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.
Nintendo announces new version of DS gaming handheld: the DSi » VentureBeat – interesting new design on the DS with the Nintendo DSi. The Nintendo DSi features two digital cameras, supports internal and external content storage, and connects to a Nintendo DSi Shop. The Nintendo DSi supports ‘physical games’ in addition to DS games with DSi-specific features and standard DS titles. The only exceptions in backwards compatibility is any DS products that use a Gameboy Advance slot.
Facebook Redesign Succeeds: Widgets Are Dead – interesting article on how the Facebook redesign has killed the basic widget Facebook application. Clearing this clutter will hopefully make Facebook a more useful and rewarding platform to use. I still personally dislike it however.
Social media and brands in 2009 – Shiny Red’s vox pop survey; nicely done. Wouldn’t necessarily agree with some of the trends such as the semantic web, but otherwise good material. More related content here.
James Earl Jones has one of the most distinctive voices in the entertainment industry as you can hear in this Sesame Street clip. You might recognise from his appearance in Conan the Barbarian film, but James Earl Jones has a surprising variety in his career across film, television and stage performance. James Earl Jones has done voiceover work for everything from Disney’s The Lion King to CNN station idents.
Hollow Spy Coins – talk about niche businesses, this is definitely on the long tail. You have to admire their dedication to engineering this.
Economics
Boomtown of Dubai feels effects of global crisis – International Herald Tribune – Until recently, credit in Dubai was growing by 49 percent a year, according to the Emirates’ Central Bank — a rate almost double that of bank deposits’ growth. That unnerved some bankers here, who felt it could lead to a collapse. “In the U.S., the challenge is about keeping the banks going,” said Marios Maratheftis, chief economist for Standard Chartered Bank. “Here, the economy has been overheated, a correction is needed, and it’s about making sure the slowdown happens in a smooth, orderly manner.”
Klein Verzet: Freaking doomed – the premise is that the demand for shipping of raw materials like coal, bauxite and iron ore have ground to a stand still and soon even the factories of China will be a lot quieter – so the economic outlook is nothing short of ammegeddon
P&G to launch washing gel that cleans at 15 degrees – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic – “According to P&G, Ariel’s Cool Clean campaign encouraged more than five times as many customers than normal to switch to low-energy washing programmes, with Ariel customers twice as likely as the average consumer to wash at a lower 30 degrees temperature (28% of Ariel customers in 2007 versus 13% of those using other brands). P&G has a partnership with the Energy Saving Trust, which encourages people to use energy efficiently and reduce their carbon footprints.”
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS – cloud computing versus DBMS, interesting reading, I need to go back and look at it a few more times to understand it fully. But initial take is that parallel computing as well as parallel processing changes how computing works and databases have to be adapted (like Oracle’s Grid database concept from the tail end of the dot com era and cloud computing. It’s the failings of Moore’s law rather than progress that is driving this change
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman – while I have sympathy for some of what Mr Stallman says, his argument misses the point about the benefits of social software. Open formats and APIs allow you to move from one service to another as needs must.
I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Collateral Damage | PBS – interesting take on the mobile market, not one that I necessarily agree with, but interesting none the less. Cringely expect that Microsoft Windows Mobile software will fail and has some interesting ideas around the why. I think Microsoft has everything to play for with enterprise users and can leverage items like security authentication and Outlook email access – they might not be dominant but they could still be in with a shout
Beginning of end of megapixel marathon – Pixel count gives phones and cameras the ‘Dixons Factor’ – being able to be sold easily by some pimple-faced oik; but doesn’t mean you will have better quality pictures. I have a digital SLR which takes pictures at 5.1 megapixels and a phone camera that will do the same – no prize for which one takes the better pictures.
I saw this notice talking about 87000 possible combinations and was reminded of the car industry. Back in the 1990s, I remember being told that car maker Volvo had over 30,000 combinations of vehicles available as passenger cars. This included: body shell variants, diesel and petrol engines of different sizes and power, manual or automatic transmissions, interior design options, in car entertainment options, safety features, paint jobs, body accoutrements. Since then Volvo has hinted at electric vehicles and now has at least two models of SUVs.
While I don’t doubt the statistical capability of Starbucks marketing department, I was surprised to see that the coffee shop could serve up 87000 possible combinations of drinks based on relatively few options. This could be even larger in Starbucks other markets like Hong Kong or Japan, where there are more beverage varieties like Milk Tea or Matcha lattes, and more seasonal variation such as sakura season and mid-autumn festival alongside the usual Starbucks products.
All of which brings home the impact of mass-customisation to a business. How would the Starbucks EPOS (electronic point of sales) system handle 87000 possible combinations? How does this impact the training of their baristas? Is there an operational model like a decision tree for these coffee options?
I wonder is there a Starbucks long tail? What is the split between cold coffee drinks and hot drinks? Has this long tail altered itself over time, as the popularity of flat white drinks have taken off due to the influence of Australian coffee culture? How does the long tail affect the relative prioritisation that Starbucks might put on the different ingredients that go into their drinks? Mass customisation has gone mainstream. What does this degree of customisation mean for other service and retail businesses? How does this compare to what is seen in personalised products like NikeID or MyAdidas?
Rob Enderle does not know the meaning of surrender. Or disclosure. – MacUser – industry analyst gets called out on astroturfing. Rod Enderle is old school Silicon Valley, he worked in finance, and IT business analysis roles at Rolm. Rolm sold military specification computers to the US armed services and for other applications like oil exploration and various telecoms products. Rod Enderle would have worked with partners like IBM and Data General – in their time big enterprise technology firms. (Data General would be later bought out by EMC, now part of Dell). These connections probably helped Rob Enderle throughout his analyst career. He started as an analyst in the mid 1990s, which was a golden time. Rob Enderle was meeting large corporates rolling out ERP and CRM software, his opinions and research at Dataquest and Giga helped sway multi-million dollar deals around the world.
WordPress for iPhone – this is going to get a lot of hype, whats wrong with using the update by email option? I think this is brand over requirement. You are not a credible digerati brand unless you support the iPhone platform.
EitaroSoft is an interesting Japanese WeeWorld style avatar competitor but it is much more focused on gaming. EitaroSoft developed Japan’s first 3D engine with application software. It then developed a 3D avatar system based on its self-developed 3D technology. EitaroSoft made Japan’s first 3D avatar system for a mobile phone browser by using Ajax running in the browser. More here
How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand – the vernacular of language changes all the time. English was spread around the world by a common culture but has been adapted in different ways. In addition, youth and minority cultures adapt it for their own use
How to
PR Skillsets of the Future – nice article by my old colleague Dan Young on how PR skillsets need to change in order to take account of technological and media industry changes
Feedtweeter – converted RSS to tweets for content syndication
Apple to .Mac Subscribers – Sync Bookmarks by Sunday – NYTimes.com – this is huge for Apple user experience. I use bookmarks to add functionality for my different Mac and iPhone accounts for instance my social bookmarklet, taking this away would hamper my productivity
