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.

  • Five star living

    Trendwatching is back with a pattern that they call five star living, where property developers and high-end resort or hotels sell a home away from home to the super dumb but loaded.

    They put a whole pile of luxury living brand experience about it, but what they are seeing is the window dressing not the trends in five star living. Five star hotels are capital intensive and unless you have high occupancy all the time, expensive.

    Apartment complexes can draw on the service aspects of five star hotels; but farm off a lot of the capital risk to apartment purchasers and still charge them for premium rate services. Five star living is about hotels hedging their bets in a post-September 11 world. I realise that this is a less romantic and stylish explanation of this trend, but its all about the money.

    Mandarin Oriental have built suites in their Hyde Park hotel which would be a great example of five star living. Luxury brands like Giorgio Armani have extended into interior design to try and capitalise on this trend in combination with luxury property developers. 

    You also have people like the Trump Organisation extending themselves from real estate into hotel services and tourism in the opposite direction with its golfing themed resorts. More five star living related content here.

    Apple spoof product lifecycle article which can be found here. Its funny because there are a lot of underlying themes which are close to the truth as consumers see it.

    Finally, the New York Times have got a great interactive presidential election guide that they are going to keep updated. So go to this link, have a play and bookmark it until November. Interactive data like live dashboards in business allow you better understand the data. It makes for shareable content and is sticky in nature. 

  • Plaxo Is the New Google?

    Plaxo is a useful addition to the arsenal of the knowledge worker. We go through lives developing thousands of connections but probably only keep in regular contact with a couple of hundred. (This is broadly in line with the Dunbar number proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar.)

    Plaxo vs. Google missions

    Where Google plans to organise all the world’s information, Plaxo seeks to organise all our address books.

    With Plaxo you complete an account and update it if you move jobs, that way your looser network can keep up to date if they are members of Plaxo too.

    Pros

    – Cheap, free software, you only pay for support. That also means limited growth

    Cons

    – Only works with Outlook at the moment, so not great for people orientated businesses like the creative industries, how about conduits for Lotus Notes, Entourage and Apple iSync?

    – Privacy concerns, where there’s data there’s risk and businesses are increasingly using online services to run their businesses; it makes sense for consumers to use similar services to run Me, Inc. Privacy restrictions makes it harder for Plaxo to monetise customer data held

    – Is reliant on a critical mass of users; Plaxo only updates less than 9 per cent of my contacts and its user base does not seem to be expanding at the rate of Friendster or LinkedIn

    Anyway, make up your own mind by watching an interview on CBS Marketwatch with the founders. More technology related content here.

    More information

    Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates”. Journal of Human Evolution.

  • Apologies and Connection

     Since my last post there have been lots of interesting things happening like the media being surprised that systematic torture has been occuring in Iraq. I’ve got some news for you its war, that means that its dirty, bloody and thoroughly unpleasant – try reading the works of Wilfred Owen or watching the Battle of Algiers to get a sense of how nasty it can get.

    On RTE radio one this morning, they had an expert comment about some CIA torture manuals that had been found. The main themes were that you used peoples fear against themselves – rather than torturing them, use the threat of torture because people had a greater capacity to withstand pain than they realised. This approach makes sense given established behavioural bias towards risk aversion. Risk aversion is one of the key cues used in behavioural science, it doesn’t surprise me that it manifests itself in this scenario as well.

    Sony has launched its Connect service, a rival to Apple’s iTunes Music Service. According to the Washington Post the service is ‘unworthy’ of the corporation who gave us the Walkman(TM). If it gets the kiss of death from Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be more salarymen falling on their swords than a Kurosawa samurai film. As the New Yorker put it: “someone whose judgment can ratify years of effort or sink the show.” More media related content here. 

    Lastly owe those of you who read this blog regularly an apology. I have not been contributing here much because I am in the middle of selling my house and moving closer in to London. Any of you who have dealt with British estate agents will have felt my pain. More news on the woes of house buying in the future.