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.
Interesting talk on how distrust in media skews to more right wing voters in the US. Gallup have tracked distrust in the media over time amongst Americans. The Poynter Institute is a respected media research organisation and has done a lot of work on media bias which affects and partly explains distrust in media. Distrust in media is also fuelled by rumours and conspiracy theories according to research by Louisiana State University. While identifying conspiracy theories is well understood, distrust in media continues.
Consumer behaviour
Interesting podcast by the Wall Street Journal on how retirement is something older people put off due to finance, ennui of retirement and the longer lifespan. It is interesting how technology is enabling avoidance of retirement and it even has its own hashtags #neverretire.
I have touched on earlier posts on the rail origins of the barcode, here’s a great documentary on the Kartrak.
Japan
Early 1940s adaptation of the 47 Ronin story. The 47 Ronin is something that really happened in 1703 and is known in Japan as the Ako incident (赤穂事件). The protagonists were seen as examples to be emulated in terms of dedication, honour, loyalty, persistence and self-sacrifice.
McDonalds CSR activities came up a few times over the past day or so I thought I would visit it. CSR stands for corporate and social responsibility. A few American PR executives that I have come across used not to like the S in the middle, which sounded like socialism. The idea was doing good to enhance brand reputation – generally it was a strategic function.
ESG operates at a higher level. CSR predates ESG as an idea. McDonalds CSR is interesting because of the tactical way it seems to be employed around what a couple of rules that I have noticed.
Children are always a good universal focus of McDonalds CSR, which is the reason why Ronald McDonald House is a common theme throughout the worldwide operations of McDonalds
McDonalds CSR is on the side of authority, hence its support for the Metropolitan Police when dealing with XR protests and Korean national service draftees. There is a risk that this could make its conduct in authoritarian countries more problematic
To be a poem. – from the Web Curios newsletter ‘is a digital poem by Alicia Guo – it’s infinite and self-generating, and I don’t quite know how it works or where it’s pulling the words from, but each time it’s different and each time it’s fragmented and magical and silly and poignant and confusing and beautiful and I would like this to be read forever by a choir of machine voices until the heat death of the universe please thankyou.‘
Hiro Protagonist is the main character of Neal Stephenson’s iconic novel Snow Crash. In the novel talks about the rise of the corporation to become a quasi-nation state, a winner takes all economy, a vision of a future metaverse, hacker culture and service hyper-competition with Uber-like employees.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Hiro Protagonist is a hacker who moonlights as a courier to make ends meet. The story starts with Hiro Protagonist trying to deliver a pizza at high speed. The idea is that the courier would deliver a pizza to any location, not just delivery to a building like getting pizza to work or home. Now we’re starting to see these kind of services being rolled out in real life, by building them into in-car systems and mapping applications. This will add more importance to dark kitchens over store fronts, but store fronts are important as they build brand experiences.
The playground behind the interviewee before it was refurbished in the early 2000s used to have a roundabout that I was thrown off at a tangent while it spun around when I was about 3 or maybe 4 years old and landed straight into a puddle. I wore a red hooded anorak made of a red sherpa fleece fabric with an elasticated hood, cuffs and bottom which soaked up half the puddle like a sponge. The photographer had his back turned to Grove Road and what is now an Iceland supermarket. Back when I fell off the roundabout it was a Kwik Save.
Struggling
Even back then it had a reputation of being a hard neighbourhood. Local shops such as Griffiths the butchers catered for a customer base struggling to make ends meet.
To the photographer’s left down the road a bit would have been a social club for (former) members of the Civil Defence. The Civil Defence Corps itself had been stood down in 1968. It was a solid working class area full of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who were employed either locally at the Lever factory next door or on the Mersey from the shipyards of Birkenhead to the chemical industry of the Mersey basin and assorted factories further afield.
Community spirit doesn’t pay the bills
By the 1980s, it looked worse for wear. There were few jobs, fewer still that paid well. And that was before unemployment and the heroin epidemic took their toll. As the economy picked up in the 1990s, the benefits didn’t make it to New Ferry. The one bright spot was a pirate radio station ran by community DJs playing house and techno records every night of the week close by to Grove Road playground. I’d held a couple of small (250 people) all night parties (acid house and garage) in the Civil Defence social club, with the blackout curtains keeping the noise and lights away from nosy neighbours and police patrols.
The people who ran the club put on breakfast for the revellers after the main event. We played ambient music from CDs supplied by a friend’s older brother (Tangerine Dream, The Orb, Vangelis, Kitaro, Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Abba’s Arrival) mixing between two Discmans as the tired revellers drank tea and ate bacon ‘bin lid‘ sandwiches while sprawled out on the floor.
Tickets were sold in advance and the venue details given out on the night by ringing an answerphone. Everyone involved broke even if they were lucky.
Despite being really hard scrabble there was a certain amount of community dynamism going on in the village hall. My Mum used to travel down there to go to knitting classes with older women, some of whom were Irish like her. They would knit for charity.
But all that won’t keep social decay from the door while the community is underemployed and underpaid.
No easy answer
The social decay described in the article isn’t something that happened overnight but over decades. There is no quick fix to the social decay of bad behaviour and feral gangs of children. It is not clear whether there is the commitment, investment, government will or the way to resolve this social decay.
The most individually logical thing to do in a time of social decay is thinking more about personal safety.
Techno-utopianism of early 2000s
Looking back the technology adoption of the 1990s and early 2000s was phenomenal. The mainstreaming of the cellphones, the PlayStation, home PC computers and internet access creating immediacy.
The changes wrought by mobile phones in particular are still rippling through the developing world.
Driving in Japan
I am a huge fan of walkabout and driving videos because you can tell so much about the environment looking at retail spaces, brands, clothing and social interactions going on around you. For instance Japan’s apparent rejection of the electric car for now, favouring hybrid vehicles instead. This particular one of a rural Japanese town gives you a good idea of where Studio Ghibli‘s work comes from.
Fintan O’Toole on Ireland
Great talk by Fintan O’Toole at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
Horns that seemed to portent the apocalypse and stuttering dialogue: ‘none of them received a heroes welcome, none of them, none of them. None of them received a heroes welcome’. This was the soundtrack of 1985 as part of Vietnam Requiem sampling 19 by Paul Hardcastle. At the time the sampling got me interested in music, production, technology and DJ’ing – which pretty much set the path for the various stages of my career to date.
The best part of four decades later and I finally got the see documentary that was responsible for much of the samples in 19. I can understand how Vietnam Requiem might have profoundly affected Paul Hardcastle at the time.
Scott Galloway on Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse and the rise of Saudi Arabia. More on SVB here.
BMW M1
I am a huge fan of the BMW M1 and have written about it before. So I wanted to share this documentary by Jason Cammisa on the car. The putdown of modern BMW’s current 2-series range as ‘Grand Corollas’ is actually an insult to Toyota.
Driving Japan
Before I moved to London, I had a car and drove everywhere. I even drove for leisure. One of my favourite drives was going past the local oil refinery and associated chemical works late at night for the dystopian cyberpunk vibes of mercury vapour lamps reflected from matt zinc coated lagging.
These videos of driving in Japan gave me a similar sense of enjoyment.
Au campaign
KDDI cellphone service brand Au are looking at metaverse and Web 3.0 value added services, which partly explains this new campaign. I think that it is interesting as it reminded me of CD-ROM era motion comic and how Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can be used to reduce production costs on a campaign.
If this all feels a bit 2021, its because large corporate take time to catch up with where things are. I can also understand the attractiveness of the metaverse and digital assets as a concept in modern Japanese culture. Even if it is out far, far ahead of where technology is actually going.
