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.

  • Divorce talks + more

    Britain, EU at odds over timing of divorce talks – The Boston Globe – The markers of European decline are not hard to find. For the first time in modern history, Asia has more private wealth than Europe, the Boston Consulting Group said last year. And China will account for 70 percent of Asia’s growth between now and 2019, the group said. – It is of course more complex than ‘because China’. Rampant deindustrialisation, a loss of pride, crushing austerity. Intractable economic problems. A loss of identity and loss of empire. A collective hallucination all contributed to the non-binding vote that has resulted in divorce talks. Just wait until these divorce talks get on to fishery issues, free trade and state aid.

    How a Former Apple Designer is Updating Huawei’s Look — The Information – trying to crawl out of the commoditisation trap. More on Huawei here

    How ‘Deleted’ Yahoo Emails Led to a 20-Year Drug Trafficking Conviction | Motherboard – this has interesting privacy implications, i.e. you don’t have any with Yahoo! or probably most other email services

    Earned Brand 2016 – Edelman – interesting research into consumer brand relationships across a range of brand categories

    Chinese Company in Patent Dispute With Apple Barely Exists – WSJ

    Something doesn’t add up in Nikesh Arora’s sudden exit from SoftBank | Techinasia – it’s rather cast a shadow on Nikesh

    Universities and startup factories are fuelling a rise in UK startups like Magic Pony, the AI business Twitter bought for $150 million – While the Magic Pony exit is likely to be seen as a positive step for the UK AI scene, it does raise questions about whether the UK will ever be able to produce a really big AI company if Silicon Valley keeps preying on the country’s most promising startups. – This rather reminded me of the role that lower division clubs like Tranmere Rovers used to play for top sides. Feeding talent through and not profiting by the talent development themselves.

    Taking the headphone jack off phones is user-hostile and stupid | The Verge – you could argue the same about removing floppy disks on the original iMac, though I am inclined to agree with this

    BNNS – Apple Developer Documentation – Apple’s API that allows the GPU to run a simple neural network that helps the iPhone be smarter about preferences

    Jack Ma’s Counterfeit Comments Shed Light on Taobao’s ‘Legal’ Fakes | Jing Daily – Alibaba throws a grenade at the luxury industry

    Y Combinator’s Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer – amazing when you think about how long ago it was and how little forward we have come from it by comparison in subsequent years

    RIMOWA – Electronic Tag – interesting, but looks like tech, for tech’s sake

    Social influencers now more popular for brand campaigns than traditional celebs | PR Week – so the survey data is self serving but it also might say something about client budgets

    Survival on the Wirral | Culture | The Independent – if you want to know why the poor are voted for Brexit, its because scenes like this haven’t changed

    Brexit and Trust – Edelman – this has been a long train running in the UK for decades not years, but otherwise an interesting read

    RA: Real estate, gentrification and nightlife in New York – pretty much the same story as London

  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

    It’s been nine years since Taleb wrote The Black Swan. Like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man before it, The Black Swan is widely cited and paid lip service to.

    The timing of publication for Taleb was particularly pertinent as the book became popular as the financial system broke down in 2008. Some eight years later, the economy has limped along as financial issues were punted into the future, rather like a child kicking a can down an alley. Like the can, the financial issues are still here to be ran into. I thought it was time to re-read Taleb’s book.

    Taleb’s work is philosophical rather than scientific in its method. Although he avoids the talk show friendly cliches of Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin. Much of our world is based around the normal distribution, it is used by insurance companies and pension funds to access risk and longevity. Taleb points out that the really big changes that rock the boat often don’t fit neatly within these models.

    Taleb’s solution boils down to two things

    1. A defensive skepticism that would encourage the average person to question common wisdom and ask ‘what if’
    2. For those that can afford it, an offensive posture that asks ‘what if’ and has a mix of savings or investments most of which is put in very safe vehicles and 15 per cent or so on high risk speculative investments to take advantage of change

    Taleb’s work doesn’t seem to have had the impact that one would have expected just five years ago when it was quoted as a touchstone to modern life.

    Much of the excess and risk that had happened previously is happening again, despite a plethora of disruptive forces laid out in the media.

    Audiences are paying too much attention to listicles that go something along the line of ‘5 habits you need have to be like Bill Gates’. Where is the critical filter? More books reviewed here.

    More information

    McMansions Are Back And Are Bigger Than Ever – There was a small ray of hope just after the Lehman collapse that one of the most lamentable characteristics of US society – the relentless urge to build massive McMansions (funding questions aside) would have subsided
    The market’s most crowded trades could be causing dangerous bubbles – Business Insider
    Many Middle-Class Americans Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck – The Atlantic
    Economic Conditions Snapshot, March 2016: McKinsey Global Survey results | McKinsey & Company
    Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley – The New York Times – Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.
    Crap IT means stats crew don’t really know how UK economy’s doing • The Register – and people make accusations about Chinese economic data…
    Return of ‘100% mortgages’ ease burden on Bank of Mum and Dad | FT

  • Google I/O 2016

    Google I/O 2016 happened on May, 18 – 20.  There had been a lot of pieces of coverage about the different products and services released. But I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on what Google I/O 2016 told us about their viewpoint on technology.

    Giving apps a second chance

    Google knows as well as anyone that the app moves towards a maturity model where consumers stick with the core apps that they want and then don’t go any further.
    apps
    Data shows that consumers use their top five apps 88 per cent of the time. So why would Google care when it knows that 60 percent of the top apps on the Android platform?

    The reasons for an expanded app usage include:

    • A proportion of Google’s advertising (like Facebook) is derived from the promotion of app downloads
    • Android devices are reaching market maturity in many markets, growth is likely to come from new uses – at least some of which will be derived from third party platforms
    • Google has staked its ambition in the PC sector on its Chrome operating system being able to run apps from the Android eco-system. In order for that to happen there needs to be a healthy community of developers
    • In the same way that DoubleClick’s ad network greatly expanded the inventory of Google’s advertising business, third party applications offer Google an additional source of usage for its own services. If you want to see the future of Google Apps look at the the way the likes of Baidu and Tencent allow third-party integration with their own tools

    Streaming or ‘instant’ apps is part of Google’s efforts to encourage consumer trial of new apps and enhance relationships with developers. Firebase, it’s new analytics platform for mobile developers helps them have a better relationship with their installed user base allowing them to use data to target notifications and campaigns.

    More faith in wider area networks (WANs) than personal area networks (PANs)

    Android Wear’s updates were interesting. Put simply Google has more faith in data being delivered in a timely manner over cellular or wi-fi networks than it does for inter device transfers over variants of Bluetooth. Both the Apple Watch and Android Wear products suffered from performance lags when the watch was a thin client of a phone. Having a cellular radio on board the phone presents challenges with battery life, but speeds up real world performance.

    The original design failure wasn’t down to network performance, but is likely to have implications for personal area network technology like Bluetooth in its different variants or ZigBee. These technologies are all about scale, lose a scale advantage and it poses a problem for future adoption by others. This can happen in a virtuous way. Apple’s adoption of USB benefited the standard greatly and drove interest in peripheral development for both Mac and PC. Apple’s abandonment of FireWire and the 3.5″ diskette marked their decline.

    Lots to be concerned about from a privacy point of view?

    Google Home moved yet another pair of Android powered ears into our environment. It was obvious from Google’s description of services that a paid marketing model to be the ‘car booking’ or equivalent service of Home could be very lucrative for the search giant. How this device could be used for market research, tracking brand mentions or government surveillance also poses some conundrums moving beyond smartphones to brown goods.

    Android N features file based encryption rather than treating the whole device as an encrypted disk. This raises questions around the comparative ease of access from a privacy perspective. Secondly, SafetyNet allows Google to reach into a phone to remove pre-existing applications without user permission. There is no explanation if they also have write privileges to the phone as well. If so, expect law enforcement and intellectual property owner interest. From the way it reads this would affect apps and content that have been side loaded as well as got from an app store.

    Android is giving the high ground to Apple on privacy presumably because it considers its own customers don’t care about it that much.

    Reference designs in VR to drive adoption and commoditisation 

    Google’s Daydream project looks to provide standardisation in hardware. By going down this route, Google hopes to spur on the sensor market required for improved AR experience and drive uptake. These will likely be a very different experience to the computer workstation powered Occulus Rift. Driving this technology into the smartphone market may combat the current stagnation in phone sales growth.

    More information
    Google I/O 2016 event page
    A16hz on Google I/O 2016
    Everything Google just announced at its I/O conference
    Palm, Apple, Google and the whole mobile device thing
    The Limits of Google
    If Google’s right about AI, that’s a problem for Apple – Marco.org
    ISIS’s Mobile App Developers Are in Crisis Mode | Motherboard

  • Jeremy Corbyn + more things

    Jeremy Corbyn Facebook strategy is so much more sophisticated than you think | Business Insider – I am not convinced that this is going to move the needle for him, it won’t reach beyond his core followers. It doesn’t match marketing best practice which makes me believe Jeremy Corbyn will be very disappointed come election time.

    How e-commerce changes lives in rural China | South China Morning Post – interesting article the key thing to remember is that the South China Morning Post is owned by Jack Ma of Alibaba. More on China here.

    Deodorant Changes Attractiveness Of Men And Women In Different Ways – PsyBlog – How men who appear low in masculinity can be more attractive to women.Wearing deodorant makes men who are seen as low in masculinity more attractive to women, new research finds. – the original Lynx / Axe brand positioning was closer to the mark than we thought

    Can a Neuroscientist Understand Donkey Kong, Let Alone a Brain? – The Atlantic – Two researchers applied common neuroscience techniques to a classic computer chip. Their results are a wake-up call for the whole field.

    This ‘Demonically Clever’ Backdoor Hides In a Tiny Slice of a Computer Chip | WIRED

    The Chinese Government is Setting Up Its Own Major Science Fiction Award | io9 – this is really interesting, think about how Star Trek inspired the cellphone or Neuromancer and Star Wars inspired augmented reality. I wonder what way the government will be directing the content towards. Now do you see what China is doing here? A second thing is the that science fiction writer Cixin Liu is the one bright spot in Chinese (government-approved) soft power at the moment

    The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do. — Backchannel – life inside a malvertising company. Interesting expose

    Berlin clubbers are now snorting chocolate to get high | Dazed – WTF. I’d imagine that just because chocolate sounds innocuous doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be painful to snort

  • June 2016 research slides

    Here is a copy of the slides that I pull together (when I have the time) of publicly available data that would be of use. This is the June 2016 research slides.

    Google search volumes

    This month I have some new data around search which came from disclosures at Google I/O in terms of search volumes. We talk about social as if search has gone out of style but its growth is still staggering. This is now driven by mobile device penetration and adoption as computing devices on the go. It also speaks to the wider number of questions that search now answers. It used to be that search answered with ‘facts’ found online. It then became more contextual with shortcuts that gave you the weather forecast or a foreign exchange rate. Mobile moved this on further to items like local recommendations.

    Partly through the search box, but also by more meta detail about the device doing the searching and its location to within a few metres due to GPS and cell tower triangulation. Voice interaction has also started to impact search volume. Image driven search still seems to be an area that could drive much more potential search volume, that would be valuable for commerce.
    Google global search volume
    Looking at global search revenue over time, Google’s monopoly position becomes immediately apparent. It is amazing how Bing and Yahoo! haven’t managed to grow market share but just transfer value from one to the other. In the Chinese market, Sohu has been obliterated with Baidu search. But one does have to wonder about the value of web search, when so much internet usage now happens in the WeChat eco-system.
    Global Search Revenues
    More details about me here.
    Slide20

    Full presentation

    Full presentation available for download as a PDF on Slideshare and you can find more research related posts here.