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.
This was the last place I expected to see anti-China sentiment addressed. I like Steve Guttenberg’s writing in the past for CNet on all things hi-fi and now follow his videos. What he does in in video makes up in enthusiasm, what he lacks in production skills. It was interesting to see him shoot a video that directly addressed a desire in his audience to not buy Chinese hi-fi products. Whilst some of this is about protecting well loved brands, I think some of it reflects a real turn in consumer sentiment towards an anti-China tone. Guttenberg manages to address the topic in an even-handed manner and tries to take some of the vitriol out of the discussion. More China related content here.
The New York Times wrote a great feature on the rise of statist intellectuals in China who are influencing government policy. Providing an intellectual justification for Xi era policies. What’s interesting is that they draw on German intellectual thinking used to support Nazi ideals of authoritarianism: ‘Clean Up This Mess’: The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xi’s Hard Line – The New York Times
Ambient music to work by. There is an internet community who are re-editing selected pieces of sci-fi soundtrack to provide an epic ambient audio background. Here’s edits that have been done featuring Blade Runner and Ghost In The Shell.
This TV series provided one of the best backgrounds of Irish history. I remember seeing one or two of the episodes that my Dad had managed to capture on video tape. I can also recommend Robert Kee’s book Irelandwhich accompanied the series. It stops during the Troubles. Given the quality of the series and the mainstream audience that it received at the time, the UK is still astonishingly ignorant of Irish history. This has become especially apparent the Brexit process. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have been moved on to Blu-Ray, DVD or legitimate streaming services. More Irish-related topics here.
Ian Murray of House 51 takes on some marketing sacred cows such as brand purpose in The Empathy Delusion. His presentation sets out to show how different marketing and agency folk are from the general public. Positive traits, like the gumption to move to London put a difference between them and the general public. This is just one aspect that Murray touches on when talking about The Empathy Delusion.
I was recommended Economy Candy in New York. Their collection of vintage trading cards is a site to behold. The film tie-ins from Back To The Future and ET to Howard The Duck are tremendous.
Local Hong Kong group StreetSignHK are featured on this video of the process that goes into saving Hong Kong’s neon signage. The biggest threat seems to be building regulation bureaucracy rather than technology.
I loved the style of this 1980s vintage Mercedes sales training video, presumably for American dealerships.
I was reminiscing about The Site. This used to run on CNBC Europe when I was in college and provided a window into the early net. Soledad O’Brien has gone on to produce documentaries. Leo Laporte who played the Dev Null* character is now better known for his technology podcasts. (Technically it should be /dev/null* for maximum geek humour.) The programme sat at a sweet spot. The web was small, but inaccessible to many of the viewers. AOL and CompuServe were just taking off. I had net access in college and used that to take a look at their online recommendations at the time.
The Site pioneered virtual characters and offline integration of programming with its own site. Dev Null now has a kind of PlayStation 1 vibe to him. But this was all new stuff. Terminator 2 had been in the cinemas five years earlier and blow people away with its animation.
The year after we had the virtual world of The Lawnmower man. Lawnmower Man brought to life the kind of virtual world on screen that had previously only existed in the works of authors like William Gibson and Vernor Vinge.
Then in 1995, there was Hackers that tapped into gen-x youth culture (X-Games, Oakley T-wire glasses, the psychedelic side of rave culture) to create a connected world closer to our own now.
This all explains the look and feel of The Site and its role in helping the general public to experience online. What I didn’t realise is that the show was run on one dial-up modem. This around about the time when I worked in my first agency with a 1MB T1 line – and that was hard enough. I am not sure how the programme researchers, broadcast production team and web producers managed on 1 dial-up line.
Zero touch spaces – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence – I am actually liking these Logan’s Run style personal space bubbles. I also understand Wunderman Thomson’s concerns over zero touch spaces being close, but still isolated. I think of zero touch spaces as a physical manifestation of what we do mentally through cocooning with gadgets such as iPods, smartphones (and apps) and noise-cancelling headphones. Before that there was social networks (rather than real world networking), sat navs, etc. Both the zero touch spaces and cocooning puts distance between us and the world around us.
Government minister Liz Truss. get pwned on Brexit, international trade and the WTO by Adam S Posen of the Peterson Institute of International Economics. The discussion is so one-sided, it is like watching a naked drunkard getting mauled by a polite but hungry polar bear. Truss’ ministerial portfolio is international trade. It’s exceptionally grim to watch if you’re based in the UK.
Ad Aged: Talmudic, Biblical, Keynesian and Advertising. – I have taken a different path. I always have and I always will. I try to do what I think is right and smart and good—and mostly difficult, not what is popular, obvious and pandering. Never trust anything from anyone who spends a good portion of their time practicing expressions in front of the mirror – some savage burns in this post
How a Chinese agent used LinkedIn to hunt for targets – BBC News – The use of LinkedIn is brazen, but not surprising, said Matthew Brazil, the co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer. “I think lots of worldwide intelligence agencies probably use it to seek out sources of information,” he said. “Because it’s in everybody’s interest who is on LinkedIn to put their whole career on there for everybody to see – it’s an unusually valuable tool in that regard.” He said that commissioning consultant reports is a way for agents to get “a hook” into a potentially valuable source who might later be convinced to supply classified information. I’d be surprised if LinkedIn wasn’t used in this way.
You Won’t Find These Masks at 7-Eleven – The New York Times – Although the pandemic will end at some point, he added, “people will still be using masks because they’re afraid.” While it’s unclear how well some of these more ambitious masks will fare with consumers, one innovation has been a clear hit: face coverings with high-tech fabrics that are said to provide superior comfort or protection. As summer temperatures rise, masks made of materials intended to keep wearers cool are in demand. People who have been wearing reusable cloth masks — including those sent by the Japanese government to every household in the country — are finding them ill suited for the heat and humidity of summer in central Japan, much less Singapore or Hong Kong. – That humidity also has issues for skin conditions beneath the masks offering beauty product opportunities. More design-related posts here.
Parfums Givenchy Debuts Makeup in Animal Crossing – WWD – we’re seeing more of these brand activity for a few reasons. Lockdown gave the game increased cultural relevance. The game has a significant amount of female users. Like the original Atari games it isn’t too childish or gender-specific. Animal Crossing’s creator tools allowed consumers to bring brands to the platform.
China’s two-child policy means more babies named after mum | Today Online – Giving the mother’s surname to a child is gaining traction in Chinese cities, defying deeply entrenched family traditions in the country. The country’s one-child rule, which ran from 1979 to 2016, meant daughters have also been tasked with safeguarding their parents’ wealth and bloodline — previously this had been the preserve of male heirs. This caused a shift in some family’s attitudes but it was the law change to allow couples to have two children that has ignited the trend for kids to be given the maternal name. Now, some parents are giving the father’s family name to the first born and the mother’s to the second child.
There are myths that we tell each other about the internet. These internet myths aren’t helpful. They can adversely affect our planning and our online experiences.
Laurent Houmeau – mask, Bali
So onward to the internet myths:
What’s online, stays online forever…. – Tell that to the archiveteam.org who were frustrated in their efforts to save Yahoo! Groups for posterity by Verizon. This obstructive unhelpful behaviour is entirely in keeping with Verizon’s core values.
Or the 700,000 Tumblr blogs containing over 800 terabytes of that were deleted from the web. Machine learning software designated any image that contained round shapes or beige for deletion. This was part of a Verizon effort to purge adult content from Tumblr.
Finally, keen students of digital media services like Amazon Prime, Apple iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify etc will know how content appears and disappears in their digital libraries. A case in point would be my collection of James A. Michener books that I bought on Apple Books and then disappeared less than a fortnight later. No refund, and no mindless reading material to keep me occupied on a long haul flight.
Everything is online…. – no it isn’t. There are large rafts of content that aren’t digital let alone online. Google and IBM have worked on large scale digitalisation projects. But there is content that never made the jump from analogue to digital. Master tapes decaying in record company vaults. If you go through Discogs like I do on a regular basis, you can see a huge body of recording that have never made it online via legal, or illegal means.
You can find anything you want online…. – I remember the first time I found a web ring. These were connected ‘walkthroughs of pages by different authors all linked together in a giant ring. They catering to people who liked different subject areas. Education had double the amount of subject area webbings compared to sports. Cats hadn’t conquered the web yet: there were just 17 rings for animals and pets.
And you got an arcane level of detail in discussions about the subject area. Over time, the web became too vast for ‘surfers’ and search engines came to past. Prior to the rise of the modern social web, I saw estimates that Google only indexes 15% of the available web. So 85% of content that hasn’t disappeared isn’t searchable.
Secondly, a lot of content is being created on platforms like Instagram; where search is essentially broken in nature. There is a similar curation of search in TikTok where the focus is on the ‘now’.
Then there is the concept of link rot. Where deleted content or broken links caused by SEO (search optimisation), or technology platform transition mean that content disappears. The phenomenon has been studied since at least the mid-1990s and Library studies academics have put serious efforts into documenting it. They set out measure how ‘unstable‘ in nature the worldwide web is as a research resource. The quote below by Sarah Rhodes of the Georgetown University Law Center sums up the problem quite elegantly:
In the context of web archiving and digital preservation, one often hears that the average life span of a web page is forty-four days. This statistic has been repeated among those in the digital preservation community for years, but it never seems to be accompanied by a citation. In a 2002 article by Peter Lyman, a footnote briefly explains why the source of this figure is so elusive: “These data sources were originally published on the Web, but are no longer available, illustrating the prob- lem of Web archiving.” Ironically, the very source of a statistic often used to sup- port the cause of web preservation has itself become a victim of “link rot.”
Morgan Stanley blocks remote network access for China interns | Financial Times – Another large US bank said its systems in China were exposed to frequent cyber attacks that were of “infinitely greater” magnitude than many other countries. – not terribly surprised that remote network access is a threat vector in China. More China-related posts here. It will be interesting to see if remote network access brings out more
Do Chinese millennials want diversity in fashion ads? | Advertising | Campaign Asia – Fashion’s culture wars are dividing Chinese millennials. In June, a series of fashion and beauty moves, including a Calvin Klein pride campaign featuring the black trans model Jari Jones and the decision by some top beauty groups to take their skin-whitening products off the market in China, polarized opinions across the country’s social media landscape. While the mainstream overwhelmingly saw these radical changes as a byproduct of the West’s excessive political correctness, the fashion-forward crowd recognized these debates as the start of a much-needed change in their country.
On the Twitter Hack – Schneier on Security – Whether the hackers had access to Twitter direct messages is not known. These DMs are not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that they are unencrypted inside Twitter’s network and could have been available to the hackers. Those messages — between world leaders, industry CEOs, reporters and their sources, heath organizations — are much more valuable than bitcoin. (If I were a national-intelligence agency, I might even use a bitcoin scam to mask my real intelligence-gathering purpose.) Back in 2018, Twitter said it was exploring encrypting those messages, but it hasn’t yet.
Enter the parents | Film | The Guardian – no one suspected that he would turn out to have two brothers still alive and living impoverished, anonymous lives in mainland China. Nor did they have any inkling that Jackie’s mother had once been a legendary gambler in the Shanghai underworld or that his father had been a Nationalist spy and gangland boss. These are among the more startling revelations that Cheung uncovers. “The fact that his mother was an opium smuggler, a gambler and a big sister in the underworld was a big shock to Jackie and also to us,” she admits. “Everybody in Hong Kong knew that his mother was like a common housewife, very kind, very gentle.”
China has big ideas for the internet. Too bad no one else likes them – CNET – New IP would shift control of the internet, both its development and its operation, to countries and the centralized telecommunications powers that governments often run. It would make it easier to crack down on dissidents. Technology in New IP to protect against abuse also would impair privacy and free speech. And New IP would make it harder to try new network ideas and to add new network infrastructure without securing government permission
