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
Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation – Data & Society: Points – well worth a good read. Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. This reminded me a lot of work that was done by large corporates on tobacco health and more recently on peak oil and climate change. More recently it seems to be culture and value related; where the results don’t fit the wider progressive view in academia. That too isn’t healthy. More consumer behaviour related posts here.
WePresent – lovely creative brand building work by wetransfer and an amazing 404 error message page. Each of the works presented here are very thoughtfully curated for a creative audience. Its all amazing.
Facebook’s off-again, on-again affair with privacy – Axios – less of a pivot and more of a zig-zag. What appears to be apparent is that Facebook’s internal values are at odds with wider society and there won’t be any meeting of minds any time soon.
Leo Burnett, Lucky Generals and Ogilvy decline to pitch for Audi – Leo Burnett London, Lucky Generals, Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi London and VMLY&R all declined to take part in Audi’s advertising review. Which is a pretty damning critique of either Audi’s pitch process, or their reputation in the UK as a client. Given how toxic Boots or Samsung are as a client, this is a pretty damning indictment of Audi as an organisation in the UK. This is a world away from when Audi’s Vorsprung Durch Technik ads went head to head with BMW in the 1980s and 1990s.
Record Store Day 2019 redux. Record Store Day has moved away from its origins, to drive music fans into independent record stores and support independent record labels in a time of iTunes and Spotify. For various reasons I didn’t do any any vinyl shopping but used The Vinyl Store to compile a list of what I would have considered buying if I had been in a position to.
A few things:
Madonna’s True Blue single was one of her classic 12 inch singles. I am less convinced by the fake ‘obi’
Cloud One were a studio-based disco production team
Jazzanova’s Heatwave was given a 1980s makeover which sounds amazing
Lonnie Liston Smith – Space Princess is a great disco cut from the man that brought you Expansions
Online consumer behaviour
danah boyd on the current state of play of participatory media. I first met danah back in 2005 at the Yahoo! Campus in Sunnyvale with Bradley Horowitz. She was working on a project for Yahoo! Research back then and has kept close to youth and ‘social’ media since then.
Design
Even if you don’t know eBoy, you’ll recognise their work and its distinctive style. They’re doing a collaboration in customised Swatch watches. The video talks about how they work together, which is an interesting process in and of itself.
Korea
Asian Boss have done a collaboration with a documentary maker to bring Crossroads to YouTube. Crossroads is a documentary that shows how the Sewol Ferry disaster shaped modern Korean culture and politics. It was as big as the Poll Tax riots or the Brexit vote in the UK. It pressed the reset button on the Korean public’s relationship with the government captured by chaebol which was business as usual.
Japan
And Tomy’s range of mini retro consumer electronics are amazing. I presume that these are all aimed at adults. The level of detail is impressive. More related posts here.
RESIST – counter disinformation tool – published by UK government. There needs to be more done beyond this document however. Secondly, much of the disinformation in the UK is from within the country supporting anti-vaccination, Islamic fundementalism, Islamophobia, the far left and the far right. RESIST feels like a start rather than a solution. This brings up a whole range of issues from security to wider societal ethics. (PDF)
15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook | WIRED – interesting read on the cultural issues and business decisions inside Facebook as it faced criticism externally. The world has changed, Facebook’s culture hasn’t. The comparison between Facebook and Microsoft under Gates and Ballmer is a valid one. This time the stakes are much higher (paywall). More on Facebook here.
I was gobsmacked when Leica dropped The Hunt. Chinese netizens are notoriously nationalistic, taking offence at any perceived slight. Chinese consumers are a big market for Leica and this was way beyond what even Dolce & Gabbana did in China. Like the NBA, Leica will still have diehard fans amongst the camera community in China. It also screws their partner Huawei who make a big deal of their top-of-the-range smartphones using ‘Leica’ cameras. But that maybe the idea given how toxic the Huawei brand is becoming.
More on The Hunt reaction in China from the South China Morning Post.
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)
Easter Week has mean’t that I’ve been exceptionally busy closing things before taking the long weekend break. Easter isn’t a huge holiday in the Carroll household, but its the first break that we get since the Christmas holiday, so always welcome. For many students in Europe Easter signals a hard push on revision in advance of exams. If you are studying or relaxing Happy Easter and Passover.
Kerri Chandler went through one of his Dad’s record boxes, that he hadn’t previously opened. His Dad had been a DJ and inspired Chandler to get behind the turntables himself.
Chandler Senior’s box is an eclectic collection of songs but also had impeccable taste.
Cerrone – Love in C Minor (1976)
Kerri Chandler – Get It Off (1990)
Kerri Chandler – Super Lover (1990)
Kerri Chandler – Drink On Me (1990)
Ronnie Laws – Always There (1975)
The John Coltrane Quartet – Greensleeves (1961)
Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes – Summer Nights (1975)
The Impressions – People Get Ready (1965)
The Delfonics - Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) (1969)
Crown Heights Affair – Dreaming a Dream (Goes Dancin) (1976)
Crown Heights Affair – Dancin (Special Disco Mix) (1976)
The Dells – Always Together (1968)
The Dells – I Want My Momma (1968)
The Dells – Agatha Van Thurgood (1968)
Bob James – One Mint Julep (1976)
Bob James – Westchester Lady (1976)
Roy Ayers – Searching (1976)
Teena Marie – Portuguese Love (1981)
Jakki – Sun…Sun…Sun.. (1976)
Donald Byrd – Lansana’s Priestess (1973)
Roy Ayers – Running Away (1977)
Kerri Chandler – Atmosphere E.P. – Track 1 (1993)
Martin Circus – ‘Disco Circus (Disco Version) (1979)
Beats in Space put together yet another amazing mix
Amazon leaving China. Amazon bought into an e-commerce business which at the time had just over 10% of the country’s e-commerce market. At the time I had colleagues in Hong Kong who worked on promoting the newly acquired business. A number of years ago I spent an inordinate amount of time creating a three-page document pitch for the Amazon China business. At that time Amazon’s market share was between 1.5 and 2% of the Chinese e-commerce market place. Five years later and its down to 0.6%.
What’s going on? Like most things there are a wealth of factors impacting foreign competitors in China. But one big one that people probably don’t want to admit is that Silicon Valley isn’t insurmountable. For decades the US technology has managed to concentrate wealth and talent in a small place and then benefited from market scale. Europe has been unable to replicate this success. It’s home market is an aggregation of markets that aren’t as integrated or coalesce as well as the US. And US companies exploit the European single market treating as divisible international components illegally.
When US companies like Google, Uber and Amazon hit China they come up against:
Smart people – Chinese universities churn out huge amounts of developers, engineers, designers and business managers
Huge home market scale
Equally well motivated entrepreneurs who know their home market better than the foreigners. They are also willing to work very hard with a 996 culture
Local market conditions that are divergent from their own. For instance, Google failed to predict how fast it needed to grow its search indexing to match the Chinese web. Baidu kept throwing in the boxes needed. Google had lost when it suddenly changed its mind on censorship
Government regulation (but that isn’t as important as they’d have you believe in most cases)
Amazon thinks that its cross border business where Chinese consumers buy abroad from online will grow. Consumers do this to get products that they can trust. Domestic platforms have made big gains in this market sector too though.
I wouldn’t buy a Range Rover Evogue, even if I was richer than Bill Gates. But I did love this advert.
And this old video of Jim Carroll talking about ideas as they relate to account planning.
The complexity of Chinese typing. Chinese typing relies extensively on predictive text technology. It is even more problematic that Chinese people are forgetting what some characters look like. The idea of memory trade-off is interesting. It is also worthwhile considering when one thinks about Chinese internet behaviour and the popularity of gaming (because chat can be a pain)
Meet Liam. He has 5000 Instagram followers, but no pulse. | Campaign Asia – Nikuro is Japan’s first male virtual influencer. A 3D computer-sculpted head mapped onto to a live-action body, he seeks work “in the fields of music, fashion, and entertainment, where he will be involved in the production of a wide range of content as a multimedia producer”, according to the company, which also mentions using AI to create innovative content – digital influencers won’t misbehave, have a me too moment or be arrested for a criminal offence.
An amazing looking Mac-based desktop phone. This was an Apple prototype from 1993. Eventually things went the other way and phones were integrated into computers. This was from back when people were starting to think about VoIP services and Novell Networks integrated telephony solutions. And that’s before we even get to smartphones.
The quaint industrial case design is classic early 1990s Silicon Valley chic. You can also see aspects of the thinking of General Magic’s connected devices in this computer. More design related posts here.
Kantar Media has done some qualitative research on consumer attitudes to marketing, media and advertising. You’ve got three reports that are free to download: Dimension 2019 | Kantar
