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.

  • Income and wealth inequality + more

    Income and Wealth Inequality in America, 1949-2016 by Kuhn, Schularick and Steins (University of Bonn) – We expose the central importance of portfolio composition and asset prices for wealth dynamics in postwar America. Asset prices shift the wealth distribution because the composition and leverage of household portfolios differ systematically along the wealth distribution. Middle-class portfolios are dominated by housing, while rich households predominantly own equity. An important consequence is that the top and the middle of the distribution are affected differentially by changes in equity and house prices. Housing booms lead to substantial wealth gains for leveraged middle-class households and tend to decrease wealth inequality, all else equal. Stock market booms primarily boost the wealth of households at the top of the distribution. This race between the equity market and the housing market shaped wealth dynamics in postwar America and decoupled the income and wealth distribution over extended periods. The historical data also reveal that no progress has been made in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years, and that close to half of all American households have less wealth today in real terms than the median household had in 1970. – long read but very worthwhile study on historic US income and wealth inequality. More related content here. (pdf)

    Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17, redirects users to group messaging app Squirrel | TechCrunch – end of an era

    New Ways for Gaming Creators to Get Started and Get Discovered on Facebook | Facebook Newsroom – in app ad bidding

    New Ways to Enjoy Music on Facebook | Facebook Newsroom – rip off of musicia.ly

    Apple Ignores What’s Wrong With the Mac | Sascha Segan | PCMag.com – a pretty fair critique of Mac industrial design

    Apple, where’s the smarter Siri in iOS 12? USA Today – it would be more interesting if one could use the workflows created by others a la IFTTT

    Meet the people who still use Myspace: ‘It’s given me so much joy’ | The Guardian – something to be said for smaller communities

    Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence – The New York Times – it gave access to a number of vendors including the main Chinese players

    The Chinese “gang” manipulating the market — now in EOS?

  • The limits of the IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It

    The IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It (TLATSOI) has been a north star for agency strategists since it was published in 2013. It’s now been out there long enough to understand the limits of its approach.  This post started with a blog post that talked about the IPA’s The Long And The Short Of It (TLATSOI) role in the planning and strategy process of the ad industry.

    Thermometer

    The Long And The Short Of It Needs The Wrong And The Shit Of It. Feel free to go and have a read and come back.

    The Limits

    The IPA’s original research had flaws that dictated the limits in the methodology:

    • Focusing purely on successes brings in biases due to the research being taken out of context. Context provided by the ‘complete’ population of good, mediocre and awful campaigns rather than award winners
    • There aren’t any lessons on how not to truly mess up

    TLATSOI isn’t a LinkedIn article

    Its easy to throw shots over the table when someone has done a lot of work. TLATSOI isn’t an article on the ‘five morning habits of Warren Buffet’ to make you successful.

    Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 996 campaigns entered in the IPA Effectiveness awards (1980 – 2010). That would have taken them a considerable amount of time to do. They then managed to write it all up and distill it down into a very slim volume on my bookshelf.

    The work is an achievement and Binet & Field deserve our gratitude and respect. Secondly, other marketing disciplines don’t have their version of TLATSOI. We couldn’t critique TLATSOI if it didn’t exist.

    Let’s say we want to stand on their shoulders and build something more comprehensive than TLATSOI. Just what would it take?

    The limits of working with what you have

    Binet and Field worked with what they have. If you’ve ever written an award entry you’ll know pulling it together is a pain in the arse. 996 award entries represents thousands of weeks of non-billable agency time. This was also strained through their empirical experience in the business, which adds a ‘welcome’ bias.

    Now imagine if that kind of rigor in terms of documentation and analysis was put into mediocre campaigns. The kind of campaign where the client logo barely makes into the agency credentials deck.

    Without a major agency (nudge, nudge, wink, wink BBH) providing all their warts-and-all data, the initative won’t start.

    It will be hard to get what is needed. Agency functions aren’t geared up to deliver the information. A technological solution would take a good while to put in place; and like all IT projects would have a 70% failure rate.

    In an industry where careers are made and talent attracted on ‘hits’; theres a big chunk of realpolitik to address.

    How would you keep a lid on the dirty laundry?

    We live in a connected world. To the point that there are now likely to be four certainties. Birth, death, taxes and data breaches. Imagine a data dump, some Excel skills and what was a bit of snark would do to an agency’s reputation? The stain of an ad agency equivalent of the movie industry Gold Raspberries would likely bury careers.

    What do we measure?

    My friend Rob Blackie started some of the thinking on effectiveness data SLA tiers

    A = Tests the objective directly using a Randomised Control Test (RCT) in a real world environment (e.g. measured at point of sale).
    B = RCT tests of proximate objective (e.g. brand), direct measurement of impacts without correction for population bias or confounding factors (e.g. a sunny week drives a lot of ice cream consumption). Or case studies (independent), quality survey data on changes in behaviour, testing in an artificial environment. For instance a Nielsen Brand Lift study
    C = Case studies (non-independent), data sources that may contain significant bias compared to the underlying population. For instance: Award entries.
    D = Indicative data such as PR coverage, social media Likes and similar.
    E = Anecdotes. Extra points for quality, and reproducibility across different suppliers / evaluators.

    There are challenges capturing long-term branding factors such as advertising ‘ad stock’ or ‘carryover‘. That then takes you into fundemental questions:

    How long is the minimum viable time of campaign duration to be considered for assessment?

    How long should we be measuring long term branding effects? How do you measure ‘clientside’ quality issues:

    • Resourcing / budgets
    • Product
    • Ambience in the case of client-owned channels
    • Adequate quality briefs. Are the objectives written well? Are they relevant to the business
    • Mission creep or changing company agendas

    All of this means that getting to the greater volume of poor campaigns as well as the best is easier said than done. The best way to kick it off would be having large agencies to work together on putting together data sets.

  • Re-Tros & things from this week

    This documentary on genre defying Chinese group Re-Tros and their first European tour in support of Depeche Mode. People often use the descriptor post-punk for Re-Tros, but Re-Tros come out of a different historical context to the post-punk movement in the west. Their style definitely has a jazz or progressive rock-style improvisation feel to it. The 1980s descriptor ‘electronic body music’ applied to the likes of Front 242 seems to be as good a descriptor as any.

    In what has become an internet tradition, Mary Meeker presents her annual trends presentation

    And here are the slides

    If Mary Meeker hadn’t convinced you about the robust state of innovation in the Chinese technology eco-system then this presentation by George S Yip may do the trick.

    I started using the Usenet for the first time in years for a research project. I wanted to go back and understand longer term trends. The Usenet archives were a handy primer. The Usenet served a similar purpose to the likes of Reddit. I wanted a native application and this was the best Usenet client that I found. NZBVortex | Simply the best Usenet client for Mac. Many old favourites were no longer in development or supported by the latest version of macOS.

    The top thing would be catching up with old friends. ‘Old is gold’ as they say. I got to go to the Bicester Village outlet centre (as guide rather than shopper) and the contrast between the restaurants just outside the village was an eye-opener to my foreign guests.

    My key take away on their reaction: China isn’t going to be jumping up and down to invest in a post-Brexit UK. Bicester Village’s owner has already hedged its bets; it has twin outlet villages in Barcelona, Dublin, Madrid, Milan, Paris Shuzhou and Shanghai – all competing for global luxury buyer spending. They are either in nicer climes or more convenient for East Asian shoppers. They’ve been changing the way Chinese consumers buy luxury and Bicester may not reap the full rewards now. More luxury related content here.

  • Malayan emergency + more things

    Psychological Warfare of the Malayan Emergency – interesting read; I wonder what C.C. Too would have made of the Leave and Remain campaigns? It is amazing how much of things in the UK goes back to Borneo and the Malayan emergency. The COIN strategies that were successful in the Malayan emergency were applied time and time again

    Reliance Jio has become the world leader in feature phones in just 10 months — Quartz – The strong growth in Jio, clubbed with the return of the Nokia brand, has helped the global feature phone market grow 38% year-on-year in January-March 2018, Counterpoint said. India contributed to nearly 43% of all feature phone sales during the first three months of 2018.

    Highlights from CCS Insight’s Predictions – Manufacturers’ vision for smart TVs fails. Despite their efforts to introduce apps and smart features, makers of smart TVs have failed to convince customers, who still use them as “dumb” screens. They buy TVs mainly based on design and picture quality, viewing the smartness only as a by-product. – More consumer behaviour related content here.

    The Bill Gates Line – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – interesting essay on the nature of monopoly power, platforms and aggregators

    Microsoft and Publicis unveil Marcel, an AI-based productivity platform for the ad giant | TechCrunch – interesting narrow expert apps rather than a general intelligence

    Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 710 platform in mobile AI, neural networking push | ZDNet – further enhancing neural networks on smartphones

    New Sony CEO to Detail Shift Away From Gadgets in Mid-Term Plan – Bloomberg – huge implication for innovation though

    US-China tech wars threaten global sector disruption | FT – strikes at the heart of China’s ambitions and is likely to curb revenues as well as disrupt supply chains at foreign multinationals, many of which see the country as a key market. But it is also prompting a rethink at the corporate level in China, with tech companies looking to develop their own chips (pay wall)

    Is Douyin the Right Social Video Platform for Luxury Brands? | Jing Daily – Douyin insider Fabian Bern shared that 85 percent of the app’s users are under 24 years old, over 70 percent are female, and the majority are from upper class families living in first tier cities

    Social credit system must bankrupt discredited people: former official – Global Times – China’s social credit system had blocked more than 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed train trips by the end of April.

    An improved social credit system was needed so that “discredited people become bankrupt,” Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the development research center of the State Council

    Opinion | What the Microsoft Antitrust Case Taught Us – The New York Times – interesting how what would have isolated sporadic criticism of the big four internet giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google is now morphing into criticism and calls for remedy on a regular basis. Behavioural change from a marketing perspective is usually driven by reach and repetition. It feels like the ground is being prepared for legislation or a court challenge a few years from now

    A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard | Bloomberg Professional Services – really interesting evolution of design

    The surprising return of the repo man – The Washington Post – “So much of America is just a heartbeat away from a repossession — even good people, decent people who aren’t deadbeats,” said Patrick Altes, a veteran agent in Daytona Beach, Fla. “It seems like a different environment than it’s ever been.”

    How Judea Pearl Became One of AI’s Sharpest Critics – The Atlantic – Three decades ago, a prime challenge in artificial-intelligence research was to program machines to associate a potential cause to a set of observable conditions. Pearl figured out how to do that using a scheme called Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks made it practical for machines to say that, given a patient who returned from Africa with a fever and body aches, the most likely explanation was malaria. In 2011 Pearl won the Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor, in large part for this work.

    But as Pearl sees it, the field of AI got mired in probabilistic associations. These days, headlines tout the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks. We read about computers that can master ancient games and drive cars. Pearl is underwhelmed. As he sees it, the state of the art in artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently.

  • Experience Ramadan & things from this week

    Experience Ramadan

    Via Matt’s Imperica newsletter, Experience Ramadan. A site that connects Muslim families and secular people to meet for meals breaking the fast of Ramadan. Experience Ramadan looks like a great way to build greater mutual awareness among communities.

    Artefacts and Dementia

    Boots and Ogilvy have made this film on how artefacts can spur memories in people suffering from dementia. It is amazing how things are affected by our senses. I thought it was interesting because it implies the importance of artefacts, even as we live in a digital world. We have evolved for a physical world. How would a similar type of programme be done in the future when everything from toys to culture is digital and ephemeral in nature with the cultural impact of pet rocks?

    Mercedes 190

    Great vintage Mercedes-Benz film on the development of the Mercedes 190. There is something really beautiful about the process shown. The Mercedes 190 was developed under the name W201. It was a car that was influenced by the OPEC oil crisis. It represented a more aerodynamic model design for Mercedes. Usually Mercedes innovations saw them debut on the S-class first, but the 190 brought in a number of innovations for suspension and handling. The biggest impact for me was the 190 E 2.3-16V. It was a classier hot saloon that competed with the BMW M3 and Ford Sierra Cosworth.

    Black Klansman

    The trailer for Black Klansman. Good comedy film about the Klu Klux Klan aren’t two concepts that I thought I would have in the same sentence.

    Benazir Bhutto

    BBC World Service – The Assassination, 10 part documentary – on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, great piece of investigative journalism. I can also recommend The Bhutto Dynasty by Owen Bennett-Jones which provides a good deal of context on the Bhutto family role in Pakistan.