Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Big game: HK vs. LDN

Charlotte, my counterpart in Hong Kong, was in London for a couple of days last week. It was interesting to learn about the differences between what she does and what I do.

First up: the commute. Her seven minute bus journey initially looks favourable to my hour-long, two train shuffle from Surrey to London. However, Charlotte doesn’t clear her inbox and read two newspapers before arriving in the office. So, although I have a longer commute, I make it work for me. We’ll call it a score draw on that one.

Next on the list is the price of coffee. “How much?!” I exclaimed when told a cup of this wonderful, life enhancing nectar would set me back about £4.50 over on the island. Hong Kong living would require me to part with around £15 on a good day, possibly nearing £30 on a bad one. Cripes! Definitely one up for these Isles.

Time zones. We’ve all got them. Some are conveniently situated between the US and Asia, others aren’t. Hong Kong’s is very awkward for global calls. When I sit on a call at 1400, happily shooting the breeze and eager to discuss the minutiae with colleagues in the US and Asia, poor old Charlotte’s sitting at home at 2300 wanting to go to bed. So far, so good for the UK.

Moving on from the day-to-day practicalities, let’s look at the market place. Over in the UK the global social media networks dominate, there’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Everyone knows them, and when something new pops up, it’s easily picked up. Over in Hong Kong, as well as the global players, they also have Chinese equivalents. A lot of them. There are facebook equivalents, there are Twitter equivalents. And it’s all changing. And it’s all different on mainland China, which Charlotte needs to cover too! It sounds like she’s got a lot to do, but in my book that’s a good thing. It sounds busy and it sounds exciting. The more tools and channels and networks the better, I say. Others may disagree. So Hong Kong’s finally scored a goal.

Finally, Hong Kong is the gateway to the biggest emerging market of them all: China. A market growing at a rapid rate. Companies springing up from within and moving in from abroad constantly. A market growing and changing so fast no one can say they’ve cornered. From a marketing point of view, that’s massively exciting. Lots of companies to meet, people to pitch, networks to build. That’s a massive goal for Hong Kong.

It looks like a draw where HK scores the interesting goals and London’s just plodding comfortably, but hang on a second, London’s not exactly lacking for opportunity.

Despite anaemic growth and a mature market, there are tech start ups, lots of pitches, loads of ideas and creativity. Many companies use London as their hub for Europe. I get to liaise with partners across Europe, speaking with people in France, Italy, Norway or many other nations on any given day. I say London wins with a late goal in extra time. Not sure Charlotte will agree.

This piece was orignally posted on the Asian Insight blog.

Smart money on smartphones?

 

panasonic eluga

 

With less than a week to go before #mwc12 kicks off, both Fujitsu and Panasonic have played their hand and announced that they’re breaking out of the Japanese smartphone market to conquer Europe. It’s possible that both companies were emboldened by the record quarterly profits announced by Samsung last month, which were driven by its smartphones division, and Cisco’s recent projections that there will be 10bn handsets globally by 2016.

Android-based smartphones are clearly the product category to be in at the moment. HTC’s rise a few years ago and its subsequent decline in the face of Samsung’s dominance shows that, as technological development continues apace and people adapt to new interfaces, no one has really cornered the market just yet.

It’s worth keeping an eye on the margins though. Apple makes a 37.4% operating profit on its iPhone. In comparison, Samsung makes just 11% on its handsets. As volumes grow, it’s reasonable to expect component prices to fall. There is a danger that the companies that only make handsets will rapidly fall down the value chain and see their profits squeezed.

The situation may not be too dissimilar to that currently being witnessed in the market for TVs, where manufacturers are operating on slim margins and many are losing money. Still, that’s no reason not to make money while it’s there and, unlike 3D TVs, smartphone technology looks to be something consumers can’t get enough of at the moment.

IMAGE CREDIT [Panasonic]

This piece was originally posted on Racepoint’s #mwc12 blog

Social influence and social media

This morning I went along to Like Minds’ Social Media Week debate on Trust and Social Influence.

The good people at Like Minds pulled together a great panel and the debate was very wide reaching, so I’m only going to focus on a couple of the useful points I took away with me.

Behaviour, not values

The first point is that the tools that currently measure influence base their scores on your online behaviour, not your values or work or your offline behaviour.  Now, I love watching rugby, I used to love playing rugby, I still play squash, however, I rarely ever tweet about either sport.  I’d like to think I influence some people about rugby and squash, but no tool that uses social media as its data source is likely to pick that up.

Margin of error

For PRs it’s important to note that tools that provide influence scores or assign which topics someone is interested in, work best when aggregated.  That is to say that individually they’re either right or wrong, but across 1,000 or 1,500 of the vast majority of people they’ve highlighted as being influential on topic X should indeed have some influence on topic X.

Don’t shoot the messenger

Azeem Azhar from PeerIndex made a point that perhaps is the most important one to note on a personal level.  Tools like PeerIndex, Klout and Kred all publicly tell you what they think of you.  Other tools, some developed for proprietary use by large brands, judge you and assign a value to you without you ever knowing what they think of you.  A good, recent example is American chain Target figuring out a teenager was pregnant before her father knew.  So, as much as people knock PeerIndex and its rivals for inaccuracy, at least they’re making their mistakes in the open.

This piece was originally posted here on the CommsTalk blog.

Who’s winning on the sub-continent?

I recently went to Delhi for a few days. On my way back to London, sitting in the departure lounge at Indira Gandhi International, I noticed a phone charging station and it got my attention for one reason.

docking station - delhi

Take a look at it on the left (sorry for the terrible photo – I was working with very harsh light). What do you notice?

What I noticed is that this docking station in the international airport of the capital city of a BRIC nation is sited in a place only accessed by wealthy Indians (i.e. those who can afford to fly) and foreign visitors, and that Blackberry and Nokia are the dominant brands. They’re the brands that take pride of place and have the most docking points.

Now, this is just a snapshot. The trends might favour Samsung and Apple. I don’t know. What I do know that there’s an Indian elite who still use Blackberrys and Nokias and they haven’t fallen out of love with them yet. This means phones like the Lumia (which I saw heavily advertised in Delhi’s upmarket shopping malls) aren’t perceived to belong to old fashioned brands.

For all the talk of Nokia’s decline and turmoil at RIM, I wouldn’t write off the incumbents just yet.

NOTE: this post was also published on Racepoint Group’s #mwc12 blog