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.

  • Machine learning sublime influence

    Scott Galloway talks about the way brands are using AI (machine learning) and the examples are very much in the background.  Welcome to the sublime world of machine learning where the impact on the customer experience won’t be apparent. In many respects this is similar to how fuzzy logic became invisible as it was introduced in the late 1980s.

    The Japanese were particularly adept at putting an obscure form of mathematics to use. They made lifts that adapted to the traffic flows of people going in and out of a building and microwaves which knew how long to defrost whatever you put into it. Fuzzy logic compensated for blur in video camera movement in a similar manner to way smartphone manufacturers now use neural networks on images.

    The Japanese promoted fuzzy logic inside products to the home market, but generally backed off from promoting it abroad. The features just were and consumers accepted them over time. In a quote that is now eerily reminiscent of our time a spokesperson for the American Electronics Association’s Tokyo office said to the Washington Post

    “Some of the fuzzy concepts may be valid in the U.S.,”

    “The idea of better energy efficiency, or more precise heating and cooling, can be successful in the American market,”

    “But I don’t think most Americans want a vacuum cleaner that talks to you and says, ‘Hey, I sense that my dust bag will be full before we finish this room.’ “

    This was also the case with the use technology companies made of Bayes Theory. This was used by the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft Research.

    A second technique was rules, put simply IF then THAT. This kind of technology has been used to drive automated trading models and credit card approvals for decades. Pegasystems are one of the leaders in developing rules based processing. Rules based systems could even be built in an Excel macro and would still count as a form of machine learning. 

    Finally machine learning needs to think about a number of things with regards the models being used:

    • The importance of accuracy in the use case
    • The level of precision required and ways to indicate that precision means
    • The cost of generation versus other methods, this is very important in terms of computing power and energy consumption 

    More information
    The Future of Electronics Looks Fuzzy | Washington Post (December 23, 1990)

  • Marketers: you are not a goldfish and neither is anyone else

    I have grown tired of a ridiculous statistic being used so frequently that it becomes marketing truth. It’s regurgitated in articles, blog posts, social media and presentations. The problem with it is that affects the way marketers view the world and conduct both planning and strategy. The picture below is a goldfish, his name is Diego. If you’ve managed to read this you aren’t Diego.

    Diego

    I realise that sounds a little dramatic, but check out this piece by Mark Jackson, who leads the Hong Kong and Shenzhen offices of Racepoint Global. It’s a good piece on the different elements that represent a good story (predominantly within a PR setting). And it is right that attention in a fragmented media eco-system will be contested more fiercely. But it starts with:

    Over the course of the last 20 years, the average attention span has fallen to around eight seconds; a goldfish has an attention span of nine! The challenge for companies – established and new – is to figure out how to get even a small slice of that attention span when so many other companies are competing for it.

    Mark’s piece is just the latest of a long line of marketing ‘thought leadership’ pieces that repeat this as gospel. The problem is this ‘truth’ is bollocks.

    It fails the common sense test. Given that binge watching of shows like Game of Thrones or sports matches is commonplace, book sales are still happening, they would have to be balanced out with millisecond experiences for this 8-second value to make any sense as an average. The goldfish claim is like something out of a vintage Brass Eye episode.

    To quote DJ Neil ‘Doctor’ Fox:

    Now that is a scientific fact! There’s no real evidence for it; but it is scientific fact

    Let’s say your common sense gets the better of your desire for a pithy soundbite and you decide to delve into the goldfish claim a bit deeper.  If one took a little bit of time to Google around it would become apparent that the goldfish ‘fact’ is dubious. It originally came from research commissioned by Microsoft’s Advertising arm ‘How does digital affect Canadian attention spans?‘. The original link to the research now defaults to the home page of Microsoft Advertising. Once you start digging into it, the goldfish wasn’t actually part of the research, but was supporting desk research and thats when its provenance gets murky.

    PolicyViz in a 2016 blog post The Attention Span Statistic Fallacy called it out and provided links to the research that they did into the the goldfish ‘fact’ in 2016 – go over and check their article out. The BBC did similar detective work a year later and even went and asked an expert:

    “I don’t think that’s true at all,” says Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University.

    “Simply because I don’t think that that’s something that psychologists or people interested in attention would try and measure and quantify in that way.”

    She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an “average attention span” is pretty meaningless. “It’s very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.”

    There are some studies out there that look at specific tasks, like listening to a lecture.

    But the idea that there’s a typical length of time for which people can pay attention to even that one task has also been debunked.

    “How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation,” explains Dr Briggs.

    “We’ve got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, what we can expect. And those expectations and our experience directly mould what we see and how we process information in any given time.”

    But don’t feel too bad, publications like Time and the Daily Telegraph were punked by this story back in 2015. The BBC use the ‘fact’ back in 2002, but don’t cite the source.  Fake news doesn’t just win elections, it also makes a fool of marketers.

    This whole thing feels like some marketer (or PR) did as poor a job as many journalists in terms of sourcing claims and this ‘truth’ gradually became reinforcing. Let’s start taking the goldfish out of marketing.

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  • Qualcomms new chipset + more things

    Qualcomms new chipset allows cars to communicate with each other | SiliconAngle – Qualcomms new chipset shows an ambition that isn’t written in stone. Qualcomm has a serious partnership problem and the auto industry should consider carefully before letting them inside their supply chain. More on Qualcomm here

    Tech companies spend more on R&D than any other companies in the U.S. – Recode – not particularly surprising in a world of shareholder value, whether that money well spent is another topic

    If Unilever Can’t Make Feel-Good Capitalism Work, Who Can? – Bloomberg – good if uncritical view of Unilever

    America needs its unions more than ever – Interesting op-ed by Larry Summers. Never thought I would see this argued by him

    Google is losing allies across the political spectrum | Ars Technica – not terribly surprising

    Huawei to unveil new smartphone with AI-powered chipset ‘Kirin 970’ | South China Morning Post – interesting more for the design choices Huawei has to make. It needed something that would work with Google’s Android and the Chinese home-brew distribution. Imagine trust and cloud services influenced it. Finally networks just aren’t as ubiquitous as we’d like either

    There is only one winner when start-ups advertise on Facebook | Business | The Times & The Sunday Times – every day at Jam Jar, our angel investing fund that backs UK entrepreneurs, we sit through pitch after pitch, for every conceivable type of start-up, from dog food to posh watches, and everyone — and I do mean literally everyone — is selling their equity and raising millions and millions of pounds seemingly for one reason — to pay for ads on Facebook. It is a phenomenon so consistent across the companies we see, the money being raised is so big and the faith in the strategy so absolute, that at the end of every pitch, we are always left with the same conclusion: we should just buy shares in Facebook

    How to handle an HireVue interview with an investment bank – “There are over 15,000 traits that can be used to identify top performers,” says Clark. These include your choice of language, the breadth of your vocabulary, your eye movements, the speed of your delivery, the level of stress in your voice, your ability to retain information, your ‘valence’ (emotion), and 14,993 others. With a HireVue interview, it’s not just about running through your work history and academic achievements, or using the S.T.A.R. technique to answer questions. It’s about your delivery, and what’s going on beneath the surface.

    Three’s Smarty: Pants or Tops, Dude? – Three UK launches a low cost MVNO – how low can it go?

  • KFC China virgin mojito + more

    KFC China virgin mojito

    KFC China launched a virgin mojito drink with a 1960s feel to the ad. Its a bit of an odd product for KFC, even in China particularly with its positioning against drinking. Quite how the product development process and consumer insight worked to produce it is beyond me. Beautifully produced advert

    Great documentary on Sterns Music (of Sterns Edits fame). The vastness of Sterns Music library is astounding. Sterns Edits did to African and Brazilian music what Razor N Tape have done to disco music more recently.

    High Snobriety have done their first documentary. It looks like the kind of thing I would expect from Vice. Given High Snobriety’s streetwear literate audience I was surprised at how ‘basic’ it approaches the topic.

    Korea’s historic fashion industry, its association with replicas since the days of Daper Dan and the retail infrastructure stifled by chaebols are issues. But streetwear couldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for the Korean textile industry – Daper Dan connection.

    The market in Korea reminded me very much of the ‘snide’ garments that were popular in the UK scene through the 1980s and 1990s.

    On a secondary note the size of the YouTube video embed was restricted to 560 pixels wide. Not sure why that was. I look forward to seeing more material by High Snobriety on Korea’s fashion industry moving forwards, particularly if local brands can get on the K-pop train.

    William Gibson: ‘I Never Expected to Be Living in an American Retro-Future’ – Motherboard – William Gibson critiquing Trump administration era America. This probably also explains why Gibson’s writing has become nearer term and has an apocalyptic focus in the Jackpot Trilogy

    Cities and Memory: global collaborative sound project – Cities & Memory | Field Recordings, Sound Map, Sound Art really nice project correlating field recordings by location. It would also be useful for open source intelligence outfits like Bellingcat.

  • Tencent Baidu and Sina + more things

    Tencent Baidu and Sina investigated by Beijing for their content | CNBC – likely to keep things buttoned up during the forthcoming party congress. What’s more surprising is the amount of restraint China has shown with regards to antitrust regulations of these businesses. They affect everything from state media to state owned banks. Tencent Baidu and Sina, alongside Alibaba have business empires that span media, gaming, entertainment, e-commerce and financial services.

    Uber’s new in-app chat will help you avoid exchanging creepy texts with your driver – The Verge – interesting move – unfortunately treating the symptom of a problem

    The Guardian reimagines media planning as a B2B bed-time story | The Drum  – Attracting more media planners like Claire would be the ideal scenario for Guardian Media Group right now, as it looks to balance the books by 2019. It reported a 2% rise in revenue last month, largely due to a climb in the amount of paying members and a 15% boost in digital spend. Meanwhile the Guardian’s print newspaper sales declined by 7.4% year-on-year in June to a circulation of 159,007, while its Sunday paper the Observer declined by 5.9% to 192,889, according to the latest ABCs. This is presumably why Claire is seen cutting deals in virtual reality and mobile, rather than in print.

    Inside Facebook’s Institutional Policy of Copying Competitors | WSJ – pretty all encompassing embrace of user data – I wonder what Apple thinks about it given the privacy positioning of the iPhone?

    Andy Rubin’s Essential phone startup gains backing from Amazon, Tencent – CNET – interesting that Tencent got onboard

    Why Google can’t compete with what Apple is doing with ARKit – BGR – however if AR is going to take off cross-platform development is what’s really needed since the iPhone is a small (but lucrative part of the market)

    One in three marketers believe ad tech “is broken beyond repair” | Marketing Interactive – quite possibly when also thinks that 85% of online advertising growth in main markets is split between Google, Amazon and Facebook. In China its probably worse with the split between Tencent Baidu and Sina

    Buzzfeed and Breitbart at bottom of media trust list as Americans place trust in British outlets | The Drum – I do wonder about the methodology

    WSJ City – Abu Dhabi Sovereign Fund Extends 1MDB Deadline – they really think that they’ll be getting that back?

    Mirage World on the App Store – allows you to do ‘briefing’ but in the real world