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.

  • Viktor Bout + more news

    Viktor Bout

    For Arms Sales Suspect, Secrets Are Bargaining Chips – NYTimes.com – continuing story of Viktor Bout. Viktor Bout was a Russian arms dealer. Viktor Bout graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in the Soviet Union. Viktor Bout first appeared in Angola supporting Soviet proxy the MPLA. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union Viktor Bout set up an air freight business based in Angola. As well as legitimate cargo Viktor Bout built up a reputation breaking UN arms embargoes across sub Saharan Africa, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.

    Consumer behaviour

    Are You Working With Energizers or Rotten Apples? | Fast Company – interesting article on consumer behaviour in the workplace

    Culture

    The prescient cultural criticism of Max Headroom. – Slate Magazine – I love Max Headroom, though when watching it, I find its funny how dated it feels; particularly the portrayal of TV as a dominant figure in society

    William Gibson: I’m agnostic about technology. But I want a robotic penguin | The Observer – I love the phrase agnostic in relation to technology, its often how I feel

    Economics

    Are Counterfeit Drugs Really 10% of All Drugs? – The Numbers Guy – WSJ – interesting article on the pharmaceuticals industry, worryingly the BMJ gets called out for citing make-believe data

    Ideas

    SSRN-Convexity, Robustness, and Model Error by Nassim Taleb – interesting whitepaper about economic | financial risk from the guy who wrote that Black Swan book

    innovation

    Computer Chips Seem Poised to Shrink Again – NYTimes.com

    Japan

    Tokyo Girls Collection 2010 A/W – JAPAN Style – Japan Style reports on the autumn | winter show of the Tokyo Girls Collection. Over 30,000 women in a stadium where models (just like them) show wares that they can order using their mobile phone in real-time. Those that can’t make it, watch the show online and can order via the website. . A bit of entertainment and show business is thrown in as well. It cirumvents the complex retail distribution channels that are prevalent in Japan. TGC will be run in Beijing next year as well. Here is a post that I wrote in more depth about the TGC phenomenon and two more posts about brand extensions to the TGC formula

    Online

    Yahoo Revamps Mail Service – WSJ.com – just waiting for when Carol Bartz comes out and says that Yahoo! was never an email company… What has surprised me on this was that Yahoo! has been steadlly been losing share to Google. Yahoo! slew the 1GB mail box size issue years ago with some fancy work which meant consumers got unlimited storage but had to load up through normal use rather than dumping stuff in. The Oddpost derived interface is up to scratch as well. So this seems to be more about the perception of the Yahoo! domain and associated services?

    Retailing

    Evolving convenience stores | The Japan Times Online – I couldn’t imagine APAC without 7-Eleven and Lawson yet they have only been in Asia for just over 25 years and come to be a key player. Yah! for slush puppies

  • Corvette ‘roar’ campaign

    The new Chevrolet Corvette marketing campaign has had a lot of positive vibes out in adland so I thought I would share it with you along with some thoughts.

    The video

    The idea

    The two-and-a-half minute video is designed to promote a Corvette experience: for an extra 5,800 USD you can help build the power-plant which is fitted into your new Corvette.

    Here is in Europe a number of sports car companies used to allow to to visit the factory (it was part of the experience of buying a TVR for instance) and in the case of continental companies drive it back home. This way you could see the craftsmanship that went into your vehicle and meet some of the people responsible for it. In the same way that the lord of the manor may meet some of the landscape gardeners who were remodeling the maze or the alpine rockery.

    Being able to participate in building the engine, struck me as something different. If you think about the ‘golden days of the 1960s and 70s’ real men were renaissance creatures regardless of their profession they could also throw themselves into DIY and major mechanical work on the car. It was supposed to be a major bonding opportunity between father and son, working on the car together like Yoda and Luke Skywalker.

    My Dad has a garage full of tools that he accumulated over time, some of them handed on to him by friends or given to keep at the end of a job. I used to help him working on our car, though not much of it made sense to me. I haven’t inherited his practical gene, but it did give me a good worth ethic.

    It was also a time of family breakdown as divorce and womens long-deserved independence finally came into its own.

    It used to be that clocks and sewing machines were the only non-user serviceable items on a household; but as time moved on globalisation and technology meant  that cars like most household appliances and consumer electronics needed an expert. Not just the handyman with a garage and a service pit around the corner, but the correct software to understand the different diagnostic outputs on the car.

    Manufacturers have taken advantage of this development to shore up their total lifetime revenue funneling these customers into dealer service centres, requiring special fitting tools and clamping down on third-party parts in a similar way to HP’s chipped toner and inkjet cartridges.

    Instead real men are now likely to be slightly buffoon-ish a la Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May in Top Gear.

    So is the building the engine experience less about demonstrating the handmade craftsmanship of your sports car and more about selling you the mythical father-son bonding experience that the car’s owner may not have had as a child?

    The soundtrack

    So I was thinking about this Corvette ‘auto-worker as father-figure’ concept when I thought about the soundtrack to the video. According the video titling the Corvette is all about the roar, yet there is no engine noises in the soundtrack at all. Don’t get me wrong I quite like the soundtrack, it’s the kind of sound you’d expect if the Chemical Brothers drafted in Keith LeBlanc, Skip McDonald and Doug Wimbish from Tack>>Head as collaborators to come up with an appropriate soundtrack. It would fit right in with the first Matrix film soundtrack – again planting this very firmly in generation-x territory.

    But there is no engine noise, making the statement that its the roar seem dubious. Have a look at the Audi R8 microsite whilst it has brooding electronica pretending to be a Wagnerian mood music, the engine noise does feature in the video clips as you explore the site. The new Lexus LFA website makes no bones about the cars sound even allowing you to download it as a ring-tone (though I imagine that it would grate on the nerves after a bit).

    So I don’t think that its about the Corvette ‘roar’ at all, instead I think its about a mythical father-figure | son experience – a blue-collar bromance: it is the Brokeback Mountain of car adverts.

    It’s a smart offering and campaign which I imagine was probably based on some sort of clever consumer insights programme. And it breaks away from the usual ‘our car is an incrementally better phallic compensator than X, Y or Z’ personified by recent Nissan Z-series marketing efforts. More marketing related content can be found here.

  • Omake + more news

    Omake

    Omake trends: Elle Japon x American Apparel – gives away headband with magazines. Omake pronounced ‘O-ma-ke’ means incentive. They have become a monthly magazine giveaway, particularly for fashion publications like Elle Japon. There is also a second series of magazines called eMook. An e-Mook is a brand lookbook for a season. People often bought them for the product give-away, A Bathing Ape popularised this idea outside Japan and their e-Mooks are sought after. People buy e-Mooks for the giveaway item rather than the content. Increasingly that seems to be the case with Omake as well.

    China

    FT.com / Comment / Analysis – China: Futuristic yet fruitful – interesting overview of the Shanghai expo

    Consumer behaviour

    Retailers Look to Profit From Last Century’s Styles – NYTimes.com – when you can’t trust the banks, the government, businesses and authority figures what can you trust? The past.

    Culture

    YouTube – chelskifl’s Channel – the seminal Pump up the Volume documentary which has interviews with the heroes I looked up to as a house DJ. Check out part three for the HotMix5 stuff. The WBMX sets of HotMix5 blew me away and fired me up to want to DJ house music

    Design

    Innovative Mayor Sam Adams Builds a Cleaner Portland | Fast Company – interesting use of mobile so that the public an report rubbish etc

    Nokia’s designs on Apple | FT.com – interview with Marko Ahtisaari. On privacy: “The industrial logic of every single social network is that those terms of service will be renegotiated very quickly.” On interface design “All the touchscreen interfaces are very immersive. You have to put your head down. What Nokia is very good at is designing for mobile use: one-handed, in the pocket. Giving people the ability to have their head up again is critical to how we evolve user interfaces.” No comments on why the N900 and N97 are the worst of both worlds – bring back the Communicator form factor

    Ethics

    Did Microsoft Hire Consumer Watchdog to Attack Google? | Techrights – really really stupid, surprised Frank X Shaw wouldn’t stomp on this practice if it turns out to be true

    Anti-piracy enforcers claiming to represent Microsoft used to shut down dissident media in former USSR – Boing Boing – quick denials in place otherwise this could have been a Yahoo! moment for Microsoft’s corporate reputation

    FMCG

    FDA Calls Marlboro Out on Creative Marketing of “Light” Cigarettes | Fast Company – I think the FDA is a bit out of whack here, although I can see where they are coming from in terms of trying to flatten the light message, for regular smokers the cigarette will be the same, same length, taste the same.

    Japan

    Big in Japan: Millions ‘Mumble’ on Twitter – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com – more unique users than Mixi

    Tokyo fishermen update seafood e-commerce site from their boats – Boing Boing – not surprising given that the Japanese invented JIT and lean manufacturing processes that they would extend it when the technology came available to their fishing industry

    Wired 9.09: My Own Private Tokyo – William Gibson on Tokyo

    Is it a good idea to kick those Downfall spoofs off YouTube? Perhaps not | Technology | guardian.co.uk – ironically exposes rights owners to legal issues

    Media

    France, the U.K. Take Steps Against Digital Piracy – WSJ.com

    Luxury

    Luxury market starts to evolve in China – hyperinflation for luxury lifestyles

    Online

    Yahoo wants to do what Facebook did, only slower – as the FT said: sounds familiar and unambitious

    Retailing

    FT.com / Companies / Retail – Gome reappoints ousted Bain directors – its like a tele-novella

    Security

    UK MPs call for ID cards and surveillance, but demand privacy for themselves – Boing Boing – looks like the Digital Economy Act has brought a whole pile of tech politics out of the bag

  • Data that matters

    Data that matters has impermanence – One thing that springs up periodically is how older electronic data becomes harder to access.

    Apple font pack disk from the mid 90s

    Whether its floppy disks that are no longer readable or optical disks which have become corroded through chemical reaction over time electronic data is generally impermanent.

    I lost a substantial amount of the posts on this blog two years ago when the server I used over at Yahoo! Small Business hosting went into meltdown 90 per cent of my blogging output between December 2006 and January 2008 disappeared. I managed to recover 10 per cent of the content from the Google cache of my blog.

    However it isn’t only digital artifacts that are at risk. I was going through bags of old papers and found my old P60s some of which could no longer be read since they were printed on thermal paper and my first payslip which was barely readable.

    my first proper pay slip

    This was from my first full-time job cleaning and repairing equipment that was rented out to building contractors including lawn mowers, concrete mixers and Makita power drills.

    You can also see paper go yellow from the acid used in its manufacture as well as fade from the carbon paper print.

    I had obviously put it away to keep it for posterity, but I decided to keep it in the cloud as I figure that it might last longer that way now. Though your guess is as good as mine. The thermal paper and Flickr’s business model are both tough things to fathom how robust they will be.

    The problem with this is often the data we don’t want to keep stays like embarrassing pictures on Facebook or a drunken rant on a Usenet forum, whereas the stuff we want to keep too often fades away. So how do we get better at looking after electronic data that matters? More online and internet related posts here.

  • The sale tag

    The sale tag is like manna from heaven for my Mum. She loves a bargain and looks forward to sales at her local stores.

    Like many people she suspects that some stores may put in special stock that they have shipped in to sell especially at this time amongst items that have just not sold.

    Allied Carpets was often the butt of jokes for its never-ending sales, but thought of as the exception rather than the norm.

    Sale basket in Shenzhen

    A friend here in Shenzhen got this basket from a market here. The markets are usually full of production overruns and samples. I managed to pick up a couple of genuine North Face Basecamp duffle bags for 30 percent less than UK retail.

    What I found interesting about this particular item was that it had a UK sale tag attached.It reads £29.99  £19.99 SALE.

    My initial reaction was how can it be reduced if it hasn’t even reached the shopfloor yet? It was an interesting proof-point of how retailers play customers as chumps. By all means enjoy bargain hunting but don’t believe the SALE tag hype. From what my friend told me about the production overrun market; the retailer in question (Woolworths) seemed to have vastly overestimated British consumer demand for rattan laundry baskets.

    My friend had the basket for a few years. I was writing this post almost a year to the day after Woolworths Group had gone into administration, closing its stores across the UK. More retailing related content here.