was much rattier.

    https://flic.kr/p/FrijXF
    A mark two XR2 very similar looking to the car my friend transplanted with a diesel engine. The only difference being that his had the ‘pepper pot’ alloy wheels. Picture by Kieran White on Flickr (creative commons licence)

    We used the beefier Escort springs to handle the increased engine weight, but kept the Fiesta braking system and gearbox. So I had a diesel Ford Fiesta van. Over a weekend, we used a Makita jigsaw to remove the van panels were the windows should be. New window gaskets and rear side windows from a totalled Ford Fiesta mark one. In went the mark one seats and rear seat belts and I had a car.

    The van was old enough that I didn’t need to pay VAT after converting it to a car according to the DVLA at the time.

    The gearbox was less direct than my previous cars, the steering lacked the go-kart feel of the Fiat and there was more body roll, but the Fiesta was a good car to drive. It had enough power for confident standing starts at junctions and motorway driving was comfortable. The best part was the fuel economy, I typically got 70 miles to the gallon (over 29 kilometres per litre).

    I read that Ford was getting rid of the Fiesta and I was reminded of my old car and the role that it played in taking me around the country and allowing me to earn a living before I had moved to London.

    Why are Ford Motor Company likely to be binning the Ford Fiesta?

    I suspect that it is down to a number of factors:

    • Consumers want the higher driving position of a crossover or SUV, super mini vehicles like the Ford Fiesta have fallen out of favour
    https://flic.kr/p/2jL7DVh
    Carl Spencer | Flickr (creative commons licence)
    • Small vans no longer share the same body shape as their car equivalents. Ford has its Transit Courier small van with a body better designed to cope with large objects or small pallets. So there are less common tooling that they can use to mitigate for lower production volumes
    • Germany is an expensive place to built a small car, even in a highly automated factory
    • It makes sense to prioritise scarce components in crunched supply chains to vehicles that produce the highest profit margin
    • An electric version of the Fiesta would give only a limited range between recharges. Electric battery carrying capacity is directly proportion to the size of the vehicle floorpan and Fiestas are very small. BMW couldn’t get its I3 to work from a business and consumer offering perspective
    • The price point of an electric Ford Fiesta would represent poor value for money for consumers

    Goodbye to the Fiesta

    Ford of Europe put together a farewell video to announce the end of Ford Fiesta production.

    https://youtu.be/UYcoJ5cU-v4
    Ford of Europe

    YouTube channel Big Car did a great history of the Fiesta that is worth watching. Until I watched this video I had no idea that the impetus to develop the Ford Fiesta didn’t come from within Ford of Europe, but from American executive Henry Ford II. Henry Ford II is most famous amongst gear heads now as being the executive who drove support for the Ford GT40 after talks had collapsed with Ferrari.

    Hank Deuce as he was known was portrayed by Tracy Letts who acted opposite Matt Damon and Christian Slater in the movie Ford vs. Ferrari.

  • Brand purpose

    What is brand purpose?

    For senior marketers who came up with a Jack Welsh influenced shareholder value focus, brand purpose was a seductive concept for otherwise empty and meaningless careers that could even be considered ‘bullshit jobs‘. Brand purpose campaigns are not coming from the need of consumers mostly but from the desire of marketeers to do something good of their day, of achieving something more than just selling a humdrum product.

    In essence it is the same drive that motivated the apochrical question from Steve Jobs to future Apple CEO John Sculley

    Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?

    John Sculley recalling Steve Jobs pitch on a documentary profile of Jobs that was part of the Bloomberg Game Changers series.

    In recent years over 90 percent of Cannes Lions winners were found to focus on brand purpose. In 2016, the Singapore office of advertising agency Grey created a fake brand purpose campaign for Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) designed to dupe consumers and award judges. The I Sea app was supposed to crowdsource help to spot refugees, but it was built on fake data.

    Brand promise

    Historically the focus has been on the brand promise – the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service. An example of this would be First Direct – a branchless bank providing its services by telephone and internet instead. It is a retail bank division of HSBC that was founded back in 1989.

    Brand purpose, goes way beyond brand promise and is is the brand’s reason for being beyond making money, sales or profit – it’s a framework that guides business decisions and thought processes. A brand purpose is supposed to connect with consumers at a more emotional level. It is why the brand exists and should guide the brand’s mission that differentiates it from others.

    By 2014 you had marketing royalty like David Aaker endorsing brand purpose, or as he called it Higher Purpose. It was further popularised in management by the 2017 publication of The Guiding Purpose Strategy: A Navigational Code for Growth is a book by Markus Kramer and Tofig Huseynzade. Kramer and Huseynzade looked at purpose at an organisational level and how it should be brought to life through brand management.

    Corporate and social responsibility (CSR) is not brand purpose

    It is distinct from earlier concepts like CSR or corporate responsibility as US organisations often prefer to say. The easiest way to demonstrate this is by example. One of my first clients was Verizon Wireless the US mobile carrier. They used to donate pre-used cellphones, together with free services to charitable organisations like women’s shelters in the New Jersey area where they were headquartered. While they meant well, this clearly wasn’t the key focus of their business, but did make use of edge effects brought about by customers upgrading their phones.

    I helped them template this activity in markets were they had an international presence at the time:

    • Czech Republic
    • Greece
    • Indonesia
    • Italy
    • Mexico
    • Slovakia

    The role of CSR can be for many reasons:

    • Being a good corporate citizen
    • Being closer to the community to better understand the environment
    • Pipelining new talent for the business (like Shell’s Young Engineer programme)
    • The act as a counterweight to negate negative effects of having the business in the area. A classic example of this would be education and health clinics for communities where there is oil drilling

    Is brand purpose effective?

    We know that purpose lead marketing is 30% less effective than non purpose campaigns according to Peter Field, so purpose shouldn’t be seen as a money making decision. In fact, being prepared to forgo money if necessary is a hygiene factor in a brad purpose. Ethical behaviour won’t necessarily generate revenue.

    Brand purpose is most likely to demonstrate effectiveness internally, where it can get people to do more for a company they believe in and matches a set of internalised values. Internal altruism and work life are aligned – they aren’t working in a bullshit job.

    Risk management

    Business risk management has a number of challenges with brand purpose. The moral challenges and perceived required speed of reaction poses problems for brand purpose risk.

    Glocal nature of purpose

    There have been a procession of (foreign) multinational companies that have committed costly perceived slights in China. Western businesses such as Nike have generally erred on the side of a Chinese brand purpose for profit and a perceived lower risk of reaction from western customers. For example Nike Withdraws Products After Brand Partner Vexed China for Supporting HK | Jing Daily or how western brands responded to China’s Xinjiang boycotts including concealing past corporate statements or flip-flopping like Fila, H&M and Hugo Boss.

    TL;DR – brands are most afraid of offending: Chinese consumers > western consumers > developing world consumers – though this may change with de-globalisation.

    Bringing a knife to a gun flight

    The Unilever board have been pummelled by shareholder reactions to its brand purpose driven approach

    Unilever seems to be labouring under the weight of a management which is obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business. The most obvious manifestation of this is the public spat it has become embroiled in over the refusal to supply Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the West Bank. However, we think there are far more ludicrous examples which illustrate the problem. A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot. The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913 so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert — salads and sandwiches).

    Terry Smith, Letter to Investors (January 2022) United Kingdom: Fundsmith Limited.

    Fundsmith is one of the top ten largest shareholders in Unilever at the time. This then set the tone for activist investor Nelson Peltz to secure a seat on the company board

    Having a position

    Having a position is a risk in itself. Some brands notably Dunkin Donuts Refuses to Get Woke: ‘We Are Not Starbucks’ just focus on their brand promise. They keep consumer expectations realistically low. Contrast this with Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s who took a position on the Palestine question and the invasion of Ukraine. In the case of Israel, Ben & Jerry’s independent board has taken Unilever to court over an attempt to stop sales inside Israel.

    Purposeful consumer behaviour

    Consumers generally have good intentions. They mostly consider themselves charitable, an example of the Lake Wobegon effect named after the fictional town featured on the US radio show A Prairie Home Companion. In reality, only 20-25 percent of consumers donate to charity. Consumers green tendencies seem to vary with the state of economy according to longitudinal research conducted by Gallup, regardless of their generation. Price is still the key consideration for consumers, but brand purpose can increased the perceived benefit for a consumer when considering similarly priced products.

    Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

    Garrison Keillor

    Purpose is perceived as being of key importance to consumers because of misinterpretation of of market research and poor research design such as making a false association between the correlation of successful brands and assuming purpose as the causality.

    Consumers don’t think every issue have the same weight, they are likely to feel more personally connected to health, economic and societal issues. Political, business or legal issues of brand companies are considered to be ‘hygiene’ factors.

    Purpose-washing

    One of the key challenges with brand purpose is that many brands have approached in a superficial manner at best. Superficiality might be one of perspective, for instance, Nike supported Colin Kaepernick and other progressive causes, but also funded right-wing Republican Party politicians. Progressive leaning consumers may feel betrayed or gaslit.

    Les Binet of Adam and Eve outlined a good test of brand purpose

    Purpose bullshit detector. Ok, you have a brilliant new purpose drive marketing initiative.

    1) Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?

    2) Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?

    If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.

    Les Binet on Twitter

    Purpose-washing isn’t new and can see its roots in the ‘greenwashing’ of the mid-1980s where companies claimed ‘green behaviours’ that were designed to cut costs, or create the illusion of caring for the environment.

    Brand purpose examples

    Brand purpose examples become difficult. Patagonia would be amongst the first brands that would be used as an example. It’s an unusual company that inspired other brands like Warby Parker and Toms. Things start to fall down when you look at large corporates.

    PepsiCo tried to pivot towards nutrition as a brand strategy and purpose focus in the early 2010s under then CEO Indra Nooyi, yet still relies on sugar filled drinks for its business.

    I worked at Unilever on Family Brands, what people in the UK would know as Flora margarine, when the company mandated that every brand had to ‘find its brand purpose’. Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ success sparked a change over at Unilever.

    Dove’s brand vision / purpose is interesting because it came out of a consumer insight. After surveying 3,000 women across 10 countries the brand team found only 4% considered themselves beautiful. Further research found that a majority of girls had anxiety about how they looked.

    We believe beauty should be a source of confidence, and not anxiety. That’s why we are here to help women everywhere develop a positive relationship with the way they look, helping them raise their self-esteem and realise their full potential.

    Our Vision – Dove.

    Note that while Dove has a successful men’s range of products, men and boys self esteem or confidence isn’t a concern of Dove’s brand purpose despite academic research suggesting similar issues.

    Then CEO Paul Polman focused Unilever on its Sustainable Living Plan and brand purpose was at the centre of it.

    Those that didn’t have one were to be sold off. We focused the flora relaunch around being ‘Powered by Plants’. The reality is that I was working on a product known by different brands in much of the 23 or so countries that it was sold in. In the UK, there was the health aspects of Flora versus butter and the vegan credentials. In Kenya and other parts of Africa it was about nutrition for children in the family and the superior shelf life compared to butter. Despite its brand purpose, yellow fats were perceived to be a lower growth sector and the business spun off to Upfield. Money trumped purpose, although Polman has continued to advocate for a change in business practices with his book Net Positive.

    Unilever has stumbled with its brand purpose focus, being too focused on it for active investors and insufficiently focused on it in the eyes of other stakeholders, including company insiders.

    The pharmaceutical industry is beset with conflicting views regarding brand purpose. The companies will view their products has having a live changing or life saving brand purpose, where as external views will be more concerned about predatory pricing and the non-inclusive access that is a side effect. For instance, one in five people with diabetes in the US have rationed their insulin usage due to high costs.

    Secondly you had lifestyle medicines, notably Pfizer’s Viagra, but still no breakthrough AIDS vaccine. Finally there was the exploitative nature of Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson providing opioids for pain relief that drove a crisis in addiction.

    Many commentators would cite Nike but the examples are problematic:

    • Their FlyEase design approach that enables disabled people to participate in sports, is a great example of accessible design. But disabled customers have found them hard to obtain as they flew off the shelf. Accessible design benefits able-bodied consumers too
    • Plus size activewear could be just about capitalising on the obesity epidemic, rather than truly inclusive sports participation
    • Supporting Colin Kaepernick and taking the knee for racial justice is at odds with other Nike behaviours including the nature of their supply chain. While anti-sweatshop campaign dented Nike’s reputation in the 1990s, it still has appalling labour conditions today.

    What about Mattel who have been trying to bake representation into their products. For example Hot Wheels releases a remote-controlled wheelchair that flips & spins – brand purpose or will Hot Wheels have its ‘Joey Deacon’ moment?

    Brand purpose thinking from academia and the advertising industry

    Articles like this one in AdAge have helped to drive the brand purpose movement: Gen Z doesn’t want to buy your brand, they want to join it | AdAge – This group isn’t waiting for brands to lead on issues. Instead, they’re leading. Since movements rarely come with a business case or cost-benefit analysis, marketers must consider how they can partner with Gen Z to become more involved and deliver on the promise of purpose (paywall)

    Brands take note: The purpose of purpose is purpose – Most of the data used to support the case for brand purpose is verbal, spoken data which lays itself open to the ‘intention-action gap’ that exists between what people say they will do and what actually transpires. That gap is particularly large with topics like brand purpose because social desirability bias leads respondents to, knowingly or unknowingly, overclaim the importance of purpose in their purchase decisions in order to look less like a wanker. But there is a bigger, more pressing question now being asked of brand purpose. As we enter a recession, we know – from bitter past experience – that customers will change their behaviour in the tricky months ahead. In May, Kantar was already showing a significant proportion of the market (albeit, again, with spoken rather than derived data) switching to lower priced options. Such moves are not a uniform downgrade of every brand for a cheaper alternative. In order to justify the continued purchase of some premium brands that are deemed different and meaningful enough to retain their place, customers trade down on weaker, less essential fare – Mark Ritson takes a pragmatic view on brand purpose in this Marketing Week op-ed. Meanwhile Byron Sharp over at the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science has even greater concern about brand purpose: Purpose could be ‘the death of brands’, warns Byron Sharp 

    Richard Shotton on brand purpose: ‘marketers have fallen out of love with marketing’ | The Drum

    The Future of Purpose – TrendWatching – Trendwatching’s take fits in with Richard Shotton’s view …in 2020, consumers will embrace businesses that BREAK the CODE of the brand DNA or their entire industry in the name of a more ethical or sustainable consumerism.

    Think a superband that doesn’t tour, a fashion magazine with no photoshoots, or an airline that tells passengers to fly less (see innovation examples below).

    • Yes, this is a highly actionable trend, and a tactical chance to prove to consumers that you really get the scale of the challenge ahead. But it’s being driven by deep shifts in the nature of status, innovation and transparency…
    • Unconsumed Status. Status has always been a key driver of consumption behaviors. But via rising awareness of social and environmental damages, the nature of consumer status is changing radically. That means rising numbers fulfilling their status quest by seeking out new brands and new modes of consumption that reimagine, or even invert, old attitudes and priorities.
    • Clean Slate Mindset. Today, purpose-driven insurgents can become mega-brands that shake the mainstream faster than ever. Tesla is rewriting the rules of automotive; Impossible Burger those of meat. That’s driving expectations across all industries that legacy codes can and must be rewritten in the name of a better consumerism.

    Brand purpose. The biggest lie the ad industry ever told? – Tom Roach 

    Mark Ritson: A true brand purpose doesn’t boost profit, it sacrifices it | Marketing Week 

    “Brand purpose” is a lie – a lot of truth in this Fast Company op-ed and this article from 2017: Truthiness in marketing: is the evidence behind brand purpose flawed? | The Drum 

    Study of award entries reveals tighter budgets and a struggle to achieve ‘brand purpose’ – Mumbrella Asia 

    This Brand is Late Capitalism | Rachel Connolly 

    One last thing

    I have a related post on environmental and social governance (ESG) which looks to apply the doing well, by doing good philosophy that is also behind brand purpose.