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.

  • Digital Natives

    Digital natives is a generational term rather like generation x which is starting to hit the mainstream. A digital native is someone who has growth up in close contact with computers Mark Prensky hypothesised and found some proof to indicate that these people absorb and process information in a different manner to those of us old enough to remember the analogue world. The term digital native comes from Prensky’s view that these people are native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. This has implications for teaching, advertising and the media.

    Just because someone has grown up with computer technology does not mean that they particularly want and like immersive experiences like video games. I am sure that there will be personality and learning types within the digital natives group as there are within the immigrants: some are better at learning by rote, others by doing.

    Those of us that have adapted to this world are considered to be digital immigrants rather than digital natives. Prensky then goes on to forecast the demise of printed materials amongst other items, but if thats the case why is Amazon so successful? Why are young people buying increasing amounts of vinyl?

    To find out how good a digital immigrant you really are, try this quiz courtesy of AlwaysOn.

    Wired has an article yet again on the death of print media because of technologically savvy young people based on the findings of these surveys here and here. News print has declined for years before the rise of the public internet and web browsers.

    Finally Piper Jaffray have been hyping up the Apple share price with a target to hit 100 USD from 61 and change. This based on the results of a survey that they think indicates that the iPod will turn a significant number of iPod owning PC users into Mac users. More gadget related posts can be found here.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Marketing crisis

    Marketing crisis in competence and capability: Creative Business has a great leading article based on research conducted by The Marketing Society and McKinsey called Marketing in Crisis.

    When you think about the marketing crisis, you also need to think about the people providing the feedback. Other board colleagues might have a stilted or inaccurate view of what marketing does. But at the very least there seems to be a marketing crisis in miscommunication.

    A second aspect of this marketing crisis report is to ask what’s in it for The Marketing Society and McKinsey. The Marketing Society would be looking to professionalise marketing and differentiate from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. McKinsey would look to deposition marketing teams so that it can sell additional services.

    Key takeaways from the report include:

    • Marketers are seen as creative but undisciplined
    • Marketers don’t understand their own businesses
    • In marketing led businesses such as FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), marketing is too important to be left to the marketers
    • Marketing attracts the wrong kind of people
    • Marketers are undisciplined
    • Marketers are not interested in the P&L

    So this also might explain many of the client horror stories that I hear from agency veterans in PR, advertising, design and branding.

    The Buy Buy Generation

    Young Japanese women are consumers with a high disposable income, publishers target them with ‘product porn’ style magazines focusing on luxury handbags, shoes and clothing. UK publishers are now looking to copy this format. What surprised me about this article is that it did not draw comparisions with the product porn gadget magazines targeted at young men in the UK like Stuff and T3.

    Anybody walking the streets of London will have realised young Japanese are the most stylish people on the planet and avid collectors of the latest thing. On a related note the British boutique with a Japanese name Oki Ni have teamed up with the Adidas vintage connection to do two cool exclusive versions of Adidas’ ‘Torsion Special lo’ trainers here and here. These were the ultimate ravers trainer when they originally came out in the early 1990’s, they fit like a glove, are light, good cushioning, came in a multitude of colours (my originals were predominantly purple) and have a sole that will grip to any warehouse floor.

  • Nokia 8850

    I am reasonably tech savvy, but I am using a Nokia 8850; let me explain. I have been on email for ten years and used a mobile phone number for a decade and a half. However I have found myself sliding my mobile technology back in time. Last year I had a 3 mobile phone, on the UK’s first 3G network. It was shocking. I then had a traumatic move to Orange and got given a Nokia 6600.

    The Nokia 6600 is not a bad phone, but I don’t need a colour screen or camera, I occasionally read my home emails on the phone and get texts. However, the phone is bulky and the battery runs out after just two days. That’s better than the NEC e606 3 mobile phone I had, but way behind other phones that I’ve owned in the past.

    Finally I decided enough was enough for now, and have gone back in time from a technology perspective. I took the technology time machine back to 2000 and am using a vintage design Nokia 8850. Its small, it texts, you can speak to people, its intuitive to use and the battery lasts a week, oh yeah it has a need aluminium shell and a sliding key cover.

    The 8850 is an elegant solution to my communications needs, the point is that I have gone back in tech time because the present offerings fail to meet my needs of:

    • being intuitive to use
    • easy to call and text
    • good battery life
    • good product design
    • small / discreet
    • no unnecessary features

    3G at the present time isn’t ready for modern usage. The NEC e 606 phone used to get hot to touch in my hand during use. The reception was awful and the device was cumbersome. At the moment there is no killer app to using 3G. More related content here.

  • Five star living

    Trendwatching is back with a pattern that they call five star living, where property developers and high-end resort or hotels sell a home away from home to the super dumb but loaded.

    They put a whole pile of luxury living brand experience about it, but what they are seeing is the window dressing not the trends in five star living. Five star hotels are capital intensive and unless you have high occupancy all the time, expensive.

    Apartment complexes can draw on the service aspects of five star hotels; but farm off a lot of the capital risk to apartment purchasers and still charge them for premium rate services. Five star living is about hotels hedging their bets in a post-September 11 world. I realise that this is a less romantic and stylish explanation of this trend, but its all about the money.

    Mandarin Oriental have built suites in their Hyde Park hotel which would be a great example of five star living. Luxury brands like Giorgio Armani have extended into interior design to try and capitalise on this trend in combination with luxury property developers. 

    You also have people like the Trump Organisation extending themselves from real estate into hotel services and tourism in the opposite direction with its golfing themed resorts. More five star living related content here.

    Apple spoof product lifecycle article which can be found here. Its funny because there are a lot of underlying themes which are close to the truth as consumers see it.

    Finally, the New York Times have got a great interactive presidential election guide that they are going to keep updated. So go to this link, have a play and bookmark it until November. Interactive data like live dashboards in business allow you better understand the data. It makes for shareable content and is sticky in nature. 

  • Plaxo Is the New Google?

    Plaxo is a useful addition to the arsenal of the knowledge worker. We go through lives developing thousands of connections but probably only keep in regular contact with a couple of hundred. (This is broadly in line with the Dunbar number proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar.)

    Plaxo vs. Google missions

    Where Google plans to organise all the world’s information, Plaxo seeks to organise all our address books.

    With Plaxo you complete an account and update it if you move jobs, that way your looser network can keep up to date if they are members of Plaxo too.

    Pros

    – Cheap, free software, you only pay for support. That also means limited growth

    Cons

    – Only works with Outlook at the moment, so not great for people orientated businesses like the creative industries, how about conduits for Lotus Notes, Entourage and Apple iSync?

    – Privacy concerns, where there’s data there’s risk and businesses are increasingly using online services to run their businesses; it makes sense for consumers to use similar services to run Me, Inc. Privacy restrictions makes it harder for Plaxo to monetise customer data held

    – Is reliant on a critical mass of users; Plaxo only updates less than 9 per cent of my contacts and its user base does not seem to be expanding at the rate of Friendster or LinkedIn

    Anyway, make up your own mind by watching an interview on CBS Marketwatch with the founders. More technology related content here.

    More information

    Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates”. Journal of Human Evolution.