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.

  • Corona brand + more news

    Mark Ritson: Coronavirus won’t hurt Corona, it will actually boost sales – differentiation, particularly at the symbolic level, was overstated. Any evidence that people perceived Brand A as vastly different from Brand B could be largely explained by its size and prior purchase experiences. Purchase caused brand image, not vice versa. Ergo building a brand image was waste of marketing effort. The big job of brand was to create salience, so a brand came to mind in buying situations. – Great discussion on the brand salience of Corona beer during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the flipside Corona probably won’t get a brand lift from the corona discussions around a solar eclipse either

    Pandemic brands – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence – nice counter-cyclical brand building and CSR during the corona virus outbreak

    Terabytes Of Stolen Adult Content From OnlyFans Have Leaked – There are communities on Reddit and Telegram dedicated to cracking performers’ accounts and sharing the content without their consent. Many of those videos eventually make their way to various tube sites. A similarly large, though different, OnlyFans leak was posted last Saturday to forums dedicated to cracking and leaking pirated content – that is one of the bleakest things that I’ve read in a good while. Especially given the amount of people who are turning to DIY porn on OnlyFans due to the corona virus disrupting employment for low paid services jobs and the entertainment sector

    Nando’s-inspired sex slang used by girls as young as 10 | Technology | The Guardian – you’ve got to wonder about what other level of monitoring and censorship is going on. I find this monitoring of kids distasteful.

    Second-hand clothes sales: fashion forward | Financial Times – vintage all over again. I wonder how the corona virus will impact the desire for pre-owned clothing?

    porsche to print giant fingerprints of customers onto hood of 911 sport cars | Designboom – not sure I think its smart to post a copy of a biometric data on the bonnet of your car. These are the kind of people rich enough to personal safes and secure rooms with finger print locks. I’ve got visions of hackers working out how to take advantage of this

    IBM and Microsoft sign Vatican pledge for ethical AI | Financial Times – the pledge, called the “Rome Call for AI Ethics”, will be presented on Friday morning to Pope Francis by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, and John Kelly, IBM’s executive vice-president, as well as Vatican officials and Qu Dongyu, the Chinese director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation – so it wasn’t a Vatican driven initiative after all but a public affairs exercise

    Baidu/tech groups: traffic warning | Financial Times – But higher traffic does not equate to higher income for search platforms. The contrast is with gaming, where more time playing means surging in-game purchases. For Baidu, which makes about three-quarters of total revenue from advertising, that is bad news. Even before the outbreak, a slowdown in China had trimmed the advertising budgets of clients. Marketing campaigns have now been cut further. Cancelled events and concerts contribute to the malaise. Baidu’s biggest clients, which include online gaming companies, real estate developers and plastic surgery clinics, have little incentive to advertise. A surge in new sign-ups for online games means fewer game ads are needed. Demand for homes has plunged and some cities have banned home sales altogether. Plastic surgery clinics, a lucrative source of core ad revenues, are taking a hit.

    Twitter is testing new ways to fight misinformation — including a community-based points system – sounds curiously like Cory Doctorow’s concept of whuffie

    How to deliver the personalization consumers want while respecting the privacy they expect | Think with Google – I am not convinced by the focus on mass personalisation. What about brand, culture etc?

    Ogilvy brings on global executive creative directors for Instagram | Campaign Asia – God help us

    Volvo Trucks – The Tower By Forsman & Bodenfors, Sweden – THEINSPIRATION.COM – interesting that they got the head of their business directly involved

    Did America Forget How to Make the H-Bomb? – Mother Jones – and things are probably worse with processes reliant on electronic records

    Chinese navy accused of using laser on US military aircraft | Financial Times – This reads like something from a William Gibson novel

    Otl Aicher: The Olympic Designer Who Shaped Your Journey To The Toilet – Flashbak – Like a paperclip, we don’t think of Aicher’s pictograms as designed objects per se, but rather as the objects themselves. The chairs we own are someone’s take on a chair. That’s not the case with the average, everyday paperclip. It is what it is, a paperclip. That’s it. Objects at this level of comprehension are simply there. They feel as though they have always been there, and did so from the moment they were presented to the masses. In every country, in every city, they are simply there. In the case of Aicher’s icons they’ve become shorthand that everyone can understand, a set of simple shapes that successfully tells us where to go when we need to use a bathroom. – pretty much sums it up

    Google tops Facebook, Instagram in e-commerce activity, study finds | Mobile Marketer – context wins, but guessing that this may vary by category

    LinkedIn | Balenciaga Summer 2020 collection video – Jay Owens – This is a genius bit of media buying for a collection themed around power and power dressing. The catwalk show saw private equity associates, architects & engineers stalk an EU-blue stage set like a parliamentary building. Advertising on LinkedIn now is just 👌– nails context

    Featured Customer – Oscar the Grouch – Squarespace – I used to hate writing case studies for technology companies at the start of my career, but I do like this one that Squarespace did for Oscar the Grouch

    How Japan’s family businesses use sons-in-law to bring in new blood | Financial Times – For hundreds of years, owners of Japanese companies have been adopting their sons-in-law as a way to recruit talent — a practice known as mukoyoshi — giving rise to the saying “You can’t choose your sons, but you can choose your sons-in-law”. The histories of zaibatsu (conglomerate) families such as Sumitomo, Mitsui and Iwasaki (of the Mitsubishi group) are studded with adopted relatives and sons-in-law

    The Sun posts £68m loss as it pays out £27m in legal costs over phone-hacking scandal – However, revenue at News Group Newspapers for the 52 weeks ending 30 June 2019 were up, with total turnover growing to £420m in 2019 from £401.4m in 2018. Circulation of The Sun was down to 1.38 million last year from 1.51 million in 2018, and fell to 1.16 million from 1.28 million for The Sun on Sunday. – so despite revenue increasing losses were up. You also have to wonder how sustainable revenue increases can be with a declining audience

    Smartphone startups take on Google, Apple and put privacy first | DW – I just can’t see these taking off. Interesting data on Google and consumer attitudes

    How Adidas is using WhatsApp as a direct marketing channel – Digiday – The most recent example of the strategy was the “100% Unfair Predator” campaign. Earlier this month, Adidas opened up a hotline on WhatsApp for people in need of a footballer to cover for unreliable teammates on their team. Adidas-sponsored players were made available for games last week once fans had shared some basic information with the hotline such as the game they need the player for. The company’s marketers would notify fans on the morning of their game if their request was successful. The rented players turned up dressed in Adidas’ new Predator20 Mutator footwear. “We know our audience use it to share fixture info, team selection — and team-mates messaging to find last-minute replacements,” said Coveney. “WhatsApp was perfect for the more functional elements of the ‘Rent-a-Pred’ hotline as it allowed consumers to share private information one-to-one with us for review, before being allocated a Predator player near them.”

    Unilever kicks off strategic review of personal-care brands | Campaign Live – this could get interesting

  • Salience overloads advertising

    Salience is the buzz word of the moment in advertising circles.

    What is salience?

    According to Siri salience is a noun. It’s definition:

    the property of being particularly noticeable or important.

    Historically, when you tested an ad through the likes of Kantar. One of the attributes that an ad would be measured on is salience. Relatively recently salience has become a more important attribute in advertising from a marketing science point-of-view. But this shouldn’t be to the extent of eclipsing other attributes such as distinctive brand building.

    Salience becomes pre-eminent

    But now you see campaigns where salience is pre-eminent. I had only seen this in Asia in the past, where random endorsement choices looked to drive impact.

    At one stage in the early noughties you could see Jackie Chan side-by-side with over 20 products including:

    • Canon cameras
    • Mitsubishi cars
    • An anti-hair loss shampoo that allegedly contained carcinogens
    • Zhongshan Subor – games consoles with a basic home computing capability. Subor ‘Learning Machines’ had educational programmes, games and provided Chinese children with an opportunity to try computer programming. Think of it as an analogue the Sinclair range of home computers in the UK
    • Fenhuang cola drink
    Jackie Chan-branded Canon Rebel T2i / 550D
    Jackie Chan branded Canon Rebel T2i / EOS 550D via M.I.C Gadget

    A classic example of an ad that personifies salience is Burger King’s The Moldy Whopper.

    The campaign is a one-off stunt designed to drive water-cooler talk. Some colleagues were at a breakfast event last week. The outtake that they took from the event was that the future of advertising is PR. Or to be more exact the publicity stunt.

    I get it, creative directors are measured on memorable award-winning campaigns. They are less worried about effectiveness and brand lift. It’s sexy. And it moves things away from soul-crushing digital disruption-driven work. Big data, A-B testing that’s just aimed at sales conversion.

    But publicity is just a short term effect, contrast this with effective advertising that can keep paying off for decades!

    But when you’re doing stunt-after-stunt what does the brand stand for? I agree that a brand has to be distinctive, but to make a brand distinctive you need to reinforce it. Think about Coca-Cola; distinctive and instantly recognisable.

    Don’t believe me, here’s what Mark Ritson said about it. Ritson uses ‘brand image’ as a way to discuss brand distinctiveness and visibility at a granular level in the ad:

    The new global campaign from Burger King features a month old burger complete with the mould and decomposition that comes with it. Supposedly, this is a campaign aimed to promote the absence of preservatives. But is it good advertising? No. Showing a disgusting, mouldy version of your hero product to target consumers is – believe it or not – a really bad idea. So why are Burger King doing it? First, we see the ultimate exemplar of the focus on salience over image that is sweeping much of the advertising world. “It got me talking about it, so it is great marketing,” has been the response of many addled marketers to the new campaign. While it’s true that salience is a much bigger goal than we once thought, there is still a need to focus on brand image. All publicity is not good publicity. It’s also the latest in a long line of marketing stunts that Burger King has pulled. Hiding Bic Macs behind Whoppers in all their ads, asking consumers to order a Whopper online from a McDonalds, the list is long and stupid. It wins awards and gets marketers talking but it is eclipsed by KFC and McDonald’s less flashy, more enduring and more effective tactics. Same store sales growth over the last two years tells its own story. This is flashy, ineffective fare.

    Mark Ritson on LinkedIn

    Or Phil Barden who wrote Decoded:

    From a behavioural science point of view this is a bizarre use of marketing money; Firstly, our attention and perception are implicit (‘system 1’) processes that are stimulus-bound. System 1 can’t imagine, it responds to stimuli. Kahneman uses the phrase ‘what you see is all there is’ and it is the stimulus (what you see) that will be decoded using our associative memories. The brain metaphorically asks the questions, ‘what is it, what does it represent, what’s in it for me’? The answers to these questions are ‘rotten food’ and ‘nothing’ because rotten food is a threat to survival. This triggers ‘avoid’ behaviour. Secondly, this image is highly likely to trigger ‘reactance’ which is emotional arousal with negative valence ie it’s unpleasant. Thirdly, memory structures are built on the basis on ‘what fires together wires together’. In this case, Burger King and rotten food. Fourthly, the category is hedonic; it’s all about enjoyment. Rotten food and enjoyment have no implicit intuitive association. The only saving grace for BK may be that their logo is such low contrast and the food is so salient that the brand may not be attributed to the image.

    Phil Barden on LinkedIn

    Many of Barden’s points are very specific to the mouldy burger creative. But points like attention and perception are implicit processes that are stimulus bound works against salience. It triggers related memories, which is distinctive brand building allows you to tap into. The importance of hedonic enjoyment plays against a lot of shock tactics used to get salience.

    I am not saying that marketing campaigns shouldn’t have salience. Some of the best ads of all time use salience like Coca-Cola’s ‘Hilltop’ advert.

    But that they shouldn’t be salient at the expense of other attributes of brand building. A side serving of salience adds cut through to consistent distinctive brand building. But balance in different attributes for an ad is needed.

    For more on how to achieve a balance in attributes, I can recommend Building Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk. The book is based on research by the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.

    More on advertising here.

  • Tablet demand + more things

    Tablet demand in China gaining momentum from epidemic | DigiTimes – compared to global demand drop of 20% predicted for tablet computers. This is a fascinating change. Any explanation of this tablet demand is just a hypothesis. My own guess is . More tablet computer related posts here.

    Great mix by Andy Weatherall. It is interesting that for a considerable amount of time there was destination radio and a loyal taping culture. Some cassette decks featured timers similar to a video recorder. People would set them up before they left. Prior to digital formats becoming commonplace, I remember die-hard fans using VHS Hi-Fi audio recording to capture these shows in as high a quality as possible. More listening material here.

    Targeting v context | Campaign Live – really interesting article by Dave Trott. I’d argue (like Dave has) targeting and context together is what matters, rather than targeting or context.

    Experts react to Google’s Brexit-driven decision to move UK data to the US – Business Insider – also probably Google trying to avoid double-jeopardy between EU and UK law presented by UK consumers being out of the EU

    Victoria's Secret
    Victoria’s Secret by Eternity Portfolio

    WSJ City | Victoria’s Secret goes private at $1.1 billion valuation – this is down from over $7 billion. This marks the end of an astonishing destruction of value. The company was also quick to get the power of online. Designers now think live-streaming their show is a matter of course. Back in 1999 I worked at an agency where we did their first live stream. They were also quick to get into e-commerce.

    WSJ City | Grocers Wrest Control of Shelf Space From Struggling Food Giants – is this really news? Interesting that Clorox and General Mills are called out though

    Hackers can trick a Tesla into accelerating by 50 miles per hour – MIT Technology Review – MobilEye complains that it would also fool the human eye, but most humans would at least question it. Artificial smarts isn’t intelligence

    Banned recording reveals China ambassador threatened Faroese leader at secret meeting | Berlingske – the problem might not be Huawei but the Chinese government with Huawei just a conduit – but yeah

  • Regulating AI + more things

    Regulating AI in health and care – NHS Digital – no privacy expert on this panel – which is a bit concerning given they are talking about the business opportunity and regulating AI. More machine learning related posts here.

    120627-O-ZZ999-004
    Dutch army Maj. Christiaan Hoff, left, and Royal Australian Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McHugh, right, perform oral surgery to remove a tumor from a Filipino woman aboard Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) June 27, 2012, in Samar, Philippines

    Coronavirus: Hong Kong restaurants install physical barriers between diners to allay contagion fears – interesting design hack by restauranteurs – I wonder what it will do to restaurant noise levels?

    The ‘Alpha Female’ Look is Big in China. Brands Take Note. | BoF – good for Dr Martens (paywall)

    Bulgari Is Pulling Out of Baselworld 2020 Because of the Coronavirus | Robb Report – I am surprised that Baselworld hasn’t been re-scheduled already

    Kering Halts Spending in China on Coronavirus Fears | BoF – I’d have still done brand advertising to do contra-cyclical brand building but otherwise their approach makes sense

    The Karakax list: how China targets Uighurs in Xinjiang | Financial Times – surprisingly manual process rather than machine learning driven. China has set up a research lap for technology in law – think pre-crime and done some of the first thinking about regulating AI

    You Can Pay People to Style Your Houseplants – The New York Times – corporate florist now do homes as well (paywall)

    “With the Beatles,” by Haruki Murakami | The New Yorker – great read

    It’s time for global businesses to admit it: China isn’t a good investment – The Washington Post – right sentiment, but the wrong reasons. China is important but too prominent in the global supply chain and a source of weakness. Multiple sourcing makes more sense

    With Harsh Words, China’s Military Denies It Hacked Equifax | New York Times – yeah right. I think its a totally gangster move, really smart work which is why they would do it (paywall)

    Chinese retail is getting a nationalistic boost – Inkstone – “The millennials are more faithful to Chinese brands which are capable of delivering equally good quality products like those from foreign powerhouses, if not better,” said Xue Ying, senior marketing manager of Dr Yu. Fashion brands no longer see Hong Kong as bridge to 1.4 billion consumers – Inkstone – an increasingly nationalistic youth

    Coronavirus response benefits Watsons: YouGov | Campaign Asia – Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka Shing, who’s majority-ownership of the Watsons franchise is well-known, pledged HKD$100 million (US$13 million) to combat the coronavirus. All of these responses appear to have been met with popular approval for the brand. Since the start of the year, Watsons’ Current Customer score has risen from 20.2 to 29.0, a rise of +8.8 points. Its Recommend score has risen from 9.9 to 16.9 , an increase of +7 points. Finally, its score on YouGov’s Buzz index has jumped from 8.6 to 25.4, a significant increase of +16.8 points. – Li Ka Shing always comes out of a crisis better than he went in

    Coronavirus Test Kits Sent to States Are Flawed, C.D.C. Says – The New York Times – the failure of the kits means that states still have to depend on the C.D.C., which will mean several days’ delay in getting results. The C.D.C. announced last week that it had begun shipping about 200 kits to laboratories in the United States and roughly 200 more to labs in other countries. Each kit can test about 700 to 800 specimens from patients, the agency said. – this is frightening (paywall)

  • What is truly Scandinavian & things that caught my eye this week

    SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? Nothing. This was an ad done by &Co of Denmark. It’s an ad that was meant to challenge the audience and promote the benefit of travel. But I felt it got its tone wrong.

    What is truly Scandinavian reactions

    What is truly Scandinavian got backlash online. As it went towards 13,000 dislikes on YouTube, SAS took it down. This is where things get crazy:

    • SAS blamed the reaction on right-wing (possibly Russian) botnets, which it doesn’t seem to have been the case. Which begs the question can SAS be trusted?
    • The ad agency &Co had bomb threats made against their office

    Update SAS have reposted the ad, it currently has 94K down votes and 10K upvotes off 782,885 views. Comments are turned off.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShfsBPrNcTI

    I have never got the chance to see Hall & Oates play live, this recording of their 1984 July 4th concert in New York shows them at their best. It’s called the Liberty concert because of the US independence day, it was held in Liberty national Park in Jersey City and one of the main sponsors was called Liberty. The event was put on to raise money for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty.

    Sony goes against the romantic grain for Valentine’s Day with its latest PlayStation campaign. More information here (paywall).

    South Korean TV broadcaster MBC did a documentary on a family that lost their daughter at just 7 years old. The mother agreed to say a fine goodbye to her daughter in VR. The child’s death in hospital left a big hole in their grief. Now I know it sounds mawkish but the mother said that it helped her come to terms with her child’s health. It also brought home for me the power of VR to drive emotion. I think that this is really important give how uncomfortable VR’s fit with storytelling as we understand it. More VR-related posts here.

    Liam Young gave a great talk on using his art of film making to shape the future. This is particularly interesting given William Gibson’s feedback on meeting fans who worked in the tech sector:

    They’d read a book in which there didn’t actually seem to be any middle class left and in which no characters had employment. They were all criminal freelancers of one sort or another. So, it was always quite mysterious to me.”

    William Gibson quoted in William Gibson — the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse | FT

    Gibson’s experience implies that steering the future through art, requires a lack of ambiguity and subtlety than good film frequently has.