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.

  • The silent majority of social

    The silent majority as a concept was introduced to the world by Richard Nixon in a speech about America’s position in Vietnam on November 3, 1969.

    https://flic.kr/p/rdWjS2


    The portion of the speech that featured it is below:

    Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

    And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.

    I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

    Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ reference tapped into a tenet of common wisdom, that the majority of the population is generally passive in actions and discussions; a positive spin on Juvenal’s concept of bread and circuses or panem et circenses. He used the phrase to decry the selfishness of ordinary Roman citizens, their neglect of wider concerns and likely lack of civic duty.

    There is a similarly silent majority today online, in spite of the democratisation of publication via social channels. A small proportion of us publish. I got the model below from Bradley Horowitz at Yahoo! but I am sure it came from someone earlier and it still holds true today
    hierarchyofsocialmediaengagement
    What this means is essentially two things:

    • Whilst the volume of social postings continues to go up, it still represents a small amount of the general population and even the online population. Most of the people, most of the time are passive consumers of social content
    • When people do post content, it isn’t generally about brands or important issues, but about being with their friends or family. They look inwardly on their lives

    Social conversation is often the province of the highly connected, the verbose and of polarised opinions (complaining about a product that really got under their skin with poor performance or fanboydom).

    Ironically search data probably tells us more about the population in general, the problem that search presents marketers with is quality of data. The major search engines (Google, Bing/Yahoo!, Yandex) no longer provide web sites with the details of the search term used to arrive on a given site as they have defaulted to HTTPS.

    Google Trends has decided to give ‘real-time’ data rather than the few days delay it previously provided on search terms. Google Trends doesn’t provide search volumes, but search ‘rate of change’ which means that static low or high search volumes won’t register. But its the closest we have online into easily understanding the nature of the silent majority of social; what they are interested in and care about.

    More online related content.

    More information
    Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’ Speech
    Google Trends Now Shows the Web’s Obsessions in Real Time | WIRED

  • Brand storytelling: a bitter pill to swallow?

    I have been thinking about brand storytelling after watching Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake over the weekend which is ostensibly trying to tell the story of Afghanistan from then end of the second world war to today. But it is also a parable on how the simplicity of storytelling used by the political classes to get the populace on side in the west has been ultimately counterproductive. This counterproductive nature of it, made me think about brand storytelling, that is often simple to aid both delivery and effectiveness.

    I have worked for businesses since the mid-noughties that put brand storytelling at the centre of offerings – often using simple mono-myths as models. In addition, my colleagues at one agency took this a stage further and sold their services as building on the ‘best practice’ of winning political campaigns – if you like Ogilvy on Advertising but written by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

    The truth is that our relationships with brand is often more complex and shifting than we has marketers let on. Brands have symbolic and status power which changes over time. The question that Bitter Lake seeded in my mind, is brand storytelling actually going to breed a future set of consumers with little to know brand engagement? Where brand values become a mill stone rather than a touch stone? It’s too early to tell and I don’t know the answers if it did happen, though my gut says going to an approach of radical honesty. More branding related content here.

    More information
    Bitter Lake | Wikipedia

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.

  • OLED + more news

    OLED

    Samsung Display to invest $3.6 billion in new OLED production line | Reuters – interesting that they are doing this after Sony abandoned OLED technology.

    Sony had an early lead in OLED display technology. Like many inventions OLED technology has a long history. The first practical OLED was created in the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington in the UK. Eastman Kodak built practical OLED devices in 1987. A team at Yamagata University in Japan achieved the commercialisation of OLED backlit displays and lighting with white OLED technology.

    Samsung’s display business came out of a partnership with NEC for mobile phone displays. Kodak had partnered with Sanyo. Pioneer, TDK and Sony got involved in production as well. The Sony XEL-1 in 2007 herald a range of future TVs that could be hung like a picture frame it was that thin. But Sony struggled with production and withdrew from OLED manufacturing. Meanwhile Samsung took over their joint venture with NEC.

    Business

    There is no internet bubble, and never was, according to this tech visionary | Quartz – semantics

    China’s Xiaomi to open shop in the US this year, but not for phones | The Verge – no phones due to likely intellectual property related issues for Xiaomi. However even with accessories there will probably patent disputes involving these as well

    Accel and DJI Will Introduce a Fund to Invest in the Drone Ecosystem | Re/code – interesting move positioning DJI at the head of a drone movement and at the centre of an ecosystem a la Android or GoPro. I met them a couple of years ago and they felt marginally more squared away than your typical Chinese start-up

    The Short Life and Speedy Death of Russia’s Silicon Valley | Foreign Policy – (paywall)

    Grindr Said to Explore Sale of Gay Men’s Dating App | Bloomberg Business – this could be an interesting social barometer if they manage to go public or what value they sell for, in comparison to the challenges AdultFriendFinder faced a number of years ago due to its niche product offerings

    Banjo Announces $100 Million in Additional Funding | Banjo – not too sure about the valuation, but it seems to think that social media war rooms and real time marketing will continue to be a thing

    Consumer behaviour

    Luke Johnson – Animal Spirits: Silicon Valley robber barons tuck into Mad Men’s lunch – on an emotional level it struck a chord, but then I am sure the luddites would have said similar things if they were part of the Islington chattering set

    Computers aren’t making us better workers like they used to | Quartz – I wonder if this is similar to effectiveness of online marketing, some of Nigel’s Scott’s analysis would tend to suggest yes

    Gadgets

    LG launches a ‘try before you buy’ program for the G4 | BGR – reflects confidence in the product

    US phablet market soars – Kantar Worldpanel – driven by iPhone 6 Plus

    Media

    Shazam’s struggle to become a profitable verb (Wired UK) – classic web-of-no-web model, it’s time maybe now as native apps struggle for attention, but I could see this tech eventually being in LINE or WeChat

    Apple pushing music labels to kill free Spotify streaming ahead of Beats relaunch | The Verge – do record labels really need to be pushed on this, when one thinks about how they have moved away from licensing content for magazine cover mount CDs, which seemed to peak in the late 1990s

    Online

    Twitter Confirms Google Firehose Deal To Target Logged Out Users | TechCrunch – also benefits Google in terms of search quality

    Google Shuts Down PageSpeed Service For Accelerating Websites | TechCrunch – interesting piece on PageSpeed, it is part of Google’s retreat including getting rid of 20% projects and making Adplanner less useful

    Retailing

    Amazon doubles free delivery minimum spend in UK – BBC News – you can see the strain delivery costs take on Amazon’s finances

    Competition becomes tougher in the Chinese slowdown economy – Kantar Worldpanel – international retailers taking a kicking from local retailers

    Security

    AP Exclusive: Chinese banks a haven for web counterfeits – not terribly surprising given that these are also China’s most widespread banks

    The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going Broke – ProPublica – indicates the precarious nature or some of the most critical open source projects

    Russia and China Pledge Not to Hack Each Other – WSJ – the technology exchange is much more concerning given that the U.S. considers Russia the more dangerous cyber threat

    Keeping Your Car Safe From Electronic Thieves – NYTimes.com – fridge as a Faraday Cage

    Software

    Android Switchers Drive iOS Growth in Europe’s Big Five – Kantar Worldpanel – some interesting stats

    Deep Learning Machine Solves the Cocktail Party Problem | MIT Technology Review – does that mean in five years from now we won’t need stems for remixes?

    Technology

    Robot makers from China look to expand into global market｜WantChinaTimes.com – interesting clean room focus – semiconductors?

    A Chinese company is replacing 90 percent of its workers with robots | Fusion – robotic factory a la Fiat, for product assembly they aren’t likely to have fine enough movement, at the moment

    Why Eurogamer dropped review scores for games | SiliconAngle – implications for gaming PRs

    Telecoms

    Utility: Verizon To Exit Wireline Business Within 10 Years | DSLReports – which has to make one ask what is the long term value of wired/wireless or triple play models in Europe and APAC?

    Web of no web

    How A Computer Can Anticipate Users’ Needs (Without Driving Them Crazy) | Fast Company – interesting essay on the web-of-no-web and user intent

    Why Google Glass Broke – NYTimes.com – product not ready for prime time and team ripped apart by personal relationships. Ego drove out quality management. More on web-of-no-web related technologies here.

  • Drones in advertising and things that caught my eye this week

    Pepsi has got in on drones in advertising before it all goes a bit lame and tired. Some really interesting projection mapping type effects as well

    Drones in advertising builds on work that has been done since the Beijing olympics on the use of drone swarms for massed visuals that are complementary to fireworks and 3D projections

    Audi advert: Kevin Smith, Jason Meyes. Enough said (oh and some cameos from actors who’ve appeared in Marvel comic film adaptations including pioneer Stan Lee)

    Enterprise storage outfit Box.net have a great interview with Stewart Butterfield of Slack (and Flickr fame). Some interesting comments on how a GUI isn’t always the right interface for people who use keyboards. This is so right. I remember working on terminal screens when I worked in a call centre and the ease with which I could quickly tab around screens, rather than having to reach for a mouse to click a multitude of radio buttons. More design related posts here.

    Scottish National Party member of parliament Mhairi Black gave an interview back in March. I found it interesting as it shows that kind of impact social media will have on future political careers, particularly when it it will provide greater clarity than the 2009 debate around David Cameron’s raving history. Imagine if you were presented at the age of 50 with selected fringe thoughts you had at 19 years old?

    As Black notes:

    My uncle summed it up when he said that, when he was a teenager, he just used to shout at the telly. My generation tweets and there is a record of it.

    What adult doesn’t look back to things they said when they were 16 or 17 and go, ‘Oh my God?’

    The difference is my comments are being dragged out for the whole world to see.

    No trite social media analysis or fantastic technical wizardry just a great idea, client belief and a budget made 3M Korea’s Unforgettable Post-It Proposal

    Finally Helios is a new Hong Kong film gaining traction in the Chinese box office. In the face of a lack of new Hong Kong actors coming through, it was interesting that the new blood came in the form of Korean boy band member Choi Siwon who also performs some of Super Junior’s mandarin repertoire