This is particularly good stuff, especially in these times when companies want to hang on to their employees and foster a better internal culture. Insight Creativeās Staff Engagement Masterclass video tutorial has some excellent advice, in line with a lot of what Iāve preached over the years. Their model is excellent and really breaks down the process with some practical advice on how to communicate with your team. Check out the introduction video from CEO Steven Giannoulis below (one of the very few Rongotai College old boys Iām in touch with these days!) and click through on the link for the full tutorial (sign-up required).
I suppose it shouldnāt surprise me that I have a US Library of Congress entry, as a published author, though if I am reading it correctly, it relates to my 2010 mayoral campaign.
Following the links there, I arrived at a Virtual International Authority File but the data there seem to relate to my Wikipedia entries. Disappointing.
Keep going, and thereās an entry at OCLC, a non-profit library collective, also linking to Wikipedia.
Thereās some 2010 mayoral campaign stuff, five references to academic papers I wrote (nice to see they are āheld by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwideā), an early book I wrote, Typography & Branding (though I donāt recall having written it in 2002 as they claim), and a book I didnāt author but am credited in the colophon as the body typeface familyās designer, Mainland Island from Wai-te-ata Press.
Iām flattered that Typography & Branding is held at two Australian locations, the University of Newcastle Auchmuty Library and the Curtin University Library. I hope their students are getting a lot out of this early book of mine.
I admit I like this tag cloud:
Commiserations to my namesake, Jack Yan, on not winning the Toronto mayoral election. I was getting a lot of news hits from Toronto and Ontario, far more than our media here managed back in the day. I also thought he did rather well in the televised debates. We only had one episode of Back Benches in 2010 that wasnāt really a debate. But there was a fun quiz, which I wonāsome of us know more about this city than others.
In a very crowded field, Jack managed seventh out of 31, with incumbent John Tory holding on to his gig with 62 per cent of the vote.
I hope he has another crack at it if he feels he has something to offer. I found him a really great guy to deal with.
Finally, a happier post. For many years (since 2004), my dear friend Stanley Moss has been publishing his Global Brand Letter, which is not only a wonderful summary of the year (or the last half-year, since he often writes every six months) in branding, but an excellent record of the evolution of culture.
He has finished his latest and, for the first time, he has allowed me to host a copy for you to download and read (below). I commend it to you highly. Keep an eye out for future issues, while past ones can be found on his website at www.diganzi.com.
Shared on my social media on the day, but I had been waiting for an opportunity to note this on my blog.
It was an honour last week to guest on Leonard Kimās Grow Your Influence Tree, his internet talk show on VoiceAmerica. Leonard knows plenty about marketing and branding, so I thought it might be fun to give his listeners a slightly different perspectiveānamely through publishing. And since I know his listenersā usual topics, I didnāt stray too far from marketing.
We discuss the decrease in CPM rates online; the importance of long-form features to magazines (and magazine websites) and how that evolution came about; how search engines have become worse at search (while promoting novelty; on this note Iāve seen Qwant do very well on accuracy); how great articles can establish trust in a brand and falling in love with the content you consume (paraphrasing Leonardās words here); Lucireās approach to global coverage and how that differs to other titlesā; the need to have global coverage and how that potentially unites people, rather than divide them; how long-form articles are good for your bottom line; how stories work in terms of brand-building; how Google News favours corporate and mainstream sources; and the perks of the job.
This was a great hour, and it was just such a pleasure to talk to someone who is at the same level as me to begin with, and who has a ready-made audience that doesnāt need the basics explained to them. It didnāt take long for Leonard and me to get into these topics and keep the discussion at a much higher level than what I would find if it was a general-audience show. Thank you, Leonard!
Listen to my guest spot on Leonardās show here, and check out his website and his Twitter (which is how we originally connected). And tune in every Thursday 1 p.m. Pacific time on the VoiceAmerica Influencers channel for more episodes with his other guests!
The Dongfeng Aeolus AX7. But just where does Aeolus sit when it comes to indexing in Autocade?
This is something that might have to come out in the wash, and it might take years.
I think we can all agree that Ssangyong is a marque or a make, and Korando is a model. Never mind that thereās currently a basic Korando, the Korando Sports (a pick-up truck) and a Korando Turismo (a people mover), none of which really have much connection with the other, name aside. We are as comfortable with this as we once were with the Chevrolet Lumina and Lumina APV, the Ford Taurus and Taurus X, and the Toyota Mark X and Mark X Zio. So far so good.
But when do these drift into being sub-brands? BMW calls i a sub-brand, but as far as cataloguing in Autocade goes, it doesnāt matter, as the model names are i3 or i8 (or a number of ix models now coming out). Audiās E-Tron is its parallel at Ingolstadt, and here we do have a problem, with a number of E-Tron models unrelated technically. Itās not like Quattro, where there was the (ur-) Quattro, then Quattro as a designation, and everyone accepted that.
Similarly, the Chinese situation can be far from clear.
Many years ago, GAC launched a single model based on the Alfa Romeo 166 called the Trumpchi. So far so good: we have a marque and model. But it then decided to launch a whole bunch of other cars also called Trumpchi (the original became the Trumpchi GA5, to distinguish it from at least eight others). Some sources say Trumpchi is a sub-brand, others a brand in its own right, but we continue to reference it as a model, since the cars have a GAC logo on the grille, just as the GAC Aion EVs have a GAC logo on the grille. (The latter is also not helped with Chinese indices tending to separate out EVs into āNew Energy Vehicleā listings, even when their manufacturers donāt.)
I feel that we only need to make the shift into calling a previous model or sub-brand a brand when itās obvious on the cars themselves. Thatās the case with Haval, when it was very clear when it departed from Changcheng (Great Wall). Senia is another marque that spun off from FAW: it began life with the FAW symbol on the grille, before Seniaās own script appeared on the cars.
The one that confounds me is Dongfeng Aeolus, which was make-and-model for a long time, but recently Aeolus has displaced the Dongfeng whirlwind on the grille of several models. We have them currently listed in Autocade with Dongfeng Aeolus as a new marque, since thereās still a small badge resembling the whirlwind on the bonnet. The Dongfeng Aeolus AX7 retains the whirlwind, but has the Aeolus letters prominently across the back, but to muddle it up, the AX7 Pro has the new Aeolus script up front. These canāt be two different marques but the visual cues say they are.
Maybe weāll just have to relegate Aeolus back to model status, and do what Ssangyong does with the Korando (or Changcheng with the Tengyi). These are the things that make life interesting, but also a little confusing when it comes to indexing an encyclopƦdia.
Last night, I uploaded a revised website for JY&A Consulting (jya.co), which I wrote and coded. Amanda came up with a lot of the good ideas for itāit was important to get her feedback precisely because she isnāt in the industry, and I could then include people who might be looking to start a new venture while working from home among potential clients.
Publishing and fonts aside, it was branding that Iām formally trained in, other than law, and since we started, Iāve worked with a number of wonderful colleagues from around the world as my āA teamā in this sector. When I started redoing the site, and getting a few logos for the home page, I remembered a few of the old clients whose brands I had worked on. There are a select few, too, that Iām never allowed to mention, or even hint at. Cāest la vie.
There are still areas to play with (such as mobile optimization)āno new website is a fait accompli on day oneāand things I need to check with colleagues, but by and large what appears there is the look I want for 2021. And hereās the most compelling reason for doing the update: the old site dated from 2012.
It was just one of those things: if workās ticking along, then do you need to redo the site? But as we started a new decade, the old site looked like a relic. Twenty twelve was a long time ago: it was the year we were worried that the Mayans were right and their calendar ran out (the biggest doomsday prediction since Y2K?); that some Americans thought that Mitt Romney would be too right-wing for their country as he went up against Barack Obamaāwho said same-sex marriage should be legal that yearāin their presidential election; and Prince Harry, the party animal version, was stripping in Las Vegas.
It was designed when we still didnāt want to scroll down a web page, when cellphones werenāt the main tool to browse web pages with, and we filled it up with smart information, because we figured the people whoād hire us wanted as much depth as we could reasonably show off on a site. We even had a Javascript slider animation on the home page, images fading into others, showing the work we had done.
Times have changed. A lot of what we can offer, we could express more succinctly. People seem to want greater simplicity on websites. We can have taller pages because scrolling is normal. As a trend, websites seem to have bigger type to accommodate browsing on smaller devices (having said that, every time we look at doing mobile versions of sites, as we did in the early 2000s, new technology came along to render them obsolete)āall while print magazines seem to have shrunk their body type! And we may as well show off, like so many others, that weāve appeared in The New York Times and CNNāplaces where Iāve been quoted as a brand guy and not the publisher of Lucire.
But, most importantly, we took a market orientation to the website: it wasnāt developed to show off what we thought was important, but what a customer might think is important.
The old headingsāāHumanistic branding and CSRā, āBranding and the lawā (the pages are still there, but unlinked from the main site)āmight show why weāre different, but theyāre not necessarily the reasons people might come to hire us. They still canābut we do heaps of other stuff, too.
I might love that photo of me with the Medinge Group at la SorbonneāCELSA, but Iām betting the majority of customers will ask, āWho cares?ā or āHow does this impact on my work?ā
As consumer requirements change, Iām sure weāll have pages from today that seem irrelevant, in which case weāll have to get on to changing them as soon as possible, rather than wait nine years.
Looking back over the years, the brand consulting site has had quite a few iterations on the web. While I still have all these files offline, it was quicker to look at the Internet Archive, discovering an early incarnation in 1997 that was, looking back now, lacking. But some of our lessons in print were adoptedāpeople once thought our ability to bring in a print Ʀsthetic was one of our skillsāand that helped it look reasonably smart in a late 1990s context, especially with some of the limited software we had.
We really did keep this till 2012, with updates to the news items, as far as I can make outāit looks like 2021 wasnāt the first time I left things untouched for so long. But it got us work. In 2012, I thought I was so smart doing the table in the top menu, and you didnāt need to scroll. And this incarnation probably got us less work.
Thereās still a lot of satisfaction knowing that youāve coded your own site, and not relied on Wordpress or Wix. Being your own client has its advantages in terms of evolving the site and figuring out where everything goes. Itās not perfect but thereās little errant code here; everythingās used to get that page appearing on the site, and hopefully you all enjoy the browsing experience. At least itās no longer stuck in the early 2010s and hopefully makes it clearer about what we do. Your feedback, especially around the suitability of our offerings, is very welcome.
My partner Amanda and I are part of Medingeās presence at Dutch Design Week this year.
Since Medinge couldnāt celebrate our 20th anniversary due to COVID-19, some of our Dutch members, helped by many others, took the opportunity to get us into the event, which is virtual this year.
We had done a lot of work on Generation Co earlier in 2020, thanks to a load of Zoom meetings and emails. This takes things even further, but builds on it. The programme can be found here, and is titled āPutting the Planet First: a New Orientationā.
The description: āInstead of thinking about the 3Psāyour challenge is to adopt a new perspective. Always put Planet first. Then people. Then profit.ā
After signing up for free, you can head into our virtual rooms.
From the page: āOnly 21/10/2020, 10:00ā13:00 lectures and livestreams from members of the Medinge Think Tank: a group of brand experts and visionaries from around the world whose purpose is to influence business to become more humane and conscious in order to help humanity progress and prosper. With international speakers who have worked on these rights and bring in the perspective from indigenous people who co-exist with the rivers.ā
On Tuesday the 21st at 10 a.m. CET is Amandaās presentation on the Whanganui River, which was given the rights of a legal person in legislation enacted in March 2017.
Amanda worked at the Office of Treaty Settlements at the time, so this is really her talk. I just set the laptop on the table, with a microphone generously lent to me by my friend Brenda Wallace. Then I edited it in video-editing software with all the skill of an amateur.
But thatās the year of COVID-19 for you.
The way the talk came about was in discussion in 2019 with my colleagues at Medinge Group. The concept of legal rights on natural resources and indigenous rights came up, as did the case of the Whanganui River, which is known beyond our shores.
They had no idea Amanda worked on it, and proudly I mentioned her role.
From then on she was part of the programme, and it all came together last Friday.
In the talk, youāll see me on a much lower chair than her, propped up by a bag of rice that slowly sags as the recording wears on.
Thereās only so much furniture at her Dadās studio but it was the most comfortable place we could think of for the filming.
More important are the contents of her talk, which I thoroughly recommend. She worked really hard on the responses over a few weeks to make sure it was thoroughly rigorous.
Itās followed by a talk from my good friend and colleague Sudhir John Horo. Pop over, itās going to be a really eventful day in virtual Eindhoven.
Hereās a cautionary tale found by Lucire travel editor Stanley Moss. His words: āPhotographer Dmitry Kostyukov recently experienced a rich dialogue with an algorithm belonging to a Scandinavian swimwear company. Heād been auto-mistaken for a Y chromosome, and digitally invited to become a brand ambassador. Dmitry accepted, and received the sample suit of his choice, an influencer name and instructions on how to photograph himself wearing the product. This exposes one facet of what advertising has become, commodified advocacy. Following is the text of his statement about the project, filled with reminders of what today constitutes the new paradigm of product promotion. Caveat emptor.ā
In other words, donāt leave your marketing in the hands of a program. I havenāt followed up with Bright Swimwear, but I hope they’ll run with it, not just to show that they are āprogressiveā, but to admit that there are limits to how algorithms can handle your brand. (They haven’t yet.)
If the world desires more humanistic branding, and people donāt want to feel like just a number, then brands should be more personal. Automation is all right when you need to reach a mass audience with the same message, but cultivating personal relationships with your brand ambassadors would be a must if you desire authenticity. Otherwise, you just donāt know the values of those promoting your brand.
Fortunately, I took it in good humour just as Dmitry did and ran the story in Lucire, and you can reach your own conclusions about the wisdom of algorithms in marketing, particularly in brand ambassadorship.
Cash-strapped GM sells passenger car brands to SAIC to focus on trucks and SUVs
and:
SAIC builds passenger-car brand portfolio with Wuling, Baojun, Chevrolet, Roewe, MG, Buick and Cadillac
You can almost think of MG as Pontiac and Roewe as Oldsmobile ā¦ With the decimation of the GM line-up globally, and the segments they no longer field (e.g. C-segment cars in many markets), will they even have the investment needed to sustain the car brands?
I know they are saying this was all necessary to fund the electrification of the range and autonomous tech, but isn’t this the same company that nixed the EV1 and failed to make the Volt a Prius-beater?
The Chinese state wasn’t about creating “Chinese Leyland” when they forced SAIC and NAC to merge. They had much grander plans.
A few thoughts about Twitter from the last 24 hours, other than āPlease leave grown-up discussions to grown-upsā: (a) itās probably not a smart idea to get aggro (about a joke you donāt understand because you arenāt familiar with the culture) from your companyās account, especially when you donāt have a leg to stand on; (b) deleting your side of the conversation might be good if your boss ever checks, although on my end āreplying to [your company name]ā is still there for all to see; and (c) if your job is āChief Marketing Officerā then it may pay to know that marketing is about understanding your audiences (including their culture), not about signalling that your workplace hires incompetently and division must rule the roost.
Iām not petty enough to name names (I’ve forgotten the person but I remember the company), but it was a reminder why Twitter has jumped the shark when some folks get so caught up in their insular worlds that opposing viewpoints must be shouted down. (And when that fails, to stalk the account and start a new thread.)
The crazy thing is, not only did this other Tweeter miss the joke that any Brit born, well, postwar would have got, I actually agreed with him politically and said so (rule number one in marketing: find common ground with your audience). Nevertheless, he decided to claim that I accused Britons of being racist (why would I accuse the entirety of my own nationāI am a dual nationalāof being racist? Itās nowhere in the exchange) among other things. That by hashtagging #dontmentionthewar in an attempt to explain that Euroscepticism has been part of British humour for decades meant that I was āobsessed by warā. Guess he never saw The Italian Job, either, and clearly missed when Fawlty Towers was voted the UKās top sitcom. I also imagine him being very offended by this, but it only works because of the preconceived notions we have about ‘the Germans’:
The mostly British audience found it funny. Why? Because of a shared cultural heritage. There’s no shame in not getting it, just don’t get upset when others reference it.
Itās the classic ploy of ignoring the core message, getting angry for the sake of it, and when one doesnāt have anything to go on, to attack the messenger. I see enough of that on Facebook, and itās a real shame that this is what a discussion looks like on Twitter for some people.
I need to get over my Schadenfreude as I watched this person stumble in a vain attempt to gain some ground, but sometimes people keep digging and digging. And I donāt even like watching accident scenes on the motorway.
And I really need to learn to mute those incapable of sticking to the factsāI can handle some situations where you get caught up in your emotions (weāre all guilty of this), but you shouldnāt be blinded by them.
What I do know full well now is that there is one firm out there with a marketing exec who fictionalizes what you said, and it makes you wonder if this is the way this firm behaves when there is a normal commercial dispute. Which might be the opposite to what the firm wished.
As one of my old law professors once said (Iām going to name-drop: it was the Rt Hon Prof Sir Geoffrey Palmer, KCMG, AC, QC, PC), āThe more lawyers there are, the more poor lawyers there are.ā Itās always been the same in marketing: the more marketers there are, the more poor marketers there are. And God help those firms that let the latter have the keys to the corporate Twitter account.
I enjoyed that public law class with Prof Palmer, and I wish I could remember other direct quotations he made. (I remember various facts, just not sentences verbatim like that oneāthen again I donāt have the public law expertise of the brilliant Dr Caroline Morris, who sat behind me when we were undergrads.)
Itās still very civil on Mastodon, and one of the Tooters that I communicate with is an ex-Tweeter whose account was suspended. I followed that account and there was never anything, to my knowledge, that violated the TOS on it. But Twitter seems to be far harder to gauge in 2019ā20 on just what will get you shut down. Guess it could happen any time to anyone. Shall we expect more in their election year? Be careful when commenting on US politics: it mightnāt be other Tweeters you need to worry about. And they could protect bots before they protect you.
Since I havenāt Instagrammed for agesāI think I only had one round of posting in mid-Januaryāhereās how the sun looked to the west of my office. I am told the Canberra fires have done this. Canberra is some 2,300 km away. For my US readers, this is like saying a fire in Dallas has affected the sunlight in New York City.
Iāve had a big life change, and I think thatās why Instagramming has suddenly left my routine. I miss some of the contact, and some dear friends message me there, knowing that doing so on Facebook makes no sense. I did give the impression to one person, and I publicly apologize to her, that I stopped Instagramming because the company is owned by Facebook, but the fact is Iāve done my screen time for the day and Iāve no desire to check my phone and play with a buggy app. Looks like seven years (late 2012 to the beginning of 2020) was what it took for me to be Instagrammed out, shorter than Facebook, where it took 10 (2007 to 2017).
