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.

Gucci apologises + more things

Gucci apologises for sending warning letters to Hong Kong shops over paper handbag offerings – context, context, context. Paper items are burned as offerings for the dead to take them into the next life. It tends to be things that they loved or are likely to need. Gucci apologises because it got context wrong, there is zero cannibalisation of Gucci bag sales. More on luxury-related items here.

Facebook drives more traffic to articles, but Twitter users spend more time reading them – Do small screens translate to shortened attention spans? Not so, suggests a new report from Pew Research Center. Turns out mobile users are spending twice as much time reading long-form articles

Majority Of Germans Think The Media Is Controlled By Political, Economic Elites – According to a recent survey, the majority of people in Germany view the news media as simply a pillar of the government and the powerfully elite – which will have an impact on trust

China’s Internet Giants Back A Smartphone On Four Wheels – smarter cars a la Tesla

Canada cites espionage risk from two Huawei employees, saying it plans to reject their immigration applications | South China Morning Post – Huawei still has a trust gap. Canada might be especially sensitive given how throughly pwned Nortel was by China based hackers in years prior to their bankruptcy

Dentsu Aegis Network Buys Hot Chinese Agency With Focus on Mobile, Retail, WeChat | AdAge – congrats to VeryChat

Killing an American icon: Fuel delivery start-ups could downsize U.S. gas stations | SiliconAngle – something about this feels iffy to me. Service stations have a lot of safety restrictions for good reason, that could fall between the cracks in the ‘Uber model’. The margins in running gas stations are actually about the convenience store part of the business, not the fuel. It may make more sense in electric vehicles with easily swappable battery packs???

Apple to Revamp Streaming Music Service After Mixed Reviews, Departures – Bloomberg – if the sub-editor had honesty tourettes this would read, ‘Veterans scarpered, Apple strives to make streaming service less shit’. ★ Apple Music and Coherent Product Design and Marketing | Daring Fireball – John Gruber on Apple Music, he is less negative than Bloomberg

BlackBerry brings video calls to BBM on Android and iOS; North America only for now | VentureBeat | Apps | by Paul Sawers – way too late for many people to care – way behind Skype for Business let alone LINE, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc etc

Huawei G9 Lite released in two versions in China | Gizchina – interesting positioning as it seems to sit awkwardly between Honor and Huawei’s P series

The Who, What & Why of Activist Investors’ Attacks | EE Times – McKinsey seem to have incredibly rose-tinted glasses about this, presumably not to disrupt business in other practice areas such as banking…

The truth about social media algorithms – and why marketers should welcome rather than fear them | The Drum – basically the spiel that he gave at We Are Social last week

May 8, 2016
Millennials are people too

Smart funny video by Adam Conover on the marketing obsession of millennials as a form of segmentation.

Show this to as many marketers as you can.

Having been involved in youth marketing and even spoken at conferences about it, many of the challenges and insights that ‘millennials’ as a cohort face aren’t unique insights per se.

You hear the same things over-and-over again. Being young presents its own set of challenges, these are tweaked accelerated by environmental conditions such as economy and housing. You feel the injustices of the world, adulting is hard. Responsibilities have a weight to them. Education has a cost.

Getting your first home is hard. Finding the right partner is stressful. Since the baby boomers the concept of youth has become elongated. The whole of society hasn’t been drafted into fighting a war and benefited from the rise of the industrial society.

But that doesn’t mean that it makes much sense for marketers to talk about millennials in such a broad brush way. At least gen-X whilst been written off as slackers were realised to have various different sub-cultures or tribes.

That level of nuance seems to have disappeared in ‘our’ collective understanding of millennials and gen-Z.

While we’re on about nuance, since when do adverts aimed at baby boomers appreciate that they don’t all look like Helen Mirren or Joanna Lumley. Or that they like going to rock concerts and festivals? Or that they might run for health and leisure?

Marketers are increasingly looking at big data, but lacking granularity in terms of segmentation and factors that might influence brand relevance.

My hypothesis is that the fetishisation of millennials as a single cohort is down to a deeper seated fear of disruption ambushing the marketers. Millennials aren’t an alien invasion, but people just like we’re used to. This fetishisation will end up as a feedback loop distorting their own view of what they expect to be and how they expect to be seen.

More on millennial related topics here.

May 7, 2016
What about the work desk phone?

I was in touch with a former colleague of mine the other day and they sent me a picture of my old work desk phone. It was still logged into my account and with a divert through to my mobile phone.

The office had hot desking because there wasn’t enough space for everyone to be in at the same time. We had email account size restrictions and people walked around with secondary hard drives plugged into their laptops as local and network storage wasn’t adequate enough to schlep all the documents on to a file server. There wasn’t a cloud-based equivalent of a file server in use 3either.

Yet my former work desk phone remained logged in because no one was bothering to use it. So they have a surplus of desk telephones, when there was a shortage of pretty much every other resource the knowledge worker needed.

Often times, people still used the land line number which followed them due to the Cisco VoIP PBX, but they diverted it to their mobile handset. The culture was very much based around conference calls, international teams would dial into a bridge number and be connected. You would see people pacing the common spaces such as corridors or reception and participating in conference calls on headsets wired into their smartphone.

At the point of my project finishing they were just starting to roll out Skype for business. I suspect that this wasn’t going to change dramatically the use of mobile handsets, just the nature of how the call got to the recipient.

Mobile infrastructure manufacturers have been expecting this for years, they rolled out pico-cell products aimed at enterprises to deal with reception dead spots in metal framed office buildings. What really seemed to have spurred things into action is the rise of all-you-can-eat voice tariffs.

May 3, 2016
China tech data slides

I have been pulling together China tech data slides for me that were useful for some work that I have been doing. I thought it would be worthwhile sharing these slides with a wider audience.

This month, I have selected a few slides that shed a light on advertising and consumer behaviour in China.

Looking at platforms it is hard to over play the importance of Tencent in the Chinese internet which is show at the heart of the China tech data I have collated. Looking at mobile behaviour Tencent is responsible for at least four of the top ten properties: WeChat, QQ, QQ Browser and Tencent Video.

If we look at two Chinese internet companies Tencent and Netease we can see how the companies have massively increased the number of non-game apps that they provide to keep consumers in their eco-system for their digital lives.

(Microsoft’s high number is driven by a number experimental project apps and enterprise apps). What this means is that the mobile OS becomes less important, which is one of the reasons why western brands from Samsung to Apple have been hit in the market. Their platforms give them less leverage.

Tencent’s WeChat is one of the most popular methods of payment in China

If we look at advertising spend in the Chinese market we can see that digital and radio advertising spend over-indexes. In some ways this is surprising. Online content is huge and historically the government controlled traditional media much more tightly than online media – to the detriment of watchable content on the television. More recently, government regulation has tightened across platforms.

Print advertising only slightly over-indexes in comparison to digital or radio. On the face of it there looks to be a massive opportunity in television advertising.

If we look at the media market consumption habits two things immediately stand out. Television and radio are largely holding their own in the face of rapidly growing digital consumption. The rapid growth in digital consumption is being driven by non-PC devices.

If you want to know why Huawei has partnered with Leica to boost the perception of its smartphone camera function, one of the factors involved is the massive growth of photography in Chinese mobile behaviour. This is especially interesting when one compares it to messaging and social – WeChat the largest mobile social platform is all encompassing in its functionality and place in modern Chinese life. A second factor is the way manufacturers are trying redefine the premium smartphone sector, at a time when innovation and experiential difference have become incremental.

You can see the full presentation here. More posts on China and technology related subjects.

1605 online marketing and technology data points from Ged Carroll

May 1, 2016
Thin film electronics + more things

Coal redefined for thin film electronics | Electronics EETimes – sounds like a graphene connection. Thin film electronics is going to be key for wearables

Web Summit 2016 | Approach to marketing – it does beg the question why should a marketer support this and go to their conference?

The VR idea maze — Benedict Evans – worthwhile read. I think the point made on content is particularly pertinent. We may have the hardware but it could take decades for the craft of content creation to come to full fruition

China’s government sounds out international PR agencies about how to polish nation’s image overseas, sources say | South China Morning Post – A spokesman for WPP, which owns Hill+Knowlton declined to comment. Ketchum also declined to comment. Fleishman Hillard Inc, Ogilvy Public Relations and Edelman did not respond to messages requesting comment – Weber Shandwick attracted negative attention working for China during the run up to the 2008 Olympics and Ketchum had a similar experience working for Russia

Microsoft’s Silver Lining Is Shrinking — The Information – not surprisingly moving a cloud model disrupts Microsoft’s margins in comparison to package software (paywall)

Off the grid – Official site of Stephen Fry – interesting essay on the perils of social media

China Unicom bets on turnaround as net profit plunges 85pc | SCMP – 4G network capital costs and increased marketing costs

“Overpaid and underperforming”: An anonymous investors’ letter lashes out at Nikesh Arora — Quartz – there are other shoes to drop on this. Looking that the shareholders hold ADRs rather than SoftBank shares – this is a US led charge. It is also interesting that this happening right before the Yahoo! shoe drops. SoftBank, and its Yahoo! Japan joint venture are a key part of Yahoo! Inc’s value

Korean TV Dramas Are the Best Export Since ‘Gangnam Style’ | Digital – AdAge

Pirate Bay Founder: Streaming Model Could Ignite New Piracy War – TorrentFreak – really interesting essay. I had a similar experience with Apple’s iBooks. I bought James Michener’s Mexico for a long flight and trip, tried to download it a week later and it was no longer available. I now buy mostly paper books

Brands rip up media plan in the face of disruption – it decided last September, in consultation with MediaCom, to take more radical action. Tesco slashed its media budget for newspapers to practically zero and shifted most of the money into online and social media. TV and other traditional media have also been heavily cut (reg wall)

Can audio go viral on Facebook? Here’s what happened when NPR ran an experiment for a month » Nieman Journalism Lab – Sharing audio on social media is hard to do. Stan Alcorn documented many of the struggles two years ago in a widely cited Digg story

Elisabeth Murdoch’s Vertical Networks creating ‘Brother’ Snapchat Discover channel – Business Insider

IRIN | Spies Sans Frontières? – the ethical conundrums around this are particularly interesting. More security related posts here.

Is Programmatic Expertise Moving In-House? – EContent Magazine

April 23, 2016