Consumer behaviour is central to my role as an account planner and about how I look at the world.
Being from an Irish household growing up in the North West of England, everything was alien. I felt that I was interloping observer who was eternally curious.
The same traits stand today, I just get paid for them. Consumer behaviour and its interactions with the environment and societal structures are fascinating to me.
The hive mind of Wikipedia defines it as
‘the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services.’
It is considered to consist of how the consumer’s emotions, attitudes and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, marketing and economics (especially behavioural economics or nudge theory as its often known).
I tend to store a mix of third party insights and links to research papers here. If you were to read one thing on this blog about consumer behaviour, I would recommend this post I wrote on generations. This points out different ways that consumer behaviour can be misattributed, missed or misinterpreted.
Often the devil is in the context, which goes back to the wide ranging nature of this blog hinted at by the ‘renaissance’ in renaissance chambara. Back then I knew that I needed to have wide interests but hadn’t worked on defining the ‘why’ of having spread such a wide net in terms of subject matter.
I was prompted to write about collapsing the funnel as a trope that marketers and adtech salespeople tell each other after listening to Jon Evans Uncensored CMO podcast. Jon was interviewing Josh Feldman.
Josh Feldman
Feldman is CMO at NBCUniversal’s advertising and partnerships business. He has been a long-time NBCUniversal marketer. Prior NBCUniversal, Feldman started at Turner Broadcasting, where he took on various roles including national and regional advertising sales roles. He managed client relationships for a range of TV channels including Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT and TruTV. Feldman’s sales orientation partly explains his collapsing the funnel perspective.
NBCUniversal
Mr Feldman is no longer just selling 30 second TV spots at NBCUniversal. NBCUniversal is a plethora of media properties:
11:05 – The secret to building strong client relationships
14:21 – Funnel marketing and the importance of end of funnel <—–
16:34 – The popularity of Bravo
17:46 – BravoCon
21:00 – The best brand activations at BravoCon
22:51 – How brands can work with talent
24:49 – Being a media partner for the Olympics
27:59 – Josh’s advice on creativity and landing your message
31:39 – Helping smaller brands
Two aspects to collapsing the funnel
Josh’s comment about collapsing the funnel was emblematic of two separate trends going on that he encapsulated in this one segment of the show.
The first is that performance marketers are waking up to the fact that brand matters.
The second trend is the fusion of sales and marketing functions in the business-to-business through account-based marketing or what used to be a sales support function now being lionised as a ‘strategic approach’.
Brand matters
A classic example of what happens if one focuses exclusively on performance marketing is the plateauing of growth that occurred in ASOS. The ASOS story is now often cited by marketing media mix experts as an example of what happens when brand building isn’t used to support performance marketing.
In the noughties and 2010s ASOS was a purveyor of trendy clothing for young people. It started as a copycat brand over time became a competitor to Urban Outfitters and an Etsy-type platform for small vintage clothing and design boutiques.
ASOS took a performance marketing approach to growing its business. Over time it expanded to eventually ship to 197 countries, but 40 percent of its customer base was still in the UK.
Performance marketing drove the customer base, but didn’t drive a significant increase in the number of orders per customer over time.
When we look at the inflation adjusted average basket value, we see a steady decline each year, with a sharper drop from 2021 onwards.
Performance marketing failed to increase basket size, and each customer added was less valuable than the last. Especially when one factors in the complexity of global logistics required for customer deliveries.
This next bit is speculative, but the geographic expansion drove growth as performance marketing based growth in its established markets plateaued.
The business went into reverse after 2020. The reasons for this reversal are likely to be multi-variant including:
Performance marketing plateau.
The bifurcation of the market. At the bottom end, Shein, Temu and TikTok commerce. At the top end luxury brand websites and secondary market platforms like StockX.
Culture. Like other online properties including Buzzfeed and Vice News, ASOS had a millennial user base that has been somewhat aged out.
The cost of living crisis due to post-COVID inflation.
Let’s next think about advertising, in particular Les Binet’s explanation of how advertising really works. In this explanation summarises the conclusions of decades of Ehrensberg-Bass Institute research, alongside marketing science work by the likes of the IPA into a six line explanation.
Advertising increases / maintains sales and / or margins
By
Slightly increasing the chance that people will choose your brand
By
Making the brand easy to think of and easy-to-buy
And
Creating positive feelings and associations
Via
Broad reaching ads that people find interesting and enjoyable
And
Targeted activations that they find relevant and useful
ASOS failed to maintain sales and margins because they focused on targeted activations – that consumers found useful. But the utility seems to have changed over time.
This happened despite ASOS using data science to optimise their marketing with a particular focus on geo-experimentation in performance marketing rather like trialing TV ads in different TV company regions, which marketers have done for the past 70+ years.
This isn’t because Lilia and Clara are bad data scientists, indeed I think they are good marketers using data to inform their decisions. The problem was that the focus was nearly exclusively on performance marketing.
ASOS are an example that has started to persuade performance marketers that brand advertising helps performance too.
ABM
Account based marketing is a strategic approach to business sales. It depends on account intelligence and analysis. This insight is used when an organisation considers and communicates with each prospect or customer account as markets of one.
Target selection becomes important and the criteria is usually focused on the most profitable business.
In existing accounts it is focused on upselling or cross-selling products and services to the customer. The main focus is alignment of marketing tactics with sales management. This moves the focus from individuals as targets to groups of people within an organisation.
ABM isn’t about collapsing the funnel per se but about melding it and reshaping it in the service of the salesforce rather than short term and long term brand with sales.
One of my friends who I first met when we were working on global brands at Unilever, took a change in career running their own chocolatier and coffee shop at a lovely market town outside London.
Coffee shops for years have had a nice line in selling branded insulated cups. The rationale is that these cups can be re-used and act as branded marketing for the shop. In the past you have had a push on using these insulated cups in the name of going green. There was a mix of take-up, but adoption was increasing over time.
The barriers to using re-usable cups include:
Having a cup big enough to take your drink. Coffee shop chains offer their branded cups. And if you don’t want to be a Café Nero billboard, you can buy cups from the likes of Stanley that will keep your drink warm for up to eight hours.
Having your cup with you. For drivers having a cup and a cup holder in their vehicle is easy enough. the challenge is when they take it into the home or workplace to clean the cup. They need to remember to have it back in their car. Public transport users have a similar problem but need a bag to hold their cup and their work ritual paraphernalia. One of the benefits of a single-use cup is not having to remember.
Having to wash the cups. Coffee shops have to wash cups used by people drinking in a coffee shop, but customers coming in with re-usable cups would need an immediate clean. I did notice in a Starbucks in a Hong Kong neighbourhood that customers left their cups overnight with the shop. However for most shops relying on customers to clean the cup themselves and a quick blast of steam from the coffee machine cappuccino function should be enough.
Customer habits
Pre-COVID the coffee shop problem looked as if it was being slowly but surely being addressed. This was because a significant minority of customers were going to their local coffee shop near work or home with a reusable cup. You are building a smaller habit with a bigger habit as a trigger: taking your reusable cup with you as you leave home prepared for work.
COVID-19 changed the whole coffee shop experience. Insurance companies had already been pushing store-owners towards cashless transactions. But now hygiene had its place as well. We were divided from baristas with a sea of perspex and reusable cups were not accepted.
Wider daily routines were broken with working from home, and the atomic habit of a daily caffeine fix was shattered. There were other aspects going on as well. Consumers got used to making coffee at home, or not going into their workplace at all. A regular coffee habit has been more difficult to reform due to hybrid working and the cost of living crisis probably hasn’t. helped the coffee shop problem either.
Back to my friend’s coffee shop
So back to the discussion that inspired this post:
We give a 30p discount for bringing your own takeaway cup, but out of the almost 400 takeaway drinks we’ve served in the last week only 11 times have we been able to give this discount. We’ve started talking about how we can help facilitate this behaviour change more as part of our sustainability drives. One idea being explored is to actually start charging for takeaway cups rather than discounting for bringing your own…
This equates to less than 2.75% redemption rate. My take on the coffee shop problem is outlined below:
Reduce friction and doubt: Tell people you will accept any takeaway cup that has room to hold the coffee (if its bigger thats fine).
Optimise any behaviour change activities that you are likely to implement: a Phil Graves research outlined in Consumerology supports the heuristic that positive reinforcement tends to be slightly better over time. But one thing to remember is that behavioural change is a war of inches. For instance reframe the above statement ‘In just one week we’ve already helped almost 3 percent of our customer base move to reusable cups’. This then becomes a social proof that encourages consumer reading the copy to be part of a growing movement.
A cup ‘fine’ might be like a sin tax – this paper on late pick up fines at an Israeli childcare centre is often quoted in behaviour change books. Here’s a synopsis of story laid out in the research paper. In day care centres in Israel, economists tried to help schools identify ways to reduce late pick-ups. Economists conducted a study by announcing that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay a $3 fine. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went up by 100%. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid the guilt of making a teacher wait, they took it en masse.
Shutting down is a conscious choice. You might see it described as digital detox or a digital break. I, like a number of people that I know have a ‘dumb’ phone to complement my smartphone. This is different from the pre-broadband era of the internet where going online was an active decision punctuated by the sound of the modem.
At that time, keeping in touch was an active decision rather than the tyranny of the pings from messaging applications. We cocooned ourselves from each other with a personal audio soundtrack via an iPod or a Discman. This cocooning effect was viewed to have a positive effect on personal autonomy was called the Walkman effect by sociologists.
Once you used a device be it the modem-connected PC, TV or music player you went through the act of shutting down devices. My parents still go room-to-room at night shutting down devices.
My Nokia N95
Over the past two decades we have stopped shutting down. A number of things happened:
Phone as Swiss Army knife. Cellphones quickly became our alarm clock. Working on the Nokia N93 launch with Flickr (then part of Yahoo!) felt like a watershed moment allowing photos to be taken and shared instantly online. During the July 7th London bombing, I got home by navigating with the ring bound A-Z atlas of London, which lived in the bottom of my backpack. Now I have four apps that would use depending what I wanted to do.
Device as social currency, your smartphone says as much about your economic health as your car. It’s a hygiene level of status, just like branded training shoes (sneakers) were when I was at school.
Synchronous social media. The now long-forgotten iNQ SkypePhone, BlackBerry and Danger Sidekick heralded no-shutting down engagement.
Dark patterns / design techniques used to encourage app or service use as a compulsion. It is no coincidence that a number of senior design and engineering teams at Tinder and Instagram sat in BJ Fogg’s persuasive computing design (captology) modules, yet the products used techniques that Fogg described as unethical.
Parent and policy voices.
The key points that activists and concerned parents talk about revolve around the following talking points:
Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful. For instance, I can no longer phone up my local surgery to get a repeat prescription or book an appointment, it’s all mediated by the surgery website and the NHS app.
(Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. Shutting down is proving hard for many adult consumers to do. But there is a commonplace screen addiction. Empirical evidence suggests that it would be damaging for children. I could make countervailing points, here is a better place to see them outlined.
Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music).
The push seems to be on regulating the services that run on top of smartphone platforms.
There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding focus on encouraging shutting down as a desirable behaviour; presumably because the efficiencies promised by digital government services are too alluring.
Under-supply.
While there might be a desire for dumb phone, there are remarkably few options as second generation mobile networks have been turned off around the world.
HMD (what was Nokia’s terminal business) is the leading player in this sector. They are starting to do clever things that tap into the idea of shutting down and being present in the meatspace at key moments.
Heineken collaborated with HMD and streetwear atelier Bodega to collaborate on a ‘dumb’ phone in a transparent case, similar to electronic devices issued in prisons.
Heineken seem to doing this for a number of reasons:
People are less likely to be themselves when there is a broadcast studio in your pocket full of distractions to pull you away from the now.
Shutting down allows you to be more present for your friends.
Losing a £1,000+ device down the pub full of work information and access to your bank account isn’t a particularly attractive option. So providing a cheaper option is a bit like the ‘festival phone’ tough but basic Nokia that I bring to gigs and festivals.
Punkt.
A less well known competitor is Punkt. Punkt is a boutique Swiss consumer electronics company who have made a number of cellphones, home phones and a Braun-like alarm clock. Punkt want to promote the idea of intentional technology use, rather than as a wrapper around our everyday lives. Their MP02 phone acts as a wi-fi hotspot and a dumb cellphone, as they view a two device strategy of laptop and phone leans in better to their intentional technology use vision. Punkt make shutting down easier, by adding friction to switching on.
Welcome to my April 2024 newsletter which marks my 9th issue. We managed to make it through the winter and the clocks moved forward allowing for lighter evenings in the northern hemisphere.
The number nine is full of symbolism in a good way. In Chinese culture it sounds similar to long-lasting. It was strongly associated with the mystical and powerful nature of the Chinese dragon. From the number of dragon types and children to the number of scales on the dragon – which were multiples of 9. You have nine channels in traditional Chinese medicine. In Norse mythology there are nine worlds and Odin the all-father hangs on the tree of life for 9 days to gain knowledge of the runes.
Social media-related cognitive dissonance
A couple of conversations with people, spurred me to write this next piece.
I know it’s obvious and common sense, but it needs to be said occasionally. This time last year, I was on a Zurich work trip, providing support to a teammate running a workshop for a client who viewed the agency as the least worst option. We did good work and built temporary rapport, we got insight about the wider client-side politics at play. It was the classic example of the complexities involved in agency life and Lord knows we already have enough internal politics in our own shops to deal with.
The photo I shared on Instagram at the time gave no clue to what was happening, serving as a reminder to consider the curated nature of social feeds when scrolling through.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
What my answers to Campaign’s a-list questions would look like.
Boutique e-tailers and why the multi-brand luxury retail sector has gone from boom to bust.
Very Ralph and other things – Ralph Lauren’s world building abilities and how others from a cancer patient or overseas migrant workers have bent the world to their needs, or made a new one.
Books that I have read.
There are a few books that I revisit and the March 1974 JWT London planning guide is one of them. In many respects it feels fresh and more articulate than more modern tomes.
Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. But if like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit. It is important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines. Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter.
Van Horne and Riley’s Left of Bang was recommended by a friend who recently left military service. It codified and gave me a lexicon for describing observations of focus group dynamics and observation-based shopper marketing. Probably of bigger value to people more interested in the analytical side of behavioural science is the bibliography – which is extensive.
Things I have been inspired by.
Sustaining a sustainable brand
Kantar do a good webinar series called On Brand with Kantar. I got to watch one of them: Why consumers ignore brands’ sustainability efforts. Consumers are reticent to trust in brand’s sustainable efforts. Kantar’s recommendation is to stay the course and continue to demonstrate real sustainability. Kantar’s work complemented System 1’s Greenprint US-orientated sustainable advertising report. There is a UK-specific version as well with half a dozen ideas for marketers published in partnership with ITV.
Media platform trends
GWI released their 2024 Global Media trends report. GWI takes a survey based approach to understand consumer media behaviour.
Broadcast TV still commands the greatest share of total TV time, despite Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and a plethora of other streaming platforms from Criterion to Disney+.
Survival/horror players are most excited about gaming luxury collabs, whether or not luxury brands are equally excited about survival or horror gamers is a bigger question.
Games console ownership has halved in the past ten years. This surprised me given how many of my friends have a Switch or PlayStation 5. It probably explains why Microsoft is focusing on being a publisher rather than on platforms as well.
They focused exclusivity on internet advertising, which gives you a good idea on where they want the balance of media spend to go, rather than necessarily the right tool for the right job. Yes digital is very important, BUT, we live in a world were we are wrapped by and consume layers of digital and analogue media.
We can see from GWI data that this viewpoint is likely to be still excessively myopic in terms of media due to offline – online media linkages. This is likely to be even more so in Japan that still has a more robust traditional media industry.
Internet advertising reached a new high, despite being a couple of years after the Olympic games were hosted in Tokyo. (Media spend when a country hosts the olympics tends to be skewed that year upwards).
One thing I would flag is that this report is based on surveying people across the Japanese advertising industry and built on their responses. So there maybe some biases built into that process. Overall it’s a fascinating read.
Social media engagement benchmarks
RivalIQ published their 2024 Social Media Industry Engagement bench report, download it to get the full details. Three things that struck me straight away:
Macro-level decline across platforms on engagement rate, which matches the trends that Manson and Whatley outlined ten years ago in their Facebook Zero paper for Ogilvy Social.
If brands didn’t need enough reason already to reduce exposure to Twitter, the falling engagement rates on the platform add additional reasons. Overall video seemed to underperform on engagement compared to photos.
One thing leaped out to me in the industry verticals data, if you are looking to reach student age adults, why not consider collaborating with higher education institution social media accounts rather than influencers?
Shocking health outcomes
The Hidden Cost of Ageism | A Barrier to Innovation & Growth | Future Work – sparked a lot of discussion with its implications on workplace practices, particularly within the advertising sector. What was less discussed but more important was the implications of ageism related biases on healthcare treatment.
Under-treatment or Over-treatment: Older adults may receive less aggressive treatment options or are overtreated because of age-related biases, rather than based on individual health needs and preferences.
Dismissal of Concerns: Healthcare providers might dismiss older patients’ health issues as inevitable parts of ageing, potentially overlooking treatable conditions.
Age-Based Prioritisation: In some cases, age influences the allocation of healthcare resources, with younger individuals being prioritised over older ones, assuming they have more “life worth living.”
The Hidden Cost of Ageism | Future Work
MSNBC News in the US did a report on what it called a ‘Post-Roe underground’ echoing the underground railroads to free slaves in the Southern states and the Vietnam war era draft dodgers who escaped north to Canada. This time it is to help women access abortion pills or procedures in other states or Mexico.
MSNBC
My friend Parrus hosted a talk on World Health Day, more on that here, the key takeaway for me was not trying to replicate developed market solutions in developing markets. Instead think about how it could be reinvented. Thinking that could be extended beyond health care to consumer goods, telecoms and technology sectors as well.
Luxury market shake-up
Business of Fashion covered a US court case where two women brought a lawsuit against Hermès, alleging purchase of its sought-after Birkin bag is dependent on purchase of other products and is an “illegal tying arrangement” that violated US antitrust law.
Hermès is more vulnerable than other brands because it owns its retail stores. The case, if successful could have implications far beyond the luxury bag-maker. For instance, how Ford selected prospective owners for its GT-40 sports cars, or most Ferrari limited edition for that matter.
While we’re on the subject of luxury, LVMH are rerunning their INSIDE LVMH certificate which is invaluable for anyone who might work on a luxury brand now or in the future. More here.
Morizo
Toyota are on a tear at the moment. They correctly guessed that electric cars were too expensive at the moment and focused hybrids as a stepping stone to electric and hydrogen fuel cell production. They have also successfully use the passion for driving in their products and their marketing. The Toyota GR Yaris was a result of Chairman Akio Toyoda instructing engineers to make something sporty enough to win the World Rally Championship and affordable.
He also outed himself as a speed demon who went under the nom de plume of Morizo.
Quebec
For many English speakers one of the most dissonant experiences is being confronted by a language you can’t speak. It’s part of the reason why ireland managed to become the European base of companies like Alphabet and and Intel. So I was very impressed by this campaign by the Quebec government to attract visitors and inbound investment.
Things I have watched.
I watched Mr Inbetween series one in March and managed to work through series two and three this month. I couldn’t recommend them highly enough as a series. They just keep building on each other.
Over Easter, I revisited some old VHS tapes my parents still had and rediscovered the Christopher Walken science fiction horror film “Communion.” It epitomizes its era, with alien abduction narratives emerging during the Cold War and permeating popular culture from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “The X-Files,” tapering off after 9/11. “Communion” demonstrates how effective editing and minimal special effects can heighten tension and emotion. Despite the film’s incredulous premise, Walken delivers a fantastic performance.
“Modesty Blaise” is from a time when comic book adaptations were uncommon in cinemas. This 1966 adaptation of the 1960s comic strip shares stylistic similarities with “Barbarella” and stars a young Terence Stamp. I received a tape copy from a friend who was attending art college at the time. The depiction of the computer as a character with emotional reactions in the film feels contemporary, echoing the rise of virtual assistants like Siri and ChatGPT, despite being portrayed as a mainframe. It is interesting to contrast it with Spike Jonze’s movie Her made 50 years later.
Useful tools.
A lot of the tools this month have been inspired by my trusty Mac slowly dying and needing to get my new machine up and running before my old machine gave out.
Time Machine
Apple’s native backup software, Time Machine, serves as a personal sysadmin for home users. Regular backups are essential. If a crucial document disappears while you’re working on it, Time Machine, coupled with a Time Machine-enabled hard drive, allows you to retrieve earlier versions of the document, potentially saving your sanity in critical moments.
Microsoft Office
I prefer the one-off payment model over Office 365 services. I use Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps instead of Outlook. While Office is available for just £100, which is reasonable considering its features, I still prefer Keynote over PowerPoint for creating presentations.
Superlist
Many of you may recall Wunderlist, which Microsoft acquired, but much of its original charm was lost in the transition to Microsoft To Do. Superlist is a reboot of Wunderlist by the original team, this time without Microsoft’s involvement. It’s available on iOS, macOS, and the web, catering to both individual and team task management needs.
https://youtu.be/2MzzbRhYlSA?si=04eBXH-MqKLpX2bN
ESET Home Security Essential
I used to rely on Kaspersky, and while I generally like their products, I have concerns about the potential influence of the Russian government. Therefore, I switched providers. ESET has a strong reputation and offers better Mac support than F-Secure. I can recommend their ESET HOME Security Essential package.
Amazon Basics laptop sleeve
I use a various bags depending on my destination and activities. Over the years, I’ve found that Amazon Basics brand laptop sleeves work well for my machines. They’re often among the cheapest options available and tend to outlast the computers they protect.
Laptop camera cover
The photo of Mark Zuckerberg’s laptop with tape covering the camera raised awareness about privacy. Webcam privacy covers, such as a sliver of plastic that slides across, are ideal as they allow your laptop to close fully. A pro tip is to use a red LED torch to clearly locate your camera when applying the stick-on cover.
Protective case and keyboard cover
I’m a big fan of clip-on polycarbonate shells to protect my laptop, as they provide a better surface for the stickers that personalize my machine over time. You don’t necessarily need a big-name case. The one I have came with a keyboard cover that works well. Anything that prevented Red Bull, coffee, or croissant flakes from getting under my keys is worth doing.
Screen protector film
The screen protector film provides great protection and is easy to apply and clean, even for beginners like me. I’ll update you if my opinion changes.
The sales pitch.
I have enjoyed working on projects for PRECISIONeffect and am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my April 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the bank holiday.
Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!
Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
Why trends and fads came about as a post, was that I was scrolling on my LinkedIn notifications on a Saturday (I know, I know I should keep my life free of this crap on the weekends.) Creative Review were talking about how trend forecasting had become rusty, but that got me thinking about did they understand the difference between trends and fads?
A good deal of what I see described as trends are fads, which then got me wondering about how do I help people differentiate between trends and fads.
Why has it become harder to differentiate likely trends and fads?
I would argue that the difficulty in differentiating likely trends and fads is down to a few reasons.
The nature of culture has changed. It has become massively parallel in nature. This has in turn impacted trends
Culture has become elongated in nature.
The changing nature of culture means trends surface and submarine again over time.
Mass to massively parallel.
Culture has become massively parallel. Culture and its nature has been transformed over the last century. There were a few sub-cultures at best that mattered at a given given moment in time.
The idea of the ‘teenager’ which was the first attempt to carve out a new generation was done in the post-war affluence of America and latterly European countries, Japan and Korea as economic development took hold. We might use different language now, but teenagers were the engines for the sale of goods and services:
New music
New spaces (gaming arcades, fast food restaurants, coffee shops, instant messaging platforms, social platforms)
New fashion looks (mods, rockers, greasers, ravers, emo, gorpcore etc.)
At the time, the mass media helped facilitated the propagation of a mass culture. A few music publications, radio stations, newspapers and TV stations could make a break an artist. We can see this over time with the power of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin or Ed Sullivan in the US, Gay Byrne and Gerry Ryan in Ireland or Top of the Pops and Pete Tong in the UK.
Ed Sullivan introduces The Beatles.
Paul McCartney remembering the 1964 show.
However a combination of economic improvement and technology saw the mass media broaden with countless publications, TV channels, radio stations, websites and social channels until it is no longer ‘mass’ in nature.
Add to this, the world got smaller. Travel while still expensive became cheaper from the 1970s and 1980s onwards allowing more people to discover culture from elsewhere. And this was despite a massive surge in the price of oil due to troubles in the Middle East. So trends and fads moved around the world. Liverpool lads brought the ideas of sports casual dress from Spanish and French department stores, Japan borrowed various parts of Americana and streetwear, hip hop went around the world.
The connectivity from the worldwide web put this in overdrive. A world of culture opened up making things massively parallel, which allowed people to pick and choose their own cues. These choices gave us massively parallel culture and resulting trends.
Culture has become elongated in nature.
I have friends (and associates) in their late 50 and early 60s who DJ, surf, skateboard and do martial arts. These were people who remember club nights before house music let alone EDM, who can remember the first skate parks being built in the UK and knew of Stüssy because they were part of the original Stüssy tribe of interesting folks formed by Shawn himself.
People who might listen to Radio 4 on occasion, but are still cooler and more culturally relevant than many teenagers. Probably more culturally relevant than their college age kids.
This cultural elongation is something that we’re starting to see gen-z obsessed agencies. A good example of this is ZAK Agency’s Learn To Time Travelwhite paper. Part of it has been down to life stages happening later for each generation; or not at all.
Moving out on your own.
Settling down.
Having children.
Buying their own home.
Being able to afford to retire.
Part of it is down to the world norms changing. I seldom have had to wear a shirt and tie, or suit to work. My Dad wore a tie right up until the mid-1980s to work, because that was expected of him. He wasn’t a banker, but a shipyard worker. Athletes can potentially stay in peak condition for longer, all made possible by the modern world.
Despite what we believe about technology usage, for those who are 70 or younger, income influences tech adoption as much as age related knowledge. Giving all of us access to as much culture as we can mainline.
Fads
If you hear the phrase ‘TikTok trends’ that are fast-changing, it’s a clue that it’s likely to be a fad unless by some blessed miracle it sticks. In the 20th century, fads were often easier to spot and the 1970s in particular were a gold mine for the fad spotter.
Fads appear, go large and then disappear. They are ethereal in nature, rather like most TikTok trends. The Pet Rock is a prime example with its swift rise and demise.
Pet Rock
Northern California-based copywriter Gary Dahl came up with the idea of a pet rock. Essentially adhesive googly eyes attached to a rounded pebble that might feel pleasing in your hand for skimming across a body of still water like a lake. Dahl’s insight came from sitting with friends in a bar and listening to complain about the challenges of pet care.
Dahl started off his project by writing a satirical pet care manual for a rock, based on the kind of care guide a veterinarian might have for a new dog owner. This included on tips for when your rock was feeling anxious.
The rock came with the instruction book for care, it sat in a nest of long wood shavings inside a card carrying crate with a handle on top and seven vent holes on each side.
Dahl put his product into the market in August 1975. Dahl was apparently selling 10,000 rocks a day and it became a gag gift over the Christmas period with estimates on sales as between 1 million to 1.5 million genuine rocks. By February 1976, they started to need discounting. Dahl ploughed his profits into opening the Carry Nation’s bar in Los Gatos, which is still there.
The Pet Rock was clearly a fad, yet it did inspire my junior school art teacher to get us to collect stones from a visit to the beach, stick googly eyes on them and varnish the whole lot. Some were brought home and the rest sold at the school fair. Dahl wasn’t able to patent his idea. As far as I know around 2010, someone started an abortive business replicating Dahl’s packaging design and rocks.
Dahl built his freelance copywriting business up into an agency that produced radio and television ads for local businesses including wireless providers, technology firms and dot coms. The reason for this was that Campbell had been living in the Silicon Valley area as it grew up into what we know today. Dahl even wrote the For Dummies guide on advertising in 2001, which is still available today and is a good primer on the process. Dahl passed away in 2015.
Trends are resurgent, surfacing and submarining over time.
Take the idea of cocooning in our own soundscape as an example of a resurgent trend. If you go on the public transport headphones or AirPod type earphones are ubiquitous. If you go and work in an office, you will see a similar set up. Prior to the rise of the AirPods it would have more likely been Sony or Bose over-ear headphones rather than wireless AirPods.
Back in the early 1970s, my Dad took the train down to London while listening to a collection of cassettes he’d made of his record collection. The trip was one he occasionally made for the shipyard where he worked at the time. It was a long slow train journey. We had a bulky luggable cassette player similar to the one below and he wore a pair of headphones bought in Liverpool that looked like sturdy ear protectors. The tape machine was more designed for basic portable recording such as a manager recording a memo to be typed up. They were occasionally pressed into service in a similar way to my Dad’s usage.
Around about the same time, luggable stereos were being made by European manufacturers including Philips and Grundig. Soon after that Japanese manufacturers like Sharp, Sony and Panasonic released their own versions which were very successful. These were cemented into culture by young Americans who valued their portability and bass response.
Beck at Yahoo! Hack Day with a boom box
Boomboxes weighed a lot, Sony provided an alternative with the Walkman and eventually the Discman. These were portable cassette and CD players respectively which offered personal listening with headphones. These were briefly joined by MiniDisc players.
Around about the time when the web started to take off, you had early MP3 players such as the Rio series of machines and the CreativeLabs Nomad. But things took off with the Apple iPod, offering a new level of personal audio freedom.
Eventually a confluence of the smartphone as digital Swiss Army knife and BlueTooth wireless standards provided us with our current personal audio freedom.
Cocooning is just one example. As far back as the post-war era we have seen military surplus clothing go in and out of style. Thrifting has taken a similar route with it driving the iconic grunge look of the early 1990s and the Dpop shopping of today’s young people.
We could quite easily come up with a list of trends that never die. The annual trend reports tweaking the relative volumes on these trends over time to match economic and socio-cultural changes.
