Ged Carroll

Category: consumer behaviour | 消費者行為 | 소비자 행동

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.

  • Smart home: is all we want is a better burglar alarm?

    The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) put together some PR-able research on what consumers think about the smart home.

    Methodology
    First of all the methodology:  online survey of over 4,000 US, UK and German consumers. The sample size is better than many, however I don’t know if the sample was self-selecting or what kind of biases might be in there. Since it was gathered solely online one has to have a certain amount of skepticism on sample make-up. But to do this as a telephone survey, they would have had to make in excess of 170,000 phone calls to get the 4,000 respondents to the smart home research.

    The nature of the questions means that answers are prompted which would again affect consumer attitudes rather than open answers which are then categorised.

    Finally, some cultures (like the Japanese) are much more accepting of technologies than others. Home ownership differences will also add into the mix depending on the depth of capital expenditure required to deploy a given technology. Renting is much more common in Germany, the UK has an aspiration to purchase.

    How valid are consumer opinions?
    In evolutionary products such as a new chocolate bar or toilet roll, consumer opinions on developments make more sense than a largely unwritten future a la the smart home, as Steve Jobs is reputed to have said:

    “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

    On to the results
    They put together some nuggets of data from the questions as diagrams, the most interesting was
    Print
    Ease-of-use is an interesting, but largely predictable response. I guess useful was assumed rather than asked in this question.

    There was a comparative lack of interest in smart appliances in comparison to smart environment controls (lighting, HVAC and home security). I suspect that this is partly because ‘smart’ technology has rolled out first in offices with touch control A/C and motion-controlled lighting – where respondents have been exposed to it.

    The thing that puzzles me is why one would want to control some of this smart home technology via the internet. Something like smart lighting doesn’t need to connect to a cloud but instead use local sensors whether it is a Bluetooth MAC address or infra-red heat signature that moves. More gadget related content here.

    More information
    From Sci-Fi to Reality: Almost Half of Consumers Think The Smart Home Will be Mainstream in Five Years
    Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group)

  • RSS dead nonsense + more

    RSS dead nonsense

    Is RSS Dead? A Look At The Numbers | MakeUseOf – interesting stats on RSS – a very-much alive format. RSS dead is nonsense, I use it everyday. It is invisible plumbing. Reports of RSS dead is due to the demise of Google Reader. I can’t recommend RSS reader Newsblur enough. More related content here

    Business

    Adidas Group Forecasts 15 Percent Annual EPS Growth Through 2020 | Team Business – interesting definition of open source

    China

    China Focus: Top political advisor highlights CPC leadership, “Four Comprehensives” | Xinhua – comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society, deepening reform, advancing the rule of law and strictly governing the Party

    Culture

    ‘We Came to Sweat’ Tells the Story of New York City’s Oldest Black-Owned Gay Club | VICE – interesting artefact of club culture

    Economics

    Chinas slowdown has suddenly become a “fiscal shock” | Quartz – interesting economic data, the property price change doesn’t surprise me, Chinas slowdown is likely to be temporary

    FMCG

    Kraft and Heinz Merger a Cost Cutting Story | Euromonitor International – cost cutting could also be from a marketing perspective

    Innovation

    Venture investor Bill Gurley predicts startup failure – Fortune – we may not be in a tech bubble, the venture capitalist said, but we’re in a risk bubble

    Luxury

    “Dressing down” is only a status symbol for the elite – Quartz – flagged up by our Becky

    Online

    Facebook Unveils Immersive 360-Degree Video for News Feeds | WIRED – interesting moves to come up with immersive (non game) content

    Philippines

    Homegrown smartphone brand beats Samsung in the Philippines | Techinasia – part of a wider story about how Samsung is getting rolled back out of high growth markets in smartphones

    Security

    Ex-NSA director: China has hacked ‘every major corporation’ in U.S. – CNN Money – strident allegations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 5Is have also done the same thing

    Software

    Messaging Apps Offer Do-It-All Services in Bid for Higher Profits – NYTimes.com – interesting article on how WeChat and LINE are blazing the trail for western OTT messaging platforms in terms of innovation and business models (paywall)

    WeChat is how content goes viral in China | Resonance China – from a marketing perspective this confirms the decline in Weibo as a platform. It also provides challenges due to the lack of visibility for brands in comparison to Weibo

    What’s missing from this 13-year-old girl’s iPhone home screen? – Quartz – interesting but not necessarily scientific. It does make me wonder why color coding doesn’t happen in app groupings UI specs

    Technology

    No, Really, the PC Is Dying and It’s Not Coming Back | WIRED – dramatic title, 5 per cent drop in PC sales numbers. It ignores the role of the personal computer as a business workhorse and as a creative tool

  • BlueFocus + more news

    BlueFocus

    BlueFocus FY 2014 profit up 62.8% | PR Week – Sir Martin Sorrell will be concerned. BlueFocus is at the centre of a high growth market. BlueFocus has access to cheap capital due to its high share price on the Shenzhen stock exchange and it demonstrates the kind of dynamism that WPP no longer has due to its physical size.

    Consumer behaviour

    Founding Fuel Hunting with the hounds – Indian consumers, by and large and across product categories, gravitate towards lower prices and more features instead of passionate brand loyalty

    Design

    The Story of the “Save the Memory Project” | Ricoh Global – impressive dedication and process

    Economics

    4 steps to getting your business model ready for emerging markets – interesting that The Economist’s tongue-in-cheek Big Mac Index is used as a serious pricing reference point in this article

    Finance

    80% of Bitcoin is exchanged into and out of Chinese yuan | Quartz – capital flight or something more criminal in nature?

    Gadget

    Why I changed my mind about the new MacBook | VentureBeat – nice run down on the MacBook’s limitations

    Keacher.com » How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web – interesting article, especially since he has to use at least two pieces of external tech to pre-process required applications to develop a web connection and render the web content itself. It puts into perspective how powerful a smartphone is. More technology related posts here

    Legal

    German duo to be caned, jailed for spraying graffiti on Singapore train | South China Morning Post – and they weren’t good graffiti artists either. Singapore has public spaces laid aside for graffiti

    Luxury

    How Jony Ive made Apple a luxury goods company – Business Insider – interesting technology is a substitute product for luxury sector goods argument made at the end of the article

    Marketing

    Tinder Users at SXSW Are Falling for This Woman, but She’s Not What She Appears | Adweek – sci-fi film Ex Machina uses a bot on Tinder to market the film at SXSW. More marketing related content here.

    Software

    iPhone 6s specs rumors: SiP processor reportedly in the works | BGR – computing power is likely to be below what an iPhone 6 would need, but interesting

  • That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis)

    It isn’t often that my thoughts turn to Jeremy Clarkson. This is mainly because being a car-less resident of London (and late of Hong Kong); I don’t really have much reason to pay attention to Top Gear. Secondly, there is only one Stig and that’s my childhood sporting hero – rally driver (and probably Sweden’s fastest pensioner) Stig Blomqvist.
    Stig Blomqvist - Lada VFTS 1600cc
    But I couldn’t avoid the fracas when it exploded as a story across the media.

    I was particularly struck by PR Week’s coverage of the story: Jeremy Clarkson’s popularity on social media plummets after BBC ‘fracas’. Yeah, right! The problem with stories like this is about how you slice the data and interpret it.

    Social media conversation as a mode of popular measure

    The very nature of a conversation is the ebb-and-flow. Mr Clarkson would need to be more worried if he no longer was a topic of conversation as it would indicate that his celebrity had run its course. If everyone was unified in agreement when the volume of conversation would be lower, but it doesn’t necessarily measure popularity, but polarity of sentiment.

    Sentiment analysis

    Sentiment analysis is worthy of a post in of itself. Machine sentiment analysis is generally no more than 65% accurate. That sounds pretty good until you see the results. When done properly it is usually supplemented by manual analysis, to pick up on colloquial language, sarcasm or complex sentence construction – all of which can fool the smartest systems. So any argument built on sentiment as a key indicator is built on a foundation of sand.

    Social following

    If we look at the amount of followers on Jeremy Clarkson’s Twitter account using social media monitoring tool Sysomos MAP; we see numbers that suggest his popularity on social has surged rather than declined as he became embroiled in controversy.
    clarkson
    The story we are actually seeing is a polarisation of opinion with detractors becoming increasingly vocal and fans becoming firmer in their support. As a brand marketer, having a client that stands for something is the jumping off point for great creative. You are not constrained by having to please everyone and so great marketing can happen:

    • Red Bull – Gives You Wings
    • Hooters – Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined
    • Mid-1980s – 90s Guinness – Pure Genius
    • Audi – Vorsprung durch Technik

    At the moment, Jeremy Clarkson probably doesn’t have a lot to worry about in terms of his social popularity; so long as the lawyers don’t get too involved his popularity is likely to sustain him in media work of some sort for a while yet. More online related content here.

    More information
    Jeremy Clarkson’s popularity on social media plummets after BBC ‘fracas’ | PR Week
    Stig Blomqvist

  • rc is 11

    rc is 11. Well its 11 years since started under it’s own name. The first post under the rc moniker was ‘Are we too complex’ which was a brief cross post that pointed to a longer piece I wrote at The AlwaysOn Network on Dan Geer. Dan Geer is a computer security and risk management expert who did a lot of work around the economics of security and how this all relates to technological complexity. The AlwaysOn Network had been newly formed by Tony Perkins, a founder of dot.com cheerleading magazine Red Herring. At the time it was a kind of proto-social network and Huffington Post for digital thinkers. I met my good friend Ian Wood on it. The fact that rc is 11 has had me reflect on 11 years of writing, cultural and technological change.
    Apollo 11 Launch
    I had got into blogging mainly because I had Aljazeera as a client for a while. George W. Bush was about to send the US forces into Iraq after weapons of mass destruction and Aljazeera was a lot less respected in the west as a media outlet. I found it hard to get media coverage so decided to go directly to the prospective audience that we wanted to reach. We were seeding content on forums related to finance, currency and oil futures trading. I’d heard about this thing called blogging, which made sense exploring further while I was at it. The rest as they say is history.

    Some 11 years later, Always On is a more prosiac seller of networking events and op-eds, but less of salon style community compared to what it was back in the day. At the time it was built on a proprietary CMS by a company NetModular that has since disappeared into the ether of technology as other off-the-shelf social platforms came along.

    The blog went from exploration with a specific client end in mind to become an aide memoire and scratchpad for ideas. This exploration through writing inspired the name: renaissance chambara:

    • renaissance – as in renaissance man to indicate that the blog would cover a lot of different ideas
    • chambara – after my love of Japanese samurai films, in particular Akira Kurosawa’s work with Toshiro Mifune – I was curious about East Asian culture, the nascent Hallyu movement in Korea, Hong Kong and Chinese cinema and pretty much anything coming out of Japan

    Over the subsequent decade I got invited to contribute to two books and got at least two of my roles because of the content and prominence of this blog. Even though I never monetised it, it always seemed to contribute and pay me back in some way or another.

    Things have changed, social platforms, tools and gurus have come and gone. Media spend has risen in prominence and brand marketing has declined. What surprised me was the slow rate of change within the PR industry and time it took for media and ad agencies to gain the whip hand. I had expected that mobile and desktop experiences would be less divergent in nature as screens grew (I had been using a Nokia Communicator E90 in the late noughties) which meant that Google’s lead in search was much sharper than I expected.

    I never had a plan for the blog, it has always been in the moment. Blogging isn’t dead, this one now sits in a spiders web of social properties rather than front-and-centre. It is no longer a conversation but a contributor to dialogue that usually happens on Twitter. The posts are collated alongside other people’s work on my feed. The process has taken on a life of its own. I have note books were ideas germinate, tens of thousands of bookmarks of reference material and look at the RSS feeds from 954 blogs or websites for inspiration.

    This process forces me to be continually curious about my field-of-work.

    I have posted from three continents and some 11 or so countries. I got to explore my interest in East Asia by living in Hong Kong for a while as well as visiting surrounding countries. Looking at rc is 11 I don’t know if I will be writing the post ‘rc is 18’ or even ‘rc is 21’ in ten years time, but I don’t currently see any reason why I won’t.

    More information
    Are we too complex (hosted on Blogspot)
    AlwaysOn Network
    NetModular