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.

Ghostly sounds + more things

Ghostly sounds

All the ghostly sounds that are lost when you compress to mp3 – this has been quite well publicised but there is something about it that sends shivers down my spine each time I listen to the ghostly sounds.

Culture

Benjamin Von Wong’s superhero series of pictures are amazing

TJ Fuller’s animated GIFs of psychedelic animals are tremendous

Gadget

The Apple Watch Is Time, Saved | TechCrunch – watch as context dependent screen for iPhone

Apple Watch vs. Samsung Smartwatch: No new Gear announcement at MWC | BGR – a lot of supposition here but it was interesting that Samsung kept all the limelight for the Galaxy S6 models

Innovation

BBC News – Technology helps visually impaired navigate the Tube – interesting where 2.0 project on the London Underground

Japan

A History Of Gundam, The Anime That Defined The Giant Robot Revolution – as if this needs any explanation. More Japan related content here.

Marketing

Wednesday. Hump Day. Peak of the week. – hump day promotion great way to bury the competition by O2

StateOfPR – Research report – the key take out in the stateofpr research report for me was the stagnation in budgets, however this maybe due to the CIPR membership skewed towards NFP and public sector

Media

David Shing’s vision of a world united by tech: Media360Summit – Campaign Asia – the sixth biggest contributor to stress is media overload

Online

Adult content policy on Blogger – Blogger Help – Google looks to clean up Blogger which has become a bit of a spam nest. More related content here.

Retailing

Why has ASOS removed its guest checkout option? | Econsultancy – they must have data to back this up surely? Or they don’t value drive by custom? More related content here.

Security

When Strong Encryption Isn’t Enough to Protect Our Privacy | Alternet – much of this is because the information about the communication is useful in itself. It provides the typography of networks, the nature of the communication. Frequency of communications indicates the relative strength of communication. Strong encryption is like an envelope, but the stamp, the address, the colour of the envelope, the way the address is written, the franking over the stamp and the return address all provide useful information.

Edward Snowden Citizenfour: The former contractor sparked a movement that’s winning the surveillance argument. | Slate – interesting analysis of the dynamics of the US privacy movement. Thi is going to have legs. The only thing that surprises me however, is that other people are surprised. It is a natural extension of the ECHELON network of the late 1990s.

March 13, 2015
Apple Spring Forward event
Apple Spring Forward event

I started this post a few hours after watching Tim Cook and company launch a number of product revisions under the title of Apple Spring Forward. The most anticipated of which was the Apple Watch. I was in full Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder mode. I have collated some of my thoughts about the event below and tried to order them into some sort of cogent narrative.

AppleTV

The reduction of cost in Apple TV hardware at the Apple Spring Forward event was an interesting move. Apple has decided to go for market share rather than margin with the device and the incumbent HBO Now service might be just the catalyst to drive adoption. That Apple is leading with a HBO streaming service tends to imply that Apple has likely given up on trying to build its own ‘cable channel over IP’ offering. It does raise another interesting question about how other studios will want to handle their content in iTunes or via a an app similar to BBC iPlayer. Apple is passing on to consumers the cost benefits of using the older silicon design that powers the Apple TV. It also means that the Apple TV is the least powerful computer in Apple’s product range – including phones and tablets. The AppleTV is an egalitarian device rather a luxury brand product and a vote against widespread 4K adoption; unless the price discount is making room for a premium 4K capable device at a later date?

Social Enterprise

Apple’s moves at becoming a ‘social enterprise’ were interesting. For an organisation so polished at presenting itself to the outside world, the ResearchKit announcement and the case study with Christy Turlington felt awkward. ResearchKit was delivered in a flat manner and didn’t explain how the product fitted in with Apple’s position on user privacy. Turlington’s appearance was like a particularly sycophantic Charlie Rose interview. There was a lot to talk about without having to ‘over-reach’ for celebrity endorsement.

Apple needs to work harder picking the spokespeople to burnish its reputation, the nature of the projects and the deliver to be less cringeworthy. The very nature of the product and design story means that Apple already has a certain amount of implicit moral imperative and the company should be more in-tune with that.

Apple Watch

I am deeply conflicted by a lot of the discussions around the Apple Watch, for a number reasons:

I haven’t used an Apple Watch, but watching others use it in the demos made me think that it is fiddly and dare-I-say-it: hard to use. It could be un-Apple in nature

Scott Galloway points to the Apple Watch and describes Apple as having transitioned to a luxury brand. The Edition watch maybe a luxury product, but not all of the Apple product range are luxurious – the AppleTV at a new price point of $69 implies ubiquity. This maybe a specific choice to get scale for the media content that other luxury Apple devices need to function. Just in the same way that quality newspapers couldn’t survive solely on sales to luxury consumers. What does this mean for those Apple customers who use the the devices as professional or creative tools?

Much of the debate revolves around what luxury consumers want by people who can’t afford to buy the Edition version of the watch. Do the kind of luxury shoppers who wouldn’t care about a $13,000+ watch have a smartphone, or a smart person to organise their lives? An astute reader of Popbitch will soon realise that the celebrity accessory to have is a personal assistant, not a bejeweled Vertu. Secondly, not being available is a luxury as privacy and time are the preserve of the reach in an always-on world

Many of the more positive predictions depend on the Chinese luxury market. The luxury market is changing in China. Luxury goods are used as tools in China; if you look successful, you are more likely to be successful in a culture that relies on high-touch personal relationships to facilitate business. However, consumers are becoming more sophisticated and moving away from at least some of the gaudier products. The Middle East may be a more opportune market for Apple.

A second use case in the Chinese luxury market is that of a compact storage of value for capital flight or making a payment. The culture of payments for favours is being clamped down on my the Xi administration which has been made visible by a 20%+ drop in luxury watch sales. I don’t know the way plutocrats would likely jump on the gold Apple Watch.

‘Apple Watch is just an iPhone remote control‘ Craig Johnson senior analyst at Piper Jaffray – heard on Bloomberg TV. ‘Luxury watches are a store of wealth, an Apple Watch isn’t‘. Which is probably true for many people on Wall Street, but may not true for the truly rich.

Apple MacBook

The MacBook carried the biggest dissonance for me and was arguably the biggest disappointment of the Apple Spring Forward event. For long time Apple customers, MacBook means entry level laptop. They used to come white polycarbonate shells that matched the iMac G4 and Apple eMac. Instead the MacBook seems to reflect status:
- A price point above the MacBook Air, but less powerful and less adaptable
- Good battery life, but underpowered for many tasks
- Three finishes including a gold colour that screams status in the iPhone line
- A single port which made many of geek friends freak out with anger. The morning after one of my friends posted on Facebook about the single port: I am still angry. I use a Retina MacBook Pro at work and suffer from a lack of ports for external drives (including an optical drive), Ethernet, a secondary display and a card reader for multimedia work. The MacBook has a single port which replaces the MagSafe with a USB connection. For business users or creatives the machine is gloriously impractical and destroys their investment in things like the Apple Cinema display. I currently an Apple TV and have tried to screen-cast over Wi-Fi to it for presentations, it doesn’t like video at all. When I travel I usually present, for business users who travel regularly like me the MacBook feels like a pig-in-a-poke. Is the MacBook then decided to be a luxury consumer device?
The trackpad which is being rolled out across other Apple laptop models looked attractive to me. The next generation of keyboard seems to be less convincing. I suspect its attractiveness will be inversely proportional to your touch typing speed due to the lack of haptic feedback from shorter key travel. Despite the price point difference, I suspect that the MacBook is actually designed to cannibalise some Apple iPad sales as an executive toy – I don’t know whether it will.

That’s my take on the Apple Spring Forward event, but I would be interested on your take on it.

More information

Post Traumatic Apple Event Disorder
On Smart Watches, I’ve Decided To Take The Plunge
The Watch Post
Size Zero Design | 厌食症设计
 Questions I Have About Apple’s Business | Apple 业务挑战
 CES Trends
Waking from an Apple Watch hangover « Observatory
New Apple Stuff and You | The Wirecutter
March 12, 2015
Singapore police + more things

The Singapore Police issued this video where a cardboard cut-out sign warning shoplifters is brought to life, hilarity ensued amongst Singaporean netizens

Post by Singapore Police Force.

Disclosure: Singapore Home Team is a former client. The Singapore Home Team is made up of the different services that sit under the Ministry of Home Affairs including the Singapore Police. Guns n’ Roses Welcome To The Jungle for two cellos. It sounds more of an emotional roller-coaster this way than the original version by Guns n’ Roses. In that respect it reminds me of The Nursery remake of Haunted Dancefloor, originally recorded by Sabres of Paradise. IAB on how to get consumers to actually use an app rather than just download it. A focus on putting the core focus of the app front and centre. Being able to reengage is also important. Focus on an app to do one thing really well rather than being a Swiss Army Knife type approach to app development. Like anything else, if the app doesn’t add value, it doesn’t make a difference. I surprised to hear that apps were used as a display campaign by brands. Amazing ‘flow motion’ video that showcases Dubai. It highlights the way Dubai architecture feels like a letter from the future. This is partly due because there was little in Dubai prior to the modern city being built. More on the history of Dubai can found here. The soundtrack of the week was this great tech house mix by DJ Rolando Rolando relocated from Detroit to Edinburgh, Scotland since he became famous with Jaguar. He has his own label R3 (which stands for Roland Rocha Records) The records tend to fit into the melodic side of techno, what would be later called tech house. With the move to Europe eventually came a residency at Berlin club Berghain.

February 27, 2015
8K resolution & other things

NHK unveils 8K tech | TelecomAsia – of course the challenge is having a TV big enough to make 8K worthwhile. 4K is the height of digital experience at the moment. If you go to watch a film in the West End on a digital projector, you will be watching 4K rather than 8K images. Secondly pixel density like 8K is only one aspect of image improvements. Others including high dynamic range images that are brighter and clearer. Finally the controversial double frame rate of 60 frames per second. This is supposed to provide smoother movement, but has proven to be a divisive experience with cinema audiences. Particularly when it was used on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. More related content here.

China

Foreign manufacturer exodus from China | Quartz – however a lot of business isn’t moving because of the depth of expertise and clusters of related businesses that they rely on. This has been a bit overwrought and there is also further inland opportunities

Consumer behaviour

Where’s Britain spending? Barclaycard – interesting Q4 data (PDF data)

Culture

An Everton Fan On Why Scousers Hate The National Team – Sabotage Times – the complexity of national identity played out on a small scale

Finance

Hong Kong’s unwanted HK$1,000 banknote is the money launderer’s medium of choice | SCMP – intersting that cash usage has increased by 6 per cent in real terms. Something to ponder on in the face of cryptocurrency and electronic payments

FMCG

Krispy Kreme ‘KKK Wednesdays’ Facebook ad – Business Insider – I can’t believe that they went there. You would be hard pressed to make this up.

Ideas

London is changing – interesting experiment by Central St Martins

Japan

Press Releases : DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom Develop New Indoor Navigation Technology | NTT DOCOMO – really interesting move on indoor where2.0 services between DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom. I know that a wide range of vendors from aerospace and defence giant EADS to Ruckus Wireless that have explored this area over the years

Luxury

Wine fortunes take off for labels featured on inflight menus | SCMP – inflight cuisine is a great marketing opportunity for wine brands

Media

YouTube makes a move against brand-sponsored videos | Digiday – this is huge for the likes of PR agencies and networks like Nuffnang

Online

spaceprob.es catalogs the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy – beautiful site

Introducing TweetDeck Teams | Twitter Blogs – tries to win back users with Tweetdeck Teams against Hootsuite

Apple – Press Info – Apple to Invest €1.7 Billion in New European Data Centres – data centre for Athenry, County Galway, hopefully the area will get a backbone upgrade to match

Security

Pages – Update on the SIM card encryption keys matter | Gemalto – Initial conclusions already indicate that Gemalto SIM products (as well as banking cards, passports and other products and platforms) are secure and the Company doesn’t expect to endure a significant financial prejudice – if the hack was that obvious surely it would have been picked up before now and of flagged? If the security services dd their job well there would be few fingerprints

The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle | The//Intercept – that completely screws Gemalto

Software

Avicii and Other DJs Produce Hits Using Pirated Software | Torrentfreak – interesting connection to Universal Music’s Per Sundin

Web of no web

Daring Fireball: Thinking About the Split in Apple Watch Sales by Model – basically the WSJ numbers are rubbish, especially with luxury consumption down in China

Why the Internet of Things matters – and what it means for marketers everywhere | Percolate – (PDF)

February 24, 2015
A Twitter experiment on fake followers
In 2013, I worked with a number of companies and executives that has used services to inflate their Sina Weibo accounts standing with fake followers. (In case you haven’t heard about it, Sina Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging service). Often this was seen as a cheap way of getting an ego-boosting metric on their account or showing a positive delta relatively cheaply.

The idea of follower count as a measure of worth can be seen in real life. Look at the front cover of magazines and the value of a celebrity is often measured in the number of followers that they have.

Take this Elle magazine cover and interview with Kim Kardashian. Kardashian’s social media presence is as much a mark of status as a Hermès Birkin bag.

However with Birkin bags going for as much as £55,000 online (holds head in hands and rocks slowly back-and-forth), getting fake followers on social platforms like Twitter might be a bit easier. If Twitter isn’t your thing, there are a number of suppliers of fake followers for Instagram, fake YouTube subscribers and fake Facebook likes too.

I want to reiterate this here, acquiring fake followers is a cross-platform issue, Twitter is just a handy canary in the coal mine. The reason for this is the amount of tools that are are available to measure Twitter as a platform and the prevalence of its use amongst media elites.

Looking at the variety of fake follower services, it seems to be a thriving business. A quick search on buy twitter followers cheap gave me over 31,100,000 results according to Google, and who am I to argue with their maths?

De Micheli and Stroppa estimated that fake accounts used as fake followers accounted for 4 per cent of the Twitter user base, whilst Twitter claimed that the number was 5% in the S-1 document it filed prior to its IPO. The estimates of fake accounts on Sina Weibo are thought to be as high as 30% of the user base – it is hard to tell because Chinese Weibo consumption tends to be largely passive using it as a news stream rather than a ‘social’ channel.

Politicians and celebrities have both been caught out using fake followers to bolster numbers (presumably to add credibility to their social presence).

So what are the benefits and how does it work?

I added 55,000 fake followers on Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

The process itself is really easy. The fake follower services generally accept payment by PayPal and have easy-to-use e-commerce services. The followers are generally delivered over two-to-five working days.

First I tried buying a big batch of followers, 50,000. The supplier delivered 56,000+ followers, but the number declines by about 100 followers over a week or so. This number seems to be pretty consistent. I can’t work out if this is just a common business practice or a part of Twitter’s ongoing conflict with fake accounts.

The purchase didn’t:
- Move my Klout score
- Improve the quality or number of organic followers that I received
I made a second purchase with a different vendor for 5,000 fake followers. This was delivered over five days, again an extra 10 per cent of followers were added on the top by the vendor and a similar decay pattern of about 5% of the followers occurred. This small increase had more of an effect on Klout causing a temporary bump in the score. It has a more pronounced effect on Sysomos authority measure bumping my authority from 7 to 9 out of a possible 10.

It didn’t improve the volume or quality of followers that my account got organically.

With both vendors at least 5 per cent of the accounts that they used seemed to real people’s dormant accounts that had been co-opted into the fake follower game. There obviously seemed to be a market in taking over accounts that had been dormant for over 12 months. None of the fake follower accounts were set to private – this could factor into developing a heuristic for looking at fake follower accounts?

My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system. More related content here.

More information

Pay up and embrace Twitter’s fake followers | Marketing Week
Fake Twitter followers: An easy game, but not worth the risk | The Next Web
How the market in ‘fake’ Twitter followers works | Yahoo! News
Rihanna Loses 1.2 Million Instagram Followers After Spambot Purge | Gigwise
Instagram makes teens and celebrities angry by killing millions of spambots | The Verge
Twitter and the underground market by Carlo De Micheli & Andrea Stroppa at 11th Nexa Lunch Seminar, Turin, Italy (May 22, 2013) – PDF
Inside a Twitter Robot Factory | WSJ
Twitter Admits 5% Of Its ‘Users’ Are Fake | Business Insider
I Bought 10,000 Fake Twitter Followers. Why Didn’t Klout, Kred (or Others) Notice? | Ignite Social Media
February 24, 2015