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.

  • Patriot Act + more news

    PATRIOT Act

    PATRIOT Act clouds picture for tech | Politico – the PATRIOT Act passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks, giving the US government access to web services to try and fill in the gaps in intelligence. However the PATRIOT Act covers data held outside the US. So many foreign multinational companies are baulking at using US web services for their businesses. This is particularly important given the move from server and software apps to cloud computing. So the PATRIOT Act is disrupting US businesses from scaling

    Consumer behaviour

    Trendpool » Panasonic’s Female-Only Consumer Trial House

    Students of Virtual Schools Are Lagging in Proficiency – NYTimes.com – interesting that technology isn’t the panacea that people thought it would be in education. Smartboards haven’t been successful given their cost either

    Counterfeit goods losing attraction | SCMP.com – (paywall) Brands stand for quality – like they did in the Victorian era

    Young Women Go Back to School Instead of Work – NYTimes.com

    Economics

    More on What’s Left Over After Paying for Housing – The Atlantic – interesting article on housing and economics. Its less about house prices and more about income net of housing expenses

    Big Developers Dabble in Apartment Market – WSJ.com – decline in home ownership

    Finance

    Ray Dalio’s Richest and Strangest Hedge Fund : The New Yorker

    Innovation

    Single-Atom Wires Could Help Moore’s Law Live On

    Omron smartphone app comes close to instantaneous text translations | The Japan Times Online – like something straight out of a DARPA project

    Domestic robots failed to ride to rescue after No. 1 plant blew | The Japan Times Online – law of unintended consequences and innovation

    Liquid metal capsules used to make self-healing electronics | ExtremeTech

    Roboden: Japanese Company Develops World’s First Elastic Electrical Cable (Video) | TechCrunch

    Japan

    Woodford to sue Olympus, citing lack of investor support to get his job back ‹ Japan Today – not surprising he didn’t get support, first he trashes their shareholder value (probably exasperated by his theatre) then he asks for their help. They won’t care about the truth they’ll care about the 70 per cent drop in the market capitalisation

    Korea

    President Lee Myung-bak talked a lot about controlling high prices. – WSJ – growth and price inflation both considered issues

    Legal

    US Threatened To Blacklist Spain For Not Implementing Site Blocking Law | TorrentFreak

    London

    An Obligatory and Pointless Debate About the Olympics | VICE – but Vice nails it

    Luxury

    NetEase’s Luxury E-Commerce Site First Casualty Of 2012 « Jing Daily – interesting, especially since Netease has a lot of expertise in online businesses. I guess luxury handbags aren’t like World of Warcraft

    Will China’s E-Commerce Market See An Industry Shakeout In 2012? « Jing Daily

    Taking First-Class Coddling Above and Beyond – NYTimes.com – … first class represents less than 5 percent of all seats flown on long-haul routes, and business class accounts for 15 percent, those seats combined to generate 40 to 50 percent of airlines’ revenue, according to Peter Morris, the chief economist at Ascend, an aviation consulting firm

    Marketing

    UK marketers anticipate change: Warc.com – Ball & Hoolahan expecting marketing departments to get nuked in amalgamation with other departments

    Media

    Beijing Calling: The Trouble With China’s New English-Language News Network | Fast Company

    Retailing

    UK retailers face “carnage”: Warc.com – partly economics, partly industry structure due to etailing

    Wireless

    Nokia Moving to China from Singapore – WSJ – interesting complex reasons for choosing China or other countries outlined

    Interview with Murtazin – Will Microsoft Buy Nokia’s Smartphone Unit? – Forbes

    Text Messaging Is in Decline in Some Countries – NYTimes.com

    Nokia N9 outsells all other phones in Finland during October – Neowin.net – did Nokia’s move to Windows screw the pooch? Anecdotal evidence that it probably did. Also this code is now called Tinzen being pushed by Intel and Samsung

  • The North Face and Nike

    The North Face and Nike on marketing

    The North Face seems to have just peaked on its cultural moment in Korea. The North Face jackets are worn by all strata of society. Below is a Korean blog post that compares Its winter coats with different types of high school students as the brand has become so ubiquitous in South Korean school yards and on the backs of consumers during the winter months.

    The bottom of the blog post goes on to compare The North Face with the duffle coats worn by previous generation of school children in a mocking way.

    it is as much the winter uniform of the Korean salary man as his tie.

    The North Face sees itself as a technical brand rather than a true luxury brand, but the vast majority of its jackets don’t see the mountains and ski slopes for which they were originally designed. It has begun to treat itself as a premium brand with its purple label retro designs and different fabrics like Harris Tweed – currently exclusive to the Japanese market. But how can this be maintained if the brand becomes this overexposed?

    It is not a corner that it can easily get out of and technical innovation in the clothing design will be of limited use.

    North Face overexposure

    Part of the problem is the nature of Korean society itself which has a certain conformity to it. This means that once a trend picks up, it goes everywhere. But then because it goes everywhere it has a finite life. A small amount of tastemakers move on and the cycle begins again.

    The next winter jacket might be Canada Goose or Moncler.

    Contrast this with Nike: The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about how Nike and Footlocker maximised revenue from the Jordan franchise through careful timing of limited product releases. More marketing related posts here.

  • Workampers

    The Wall Street Journal had an article that introduced me to the idea of workampers. The article was on the seasonal workers that Amazon.com uses in the US to help it with the surge in demand in the run up to Christmas.

    Who were these elves to Amazon’s Santa Claus?

    The article describes them as workampers. Older retired people who live a transient lifestyle by choice in an RV (recreational vehicle) for at least part of the year.
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    Their motivations were diverse in nature. Some of the workers are similar to their ancestors during the Great Depression, who moved across the country following work were it was available.

    For others the reasons are diverse, from money to help with expenses to camaraderie with similarly nomadic peers or proving to themselves that they could still hack a task. A mix of forced earlier retirement and improvements in health mean that many seniors still have decades of potential work still in them that they want to take advantage of.

    A mix of ageism and globalisation have meant that there is a growing body of workampers. Future workampers might be in a worse financial state due to less generous pensions and health insurance, higher personal debt and automation. The move to a lower carbon economy will also impact the ability of a workampers to live out of an RV and transverse large distances at a reasonable cost.

    Workamper futures

    With an aging population and the decimation of working class communities due to the opioid epidemic we are likely to see more demographics like workampers as companies adapt to tap into an older work pool. With Amazon in particular, one has to wonder if more of their warehouse and logistics work can be automated and how it will be affected by a low carbon future.

    More explanations of of jargon terms can be found here.

    More information

    Seasonal Amazon ‘Workampers’ Flock to Remote Towns for Temporary Gigs – WSJ.com (paywall)

  • Consumer interest in iOS etc.

    If you’re like me you read far more journalist analysis of the wireless phone market than is good for you. I thought that it would be instructive to have a look at what consumers are looking for instead and look for any patterns. After sales availability and visibility consumer interest is probably the biggest determinator of success. My weapon of choice was Google Insights for Search. My research was based on a few assumptions about consumer interest in the wireless space and some limitations in the tool that I was using:

    • Consumers know what type of smartphone that they want
    • Consumers decisions aren’t carrier loyal
    • Consumers used Roman script to search for the brand
    • Search is a good proxy for consumer interest – it hasn’t been disrupted by Facebook in this regard yet despite what others may tell you
    • China despite being the world’s largest market isn’t going to be providing meaningful data because Google Insights for Search doesn’t cover that market
    • The Russia sample is indicative of overall consumer sentiment in Russia (Yandex is a big search player in Russia)

    Consumer Interest in platforms
    Some of the biggest interest in handset brands is in the developing world. In many respects this is their PC revolution. In developed Asian markets like Hong Kong and Singapore there is a much higher interest than EU countries – partly because of on-the-go lifestyles and partly because of the economic cataclysm that the western world is facing. The iPhone still attracts the most interest, but what is interesting is the acceleration that Android seems to have in terms of increasing interest. Microsoft’s efforts, whilst lauded by critics haven’t yet turned into consumer interest.  Research In Motion’s Blackberry platform seems to be down but not out yet in the consumer stakes.

    Nokia

    I took a snapshot of consumer interest in Nokia over the past three months to try and see what effect the global launch campaign for Nokia’s Windows phones are doing to consumer interest in the brand.

    I deliberately didn’t compare them to the iPhone because Nokia themselves acknowledge that they are competing against Android handset makers like HTC and Samsung. Nokia launched the Lumia phones with their biggest marketing campaign ever and had a lot of column inches written about the brand alongside a gamut of marketing commnications tactics from experiential events and advertising to point of purchase.


    Whilst Nokia’s new range of Lumia phones have had a substantial marketing budget put in place, but it doesn’t seem to have significantly affected search interest: it’s not quite living up the Amazing Everyday billing yet. This is also the case for Windows Phone with interest remaining consistently low in comparison to the Nokia brand. I think that the stubborn consumer disinterest in Windows Phone is a big challenge.

    More wireless related content can be found here.

  • iPhone pragmatism

    Despite working as a digital strategist and creative thinker (whatever the hell that means) agencyside, I have a very pragmatic relationship with technology both past and present from the iPhone to my original Mac. I have had Macs since 1989, primarily because they were the closest thing I found to a computer that just worked.

    I had analogue mobile phones from my time DJing and having friends who worked in cell phone service centres. My first phone that I had to buy was digital, the mobile phone was a Motorola; mainly because One2One (now Everything Everywhere) sold a package where you paid just over 100 pounds and had a phone for 12 months, with a small amount of inbuilt local call time. At the time I used it as a more reliable version of my pager. Even back then SMS proved to be more reliable than the pager that I had used previously

    I went from Motorola to Ericsson, mostly because Ericsson handsets were really well made and then moved to Nokia when Ericsson merged its handset business with Sony. I moved from Nokia to the Apple iPhone and a Samsung feature phone for two reasons:

    • Apple had an address book that worked. My address book didn’t brick the phone. I haven’t had that bad problems with data corruption and it syncs with my computer. It has all the productivity applications I enjoyed on my Nokia phones like MetrO and QuickOffice. The iPhone also has major flaws. For instance, the browser isn’t great, but I put up with it because I can sync my bookmarks for it across from the Safari browser on my Mac. The biggest think that I miss was the Nokia keyboard and laptop layout on the Nokia E90 Communicator
    • My Samsung phone could take two SIMs which is a boon for traveling. This is something that most phone manufacturers don’t provide for markets outside the developing world

    My iPhone was also expensive, like the price of a cheap laptop kind of expensive, which means that I look at it in a different way to previous smartphones. Instead of getting rid of my phone every 18 months, I am thinking closer to three years, just like my laptop.  An additional factor  is that whilst the first iPhones were a radical leap forward,  the iPhone 4 and 4S don’t have sufficient must-have value for me to move on until my current phone dies or the next iteration of the iPhone comes out.

    Now I wouldn’t say that I am an everyman for the iPhone using population; but this has to have some effect on sales. For every iPad that Apple sells there maybe at least a few iPhone upgrades put on hold as an opportunity cost.