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
  • Rival device makers on Amazon + more

    Amazon Restricts How Rival Device Makers Buy Ads on Its Site – WSJ – interesting that his is confirmed by both according to Amazon employees and executives at rival companies and advertising firms. Would rival device makers have an antitrust case? It would be harder for Amazon to argue that it doesn’t have a monopoly position in retail. More on Amazon here.

    China’s Sina Agrees to Go Private in Deal Valued at $2.6 Billion – Bloomberg – will probably list on a home stock market like Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong

    Oxford moves to protect students from China’s Hong Kong security law | The Guardian – one can see this is a direct reaction to Hong Kong’s national security law and also as a reaction to Chinese influence operations on campuses across the western world

    Will The Chinese-Owned French Luxury Brand Baccarat Survive? | Jing Daily – combination of bad management and circumstances. It is interesting that the owner Coco Chu has disappeared

    Mark Riston: It’s time for ‘share of search’ to replace ‘share of voice’Peckham’s Formula posits that when you launch a brand you should set its advertising budget based on your desired share of market. Specifically, your initial share of voice should be 1.5 times the desired market share you want to achieve by the end of the brand’s second year.

    Older People Have Become Younger – Neuroscience News – in terms of their mental faculties

    Netflix called out for “Three-Body” author Liu Cixin’s Xinjiang remark — Quartz – Mulan seems to have become a verb in US media in a similar way to ‘it’s all gone Pete Tong’ in late 1980s vernacular English. Although originally ‘gone Pete Tong’ meant that something had gone commercial and mainstream – in effect a sellout, which was a bad thing in the 1990s, when credibility was everything. Netflix might be able to see dramas into China a la the BBC and Sherlock; but I can’t see it being allowed to be a platform. China already has QQVideo iQiyi and PPTV

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Frank Herbert was interviewed in 1965 about the origins of Dune. He started researching an article on the control of sand dunes. He makes the fluid mechanics of sand dunes sound fascinating. That was the start point for him creating a science fiction epic. In the interview he covers a wide range of issues including environmentalism, colonialism and philosophy. He also talks about his process of working through is copy as an oral product that happened to be in books.

    Herbert is very self aware of his own writing and analytical in his process. He is also critical of people recording, rather than experiencing events. This was fascinating to read some four decades before Instagram culture.

    Here is a later talk at UCLA from 1985 with Frank Herbert as a bonus.

    Palace the streetwear brand have collaborated with the Happy Mondays for a capsule collection. It’s interesting to see Shaun Ryder and Bez still inspiring and being relevant some 25 years after the peak of their cultural relevance. More streetwear related content here.

    https://vimeo.com/457691937

    COVID comes to Sesame Street. Oscar The Grouch stars in a mask etiquette. Admittedly this comes with a grouchy reason: that he doesn’t want to see children’s happy smiling faces. Sesame Street hits out of the park again on content.

    Sesame Street – wear a mask with Oscar PSA

    George Carlin mashed up with Mad Max: Fury Road. It completely changes the feel of the film and is a stinging indictment of human behaviour.

    Finally an amazing collection of 1980s TV advertisements and station idents Beta MAX – YouTube. What struck me about this channel was the variety of categories that used television advertising extensively for brand building and activation. Some of the creative would still stand up today and were strikingly similar to work that I did for Unilever.

  • Easy growth trap + more things

    Luxury Brands Must Avoid This Easy Growth Trap | Jing DailyChina has been reporting significant growth rates in the luxury sector recently, and many global luxury brands have been counting on China to be their silver lining. However, this recent growth has, to a large extent, been driven by repatriation (meaning sales that customers would otherwise have made during overseas travels). With travel routes to Europe and the US closed, Chinese luxury customers have been shopping domestically, which has driven the luxury demand inside Mainland China. Yet, this strong increase in demand in China could not offset the drastic decline in demand in both Europe and the US, at least during the second quarter of 2020. As such, many brands across categories like luxury cars, high-end jewelry, watches, and luxury fashion are sitting on enormous inventories and are looking at empty stores – Jing Daily were warning of the easy growth trap in discounting but their description of the market at the moment is very interesting. I suspect that the luxury sector is already well aware of this. The have seen department stores fall into the easy growth trap. Luxury brands have historically gone to extreme lengths to avoid the easy growth trap. Reputedly, during the last recession Rolex is alleged to have bought excess products from its dealers and the grey market to recycle, rather than discount. More on luxury and retailing.

    AI in Marketing: Myths vs. Reality – Techerati – Johnny Bentwood articulates a more reasonable assessment of AI. Badging everything ‘AI’ wonder technology is the easy growth trap of the tech sector. We’ve been here before

    Teens are turning themselves into Gucci models on TikTok | DazedLuxury is interesting because here brands really have meaning. The Gucci brand has history and meaning that comes from their behaviours and their products – rather than merely from how they have spent their ad budget in the past. Their Northern Soul homage in 2017 is just one example of the brand’s authenticity, energy and creative eye. For Gucci, it’s vital their brand continues to be culturally relevant, so they need to participate in TikTok. First, their #AccidentalInfluencer Grans in fur coats (with 8m views) showed they understood the grammar of TikTok and then the #GucciModel Challenge invites – no, demands – people play along. As Gucci makes fun of themselves they convey strong messages and have 26m views already. One thing I particularly like is how they use the audio by Lachlan Watson, star of the Netflix hit ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’. This is the antithesis of the glossy spreads Gucci and others place in the top magazines and balances their marketing with authenticity which suits TikTok so well – Simon over at Great TikTok creative

    ‘It’s Ridiculous.’ Underfunded FTC and DOJ Can’t Keep Fighting the Tech Giants Like This – Big Technology 

    China’s middle-class dream of a second home in Malaysia dashed by coronavirus and geopolitical tensions | South China Morning Post“Most of these Chinese individual investors are not prepared – financially or psychologically – for the risks of overseas investment,” Zhao said. “They have experienced only economic growth and a booming property market on the mainland for decades, and they lack the funds and risk awareness to deal with the downside [of the economic cycle].” – the belt and road initiative isn’t all plain sailing

    ‘Funnel juggling’ is the answer to marketing effectiveness – Marketing WeekFor the long work, in most Uber countries there are a series of brand campaigns that push the emotional benefits of travel. Inevitably and rather cleverly the focus is on the top of the benefit ladder; or, in Uber’s case, the end of the journey, when it delivers you to your destination and the emotional benefit that awaits. In the US, for example, the brand uses TV, outdoor and digital media to associate Uber with these moments. It’s mass-market, it’s emotional, it’s brand-focused and it asks nothing of the consumer other than to see Uber as more than a ride-sharing service. 

    I have no idea what the split in Uber’s marketing spend actually is but I will bet about half of the money in any country also goes on the short of it.

    Gucci’s Gaming Garments | Gartner for Marketing – Chinese princelings….

    Cinnabon in the Oven | Gartner for Marketers – processed foods are the new eating out

    Public Image Decline of South Korean Churches – The PeninsulaThe PeninsulaPastors in South Korea claim that church-linked COVID-19 outbreaks have tainted the public image of churches in the country. Most recently, a church in Seoul emerged as the source of the country’s second largest infection cluster following a spike in cases associated with a religious sect in Daegu earlier this year. A 2015 Gallup Korea poll finds that more South Koreans, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, are moving away from religion.

    Hallyu Con 2020 | KCCUK – virtual festival on October 4th

    Ageism Is Not Just A Disease—It Is The New Business Model For Top Ad Agenciesthe original statement inadvertently let the cat out of the bag about agencies’ cost cutting at the expense of clients: they are now inhabited by junior talent, inexpensive and inexperienced. And this is the main reasons for the decline of the advertising industry. The holding companies like WPP were formed in the eighties, and they started consolidating the industry by gobbling up independent agencies. To do so, they needed to issue debt and the industry mortgaged itself to bankers. Madison Avenue went from focusing on the clients’ business to focusing on their balance sheet. And that meant getting rid of “cost”: talented experienced people in their forties and fifties and replacing them with cheaper labor.

    GBA hurt by Cold War, pandemic and protests EJINSIGHT – ejinsight.com – Greater Bay Area (cities and Hong Kong around the Pearl River delta) that China envisages as kind of like Judge Dredd’s Mega City One

    Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it’s not to blame • The Register 

    Hard to pardon: why Tenet’s muffled dialogue is a very modern problem | Tenet | The Guardian“Think about it: the first few Star Wars [films], we heard them all. We heard all the lines. Listen to Apocalypse Now – you hear everything.” Price agrees: “If you watch old movies, you might hear some sound effects here and there but now they go nuts: somebody’s walking across the room in a leather jacket, you hear the zippers clink and the creak of the leather and every footstep is right in your face.” When television became commonplace in the mid-20th century and challenged cinema’s dominion, cinema needed to distinguish itself; it needed to prove that it could justify people leaving the comfort of their homes. It did so partly by becoming bigger and louder. In an era – and a pandemic – in which home streaming dominates, cinema may be forced to pull out the stops once more. “I think we’re bombarded,” Paul Markey, a projectionist at the Irish Film Institute, says of modern films. “The more expensive movies have got, the more of a bombardment they become on your senses.”

    ‘The Devil All The Time’ Costume Designer On Its Style | Esquire – the world has never fallen out of love with American workwear; no split, no wandering eye. The only thing that has changed is who wears it. The plaid-clad men of The Devil All The Time wear clothes that are as tough and hardscrabble as their lives. Their ancestors still flock to the same brands – think Dickies, Levi’s and Carhartt – only now it’s because they’ve collaborated with Off-White. Still, context is context, but the fact that these classics still work is testament to their longevity, both in design and build – the timelessness of American workwear

  • Marketing, president, apocalypse – the good, bad and the ugly

    Marketing, president apocalypse – what’s going on Ged? Years ago I used to write a periodic section on this blog: Good, Bad and the Ugly. I have been doing ongoing maintenance of this blog in the background and was inspired to bring this back after visiting old posts.

    • This time I looked at marketing, president, apocalypse. Specifically: Marketing as practiced in agencies and clients
    • A president represented in media because the run up to the US presidential election in November means things are pretty strange.
    • A fictional apocalypse – because global warming, COVID19, populism, Brexit and the rise of China under Xi Jingping

    Good, Bad and the Ugly was originally inspired by my love of two magazine sections:

    • Wired magazine’s Wired, Tired, Expired – which used to be a great zeitgeist measure in a pre-brogrammer Silicon Valley. Back when the excitement of the new, new thing was conveyed through the written word and brave choices in neon and metallic inks with challenging typographic design. Wired, Tired, Expired inspired the spirit of where I wanted to go with it
    • UK motoring publication Car Magazine. Car was a pioneering publication. It invented the idea of a ‘car of the year’ back in the 1960s. As a spotty teenager I loved to leaf through its pages. The writing of the late great L. J. K. Setright who combined a love engineering and the written word in each of his articles. (Setright’s book The Designers is a particularly good read.) Beautifully photographed cars and adverts of luxury brands that I hadn’t heard of like Panerai. It was a heady mix of Esquire and petrol. I fell out of love with Car magazine as driving became less relevant to me. But the concept behind their Good, Bad Ugly classification of cars stuck with me
    GoodBadUgly
    Long and short term marketing thinking. In the past decade Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA based research, together with findings from the Ehrensberg-Bass institute have shaken up marketing. No self respecting marketer now doesn’t thinking about the importance of brand marketing. Last touch attribution. Performance (digital) marketers have used last touch attribution to burn marketing dollars at the altars of Google and Facebook for too long. Mark Read of WPP – whose ill-considered comments on digital marketing and ageism in agency life showed an extreme dose of short term thinking. It probably explains the WPP share price….
    President Bartlet – The West Wing was a touchstone of political fiction for friends of mine who worked in public affairs. The West Wing captured the tension and excitement of a high functioning political machine. I had the pleasure to chat over dinner with Don Baer. Baer was a former Clinton staffer, whom the character Toby Ziegler was based on.

    Bartlet also contrasts sharply with the bland Joe Biden and president Trump. Unfortunately neither of them have the kind of dialogue coming out of their mouths that Aaron Sorkin could provide Bartlet
    While Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All The President’s Men is justifiably famous. Their second book Final Days captures the implosion of president Nixon and makes a more tragic read on a presidential administration.The House of Cards quickly went from being sharp biting satire that thrilled, to repulsion. The story built up on and created something new from original UK source material. But the show rested too heavily on the shoulders to Kevin Spacey as president Underwood. When Spacey’s reputation fell, so did the show. Robin Wright did a valiant effort to resurrect it which is worthwhile watching.
    The Jackpot – in William Gibson’s books The Peripheral and Agency a key part of the plot line is the apocalypse. This is called the Jackpot. There is not one inciting incident. Instead the world is gradually eroded to just 20 per cent of its population. The causes are very familiar to us: climate change, pollution, drug-resistant diseases and other factors. Given that the world population is still heading upwards. The Jackpot is either a way off or still in its early stagesThe Atomic Wars – the atomic wars occur the back story of the Judge Dredd universe. The modern world is destroyed by the cold war going hot. Authoritarianism and large cities offer relative safety compared to the cursed earth outside.Avengers Infinity Wars / Endgame. Thanos has a malthusian world view. He unites the infinity stones, snaps his finger and half the universe’s population disappears. Endgame then tries to give it a happy-ever-after finish because Hollywood. Yes it conforms to the idea of an ‘end of an age’ but it just doesn’t feel that disastrous in the grand scheme of things

    Marketing, president, apocalypse choices, let me know what you think in the comments section. More versions of the Good, Bad and The Ugly here.

  • Carhartt Labor Day + more things

    Carhartt Labor Day colouring book – the American workwear brand put together a great children’s colouring book for labor day weekend. It allows parents to explain what they do for their kids and provides an activity for a socially isolated public holiday. You can download your Carhartt Labor Day colouring book here.

    Carhartt Labor Day colouring book

    Vox Media have done a great video on rotoscoping and animation. Rotoscoping as a technique allowed animation to have life-like motion, but the creativity of animation.

    I was introduced to rotoscoping with the Ralph Bakshi Lord of The Rings animated movie. Peter Jackson’s live action version borrowed from this version shot for shot, but I find the animated version more enthralling because of Bakshi’s use of rotoscoping.

    Video shot from an original 35mm trailer print

    Simon Peel of Adidas’ now famous speech that recommended a healthy skepticism on short term performance marketing and the impact of longer term brand marketing. He realises digital is important, but lays out why marketers should ask why? Peel talked honestly about marketing effectiveness, marketing efficiency and misleading metrics. I had read the articles, but this is the first time that I’d seen his talk. More on marketing effectiveness here.

    IPA Eff Week talk 2019 by Simon Peel of Adidas

    Microsoft had been experimenting with sealed underwater data centres to see if they were possible and what the benefits were. Prior to the project starting there would be some predetermined benefits:

    • Reduced energy costs as refrigeration wouldn’t be needed. (You could achieve a similar effect, if you buried the data centre deep enough)
    • Reduced data centre costs. Internet hotels and server farms can cost a lot if built in cities with expensive real estate

    But there were questions over corrosion, damage and reliability. Microsoft got around corrosion by filling a submerged data centre with a nitrogen atmosphere. They found that a data centre without human intervention had much less faults than a matching data centre on-shore.

    Microsoft are now working on how the end of life process would work for an underwater data centre.

    Microsoft’s Natick project on underwater data centres