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.
Cheddar put together an interesting study into popular Christmas songs. I really like that Cheddar put their sources including The Wall Street Journal and other news sources. I’d love to see more people do this on YouTube videos. The start of popular Christmas songs took off with recording music and the move away from religious music to a more secular family festival celebrated in America.
As the clock ticked down to Brexit finally happening, I watched the late Darcus Howe’s three part series White Tribe using the All4 service. Looking back two decades, you could see effects of the Thatcher administration which accelerated the decline of the British industrial heartland without thinking about what came next beyond shopping malls, loft apartments and garden festivals. The schism in society that fuelled Brexit was readily apparent. The void of what being English meant, was again apparent during the head-scratching paean to the NHS that was the London Olympics opening ceremony. What I thought was most remarkable is that White Tribe is very consistent with what I saw in John Harris’ series for the Guardian Anywhere but Westminster. All of it in retrospectYou can watch the full series of White Tribehere.
In common with other organisations from design agencies to the Irish government’s department of foreign affairs; Japanese airline ANA celebrated Christmas with a content focus this year DO: Bring Japanese Christmas Home ‘Tis the season… – ANA. The content is unusual as it focuses on secular Japanese Christmas traditions including Christmas songs. More Japan related content here.
How “God Makes God” is a 1993 CD ROM about probability, game theory, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary strategies | Boing Boing – I remember having my mind blown by this CD ROM at college. It reminded me of Jostein Gaarder’s book Sophie’s World in terms of its approach to making philosophy entertaining and accessible. I remember reading Sophie’s World around the same time as having played How God Makes God. There was something about HyperCard and the CD ROM authoring tools that followed. Amidst all the brochureware there were creators who drove extraordinary media projects, most notably for me was the game Myst, which I don’t think has been bettered. I suspect part of it was the excitement of new ‘hyper-media’, the limitations of the tools (though 640MB storage at the time seemed vast when I was using an Apple PowerBook 165 with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive at the time) and the media economics of the time. CD-ROM authoring tools were becoming more sophisticated. CD manufacturing plants were proliferating, lowering the cost per CD ROM disk and CD recordable drives were relatively affordable in the price range of $10,000 – $20,000. Still eye wateringly expensive, but this was a vast improvement from just two years before and allowed for better prototyping, small production runs and testing across devices.
Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic – The gig economy company, like many of its peers, has seen business skyrocket during the pandemic—while exploiting workers and even failing to turn a profit. That last bit reminds me a lot of the first generation dot com companies who tried to break through the wall of economics and succeed by moving at internet speed. This time they seem to have supplemented the usual ‘throw money at it’ approach with a lack of morality
Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng.
China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.
Luxury
From TikTok to Depop: Fashion’s new trend funnel | Vogue Business – trends like leather, feathers, neutrals or hot pinks, were relatively easy to follow: the trend funnel moved from runway to rack, with some help from popular culture along the way. This year, Gen Z users on TikTok and Depop jumpstarted a new trend funnel, quickly giving rise to aesthetics like “cottagecore” and “dark academia”, influencing young shoppers’s purchases. “If one of your favourite [TikTok] creators changes their aesthetic due to a particular trend, a whole style can be born out of it,” says Yazmin How, TikTok’s content lead. “The fashion industry is no longer the only voice directing the new season’s trends. People are tapping into TikTok to see what emerging styles are ‘in’ and what previously popular trends are coming back around.” TikTok trends manifest into purchases on Depop, where 90 per cent of users are Gen Z. In step with the rise of the cottagecore trend on TikTok, search for the term on Depop rose 900 per cent between March to August, when it reached its peak. Greater connectivity and increased time at home has boosted the amount of these consumer-led movements, and brands whose aesthetics fit the trends are benefiting, like LoveShackFancy, who specialises in the prairie dresses and gingham blouses associated with cottagecore’s countryside aesthetic – reminds me a bit of the Harajuku trends from the past 30 years. Culture and the trends that come out of it, are now massively parallel in nature
Why Bella Poarch’s “M to the B” video was the top TikTok of 2020 – Vox – TikTok automates the mix of all these topics, going farther than any other platform to mimic the human editor.” At the same time, he says, it’s also “an eternal channel flip, and the flip is the point: there is no settled point of interes t to land on. Nothing is meant to sustain your attention.” The result, he argues, is what essentially amounts to “soft censorship,” or a feed that becomes as “glossy, appealing, and homogenous as possible rather than the truest reflection of either reality or a user’s desires.” How did a perfectly average competitive dancer become the No. 1 internet celebrity in the world? Why did half a billion people watch Poarch’s face bob up and down? Because these two women are the logical endpoint of the world’s most powerful entertainment algorithm: young people centering their conventional attractiveness in easily repeatable formats
Retailing
Amazon and the Rise of the Retail “Sniffer” Algorithm | The Fashion Law – the “sniffer algorithm” – or better yet, “one or more” sniffer algorithms that not only sniff out topics that a speaker is potentially interested in but that also “attempt to identify trigger words in the voice content, which can indicate a level of interest of the user.” For example, as Amazon’s patent application states, “A keyword that is repeated multiple times in a conversation might be given assigned a higher priority than other keywords, tagged with a priority tag.” At the same time, “a keyword following a ‘strong’ trigger word, such as ‘love’ might be given a higher priority or weighting than for an intermediate trigger word such as ‘purchased.’” – when does assistance become creepy?
Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis | NBC News – investigators have realized that automobiles — particularly newer models — can be treasure troves of digital evidence. Their onboard computers generate and store data that can be used to reconstruct where a vehicle has been and what its passengers were doing. They reveal everything from location, speed and acceleration to when doors were opened and closed, whether texts and calls were made while the cellphone was plugged into the infotainment system, as well as voice commands and web histories. But that boon for forensic investigators creates fear for privacy activists, who warn that the lack of information security baked into vehicles’ computers poses a risk to consumers and who call for safeguards to be put in place
Web of no web
Tencent backs Chinese healthcare portal DXY in $500M round | TechCrunch – China has done a lot of work to move towards telemedicine and technology augmented health. Tencent’s WeChat was used by local governments for their COVID certificates, tracking and tracing applications. More Tencent related content here.
Hackers threaten to leak plastic surgery pictures – BBC News – this follows on from the hack on Finnish mental health services. Given the link between plastic surgery and self image; black hat hackers have a lot of sustained leverage. More security related posts here.
Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng. China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.
The OnlyFans revolution – The Face – Selena suggests we “talk about OF in a way that doesn’t glamourise the economics of the operation”. Instead, we need a more “nuanced conversation about the nuts and bolts of what the actual labour looks like. We aren’t seeing the injustices. It’s either focused on our trauma or on the glamorous hyperbolic examples, while most of us are somewhere in the middle.” There are many sides to running an OnlyFans that are less visible, including work that goes into maintaining a profile and the emotional labour involved in keeping up with fans. Historically, sex workers basically act as ad hoc therapists to their clients – it’s said to come with the territory, from escorting to camming to BDSM. And the “girlfriend experience” applies here too. A key part of the site’s success is one-to-one connection – often creators’ bios will explicitly state they talk with all their followers – for the right brands there is an opportunity for influence campaigns
Looking back at 2020 was based on desk research I undertook at the end of March through to the beginning of May this year for 90TEN; with a healthy dollop of hindsight added.
The first thing that I tried to make sense of was all the noise from experts who claimed that everything was going to change. Clearly that wasn’t going to be the case. But what would elements would be most affected? I narrowed it down to a combination of three factors:
Demand side and supply side economic change
Accelerating trends
Behavioural change
Where you have an intersection of all three, then you are more likely to have lasting change.
Behavioural change on its own won’t work. When we had the Spanish flu, there was a similar level of masking and social separation. But what followed was the hedonism of the roaring 20s. But all three factors together would act as a push-and-pull on sustained behaviour change.
https://flic.kr/p/2kjZMQx
Thinking specifically about acceleration, we saw a number of things happen.
Changes in sectors and practices that would have taken years have taken months. Such as the adoption of remote working practices
Things that were on the edge suddenly became mainstream, like mask wearing that was previously only popular in east asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xZX
The rise of e-commerce and food delivery was a classic edge case to mainstream move.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xZ1
Looking back 2020, one of the topics is the speed of change in circumstances and the relative lack of change in human behaviour. One academic claimed that it revealed what really mattered to a population. Although this misses out that the competency of a government as a key determining factor.
Canvas8 presented a model of human behaviour during an epidemic, which I shared in looking back at 2020. This shaped a key part of my thinking around human behaviour.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk55X4
Like the grief process, the pandemic human behaviour model starts with denial.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xXY
And then anxiety…
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xXC
Adjustment is how people have adapted to the circumstances. Society as a whole is still under strain.
https://flic.kr/p/2kjZMMM
Life is reconsidered moving forward, a classic example of this would be the Wuhan EDM pool party held in the autumn.
https://flic.kr/p/2kjZMMg
The new normal where COVID-19 is now under control and will have shaped future consumer behaviour.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xVD
Canvas8 also mapped out likely consumer behaviour against the stages.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk55U8
Consumers had a clear view of what they wanted from brands. Brands often struggled to match the expectations of consumers. Dettol’s UK marketing efforts being an exemplary example of how to get it wrong. Looking back at 2020, we had the opportunity to do fantastic marketing work utilising digital and TV platforms, but very little of that opportunity was utilised.
A couple of organisations deserve for their efforts to be highlighted. My former colleagues at LONDON Advertising used their own marketing during the middle of the crisis to demonstrate the power of marketing. Secondly, the IPA ran a sustained campaign in the FT promoting the power of advertising to the c-suite.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xUB
https://flic.kr/p/2kk55Tb
The economic factors that will be a driver in societal change, made up the third factor alongside behavioural aspects and acceleration of existing trends.
https://flic.kr/p/2kjZMGX
The initial economic forecasts were very negative which drove a ‘correction’ in the stock markets.
https://flic.kr/p/2kjZMGg
Past trends indicate that these kind of crises cause an economic decline that countries bounce back from. However a lot of the change happening is non-COVID related or only tangentially related like China’s escalating trade sanctions on Australia.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xSC
Post COVID-19 economic impact is like dropping industry sectors in a time machine. The kind of change that would normally have taken years to run its course has happened in months. What is more worrying is the amount of unsustainable debt that has been taken on board by businesses across sectors. Over time this will benefit larger established businesses over smaller, or newer ones.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk55QR
I put in an extra section into looking back at 2020 about the young because the insights challenge many of marketers holy cows in terms of views on younger members of society.
https://flic.kr/p/2kjZMEh
Telemedicine attitudes and usage shows that the heuristic of young people being technology adopters doesn’t hold up. Which is usually presumed in sentiment around digital natives.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xQU
The resisters shatters a stereotype of young people being progressive, purpose driven people. And they are media literate and media savvy by nature. Yet they are exhibiting behaviours that would be more in tune with older people with reactionary views.
https://flic.kr/p/2kk4xQ3
https://flic.kr/p/2kk55Pd
I put in the links to the sources that I mention in the presentation. However I formed my views by looking at much more material. Just over a gigabyte of data sources that relate to COVID-19 which I went through is on Google Drive. Everything from consumer behaviour to economic data is available here. The looking back at 2020 presentation is available for download here. (More on issues related consumer behaviour here.)
China’s Xi Ramps Up Control of Private Sector. ‘We Have No Choice but to Follow the Party.’ – WSJ – In some cases, it is taking charge entirely of companies it regards as undisciplined, absorbing them into state-owned enterprises. – Push driven by a concern over the private sector business owners being unpredictable and not trusted. They think a centrally planned complex economy is the way forward; with the private sector playing a subservient role at best. This view has been strengthened by the state engineered swift recovery from COVID-19. I presume that they consider that China’s place in global supply chains, big data and machine learning will solve a lot of the problems that bedevilled previous centralised economic planning systems like what happened in the Soviet Union. More economics related content here.
China-Europe Trade Forum Canceled After China Sought to Bar Critics – WSJ – Officials familiar with the exchange say the two people Beijing wanted to exclude from this year’s virtual event were Reinhard Bütikofer, the European Parliament’s chairman of the EU-China caucus who has publicly criticized Beijing over Hong Kong and its treatment of the Uighur minority; and Mikko Huotari, the head of Merics, a German think tank critical of the Chinese Communist Party. – China is depriving itself of unvarnished information about how it is viewed. A recipe for miscalculation in policymaking. Mainland Chinese contacts fail to understand why they don’t seem to have friendly relations with other nations anymore, despite Chinese achievements
Huawei, 5G, and the Man Who Conquered Noise | WIRED – Steven Levy explains Erdal Arikan’s breakthrough in information theory well. What’s interesting is how the west has abandoned long term research projects. Arikan took 20 years for his breakthrough. In an American university you wouldn’t get, or maintain tenure doing that
‘Made in Hong Kong’ prestige provides springboard for retailers Watsons, Sa Sa to find success in Greater Bay Area | South China Morning Post – ‘Made in Hong Kong’ prestige provides springboard for retailers Watsons, Sa Sa to find success in Greater Bay Area. Well-known Hong Kong retailers are aggressively expanding in the bay area, where the prestige of their brands makes them a hit with mainland consumers. The city’s retail sector has been devastated by the coronavirus keeping deep-pocketed mainland tourists away – if true, I don’t seeing it being a defensible differentiation in the medium to long term
